Recent priest talent changes/tuning(DF)

Classes Priest
1

Most recent changes below:

  • Shadow

    • Talent tree has been rearranged.
    • Dark Void – Cooldown no longer affected by Haste.
    • Shadow Crash – Cooldown no longer affected by Haste.
    • Mind Blast – Generates 6 Insanity (was 8). Damage reduced by 20%.
    • Mind Spike – Generates 4 Insanity (was 6). Damaged reduced by 50%.
    • Auspicious Spirits – Generates 1 Insanity (was 2).
    • Vampiric Touch – Generates 4 Insanity (was 5).
    • Shadow Word: Pain – Generates 3 Insanity (was 4).
    • Mind Flay: Insanity – Generates 4 Insanity per tick (was 6).
    • Idol of C’Thun – Mind Flay from Void Tendril generates 2 Insanity per tick (was 3). Mind Sear from Void Lasher now generates 2 Insanity per tick (was 1), and no longer generates additional Insanity based on number of targets hit.
    • Mind Flay – Generates 2 Insanity per tick (was 3).
    • Mindbender – Generates 3 Insanity per melee attack (was 5).
    • Hallucinations – Generates 4 Insanity (was 6).
    • Dark Void – Generates 15 Insanity (was 20). Applies Shadow Word: Pain to 15 additional targets (was 8).
    • Echoing Void – Damage reduced by 50%.
    • Idol of Yogg-Saron – Requires 100 Shadowy Apparitions (was 200). Damage of Void Spike increased by 1100%.
    • Surge of Darkness – Increases the damage of Mind Spike by 200% (was 50%).
    • Mind Sear – Damage increased by 115%.
    • Devouring Plague – Damage increased by 30%.
    • Void Bolt – Damage increased by 80%.
    • Coalescing Shadows – Increases the damage of Mind Spike and Mind Blast by 10% (was 20%).
    • Mind Melt – Increases the critical strike chance of Mind Blast by 25% (was 50%).

Looks like the focus this time around is addressing some of the more prominant issues the tree had, looking at non-functional talents, and addressing power in certain areas either lacking or being too potent.

– Power taken away from Mind Blast, and making Spike better as a proc talent(50% reduced hard-cast power, but 200% up from 50% on proc) means we’re moving away from being shadowmages, and closer back to being Spriests. While I know a few people enjoy playing shadowmage, I personally feel it too far from what Spriest is(good change in my book).

– Vform gotten back a wee tiny bit of power in the form of a considerate buff to Vbolt, to be seen how this feels.

– Yoggy idol ‘stacks required for summon’ reduced, and power considerately increased.

– Nzoth power brought to a more reasonable amount.

– Last but not least, what might look like an overall nerf(insanity gain decrease), seem to be our first look at finally making our spender feel like a spender, and not a machinegun ability with a requirement. Looks like our spender finally might see the power it deserves(tuning pending) with a first iteration being a 30% power increase, with it being used less often.

Overall I like what I see, but a few concerns remain:

– Idol of Nzoth/Yshaarj feel like they should switch places in some manner, perhaps even just take their line from bender/torrent and switch them around, since Torrent is a periodic, and Nzoth is better with a dot focused build(more procs), while the bender line focused more on the blaster side(DA affects it), procs off SW:D and Blast, and its use meaning constantly interupting Flay(Of course, this would require either moving or changing Puppet Master).

– Even before the recent change, I’ll go ahead and make the bold assumption that no Spriest ever skipped Shadowy Insight, and with the change this time, it has moved even closer to the dot/channel side, sitting between two talents both requiring the channeling of Flay and its kin(Flay: Insanity/Torrent). This brings back some of the issue we saw with Searing Nightmare requiring several globals to simply get started/setup, this is now true for our Flay build more than ever, with Screams wanting us to channel the Flay family as much as we can(more tics also equals more procs), and Flay: Insanity(DP casts) proccing often enough to give us frequent casts. Constantly having to cancel Flay to cast the SI blast proc, feels awkward in not only having to cancel your Flay, and possibly lose a Flay: Insanity proc, but also having to go through several globals to get back to where we were(cast flay[global], SI proc[global], restart flay[global] rinse/repeat).

– Whispers of the Damned itself still feels odd as a 2 point node, even with its indirect buff in other insanity gains being nerfed, its opposite being Maddening Touch, which does nearly the same ST, but more reliable, and with far more potency in AoE.

