Dragonflight Priest Talent Feedback Thread

It has its use for giga-cleaves (but not everyone needs to giga-cleave) and I do find it convenient to be able to target my AoE. I really liked it before I got better at the rest of the gameplay, not it’s just??? bleh.
When other classes get AoE that does “decreased damage beyond 5 targets” is it more like saying we have weak damage to any number of targets?

I like most of what I see. I like the new healing options that disc and shadow have. Plenty of choice for disc to spec into ST healing with Holy Word: Life, Renew, and Renewed Faith.

9 utility points in shadow is a lot. Having utility points that require other utility points (i.e. psychic horror needs dispersion needs silence) also feels restrictive.

Could mind sear, silence and last word could be put in the base tree? Silence would probably need to require filler points to make it not too cheap for disc.

In exchange maybe Shadowflame Prism and Rabid Shadows could be put into the shadow tree.

This would ease the pressure of the shadow tree to contain so much utility, while giving more utility options to all the other priest specs. Or maybe I’ve just broken PVP.

Throes of Pain (row 6) looks OP in m+, but I don’t expect it to go live like that.

For m+ I see no dealin dmg stuff at all since we have no boon Anymore

You have several talents that boost smite dmg. Holy have several talents to increase both smite and holy fire dmg. Disc have reworked Shadow Covenant to ramp up shadow spells, or they could go for Light’s Wrath. Both specs also have access to Shadowflame Prism.

We don’t know numbers yet, but even without Boon, these could be decent replacements. Alpha/beta will show us more.

Ok, thoughts:

I like the phylosophy of the class tree, I could do again some builds I was not able to make since BC, WotLK as holy priest, and I absolutely love that, plus I can try again my ‘infinite mana build’, it’s great. That means everything is good?, far from it. Holy spec tree need a few tweaks, but I like it overall, Shadow priest spec is the loser here, both in the class tree and in the spec tree, the shadow spec tree is an absolute hiperbloated mess in which, in order to pick our utilities, like dispersion or vampiric embrace, our only choice is to lose DPS, a lot of DPS, same for the class tree, but shadow loses a bit less of DPs there. But let’s go with specifics.

CLASS TREE:

  • 61 talents to choose, a bit too many (druids have 57, and they have 4 specs), the tree feels a bit bloated, and empty once you have finished picking things.
  • To force us to pick a very seldom needed ability, “purify disease” as a prerrequisite to pick our movility talents (body and soul/angelic feather), which are a highly needed pick, feels terribly bad, if you interchange the position of those 2 talents, it would feel great, as we could do builds for dungeons/bosses in which we need ‘purify disease’ or not, without lose our “must pick” mobility talents.
  • Taming the shadows in the tree, when we already have Masochism, makes little sense.
  • The ‘renew’ specific part of the tree is a great idea, good job there, I like it.
  • I hope ‘Dominant mind’ is a version where we can actually MC elites in M+, if it is the version which only allow us to MC crappy mobs, not useful enough.
  • ‘Twins of the sun priestess’… this talent must be erased from existence, period. It is too good, and feels 200% mandatory, it is specially bad for shadow priests, who will be forced to pick it, keep control of other classes CDs (as if it was not difficult enough to keep control of everything else) losing DPS for themselves and messing their rotation, even if they use it with their own CDs, instead of the other class, they will have to mess their rotation in order to select another memeber of the party/raid and then come back to boss. Blizzard, if you really want to remove toxicity, you must remove this talent, because it only will give us bad moods and toxicity. Remove it, please, please, please.
  • ‘Clerics armaments’ and ‘Tools of the cloth’, not fond of them, maybe if the increased damage is while weakened soul last, but really not fond of them.
  • ‘Tithe evasion’ this 2 point talent forces holy priests to pick also ‘Shadow word: dead’ in order to not make it 100% useless, replace it with ‘Improved mind blast’ and you will be helping shadow priests at the same time.
  • ‘Holy word: life’ is not worthy for holy priests, we already have 2 panic buttons with Holy word: serenity and Guardian angel, it is kind of interesting for discipline priests, but the price to pay vs risk is too high, to make it not damaging under 35% instead of under 20% might make it actually a good choice.
  • ‘Crystaline reflection’ probably would need a small buff to compete with ‘Mindgames’ (because nerf mindgames could make it irrelevant, so don’t do it).

