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Q u o t e:
Threads like this are tough because they start out bad and I just want to lock them but then Jastia goes and says some really smart things that I would love for people to see.



It’s ironic because we have actually ended up discussing priests so much lately. Usually the discussion starts with me asking other designers to help me understand the issue. I must admit to being at a little bit of a loss over why so many priests seem so dissatisfied with the class (and to be fair, there are many players there with the opposite feedback). I usually don’t find myself at such odds with the community, but in this case I am still having trouble understanding the issue. (And I apologize in advance to the druids, shamans and paladins who feel priest issues already dominate this forum.) I don’t honestly think that priests are just so upset about the CoH nerf that it makes them turn their back on the class. A lot of players seem really unhappy with the role of the priest as having lots of tools. I have a priest and I heal a lot. Prayer of Mending is a fun spell. Guardian Spirit is a fun spell. Those are just the tip of a pretty big toolbox.

So if you want us to be on the same page, and certainly if you ever hope to see any changes that fix the problem for you, you’re going to have to put down your weapons, step away from the rhetoric, turn off the CAPS LOCK, and try and explain to us what we’re missing.

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When you talk about Priests as a healing class and how you don't understand the problems people have with it, are you only talking about the Holy tree? Or both the Disc and Holy tree. The problems with disc are very glaring, and posts about disc make up a pretty large amount of the threads about priests. If you ask me, people have a right to be very dissatisfied with Blizzard's stance and direction when it comes to the disc priest. Your apparent adamant stance on not wanting Divine Aegis to stack in any way is very telling to how misunderstood the tree is by the Blizzard designers.

Here are four very good threads that clearly outline problems associated with the disc tree:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14318863090&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14132917869&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14318904267&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14318634898&sid=1

Look at the time. It's obvious GC is losing precious sleep over this.

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Q u o t e:
A lot of players seem really unhappy with the role of the priest as having lots of tools. I have a priest and I heal a lot. Prayer of Mending is a fun spell. Guardian Spirit is a fun spell. Those are just the tip of a pretty big toolbox.

So if you want us to be on the same page, and certainly if you ever hope to see any changes that fix the problem for you, you’re going to have to put down your weapons, step away from the rhetoric, turn off the CAPS LOCK, and try and explain to us what we’re missing.

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To me, it just seems like a CD on CoH is just the wrong solution. It's good to snipe, maybe, but its real power was in its spammy-ness. CoH needs to be changed in a different way so it retains its power as a useful part of our arsenal (by upping its healing done along with mana cost or having it proc Holy Concentration).

I think what most priests want is something powerful and unique to make us feel effective. Having lots of tools is nice but when all the other classes have more powerful versions of them, we feel rather ineffectual. Disc would actually be in a pretty nice place if Divine Aegis gets fixed since they bring powerful damage mitigation through PW:S and DA along with Penance making up for the lack of improved healing talents in the tree. Holy doesn't quite have that focus, that power without CoH.

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Q u o t e:



. A lot of players seem really unhappy with the role of the priest as having lots of tools. I have a priest and I heal a lot. Prayer of Mending is a fun spell. Guardian Spirit is a fun spell. Those are just the tip of a pretty big toolbox.

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The main problem I'm seeing is that you are so wrapped up in these awesome tools priests seem to have that you forget the grand scheme of a spell.

Hi, without mana you can't cast heals!

So yea do something about holy regen. If you revolve a spec around crit then you need to give them around 10% crit from talents... 5 is not enough. Our regen currently is kept afloat by SoL procs and really easy content. You take those two away and you will start to have issues. I'm definitely noticing it during the more hardcore encounters in WoTLK... at least as hardcore as I dare to say they are.

I .. never really liked CoH. My favorite incarnation of the spell was right before it turned into a smart heal. It had it's niche, it provided priest with a USEFUL tool that was fun and had a situational use. It was something that did not and should not have been touched.

Again it's also a matter of comparing tools. You don't use a half chipped hammer when someone else has a polished one that's brand new. You really can't get away with balancing content around people not having 100% attendance. There ARE guilds out there (usually cutting edge ones) that have 99%-100% attendance for their healers.. so this simply does not come into effect.