– Speaking of Aoe, final changes are yet to be seen, but I will continue to advocate for Dark Void being merged into Crash, and(with the change to DV) make Crash hit a bunch of targets, 8? 10? 15? uncapped? :eyes:

For the class tree itself I have but a few points of note:

– Vampiric Embrace rank 2 still gone, which is a major nerf to Shadow’s dwindling utility, while the spell itself remains in the class tree without much use for our brother and sister specs. Would still like to see something take its place(Vampiric Dominance?), and VE returned as a CD unique to shadow.

  • Vampiric Dominance
    When you deal damage or healing, 15% of the amount is healed to up to 3 low-health nearby allies(This not only affects all damage, but also healing, meaning it works for all priest specs, but sets shadow apart in being a dps that brings some healing).

– Void Shield is still nearly a blank talent, bar from perhaps a rare few niche sustained dot situations in m+(?)

– Holy Nova still exists in the class tree, and bars the way for Blessed Recovery… and speaking of BR, not sure how this will ever proc in a pve situation(requires you to be crit). Kind of wish this was just baseline, also to make up for the loss of Greater Fade, in terms of pvp.

– Flash Heal woes: This last part is mainly from a pvp standpoint. On live/Ptr, with ilvl 304, my shadowmend heals me for roughly 15-16k with each cast. With masochism in DF working with Shadowmend as it did(the dot becomes a hot), it effectively healed us for 16k + another 8k over its duration while providing the 10% dr as long as the hot lasted. With the removal of Shadowmend, our heal is now down from an effective 24k heal, to an 9k heal at only a slight reduced cost(mend being 25% mana, FH being 20%), and while masochism’s mend was a little strong with all its effects, what we’re left with now is a harsh nerf, with only the access to two schools being the consolation prize. The spell currently doesn’t even top me off before I run out of mana.

Lastly, could Spriest possibly at least have Nova and Flash Heal take on a shadowy appearance? So that I don’t have to sprinkle myself with golden sparkles, while being deep into the maddening darkness, that is Spriest. :pray:

Well, I have said mine. I like the changes this time around, feels like we’re headed in an agreeable direction this time around, even if a few concerns still remain.

Feel free to voice your thoughts as well, if you will.
Thank you all for listening. :kissing_heart:

6 Likes
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Overall bad changes. The developement team thats in charge of priest are totaly disconected from the playerbase and the class…they have no clue what theyre doing. Im sorry but thats just how it looks.

Btw yogg idol changes wont solve anything. Its an counterintuitive effect that works best if trying to spawn in heavy aoe. But its effect is an add that does a single target bolt. And on 100 still takes ages to spawn. Its like devs are trolling us.

Insanity nerf killed all the remaining “flow” this spec had and will feel like an absolute :poop: without tons of haste…again.

Im slowly giving up…theyre just incompetent.

3 Likes
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Very good change since it fixes alot of the problems of how heavy of decision making it felt like earlier when you needed to press something for filler, since now you pretty much had to take a talent which heavily buffed your mind flay if you used DP so alot of the clunkess is gone.

They kinda of overbuffed it with the 1100% damage increase, now its able to almost rival a warlocks tyrant which is their big CD they need to build into vs something you can easily see appear in bigger aoe pulls.

I’d want them to give more of the legion power of the playstyle more to really make it viable over dark ascension with potentially void torrent allowing the buff to remain while its being channeled back then, the tiny buff of damage of void bolt wont really cut it I feel.

Nerf to insanity is good, it felt way to spammy with so many procs and infinity insanity going it’s not healthy that kind of playstyle and doesnt feel dynamic at all not being able to actually dump with your spenders.

I disgree since atm you can easily get full value of your shadowfiend by only putting 1 talent into inescapable torment for aoe and benefit fully from insidious ire. My real problem is how utterly trash C’thun idol still is with it being a random proc that you cant control while its PPM is low and it cant compete with other talents. This talent should be reworked or designed since it makes the idea of builds that dont use the far right of the tree pointless from how bad it’s self is.

Maddening voice/Whisper of the dammed need to be either gone, made into 1 talent nodes, or alot stronger of effects, since compared to Dark Eva and Psychic link they have no power comparison while also blocking some talents making it difficult to move around them.

