Priests and Warriors are next in our World of Warcraft: Forever class deep dives, with updates that build on the roles, rhythms, and class-defining tools players know. This look covers new and adjusted baseline abilities, refreshed racial Priest spells, Rage and stance updates for Warriors, and talent changes across Discipline, Holy, Shadow, Arms, Fury, and Protection.
I like this apart from the battle shout nerf … We get shamys so warrior gets nerfed? lol
- Rage:
- Rage from taking damage: We kept the original formula for Rage generation from taking damage, but with one big change. Rage gain from damage is calculated by ignoring Armor. So, wearing Armor will no longer reduce the Rage you gain. We are using the old formula as if you always had 50% damage reduction from Armor. Rage gain also ignores all damage absorption effects, so Power Word: Shield will no longer decrease Rage gained.
- Rage from dealing damage: We have fully-normalized this Rage. Rage gained is now based on the speed of the weapon that dealt the damage. In the launch beta, we gave no additional Rage for dealing critical strikes. We are re-adding that. Critical strike will now give 75% more Rage than non-critical strikes.
Crit rage bonus getting re-added at 75%, hopefully this should be enough to improve the feel of the class to be a bit more high tempo.
The battle shout change is likely to balance out this increase in damage from having more rage as fury warrior dps was projected to still be extremely good in terms of damage output even when just pressing BT/WW on CD where possible.
Yeah, this seems like a weird change. I could understand if they adjusted it towards higher levels, but at lower levels its in sever need of a buff. Like, a Warrior Battle Shout at rank 1 gives 12 Attack Power, a Shaman’s Rockbiter weapon gives 50!
''Dual Wield Specialization: Now also increases chance to hit with off-hand weapons."
This talent on the current beta build also gives 100% more rage from OH hits. Would be utterly hilarious if they gave back rage on crit but nerfed the talent, which is an over all nerf.
Someone in the dev team is beyond traumatized/salty of dps warriors.
Dear devs, I have been intensively testing out leveling up as well as running dungeons as both a geared smiting priest as well as a geared shadowpriest alot and have identified after multiple runs the following serious problems:
Smite priest: Single-target it works but you’re down on the floor drinking basically the whole dungeon while the other dps is just never oom and keeps pulling pack after pack. In addition Your only form of aoe dmge at lvl 20 is holy nova and gets you oom in like 4 casts and doesn’t even do any significant dmge. at lvl 20 you’re already 1 third to max level and past 3 dungeons ! I wish we had a toggleable button that changes holy nova on the fly into a cheap viable aoe dmge spell
As shadowpriest mana management is ok but your dmge is a joke at lvl 20. Especially with the nerf to wanding you’re now supposed to use mindflay instead to be somewhat viable because mindblasts are just too expensive so I feel like the dmge needs to be tweaked, especially because you just got your newest biggest swp at lvl 18 and mindflay at 20 so they should be big dmge that lasts for X levels ahead but instead you’re already far behind the other dps. In addition also here we have zero aoe which means you’re supposed to dot em 1 by 1 and then flay but the problem is that swp ticks way too slow and for so few dmge that’s completely not viable for aoe. Everything is dead by any other dps before your dots can even do any dmge and you waste all your mana. I wish we had a toggleable on/off button to do all our SWP dmge on targets in 1 third of the time or something. And then we have to juggle that abililty to switch between singletarget and aoe.
just some ideas I guess
Regarding healing it’s basic but just fine at first looks. I’m just gutted that dungeon xp is useless now. I was genuinenly planning on healing my way to 60 in dungeons as that is. Your current implementation makes it so that no one wants to run a dungeon twice. I truly believe that the devs should provide a the balance between dungeon running or solo questing and choosing which one to go for should be a choice that the player makes, not the devs.
Also there’s no more point to spec into healing at all since you’re forced into solo questing/farming and any talent speccing into healing feels like fully wasted points now.
Yeah, for the first 20 levels, priest is pretty much “Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Pain, Wand goes Brrrr.” then you finally get Mind Flay. Unless you’re playing as Holy or Diciplin, then you just keep doing the “Wand goes brrr.” tactic.
It would be nice if Vampiric Embrace had no cooldown but was allowed to be on only one target at a time.
”Shadow Focus: Instead of reducing the target’s chance to resist, it increases the chance for Shadow spells to hit.”
What’s the difference from this?
Smite priest needs some more love. We need more mana cost reduction or some way to generate mana quickly. Holy nova also needs dmg buff and 0 cost proc from holy fire needs to be at least 20%.
Smite priest has to be a viable raiding spec!
Deep wounds still dont procc from rend crits. is this intended? the tooltip only states critical strikes.
Good job Blizzard for making spriest useless at 60.
It’s cool of Blizzard to let you test the game at max level. You must be a big deal.
What other class besides Priest has a talent with an actual drawback built into an ability modifier?
Improved Mind Flay makes Mind Flay deal more damage and increases its range, but reduces the strength of its slow. If you actually want to keep the stronger slow, you have to intentionally avoid taking the talent.
It reminds me of the old Surrender to Madness on Retail. Why is Priest seemingly the only class getting this kind of glyph-style tradeoff baked directly into its talent tree?
I love these trade offs in class design. Instead of taking it out of the priest class, I would love if they added more flavourful choices like these , to other classes as well 
Overall it seems warriors are buffed as tanks, buffed in solo PvE content, but nerfed in terms of damage scaling.
Seems pretty good to me, I am probably gonna roll a warrior.
Wether 20% Flurry, Impale and 175% rage gain from crits is going to scale warriors too well again, such later raids are filled with warriors once again remains to be seen.
I really like, where it is going though!
That’s my whole issue with it. I’d be fine with tradeoffs like this if every class had to make similar concessions in their talent trees.
But if other classes mostly get talents that are pure upgrades, while Priest gets upgrades with explicit downsides attached, then it doesn’t feel like “flavourful class design”, but it feels like Priest is being designed by a different set of rules.
My thoughts on smitepriests.
The mana cost of smite, holy fire and holy nova has always been to high so we always have had problem whit mana.
Holy nova: Make it trainabel and if you spec in to it it will lose the healing part and instead incresase the damage.
Searing light should be changed so instead of procing a holy nova it sahould ad more periodic damage. Holy fire has so long casting time and we need to be able to cast 1 - 2 more smite before we need to cast holy fire again.
I would like to see that if smite or penance critts it shaves of 0,5 sec on next holy fire. You shouldent be able to have a instant cast.
A stupid wish is that if we cast holy nova standing in another paladins consecration we do more damage ( if speced in it) or healing.
Having dual wield specialization, raging blows and enrage on the same row feels kind of bad, it is a mandatory 11 points in a single row.
so if you want to get 2 points of impale in arms you need to skip 2 points in precision because you are not going to skip points in flurry.
if you swapped the positions on dual wield specialization (row 4) and boundless rage (row 3) in fury tree then you no longer have those 11 mandatory points in a single row and you can get both impale and 3 points in precision.
this is my thoughts on the talents for lvl 60, however as for leveling it would feel better being able to spec into dualwield specialization at lvl 20 when we learn to dual wield instead of having an option of increasing our rage cap.
maybe they actually intend for arms to be the “massive slow hits” specc that the fantasy demands? my arms specc wont reach flurry, so i think its very much intended.