Tldr for those of you who havent looked at patch notes yet:
- void summoner (bender cdr) is heavily nerfed, meaning we wont have much uptime on bender
- both oracle and abilities that benefit oracle are buffed
There’s a lot more to it, so read up. Anyways, it seems clear that they wanna make oracle a more viable option, and Im trying to be optimistic. Voidweaver might end up being really good in m+ regardless, its impossible to tell at this point, but personally Im quite excited about the prospect of maybe having 2 viable options.
If they should manage to give oracle enough throughput to deal with the frequent heavy aoe dmg in high m+ (which for now is a big IF), my main concern is the lack of dmg. Having tested oracle in dungeons briefly this season, it feels like it deals a mere fraction of the dmg that voidweaver does. Oracle spot healing and survivability is already great, so obviously it cant have the same burst aoe healing and dmg that is the niche of voidweaver. But I think they could easily bridge the gap a bit without being too concerned about the spec becoming too powerful.
Im thinking a build along the lines of this, with a heavy emphasis on using shield and penance on cd.
https://imgur.com/KMNHLVB
The new oracle talent (penance shoots 3 extra bolts at friend/enemy, opposite of the regular penance), which has good synergy with talents like contrition (now baseline) and weal and woe. The removal of PtW makes SWP convenient for utilizing twilight equilibrium - ironically for oracle only. Coupled with the new inner focus talent and buffed divine aegis, the healing throughput might be good enough - fingers crossed
When it comes to dmg dealing, I feel like they’re missing out on some pretty cool things to allow oracle to deal a more sensible amount of dmg, while keeping the hero talent playstyles distinguished. One way to achieve this is to revert the nerf to crystalline reflection. And those of you who looked at the disc talents at the very early development of Dragonflight might remember the divine star talent which made it apply a dot (and a silence effect, Id be happy with the dot only). They could maybe also double down on buffing SWP for oracle, but I think the first 2 suggestions would suffice with the right tuning.