Yeah this just seems a bit too insane of a idea for balancing in a M+ enviroment. With talents that allow your MB to do 30% of its damage to every target it hits, shadowy insight, Mental decay you’d start to see infinity ramping where you’d go to legion levels of Void form lasting minutes from you never losing enough insanity to not refresh your buff and your dots never expiring from you spamming mind sear which in itself isnt really that fun since we just got free from mind sear/SN pain. Best idea would be to raise the CD on the ability and allow them to stronger as a whole like SC hitting more targets with VT.

It’s pretty much how current warrior ignore pain is, damage you deal refreshes your shield it alongside mental fortitude sound very good combo for cases where you need bonus HP to live and you dont need a faster dispersion as mental is a 10% max hp shield from damage.

should get removed/revamped

Biggest gripe with flash heal just from a pvp POV is how weak the heal is alongside it not working on mind blast the instant and manaless proc for the bottom tree talent for Power word life. It being a different school of magic that heals less is fine if its actually useful vs just there for cannon fodder.

Problems with the spec to me imo how so many of the left hand parts of the class tree have no interaction with the spec. Why doesnt Divine star/halo generate insanity when you need it for a key talent to buff your 2nd biggest defensive ?

1 Like
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Well the pet can pretty much compete with a locks tyrant since mine hit for over 100k on 1 hit on ptr maybe a bug or overbufffed and as much as 100 seems like alot it really isnt. in big aoe clusters you can get that much in like 5 seconds with cooldowns going ofc.

Nerfs to resource gen is actually a good thing in this case, being in your full CD window and not properly able to dump insanity outside of a stupid channeled ability which can have various problems in M+ or raiding at all feels awful like your playing bad, as long as it isnt so much that you need 20% haste to even to have a proper rotation without many death pause windows then its fine.

If this is what you think is incompetent then you should look at the pally tree designer and how little feedback he cares for now thats incompetent

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What if MB procs automatically spent themselves during channelling? Idk. It’s already bothered me on live that dark thoughts lasted such a short time because of their randomness in proccing, compared to demonology or frost mage who have 20-30+ seconds to spend a -stacking- charge.

Because we are built around death by a thousand cuts, we end up with many events that can individually proc, so having single charges on them is cruel.

Anyway, such a small part of the host of issues.

I don’t think merging void+crash is right for this now, I think they’re trying to do the thing where SW:P is the cheap aoe dot and VT is the invested cleave dot, but it doesn’t feel quite right. Why not… merge the dots already (everyone plays Misery) and give falloff on damage when damaging too many targets.

So you do what, toss crash and void into a pack and then start whittling down the 4 VT target with St abilities while spending any insanity on Sear? I recall not having time to do both in current. In that case a void+crash merge is def. warranted.

2 Likes
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With tier set bonus alongside shadowy orbs randomly having your MB be cast while channeling and eating procs is not the way to go. Since with now you can have Surge and orbs rolling to lead to a massive wombo combo in pvp or pve which would have wasted on MB eating the proc.

A majority of our damage comes from shadow apparitions which unless you want to nerf in aoe which is just big feels bad you cant merge them and cause falloff damage since one of the big damaging abilites/effects isnt touched

difference is that demon bolt and ice lance hit like wet noodles without cooldowns, alongside DB never being pressed unless you have a proc unlike MB so in a pvp enviroment it removes the skill and point of LOSing someone if they can infinity hold such big damage imo

2 Likes
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I played around with a few ideas as well, but I’m also generally trying not to directly suggest changes. For this one, I’d like if it instead of rng, had a cap of how many can be out at once, and then procced for sure, upon x requirement, ex. finishing a flay, and having a cap of two or three. Also, remove the Mind Sear proc, and just make the regular tentabros channel the Flay from our current tier4 on live, which would give it some aoe significance.

Completely expecting this to see a reduction. Would also like to see its Void Spike possibly cleave, yes.

Same man, same. But at this point, I’d be happy with a flat 10% haste during it’s duration or something. Ideally, they reworked Ancient Madness into a ramping haste buff, with a cap or something, to not fall into the same balancing issues legion had.

The biggest change I played around with is Mind Flay: Insanity being castable while moving, to give us any sort of repositioning potential. Also since they specifically denied Vault, and leaving SL, we also lose Surrender and Fae blink/Door for those using those, leaving us even more immobile than a lot of newer priests are used to.