Additionally those same guilds WILL min/max. If you have a choice between a priest or a shaman for aoe healing during a progression fight.. you are going to choose who is better at that job. It doesn't matter if the priest can tank heal at a later time... it's a totally irrelevant prospect because that priest won't be tank healing. You don't switch roles like that mid fight.. because during progression (assuming content is actually somewhat hard) if you lose your aoe healer a domino effect starts and you wipe anyway.

I just feel at a loss as to what my role is going to be in progression situations. I really couldn't care less about farm content, i'm only concerned with how helpful I can be when my raid is being pushed to its limits.. thats all.

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Q u o t e:
Threads like this are tough because they start out bad and I just want to lock them but then Jastia goes and says some really smart things that I would love for people to see.



It’s ironic because we have actually ended up discussing priests so much lately. Usually the discussion starts with me asking other designers to help me understand the issue. I must admit to being at a little bit of a loss over why so many priests seem so dissatisfied with the class (and to be fair, there are many players there with the opposite feedback). I usually don’t find myself at such odds with the community, but in this case I am still having trouble understanding the issue. (And I apologize in advance to the druids, shamans and paladins who feel priest issues already dominate this forum.) I don’t honestly think that priests are just so upset about the CoH nerf that it makes them turn their back on the class. A lot of players seem really unhappy with the role of the priest as having lots of tools. I have a priest and I heal a lot. Prayer of Mending is a fun spell. Guardian Spirit is a fun spell. Those are just the tip of a pretty big toolbox.

So if you want us to be on the same page, and certainly if you ever hope to see any changes that fix the problem for you, you’re going to have to put down your weapons, step away from the rhetoric, turn off the CAPS LOCK, and try and explain to us what we’re missing.

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I'm not a main healer, nor a Priest GC, but my friend is and I talk with her a lot about it, so I'm more or less going to put down what she's been telling me(I like the mental problem of figuring out how to balance things, so I love the conversations and learning the problems).


See, she's a Disc priest. Her biggest problems right now, I'd guess in order, are:

1. Viability as a PvE healer
2. Itemization
3. Disc Bugs


I'll go from the bottom up.

The Disc bugs used to be her #1, when she was still having mana issues(undergeared). Rapture not working, Divine Aegis not stacking, and then the raid issue of having any Priest's shield or ProM who does it first take precedence annoys her to all ends. The fact that there are upwards of 5 major, core-talent breaking bugs in Disc is really upsetting.

The second, Itemization, I think is just a basic problem that needs rebalancing. Currently Disc doesn't use the Tier sets, as they waste so many points on spirit. If you made spirit worth the same to a Disc Priest as a Holy Priest without turning them into Holy, or giving them even more mana regen, I'm sure this issue would be solved(my suggestion, which she liked, is like a crit-based Spiritual Guidance, since Disc is so heavily based on crit).

The first though, is really frustrating. She recently got a Pally to 80, and where people used to tell her Disc was the ultimate MT healer, she now says that she 'knows better'. Many other Disc Priests are claiming the same- that Paladins are the best MT healers out there. At the same time, she can't AOE heal effectively as Disc. She provides no real utility as Disc, and doesn't take up a 'best of' slot like every other healer/spec. With Paladins being the best MT healers, Holy being the best group healers, Shaman the best raid healers, and Druids being both great at all-around and group healing, that leaves Disc flailing in the wind without a real role- and this is worsened by the fact that Disc's stronger shields and shields in general can't overwrite weaker shields.

I had suggestions for these that she and many other Priest friends were satisfied with, but I'd rather not clutter this post, so I'll break for here and post it in another.

The way I see it.

Disc: Just wants to be fixed. There are a lot of bugs and if they are removed then most disc priests will be happy.

Holy: They are a bit confused about what they will be doing after COH is nerfed. Without such an effective spell to fall back on when the going gets rough, it seems to many that holy may not perform healing task as well as other classes. In short, holy has lost its "direction." It used to be an AOE healing king and soon it will be ________. Fill in the blank, because I'm not really sure what goes there, maybe hymns when they get fixed? Priests are scared of the unknown and are worried that people wont want them as healers without an OP COH. This is why there are so many angry posts by priests nowdays. They are unsure and scared of their future as healers.

