When I started playing WoW Classic, I heard about the “Smite Priest” specialization. I found the ability to deal damage with holy magic interesting, so I decided to give it a try. Most players call this specialization “meme spec”. Yeah, playing as a smite priest is incredibly challenging, but very interesting for me. So I have decided I will continue to play and explore raiding content in this spec in TBC.
I’ve found a lot of different information about Smite Priest in TBC over the past few months. I’ve also watched a lot of videos. And most of the authors agree that Smite Priest will be unsuitable for raiding due to low damage and high mana consumption. This really saddens me. I think this spec is capable of a lot. But it needs support from Blizzard. So I’ve studied the information about the talent tree and class sets in The Burning Crusade, and I’ve identified some problems. I think if they are fixed, Smite Priest could become a strong semi-carry/semi-support, like Elem Shaman, Moonkin and Shadow Priest.
a) Talent Tree.
Smite Priest lacks a passive talent that reduces the mana cost of attack spells. All other casters have that talent (like “Moonglow” for Balance Druide, or “Convection” for Elem Shaman). It would be cool to add a similar talent for priest, which would reduce mana cost for Smite and Holy Fire. For example, it can be implemented in the existing talent “Searing Light” (It’s a narrowly focused talent, so the change won’t affect other specializations of the Priest class). It can also be added as a separate talent in the second line of the Holy branch, because this is where you often don’t know where to put your talent points.
The best friend for Smite Priest is Retribution Paladin. He can increase your damage from holy magic with aura and seal. But I’m worried that there’s no way I can boost Paladin instead. It would be great to add some talent for Smite Priest to boost Retri Pally or group/raid members (similar to “Shadow Weaving” or “Misery” talents of Shadow Priest). This can make a cool tandem of Holy classes (as opposed to Shadow Priest + Warlock) and help them both be more useful in a raid.
Smite Priest has big problems with spell hit rating cap collection. In WoW Classic I was never able to reach the 16% hit rating. I see that the “Focused Power” talent has been added in The Burning Crusade. But I don’t think it can fix this problem. It’s pretty deep in the talent tree (the sixth line). Similar talents in other classes are placed more attractively (e.g. “Shadow Focus” is on the second line in the Shadow Priest talent branch). Another drawback of “Focused Power” is that it doesn’t act on the Holy Fire, but for some reason acts on the Mind Blast. That’s really weird!
b) Priest’s item sets
First of all I’m really glad that The Burning Crusade has separate item sets for healers and damage dealers (reference to priest’s Tier3 set, which is “very useful” for damage dealers). Still, I found a lot of problems with new priest’s sets.
Most of the Priest’s item sets are designed for Shadow Priest. Only the Tier4 set has a bonus that boosts holy spells. Tier5 and Tier6 set bonuses only enhance shadow spells. It would be good to add some bonuses to them for holy spells (similar to bonuses for different schools of magic in the warlock’s and mage’s sets).
Tier4 and Tier6 sets have a low bonus to spell hit rating. These numbers are sufficient for Shadow Priest, but as I wrote above, Smite Priest has big problems with hit rating. It would be nice to add some hit rating to these sets (for comparison, warlock’s Tier6 set gives a bonus of 143 hit rating, while priest’s Tier6 set only has 65 hit rating). The good thing is that such a change would only affect Smite Priest and would have almost no effect on Shadow Priest, since exceeding the hit rating cap doesn’t give any boosts.
I really don’t understand why mage’s Tier6 set has more spirit than a priest’s Tier6 set! Spirit is an important characteristic for Smite Priest. It has talents that give a boost to spell damage, depending on the amount of spirit the character has. Spirit also affects passive mana regeneration. I think that increasing the amount of spirit can have an effect on the Smite Priest’s bottlenecks. The thing to note here is that many non-set items for casters have no spirit at all (e.g. rings, necklaces and weapons). Other classes don’t suffer much because of this, but for Smite Priest it’s pretty critical.
c) Professions
Tailors can make three sets of items: Primal Mooncloth, Shadow’s Embrace and Wrath of Spellfire. But none of them give a bonus to holy magic. In theory, Smite Priest could use the Mooncloth set if it increased the spell damage bonus a bit. Or can add a bonus to holy magic to the Wrath of Spellfire set. This may help in the Pre-Raid phase.
No enchantment for weapons that enhance holy magic. Such a bonus can be added to Formula: Enchant Weapon - Sunfire.