I don’t dislike this, but given our mastery, it would require a change to that as well
to either not require one of the dots for full effect, or a flatout rework, which I doubt they’ll give us, and then there’s the apparitions deal. But yes, I also don’t believe in the uncapping/merg of those, but still going to advocate for it. :pray:

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Ramping haste buff would not really be good since how it would make abilites like mind sear instant and speedup procs even more so while also feeling weird to press as you’d spend all of your insanity in less then a second of casting it. A ramping crit buff since itt plays better with shadowy apparitions and how voidform is ment to be more of a aoe/cleave cooldown vs its ST counterpart. Since Acient madness is pretty much do nothing and goes against how VF is supposed to work with it geting its duration extented based on how long you can make it last so possible it grants 5-10% and ramps up to possibly even 30% crit for a long time used past its normal counter

This kinda of is bad in pvp since allowing a no cooldown 75% slow that is castable while moving is very bad for meele’s if anthing allow mind sear to be channable while moving since it has no effect in pvp and just would feel alot better for a main aoe spender to not have to sit in place and randomly stop channeling due to mechanics.

Casting while moving just should be baked into normal void eruption to fully replace surrender as its now mainly a M+ big aoe/cleave fight tool so the problem of priest being to agile isnt a concern anymore.

1 Like
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Perhaps you’re right, but currently we can hardly even find two seconds of a melee not being on us, even from across the arena, due to their obscene amount of dashes, closers or overall mobility, in recent times. Just tired of being a target dummy to melee. :laughing:

Would absolutely love this. :pray:

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I like seeing crit for this spec tbh, disliked being made entirely of haste. Also my elf does fancy poses when he crits, that showoff.

What I’d also like for VF that’s not gonna happen since there’s a competing transformation CD now is that it transformed some spells like metamorphosis does.

flay to void torrent or mf:i?
mind blast to void bolt (inherits mb properties)
void eruption as spender?

because button bloat and business could be handled with simplicity instead of tweaking cooldowns. I like the hectic windows but I’d not like it to be constant, however also don’t like having so little to do outside of them.

I also don’t like when tier4 procs are 10K of my damage and I can’t control whether they happen. So not totally excited for proc based gameplay.

Oh I see.

Maybe! Oh, I thought the “tormented spirits” thing was on targets with SW:P, but no, so that’s out.

I was thinking of the free doggo proc, but that doesn’t reset CD ofc, but don’t forget demon bolt is the best builder, so the damage doesn’t matter, it’s 2 free soul shards is what it’s for.

yes, I would recalculate mastery to match, aka you’d probably have twice the mastery % you have now, and maybe DP should not add full value on top since that’d double the mastery instead of adding 50% effect.

So could actually let us AoE without dotting, as mind sear does now, but at a damage loss - probably not a big deal with enough targets and tuning, and ST with dots. And cleave with dots if you want to. Which again brings back the “invest high in few targets” vs “invest low in many” decision making that I think is good. Idk. I’m probably not saying anything that hasn’t already been said.

And if there was only 1 main dot maybe they could tune and synergise the spec better?

1 Like
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bringbackshadowyrecall :rofl:

Spriest is a dot class with channels supporting it alongside blaster procs. So with that in mind, if I wanted a dot gone or changed, I’d rather they made our mastery have full effect with two dots, or reduce it’s effectiveness from 3 to 2(instead of 3 dots giving 10% up to 30%, just cap it at 20% with two), and instead add more power into our spender, DP.

But yes, with misery, and crash applying it/both dots, it is kiiiinda silly to have two separate, yes. Probably still like that so we don’t just have a one button super powerful dot. :grin:

Yup ! I personally believe this is a very healthy change, since rather than just spam out our spenders at little value, we now get them less often but with more power, and tuning pending, more if needed. It effectively addresses both our insanity overcapping concerns, and our wanting spenders to be more impactful, two birds in one stone. :grin:

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Actually looking at the tree now. So hold on, their solution to “I don’t want to feel like I’m burning points on utility” is to put 4 utility nodes inside the 10 first, where we need to spend 8 to progress. Okay. Fine. But a little weird. And you can take way more talents than I’d expect.

Yep, makes sense. So currently 1000 mastery gives you like <20%, where for all other classes that’d give you at least 40%, we literally have half mastery because the game expects you to have 2 dots up, and DP is the nice bonus, plus its fat damage. But you could literally have the same with 1 dot = full mastery bonus and DP gives you bonus damage equal to half your mastery. It plays the same, with misery.