I will say it once and i will say it again.
I don't think the CoH nerf is hurting priests, and is probably helping all of wow in terms of how future healing fights are going to be developed.

I do think that the potion nerf and the spirit nerf were a bit harsh when combined with the downranking nerf.
I don't think priests would be any less fun to play than a paladin, and the priests in my guild (who don't post here are happy).

As a priest, PvP is in a wretched state, even plate doesn't save me very long on things like ogrimmar arena where i get pulled over by the DK, Stunned by the paladin, and dismantled by the rogue before I can do anything. I already hate the fact that my sacred shield and Beacon are cleared at the beginning of arena, so all the time i have to spend buffing at the beginning of the arena after the gates are open (not to mention getting an opening) judge is simply not possible in arena......

... So imagine how priests feel if i am dying that easily. (sure my Res is low, i don't have much incentive to pvp)

I think the grand long and short of it comes down to one word.

Specialization.

Every other healer can point to one or two defining spells or healing styles and expound on how they can do it better than anyone else. Druids are the HoT healers, Shammies are the superior buffers with solid smart aoe healing, paladins can heal bomb the tank until the cows come home, and priests...

...well, they don't have something they can call their own. They have a big ol' toolbox that works really well in 5 man, but less well in a raid. You can assign all of the other healers to various roles pretty easily, but raid leaders seem to be acting more lost about what to do with their priests. its more challenging to make use of a good priest, and with the cooldown on circle of healing going in, you can't just say 'well you just raid heal with your awesome talented spell' anymore.

The raid game is generally more about overspecializing rather than being a jack of all trades. I think priests need that 'wee wiz bang!' spell or healing method that really stands out from the other classes, if you want the complaints to go down.

Here are the proposed 'fixes' I offered to make Priests a bit happier in PvE situations(as it feels like bringing extra Priests results in diminishing returns from the class), while retaining usability(times where they wonder why something isn't working- aka, trying to reshield a pre-shielded target, or hitting someone with your ProM only to have it just not cast because they already have it).

1. Don't have ProM stack, have the weaker one bounce.
So, 2000sp Priest casts ProM on tank. Then 1500sp Priest casts ProM on tank. as well. The 1500sp Priest's ProM procs immediately, and bounces to another target.

Or, 1500sp Priest casts ProM on the tank. Then 2000sp Priest casts ProM on the tank. here, the 2000sp Priest's ProM would replace the 1500's, and proc ProM bouncing it to it's next target.

2. Introduce two states for one's soul: Weakened, and Crippled.

Say there are 3 Priests in your 25man raid. Priest A has 2000sp, Priest B has 1900sp, and Priest C has 1500sp.

With full raid buffs, but no flasks, Priests B and C would cast Shield on a Target, but it would trigger the "Weakened Soul" effect. However, if the tank got that shield and had the Weakened Soul effect, Priest A could still cast shield- and trigger the Crippled Soul effect. This would disable any shield from being put on the tank.

If Priest B had a flask, he would instead cause the Crippled Soul effect.

Also, another way to solve this is have a high-end talent, such as Pain Suppression, also buff the Discipline Priest's shield to ignore Weakened Soul, but put a Crippled Soul onto the target. This is probably the easier solution, but could cause problems in extreme gear disparity situations(but they'd be minuscule).

I find it funny when a someone cries about a nerf that is somewhat reasonable and they havent even played a shaman past level 60.

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Q u o t e:
I find it funny when a someone cries about a nerf that is somewhat reasonable and they havent even played a shaman past level 60.

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Lets stay on topic.
/shoo

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Q u o t e:
So if you want us to be on the same page, and certainly if you ever hope to see any changes that fix the problem for you, you’re going to have to put down your weapons, step away from the rhetoric, turn off the CAPS LOCK, and try and explain to us what we’re missing.

---

Holy Nova, Lolwell, Hymn of Hope, and Divine Hymn are not fun because they are ineffective. I am very tempted to put Shadowsquid here.