HOLY PRIEST TREE:
I like it, but it is too bloated in the third part of the tree, I would move all the ‘Rune of…’ to the middle part of the tree, and it would be ready (at least for me).

SHADOW PRIEST TREE:

  • This one needs a full rework, let’s go with the reasons:
  • It is bloated as hell, 55 talents to pick and only 30 points (next spec with most talents is discipline with 52, and none of the other goes over 49) makes it feel terrible.
  • To be forced to pick ‘Mind bomb’/‘Psychic voice’ in order to be able to pick ‘Vampiric embrace’ feels bad.
  • I understand you do not want us to pick both ‘Mind bomb/Psychic voice’ and ‘Psychic horror’ without have to reonunce to some DPS, but to put ‘psychic horror’ with ‘dispersion’ as prerrequisite is bad.
  • It is impossible to pick 2 core utilities like ‘Vampiric embrace’ and ‘Dispersion’ at the same time without lose a DPS talent, to have to sacrifice DPS in order to have our utilities, feels bad, and goes against your own philosophy of, dont put utilities vs DPS in the choices.
  • Too many talents empowering ‘mind fly’, even removing ‘dark thoughts’ from the ecuation, we can find that is more interesting keep using mind fly over void torrent.
  • Too many talents in the third part of the tree, 22 talents to pick, and only 10 to use, overbloated.
  • I love the ‘Idol’ spells, they can give a lot of variety to our gameplay and allow us to do some really crazy things, good job there, pity it’s hiding under so many issues with the rest of the tree.

I hope this reach you an helps you fix the issues the tree have.

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I’m just gonna refer to my own post here

I personally think this is the work that needs to be done, It’s not a full rework but it’s a massive one

Searing Nightmare:
I stopped playing shadowpriest in CN. I think the new shadow is cool, but searing nightmare needs to be removed and changed so we have a propper AOE spender. It feels horrible in m+/open world with low haste in the start of the expansion, having to pool up insanity, then stand still for 2 abilities where it is a requisite that u can mind seer. Any mechanic in m+ and u feel bad on any difficulty of content. More than any other caster in my opinion. Open word also just feels bad having to sit and hardcast a weak spell in order for it to burst aoe. Please just remove it completely and change mind seer and searing nightmare to either be used seperatly or complement eachother not be required for eachother. I dont know a single Shadowpriest that likes m+ and most of them is because of lackluster feeling of AOE.

I got 6 words, Void Eruption as a standalone spender

Alright, I got some time to play a bit with new talents and here are some thoughts I got. I play discipline priest mostly, so my feedback will be centered around this spec.

Class Tree

  • I’m not sure why discipline start with both PoM and SW:D, giving the spec 1 point advantage. Perhaps Holy starting with PoM + Renew and Shadow with SW:D and Shadow Mend would be fair to offer all priest specs equal number of points spent within trees.
  • Holy Nova: depends how hard it hits, but if we work with current SL version, it hits like a wet noodle. I believe Legion version of the spell was the best we had in a long while - it did not heal, but dealt way more damage then now. Let’s return to that… nobody use Holy Nova to heal.
  • Tools of the Cloth and Cleric’s Armaments feels very lacking. It should either give bigger bonus, or be triggered by Weakened Soul debuff.
  • Leap of Faith: somehow, I think it would be super fun to have this choice node with standard Leap and Vault of Heavens legendary, so you either chose between grip utility and mobility
  • Charitable Souls is extremely weak talent. Without Rapture, our shields are pretty weak, so getting 10 % of that would be hardly noticable
  • Crystalline Reflection: this is actually welcomed comeback, but on this position within the tree, it feels rather underwhelming. Only discipline priest can make some of this talent, which makes it unattractive for both Holy and Shadow. I’d move this talent to Discipline tree and place Fae Guardians (perhaps redesigned to fit Priest theme better) in this position. Fae Guardains offered outstanding utility and I many players would like to see it stay in our kit.
  • Taming Shadows: In most cases, you will rather spec into Masochism then this. I think something else would be better, perhaps Depth of the Shadows azerite trait (SW:P periodic dmg increase healing of SM, stacking up to 30 stacks).
  • Translucent Image: also glad to keep this conduit, but I think it would be good to apply it for the whole duration of Fade, not just first 5 secs.
  • Tithe Evasion: this is extremely uninteresting choice on a way to highly attractive Mindgames. We just don’t SW:D ourselves to death, so reducing SW:D backlash feels somewhat redundant. This deep within shadow part of the class tree we should get something more… juicy. Perhaps SW:D backlash restoring mana/insanity?
  • Twist of Fate: this should trigger also from dealing damage to targets below 35%, not just healing
  • Dominant Mind: this talent look really cool on paper, but it was impractical for years. It has no use in most of PvE content (besides open world questing I guess) and it’s disabled in PvP. I wish this would rather disorient the target instead of making it your pet, so you could actually consider picking it in certain arena comps or m+ for more CC.
  • Throes of Pain: This seem to be OP for m+, resulting in close to infinite mana