Shadowy recall would probably be great if the dots themselves did damage; they don’t. Looking at my best log ever, sw:p was 1.3K, VT 1.8K and DP 3.6K out of a 24K total, this makes <28% of my damage from dots, but over half of that was spender DP. So if mastery ONLY buffed the dots themselves, that’d be weak, however, if it also buffed channelled spells as “periodic” then maybe?

1 Like
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Ok so its overtuned. So what? Its an single target pet that have spawn mechanic which works bets on aoe. If you seriously think that this pet will stay the same, meaning its top or second in damage in aoe with its single target bolt, then youre naive.

And yes in aoe with cd you can spawn two of them…if youre not using mind sear but single target DP. And they both do st damage…after it gets nerfed it will still be useless.

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This is a long-standing desire for me, that all these Holy spells get a Shadow appearance if you’re in Shadowform.
I get that it doesn’t really relates to balance, but appearances matter. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:
It’s one of my pet-peeves about losing Shadow Mend, that we have to go back to using Flash Heal. Some spec fantasy gets lost there, I think.

1 Like
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It still be good even after a 20-50% damagge nerf.

This is just outright wrong infomation. In my previous testing you very easily get get 100 spirits in a short duration without dumping insanity on DP since with SWP/VP ticking 80% faster your rapidly getting procs FOR MB to summon more shadow apparitons alongside each one giving 1 insanity in addition of MB/VB both creating 1 shadow or 2 if you crit from either abilty.

Demonic Tyrant does ST damage and has ways to empower its damage further but it still get’s outpaced by dreadbite and evens with impolsion both which are non CDs and from aoe but yet they tyrant is the bread and butter of the spec. One of the biggest factors of higher keys is groups pulling around you and funneling specs so they can do more damage, it might not be the best on aoe but if it preforms well on ST you could easily funnel it and get up to a set amount of spirits then have enough to be able to blast a boss with full CDs on. Saying something is useless cuz it doesnt do a insane amount of damage in ST/AOE is poor understanding

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Your tyrant comparison would make some sense if not for the major issues that thing from beyond spawns AFTER 100 apparitions, and it’s not possible to control when / if you want it to spawn because the thing that spawns it are your baseline rotational abilities and you can’t just opt to stop casting them for better timing.

Fun fact: if you don’t talent into voidform then in a 5 minute single target encounter it won’t even spawn. You do not make enough apparitions.

The idea of “Get X after some number of Y” is fine, but 100 apparitions is not a realistic aim outside of anything but very high target count sustained aoe.

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Thematic and fun as it may be on paper, I feel like it would benefit from being more controlled, perhaps even just outright be an active ability.

Do I like as a Spriest being able to finally spawn things from the void? for sure !
is it currently reliable in ANY content? unfortunately not really.

Not sure exactly what’s needed, but perhaps a cleave mechanic for half ST, to keep ST relevant as well, and then perhaps make it active, or outright just spawn on voidform/da use… just spitballing quick thoughts.

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When did I ever even try and mention earlier this is from a raiding perspective Lmao. This is M+ where you hitting like 5-10+ in giga pulls, Blizzard has already pushed VF to be a aoe abilty and counterpart Dark Ascension into the one for Raiding or ST/Cleave. If i mistaken you then its entirely on my end but this is for M+ and aoe POV

M+ not raids where downtime is the devil and you cant have ads to funnel to feed yourself controlled procs

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I didn’t mention either. I just think a disproportionately weighted passive ability you can’t control the timing of being attached to a ramp up that long is terrible design regardless of what content you’re doing. It’s just icing on the cake that it’s managed to be functionally useless on single target.

What controlled procs? I generate apparitions by casting mind blast and devouring plague. Do you want me to just stop pressing buttons lest my thing from beyond spawn at the wrong time?

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Unironically in this case yes with you have a set amount of targets in a funnel pull you could 100% hold from pressing DP/MB for a boss similar to MEGA Pull in Tavavesh streets where locks hold all of their imps and press nothing outside of shadowbolt/hand of guldan to be able to just explode that boss to the point where before his first set of mechanics he is half HP even in 25+ keys. Since with how hard hitting the thing is its 100% worth losing some trash damage to be able to melt harder bosses become worse as the fight progresses