Binding Heal is not fun because its niche is painfully small. If two people are taking damage, the group is taking damage and PoHealing will be a better spell. Zul'Jin's Eagle phase is probably the exception.

PW:Shield is not fun because it is overbalanced with dual cooldowns, a weak coefficient, and it takes a ton of talent points dedicated to the spell to make it usable. And I'm sure at least one Holy Priest has dropped a PW:Shield on a Disc's target.

If Penance and PW:Shield are on cooldown, a Discipline Priest is healing with effectively no talents. This is not fun.

Spirit of Redemption is not fun because a Priest has to die to be good in PvP. SoR is not fun because a Priest is usually one of the last to die in PvE. (There's a huge PvP tangent here, but I'll let someone with 900 resilience handle that one)

Having no synergy within talent trees is not fun. Holy has some nice effects off of critical heals, but very few ways to make spells crit. Discipline is plagued by bugs or "redefined" talents, and while the haste from Borrowed Time gives a taste of synergy, that hasted Gheal is going to cost a ton and heal for very little. And both trees are torn between desiring spirit and crit on their armor, further diluting their identities.

"Hybrids" being weak across roles because of their versatility did not work, and was changed. Having a "hybrid" within a single role (healing) is no different. When will we see the end of tank healers vs raid healers and just be healers?

Given current content, Priests can function. Given current design, the "unique" aspects of Priests are not fun.

I donn't understand why it is that priests have two talent trees but neither is as good as other classes single trees. How is it you can fit buffs and other cool stuff into a single tree for other healers but not priests?

I think GS does not see the use you would like because alot of priests donn't spec deep holy to get the IDS from Dis. Holy also needs it's own buff so it can be a true stand alone spec.

You seem to have had some great ideas for priests but seemed to worry about making them too great and split things into two trees in a way that both just ok.

I hope you know why people are upset about pvp by this point. If you donn't then you need to get on your priest and fight some rouges. That will explain that.

The last thing I would add is that you seem to ignore things that are talked about time and time again.
Hymms are clearly not liked by many. Lightwell is still called lolwell by many. Shadowfiend is still not viewed as a good way to regen mana due to it's many problems and this is huge for a class that already has mana problems as is.

Priest do not want to push any class out of any role they have but we do want to have our own place in the game.

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Q u o t e:
It’s ironic because we have actually ended up discussing priests so much lately. Usually the discussion starts with me asking other designers to help me understand the issue. I must admit to being at a little bit of a loss over why so many priests seem so dissatisfied with the class (and to be fair, there are many players there with the opposite feedback). I usually don’t find myself at such odds with the community, but in this case I am still having trouble understanding the issue. (And I apologize in advance to the druids, shamans and paladins who feel priest issues already dominate this forum.) I don’t honestly think that priests are just so upset about the CoH nerf that it makes them turn their back on the class. A lot of players seem really unhappy with the role of the priest as having lots of tools. I have a priest and I heal a lot. Prayer of Mending is a fun spell. Guardian Spirit is a fun spell. Those are just the tip of a pretty big toolbox.

So if you want us to be on the same page, and certainly if you ever hope to see any changes that fix the problem for you, you’re going to have to put down your weapons, step away from the rhetoric, turn off the CAPS LOCK, and try and explain to us what we’re missing.

---

Yes, some people don't like dealing with a big toolbox, but at that point they really just need to re-roll to something else with a playstyle they like better. In general, though, I think the problem is that small mechanical issues quickly snowball into big problems and tend to leave a bad taste in people's mouths when they go unresolved for a while.

Nightshroud and a few others may correct me on this later, but in the olden days of Vanilla WoW the Priest forums were often the place to go for great feedback. To me, it seemed that much or most of the theorycrafting and testing was done by Priests and posted on their forums. Yet, despite the high-quality feedback, a lot of the major problems continued, leading to the same complaints month after month and, combined with the very apparent lack of blue attention and statements like "one tough cookie," it left a lot of posters jaded about the whole affair. These feelings have continued to smolder and have simply been passed down, with occasional and notable flare-ups at each important patch.