Discipline Tree:

  • First of all, return of PoM and Renew to our kit seems really nice at first, but I have my concerns about it. PoM can actually heal for nice amount targets with atonements through our mastery, with the benefit of spreading free renews. On the other hand, I’m afraid it just bring another thing to watch alongside our tedious atonement management.
    Since the spell will be baseline for discipline, I think we could have some talents which incorporate it to the spec. Something like this:
    Atoning Prayers
    Your initial Prayer of Mending cast apply Atonement. When it jumps to other target, it applies atonement for half of it’s normal duration.
    This would gave us mana efficient atonement spread mechanism, which is something discipline desperately needs. It wouldn’t make our raid builds OP, since PoM bouncing usually take some time, depending on encounter.
  • Shining Radiance: this talent is extremely weak. Current conduit increase PW:R by approx 80%, so spending 2 points for 20% feels very underwhelming and I guess many builds will just spend 2 points elsewhere in the tree. It should be at least 30/60% or should increase atonement duration at least.
  • Shield Discipline: The talent is inferior to PW: Solace in most ways. To make it more competitive, it should restore some mana/rage/energy/focus/fury/runic power to it’s target.
  • Pain Transformation: Again, very weak compared to the current conduit, which offers considerable heal. Healing 10% max health on 3 mins CD feels very weak. Another issue with this talent is that it can be taken even without PS, which feels weird. I think Crystalline Reflection would be better in it’s place, considering it leads to Rapture.
  • Indemnity/Solatium: given how deep within the tree they are, 2 more secs atonements for their respective spells feel quite weak. I think these two could be inspired by PvP talent Trinity in way these talents would limit Atonement spread only to PW:S or Shadow Mend, but increase atonement duration considerably (in a case of Trinity, by 15 seconds). That would make these talents extremely impactful for flow of the spec and actually justify them as final talent choices of our tree.
  • Light’s Wrath: with right part of the tree being heavily shadow oriented, I think it would be better to change Light’s Wrath from Radiant to Twilight damage (Holy and Shadow), especially when it’s centered in the middle off the tree.

First impression is very good. Im glad they’re doing a solid unpruning. It looks like it’ll be fun to have so many abilities and effects, and Ive been having loads of fun theorycrafting different builds and figuring out all the possibilities.