So, I tried to suggest changes that would not change the balance of the game as a whole, but only allow Smite specialization to be more viable (in my opinion). I’d love to hear the opinions of players who have had experience of playing as Smite Priest in TBC. What problems have you encountered and how could they be resolved without upsetting the overall game balance? I would also be happy to discuss with everyone the changes I suggested. However, if you are against such changes, please elaborate on how they may negatively affect your playing experience in the TBC
What an interestin wall of text. Too bad Blizzard has no intention to (nor should they) engage in any class balancing for a recreation of TBC, except for minor normalization like seals for both factions.
It’s doubly too bad that noboy from Blizzard reads EU forum anyway, and you would be better served by posting this on Reddit. But even that is completely futile, because can you imagine the pandora’s box that Blizzard would open by essentially adding a support for a meta spac? How many others would crop up? And more importantly, should 2021 Blizzard even be trusted to do balance changes to TBC (the answer is HACK NO).
I honestly am sorry you wrote and thought up all that in vain.
I don’t think Smite priests have ever meant to be PvE-viable. The talents enhancing Smite dmg are meant more for PvP gameplay. Priests already have a good dps spec in Shadow, I don’t think they need another one really. Besides, as Nicolay says, this is meant to be a recreation of the game - class balancing isn’t really on the table.
So, if I understand correctly, you want Blizzard to change the priest because you want to play it in a way that was not originally intended. Can’t you see a problem there?
I don’t think that talents should get remade/rebalanced because we want TBC as close at it was.
A problem of modern day gaming is that many players are just meta-salves. They watch a guide first and check statistics before they even create a character so they could play the game in the most optimal way without using a single brain-cell. Seeing players who do something more unique is refreshing.
Smite priest already existed in classic and it will get improved in TBC.
Also you don’t need a full ret paladin, you could also combo with the holy-shocker meme spec. The two holy dmg meme specs could be a lot of fun.
Nah. Just go shadow, you wont regret it. Smite ain’t a thing. Everyone would just give you sht for not bringing the mana and healing that a shadow has.
Shadow is actually very engaging. Keeping track on durations on targets to not drop embrace etc. Fill with flay. SW:Death to accidentally kill yourself is also quite fun
I really hope that you are (or will join) in a guild with like minded people who will let you raid as a smite priest . After 2 years of classic and a decade of pservers the community has to make peace with the fact that with the knowledge of today , the game we love is not hard and there should be room for experimentation and some raidspots for the so called meme specs
But class and talent changes?No thanks
Just no - if you want to play a meme spec - by all means play it, but dont ask for changes just to accommodate the way you want to play.
AFAIK there are no + holy damage armor items in game outside of Pally tier sets ? In the same way there are no Holy resistance items - which if you start adding more and more specs that have Holy Spelldamage as their primary source then they would also have to start adding that too for game balance.
I wish Attonement healing, along with Penance was in TBC but it’s not and I’m not asking for it
Before you know it we wont be playing TBCC we will be playing TBC ++
Thanks for the reply, Nicolay, and for the advice about Reddit. I can see that many forum dwellers take a dim view of any change. It’s not entirely clear to me. Since when did balancing become something bad? It is a tool for transforming something imperfect into a better form.
Let’s project this situation onto some other area of life.Let’s say you have an old vintage car in your garage that you really like. You haven’t used it in a long time. But one day, you decide to start driving it out of town on the weekends. You start the car, start driving and then some imperfection (an uncomfortable pedal height, the squeak of the interior of the car or something else) catches your attention. And that’s the way it’s always been. Would balancing the car be something you wouldn’t want to do in this case?
About the pandora’s box: yes, any changes could cause trouble. What a wonderful thing that there is a vast array of methods and tools for testing these days. And in the end, it would be foolish to expect change, from anyone other than Blizzard.
It’s not a dim view of “any” change - it’s dim view of fundamental changes to a class / gear to accommodate a very particular set of Talents for one class.
To fix your Vintage car you wouldn’t be redesigning the squeaking part and replacing it with something entirely different.
Smite priest isn’t meant to be viable.
You’d have to completely redesign the entire class/holy talents.
We have shadow priest spec(DPS) for a reason.
You can’t really balance “smite priest” without completely redesigning the entire class.
We’re meant to be healers as holy, which is what holy is designed for.
Imagine the PvP balance as well.
We deal high smite damage + heal high as we’re a holy priest.
Disc priest in retail is probably the best type of priest that you’re requesting
Since the content etc will be balanced for it, rather than TBC requiring many changes to make this work lol.
Now that I think about it, if you can have your priest tailored to your preferences, that’s fine. I guess the same reasoning is equally good for all of us, though, don’t you think? In my case, you know, I have always wanted to be a tank with a battle mage because, you know, I like mages and I like tanking. Why not? What a wonderful thing that there is a vast array of methods and tools for testing these days.