In a recent post, I compared my suggestion of a small buff to Priest mobility to "the missing gear that makes the machine run smoothly." I think that analogy is particularly apt because it seems like the class, on the whole, is very well designed but has a number of small problems that make the whole scheme fall apart. For example, Priests have continued to complain about survivability for a very long time despite the high amount of proccable mitigation our talents provide our class. Posters often asked for "escapability," like a Mage's Blink, but such skills would seem to be at odds for a class designed with melee to mid-range CC on CDs, a plethora of instant casts, and relatively high mitigation. What everyone, in my view, was trying to get at was the excessive lack of mobility for the class as we had no snare-breakers or spam-able CC to gain any sort of distance. We can't just sit there and take it all the time; we, as a mechanical issue, need the ability to move even if just at run speed and this reality has been apparently recognized for other healers via BoF/HoF, Shapeshifting, and snare/ghost wolf (I will not argue effectiveness of those here).

Other issues with design mechanics have popped up in Disc, where the inability of DA to stack leaves a huge scaling vacuum; an ironic problem considering you JUST fixed this with Blessed Recovery and it appears, as Odes has argued, that some lessons have not been fully learned. I would not say that this is the only issue that the talent tree has, but I would consider it the most pressing one.

Anyway, I'm not going to take up anymore of your time than I already have. Goodnight.

Edit: Oh yeah, as much as it has pretty much become a joke "lackluster" was generally code for "unimaginative" as much as "ineffective." Some of the spells-made-jokes will never be accepted, even if they were made effective, because they are simply boring.

Edit 2: Because this is keeping me up: The other systemic problem we've had has been that you've used our class, "THE healer," as the balancing benchmark for healers on the whole, as you have admitted. However, this practice also meant that you didn't look at our class as it's own entity enough and that's why the whole issue of "utility" keeps popping up. You were balancing the other 3 to us instead of balancing all 4 classes together and making them unique in their own way. As a result, the issue of "versatility" has become a thorn in your side from multiple directions, and not just in discussions of Priest utility. With the Wrath expansion and your homogenization of healing classes to make them more interchangeable, you have eithe

At the risk of being called a fanboi I think that the priest class is in pretty good shape healing wise, especially holy. Disc has a few quirky bugs that need fixing and has some stacking issues but that's it.

Thinking about holy I think that people haven't ajusted to the fact that holy priests are no longer actually big bomb healers like pallies are. This is how most holy priests are used to playing and to be honest G-heal is nothing special in this department. However this isn't what holy priest healing is all about now. These days it's more about weaving a net of spells to create a symphony of healing, keep renew up on the tank, have PoM jumping about while you flash heal, toss the odd CoH or even lightwell (which still has issues) watch your procs for free heals and hasted heals, binding heal when 2 people are down life. When played well a holy priest can be 85-90% of a tank healing paladin and at lest 50% of raid healing shaman at the same time! now to me that seems pretty useful.

The one area which is currently lacklustre is renew, this spell takes so long to tick that I can weave 2 flash heals in between ticks, speeding up the ticks would really make this spell shine and return a lot of lustre to the spec. I can heal fine on mylagos without spamming CoH and if your spamming CoH on saph you need to learn to use your tools better.

If your playing well you can get everything to click and suddenly you are rocking your assignments and generally having a blast. This does involve some changes to how you gear though, start fighting those mages for crit gear and you will really start to see the power of the holy spec.

Priests are not happy because everything "new" that you gave them in WotLK flat out sucks (Hymns, Guardian Spirit). No one wants their new super Holy spell to only be castable once every 3 minutes. I may not like Riptide and think it's awful, but at least I could cast it every 6 seconds if I felt like it.

Also, healing *feels* different in WotLK than it did in TBC, with the loss of downranking. You killed GH and HW (HT was already dead 2 years prior), but at least for Shaman, you made LHW a decent spell to compensate. Did Flash Heal get better in WotLK? No.

In the next patch, Holy Priests will be healing with the exact same spells they used in TBC, except that CoH and GH, their two best spells, are worse than they were in TBC. That's not exactly a recipe for fun.

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Q u o t e:
Threads like this are tough because they start out bad and I just want to lock them but then Jastia goes and says some really smart things that I would love for people to see.