Things they could have done better:

  • do talents like evenfall (radiance procs power of the dark side) work without having power of the dark side talented?
  • do mindbender and shadow mend replace flash heal and shadowfiend?
  • they should try to avoid talents being dead outside of one specific environment (e.g. extended atonement being primarily a raid talent, same with spirit shell/evang and harsh discipline. The lack of proper “tuning knobs” has been a big issue for disc for years now, where balancing them for raids has screwed them over in pvp and m+ many times. The fact that so many of these talents seem to be designed solely with a raid environment in mind, is very worrying. They need to be better at designing talents that either work twofold or simply dont revolve around amount of targets. Or give more choice talents where one option is raid oriented and the other pvp or m+.
  • while its nice that holy and disc share some tools, I think holy getting access to shadow mend is gonna cause some issues in pvp. One of the few advantages disc has had over holy in pvp is access to different healing schools. If holy is gonna keep going down the same road we’ve seen in shadowlands, they definitely dont need yet another helping hand.
  • theres quite a lot of active ability talents, which causes a lot of unnecessary stress when swapping builds, needing to reconfigure action bars and make clever macros etc. This could in some cases be toned down by having more abilities baseline and rather have talents to modify them
  • there could definitely be some more balancing/number tweaking. Some talents seem very strong, some seem almost useless - even the supposedly “big ones”

Im confused by this. Can you elaborate.
Dragonflight talents - shadow baseline -shadowform.

Rest is pruned to talent tree. Yes you propably can talent it to get everything back…and by back i mean to the state we are now in shadowlands. But on the expense of the new stuff. To me this looks like a solid pruning. For the shadow though.

I hate that main shadow problems are aoe and searing nightmare beign the most unfun ability ever created to do aoe…and its damage is still bad. They didnt adress it and left SN untouched. Second issue was some meanibgful utility that will make our spec desirable. We now have alot of niche utility spells. But except soothe all are pruned to talent tree where you either dont have enough point to get them, or they are on the oposite side of the tree…or you would have to pick these in exchange for losing troughput talent - which shouldnt be the case- their word.

So why is shackle mass dispel silence stun vampiric embrace leap power infusion and mindcontrol in talent tree is beyond me. We got nothing to make us more desirable…quite the oposite …lost even the little we had.

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I guess I could have specified that Im talking mainly from a disc pov. I havent looked much at the shadow tree.

As disc Id be able to get the following abilities on top of what I already have:

  • renew
  • pom
  • schism
  • shining force
  • divine star
  • holy word: life

On top of that Id be able to get effects/interactions like mindbender, prism, divine star silence and both masochism and b&s/feather. Even though Id have to sacrifice stuff like shackle in many cases (and depending on activity: mass dispel, leap, mind control) it doesnt feel too bad when its niche abilities with limited use. The abilities I gain will be used a lot more frequently and make the gameplay feel considerably smoother. Either way the net sum is way on the + side.

I’m also really hyped about various mana regen we get:

  • Enlightenment provides solid 10% mana regen
  • Throes of Pain gives 10% total mana back per enemy killed with SW:P up, which will be insane mana regen for M+ (will probably get nerfed before going live)
  • Shadowfiend + Mindbender
  • Inner Light gives 15% healing cost reduction
  • PW: Solace and Shield Discipline also stays

Discipline was extremely mana hungry spec and this gives me hope we will not struggle so much in Dragonflight. With all that regen, I think I might try Shield Discipline after years, so I get one less spell in rotation (PW: Solace). We can have our shields reduce CD on Pain Suppression and with Crystalline Reflection, we get way more value for spaming them, so it might not be a bad idea.

I also like PoM and Renew back, but it might be a challenge to use them well with all the management going on… spam shields to spread atonement, spread PW:S/PtW on targets… now I can imagine maintaining renews could become quite a chore real soon. PoM with Benediction can complement our dungeon healing I guess, especially for some keys. It would be huge if PoM could apply atonements too, even in reduced duration like Radiance.

HW: Life could be really good for discs too. For PvP, it will be another CC break, so it might be hard to land some CCs on a priest now. I can imagine HW: Life + Twist of Faith can result in beefy heal, which is something disc lacks at the moment. HW: Life and then Radiance will possibly have potential to top your target in arenas, depending on numbers of the HW: Life…

Why are there way less choices in the holy tree than in the discipline tree? Disc seems way more fun tbf, there is not much variation in the holy tree - you end up taking 2/3 of all talents no matter which route you choose.

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Gonna add some of my Mayonnaise here. :slight_smile:

Change Powerinfusion to selfcast and Twins of the Sun Priestess talent to 1 point be castable on others and 2 points get 100% of the effect for the priest itself if cast on others.

