As a priest player who has a fair bit of BFD gear and has never really pvp’d before in classic wow, I thought I’d delve into the world of PVP to see how it’s looking in SOD.
Holy hell, priest’s should not be allowed to exist like this in PVP.
I’ve been grinding WSG and am halfway to exalted now and here are my notes based on what i’ve seen and experienced:
- POM is beyond imbalanced: Considering that i’m full shadow spec, this is an ABSURD spell that has barely any cost and heals for 166 per bounce (35 healing power) for a theoretical total of 830 health. Well such a powerful spell should cost a high amount right? 74 mana. Seventy Four. Using this logic, 1 mana = 11 healing. Compare this to our most efficient heal at 25 (Heal rank 2) which heals for 438 to 501 for 205 mana! This means that 1 mana is = 2.4 for a 3 second cast. This makes zero sense considering that POM is instant cast and should be on par with other instant casts like PW:S or Renew. There is no world where an instant cast should be x4.5 more efficient than our most efficient heal.
Penance: While penance is similar to my last issue (low mana cost, high throughput) this issue is made worse by the insane single target burst healing it can do (outputs 182 per tick over 2 seconds on my priest) which puts alot of classes in a tough spot due to being burst reliant, e.g rogue.
Void Plague: Ok, look. I get it. Spriest is worse than a 20 day leftover takeout burger in PVE, I understand this as a spriest main, it needed the damage buff to do even mediocre damage. But the amount of opression this has in PVP is insane. Doing 350 over 18 seconds is a large amount for a cheap dot and by combining this damage with the durability provided by POM and Penance, you’re better off fighting an elephant with a toenail clipper as the priest will /laugh as he POM’s himself while shielded while dotting and wanding you in a 1v1.
Other issues that make priests a red herring: Other healing classes just plain suck. Hpally is such garbage in SOD, which makes sense as they’re turbo late game healers that rely on crit. They’re so bad i’ve only ever seen one other hpally in my entire time playing SOD. While I don’t play horde, I hear shaman healer suffers the same issues as hpal. This leaves us with Druids and Mages. I’ve never seen a mage healer in PVP so I can’t comment, but druids take about half a mana bar and 15 seconds to do any real healing, making priests the defacto and only real healer.
Premades: Yeah, premades bad yada yada. From my completely subjective observations, the team with the more hunters and priests oftens wins and I don’t believe this to be a conincidence. As more people get stomped by premades taking 3 priests 1 pally and 6 hunters it’s understandable that people are frustrated by priests and hunters, but there isn’t a realistic fix that blizzard could implement bar role queue (you don’t want this) or stopping you from playing with friends.
All in all, I understand and sympathize with what blizzard is trying to do and they’ve done a fantastic job with the PVE elements of the game, actively trying to balance out the gap between physical and casters (thank you <3) but with this, there are unintended consequences in PVP that are hard to navigate, if you nerf POM and Penance, their PVE performance will be affected too and I can understand that. But as it stands, these abilities are breaking the PVP game, similar to LOL, the game is often over at champ select, whoever has more priests win and whoever troll picks 3 warriors instantly loses.
I’m not a seasoned pvp’er so I don’t believe I have THE solution but if a PVE Andy like myself can notice such glaring issues, something is wrong and must be adressed.