It’s ironic because we have actually ended up discussing priests so much lately. Usually the discussion starts with me asking other designers to help me understand the issue. I must admit to being at a little bit of a loss over why so many priests seem so dissatisfied with the class (and to be fair, there are many players there with the opposite feedback). I usually don’t find myself at such odds with the community, but in this case I am still having trouble understanding the issue. (And I apologize in advance to the druids, shamans and paladins who feel priest issues already dominate this forum.) I don’t honestly think that priests are just so upset about the CoH nerf that it makes them turn their back on the class. A lot of players seem really unhappy with the role of the priest as having lots of tools. I have a priest and I heal a lot. Prayer of Mending is a fun spell. Guardian Spirit is a fun spell. Those are just the tip of a pretty big toolbox.

So if you want us to be on the same page, and certainly if you ever hope to see any changes that fix the problem for you, you’re going to have to put down your weapons, step away from the rhetoric, turn off the CAPS LOCK, and try and explain to us what we’re missing.

---

Even with the CoH nerf Priests are going to be one of the best healers. If people can't live without CoH then they suck. Sorry but its true.

To the original poster, all the encounters are so easy that if you are wiping due to the CoH nerf then I laugh at you. I'd say almost every fight is easier than Void Reaver was in Tempest Keep. (Aside from Malygos and Sartharian with multiple drakes up) And Void Reaver was considered free loot.

I think Blizzard should bring back difficult trash, faster trash respawns, and bosses that you probably have to clear the trash 4 or 5 times before you get your first successful kill. It will weed out a lot of the horrible players who torment me.

Why am I upset with the class I have played for 4 years?

I rolled a priest to be the absolute best healer I could be because I like playing the healer role.

I understood that there would be drawbacks to making this choice such as poor armor, limited offensive capability, limited weapon choices, etc but that in giving up all these things I would be rewarded by being the best healer in the game. There were other options available that could heal and I looked at them but they all were supposed to sacrifice some healing power because of the benefits (or lack of disadvantages) they had instead. Instead of choosing one of the hybrid healers for the other benefits I sucked it up and took all the disadvantages you could throw at me to be the best healer in the game...

Now move ahead four years and understandably with two expansions, new technologies, and an ever evolving game world things have changed. I'm okay with things changing as a general rule. I understand the need to make the other healing classes reasonable choices to heal the smaller instances and so you buffed their skill sets. This is fine, and, as I said understandable. What I completely don't understand is why, with all priests give up in other areas, I am the second string healer in a large scale raid setting by design. Priests are the masters of healing and bring pretty much nothing else, if you want us to have a single target healing tree and a raid/aoe healing tree then if we invest fully in one of those trees we should be the best at that role. A paladin that invests heavily in the holy tree does not give up their plate armor, shield, larger weapon selection, blessings (the baseline versions), auras, etc, yet they now get to take our spot as the gods of single target healing. The same thing applies to shaman and aoe healing. In the meantime nothing has been done to alleviate the disadvantages in other areas we accepted in the original model to be unsurpassed in our chosen role.

st heals: priests: used to be #1, now #2, some would say 3 (or 4)
aoe heals: priests used to be #1, now #2, some would say 3
non healing utility: priests used to be #4, still #4
armor / weapon choices & offensive capability (in a healing spec): priests used to be #4, still #4
personal survivability / escapes: priests used to be #4, still #4

How exactly is this fair?

That is the root of my dissatisfaction with the current state of the Priest class.

I can see three possible ways to address the situation that would increase my satisfaction as a paying customer:

1) buff the priest trees such that a full disc priest is the best single target healer, do the same with holy and aoe, make no changes in other areas
2) buff the non-healing areas of the priest class in some way to reflect our diminished healing power and additionally provide a reason other than the paladin/shaman didn't log in or gimmick fights for us to be desireable to large scale raids that have access to their choice of healers
3) inflict appropriate penalties on the other healing classes as they specialize further to weaken their advantages in the non-healing areas over us as they approach or surpass our healing ability-if they want to heal as well as us they should suffer the same drawbacks we do basically

Obviously #3 is an unlikely option as the QQ from the nerfing would drown everyone