Swap Twins of the Sun Priestess with Crystalline Reflection maybe that would help with the conflict about Powerinfusion for Shadowpriest if you lose Mindgames for it if you go that route and would make Body and Soul vs Angelic Feathers more interesting.
It could also give the path between Mindgames and then Twins of the Sun Priestess more variety and make it more of a choice then a must.

Translucent Image make it that Fade in its full duration reduce the damage.
Further buff Tithe Evasion, Shadowword Death can really chunk you in situations where you dont want to but need to because of its damage and i think 20% is not helping that much.

If Mental Fortitude and Sanguine Teachings stays, i would add a healing increase on Vampire Touch for Mental Fortitude and for Sanguine Teaching an short lasting effect after the shield goes away like 5-10 sec.

Void Apparitions seems meh maybe let it reset all dots on enemies around the target to their full duration, but then 10% chance could be to high.

Can we change Mind Bomb to a 10 sec debuff that you can press again in this time to trigger its effect or when it runs out.
Dont change it for PvP but in PvE it could be a neat instead then of the Silence path.

San layn some flavor for Vampire Embrace can be nice like let it heal 1 more but for less of an effect.

Hallucinations should also change Vampire Embrace to an offgcd.

Im sorry for mistakes :rofl: and also these are just some of my ideas.

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Ellipsis made a really good post about SP impressions on WoWhead:

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Very good text with many valid points and a lot of insight. A few comments:

  • its very obvious that its written from a pve player pov (taking it for granted that the audience are raiders or m+ players). The comments on class tree make perfect sense from a pve pov. I personally think the idea of being able to go down the left side of class tree for pvp or solo pve purposes could be interesting. Even if you have to pick some “dead talents” to reach your destination, I think having such choices is what can ultimately lead to diversity and surprise builds. However I do absolutely agree that they could do a better job designing the healing side of the class tree and maybe implement more twofold talents giving some benefit to shadow. For instance unwavering will could apply to a shadow ability. Assuming you can still pom and renew in shadowform (pretty sure you could at some point in wows history :thinking:) it would be cool to see some interaction between renew healing and shadow dmg throughput, making pom with benediction talent a worthwhile investment in raid scenarios etc. I think the biggest room for improvement in the class tree is the shield path, both by tuning the existing talents and redesigning some of them into something new.
  • regarding the “more dmg while shielded talents”: I think these talents look really interesting. They might need more tuning to be desirable, but from a design perspective I think they’re really nice. Imo they shouldnt be talents where you mindlessly press shield on cd, but rather an occasional throughput increase that requires awareness and knowledge - and maybe luck :four_leaf_clover:

Nothing for dealing dmg? There are loads of talents for exactly that :smiley:
Both disc and holy look like they’ll be crazy fun in m+. Boon was imo both boring and poorly designed, so Im very happy they got rid of it.

Very strong points made by him, i hope Blizzard reads it and makes changes , atm shadow priest is a joke with the current talent trees.

A luck? Go fight any boss in shadowlands …dunegon or raid…or even to some pvp match and tell me how long you stay shielded with our 4k pw: shield…especialy when they are forcing us to play shadowflame prism…which is basicaly sending sw:dead on cd.

How do you wanna balance or tune that? You would need to be brokenly op full hp entire fight with shields from VT…or it will be completely useless…which is the case.

There is no boss where you stay 100% hp or even shielded in this entire expansion. No matter how you play or how much you try.
And if my class is balanced around buffs that i get from beign shielded…how do i manage to pull of the highest potential of the spec? Begging discs and monks before every fight to keep me shielded?

Nah. For me these are dead talents…like completely useless if you think about it a little. Shadowflame prism is the go-to playstyle…you wont be full hp or shielded ever.

I also love the points he made about making a disfunctional specs. You can make a build without shadowfiend, vt, dp or sn…so basicaly half the tree is about VT and aparations and mindblast procs from vt - no vt- useless. Every insanity boosting talent and entire toolkit useless because you have literaly nothing to spend it on. and rest of talents like yshar idol about bender/fiend …also literaly useless.

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