Yes, it’s pretty fair to expect balance changes in different aspects of the game. The changes should not be exclusive to a small group of players. Speaking of your example, I can’t suggest objective changes for battle mage. I’ve never played as a mage (as opposed to a priest), so I would be incompetent.
I thought the problem would become obvious, but I guess not. Sorry for that. Let me try again:
The problem is that there is nothing to balance to begin with. The priest is perfectly fine in TBC as it is, and the fact that you want to play it in a different way from the one it was designed for doesn’t change the fact that there is nothing to balance to begin with. Going back to your example of the car, it is not that the car has some kind of imperfection. The car is just fine working properly and doing what it is supposed to do. The problem is that you want to drive it in two wheels, and then you go to the manufacturer and ask them to change all of the cars the same model as yours so that you can drive it in two wheels. See the problem now?
I cannot agree with you Arturus. I started thinking about changes precisely because Smite Priest has
a good foundation in its current form. In my opinion, this specialization just isn’t finished, unlike Shadow Priest and other cool specs in TBC. And, as I wrote above, I’d love to hear from players who have experience playing Smite in TBC on ways to complete this specialization. Or to discuss specifically the changes I’ve suggested.
Heh, as a Druid player I can sympathize with the woes of the “meme” spec (Even though I don’t do relevant content such as raids, it does feel bad even to me to see my favorite class or spec being subpar and laughed at).
As for the changes you suggest… I both like the idea and at the same time don’t. Here’s what I mean:
On one hand, the addition of practically a new “holy caster” would definitely shake things up, and it would feel very thematic to the class as well. New talents (or changes to existing ones), new gear, new profession items, possibly new metas… It’s very much Classic + (or in this case TBCC+) content which could hypothetically be very cool!
However, the problem is that practically adding an entire new spec opens up a huge can of worms. The balancing of the game goes out the window, PvP issues could arise, and change upon change would probably happen, with lots of dangers of harming the TBCC experience. A lot of time and resources could be spent on trying to fix something that wasn’t broken in the first place.
Also… Such a thing would require new things that would be created by modern Blizzard, not the devs and designers that made TBC, but the ones that are responsible for retail (with both the good and the bad that this entails). Can they be trusted to make such changes and yet keep with the spirit of TBC, without “retailifying” it or without warping it beyond recognition?
And consider all the rest of the weird specs. Spell power rogues etc. They would feel left out, they would demand their spec to be made viable as well (and rightly so), leading to even more rebalancing.
TLDR: IMO, the whole thing sounds really awesome… But there’s just too much that could go wrong
Smitespec was not designed to be a dps spec, it was meant as a way for holy priest to be able to kill on its own, it is a fun spec to play, but have its limitations, as they should have, being full healing spec and still be able to push out competitive dps is not a change we need.
Later they made smitespec into the discipline healing, so just wait for classic cataclysm then you can smite as much as you want.
TY for reply, Kemurai. Can you elaborate on why Smite Priest needs a complete redesign to exist? Or please explain why the changes I suggested are not enough to get a good result.
TY for reply, Zalanji. I can’t call myself a PvP professional, but I doubt your statement. The problem is that all existing Holy damage boosts are linked to probability. Agree that relying on something unstable in combat against another player is not the best plan to win. In my opinion, Silence (Shadow Priest’s spell) is more PvP-centric than all Holy magic enhancements combined.
TY for wide answer, Kedros (your avatar is cool btw ) ! Why do you call Smite Priest something new? TBC came out in 2007 and Smite Priest has always existed there in its imperfect form. Also, please pay attention to the changes I suggested again. Most of them are not something drastically new. They are just small changes to things that already exist. (Apart from that Retri Pally interaction idea - that’s really something new. I doubt it myself).
TY for reply, Pitjn. Have you ever tried playing as Smite Priest to perform healer and damage dealer duties within the same battle against an actual boss? Try it, I’m sure you won’t be able to perform well. A priest who is grounded in damage dealing has a lot of difficulty healing allies. Smite Priest is not a superman.And the changes I suggest are unlikely to make him so.
You are also suggesting that I should wait for Cataclism to come out. But the most common opinion is that Smite Priest was in his prime in TBC. So waiting is not the best option. Then it might be too late.
I think you’re misunderstanding. Yes, ofc, shadow’s stronger than holy as DPS for PvP. But in PvP, just because you’re a healer doesn’t mean you should never click an offensive spell. A good holy priest or resto shaman knows when they need to pressure the enemy with dps instead of healing or standing still.
) ! Why do you call Smite Priest something new? TBC came out in 2007 and Smite Priest has always existed there in its imperfect form. Also, please pay attention to the changes I suggested again. Most of them are not something drastically new. They are just small changes to things that already exist. (Apart from that Retri Pally interaction idea - that’s really something new. I doubt it myself).