I’m going to play a retri or prot paladin or guardian or feral druid instead, maybe balance druid.
I’m done with playing healer if they’re not gonna fix holy priests non-holy word heals not moving bars and having so many abilities that are just there to reduce the cd, lol.
That was my conclusion as well when I was looking at the dynamics of some spells in holy’s tree the first time. It doesn’t feel fun or satisfying having to press supposedly ‘core abilities’ (that have been in the game a long time) that hit like a wet noodle just to get your third spell in the right spot. I’m not entirely sure what would be the solution, removal of some of it definitely seems necessary as it’s a lot of ‘sliiiightly different but yep, same thing’.
Redistribute healing power away from the holy words. Make our other heals actually move bars. Like, my priest is almost 488 at this point and a flash heal from it doesn’t even heal 10% of my retris hp. I’d have to cast like 11-12 flash heals to heal my retri to full hp from almost dead. It’s really dumb. Meanwhile, if I WoG myself with my retri when I’m on low hp, I heal like a fourth of my hp and like half if it crits.
My retri paladins, A DPS SPEC, flash of light heals almost as much as my holy priests flash heal, lmao. It’s absolutely nuts the state that holy priests are in. So many buttons that heal nothing and only exist to reduce the CD pretty much.
Felt the same way about DPSing. Reminds me of things like how frostbolt went from the main dps to a builder. Feels bad 
I was thinking along the same lines when I thought on it a while back. Personally I think the holy words were an improvement over chakras but yet it still puts the spec in a weird spot with rather bad filler spells just to get to your oomph holy word spell. Over and over again.
And yeah, the healing regularly feels rather laughable compared to healthbars. It’s weird tho, on some healers you feel this more than on others.
Yeah, I used to raid as a mage from vanilla to firelands in cata. I recently tried playing it again and I’m just like “Wth is this abomination?”. I think I did one m+ dungeon on it and then I haven’t played it again.
They need to just rethink a lot of classes/specs designs imo.
I used to play so many more classes in the past but they’ve just been ruining them and I’m down to 3 classes that I actively play nowadays. If those classes get any worse gameplay wise, I’m just gonna have to call it quits. Depending on how the archon tree looks, it might only be 2 classes in TWW.
It basically is. I use a standard mouse and keyboard and can play the game completely fine.
You just have to adapt your playstyle a bit.
The thing that struck me about frost is that it seems to suffer from a similar issue as hpriest. A lot of very similar abilities but slightly different, and then on top of that the interactivity between them. I’m no good judge on whether this is fun or not compared to those dedicated to the spec. But I think with certain specs this definitely creates some bloat for no good apparent reason, at least to my eyes.
I feel that button bloat is an issue that many specs have, not just some of the healing specs. In most cases it’s not the core rotational (or priority) abilities and spells, but the number of CDs, especially CDs that often do similar things and that could be combined.
There are classes and specs that I’d like to play, but the button bloat deters me from doing so. Monk (BrM and MW) is an example here. I have a gaming mouse with extra buttons, but I still don’t enjoy the button bloat.
Actually, I have several different gaming mice that I picked up on a quest for finding what works best for me. I’ve been using a SteelSeries Rival 500 which I really like even though it has fewer buttons (the layout works much better for me than the block of tiny buttons on the side like the other MMO mice have). I also have a Corsair Scimitar and a Logitech G600 that have more buttons. I may actually swap to one of those two now that WoW has more buttons than some years ago when I switched from a Naga to the Rival.
My solution is to limit myself to classes and specs with comparatively few buttons (but still more keybinds than almost all other games I’ve played), like this Evoker or a Blood DK. BM Hunter is also not bloated, but I prefer classes with a support spec as just DPSing never keeps me happy for long. I’ve been playing a resto shaman lately and it requires more keybindings than the Evoker (CDs and totems).
Quite a few of the long time players among my friends have voiced similar criticism and everyone seems drawn to the specs with fewer buttons. Maybe it’s unpopular here, but I liked the pruning (before it got too excessive) and thought it was the right idea. I hope they’ll prune abilities (CDs especially, see Unholy DK for example) again.
Just from a quick glance on my paladin: I have roughly 30 buttons that I press regularly enough to be considered “keybinds”.
Then I have the macros for casting sacrifice, freedom or bops directly on party members instead of having to target them with them or using mouseovers. Just those macros alone take up 24 slots. Then I have loh macro for everyone & dispel macro.
It’s absolutely ridiculous how many buttons you have when you’re playing a class with utility. You “playing the game completely fine” is laughable when you’re doing content that’s pretty much faceroll.
Could I go healer style and just do mouseover like I do on my healers? Yeah, but it’s not particularly effecient as a dps and I’d lose DPS by playing like that because my focus is not on the unitframes as a dps. If a DPS pulls aggro in a 25 key, they’ll likely be dead before my mouse can even make it to their unitframe to use a mouseover macro. With a direct cast macro? Yeah, I’ve saved people.
I feel like restoration shaman is the only healer with this problem. I use an MMO mouse, and it’s just enough buttons to bind everything. I can’t imagine playing shaman without one though.
I am not disagreeing we have a lot of buttons. I only wanted to suggest you to use Clique so you can have multiple abilities on 1 button available, which means you will have ‘everything’ on a comfortable position. With a normal mouse and keyboard. I am even only using alt as a modifier with quite some abilities bound. Not using shift at all and on ctrl i only have 2 abilities.
36 keybinds for my mistweaver, and it’s not enough. Not all used in every talent build but I can’t handle re using the same button for two things in different contexts…
Oh and some friend/foe macros and trinket macros to reduce it. Still over 36.
on rdruid we have so many hots xou cpuld delete 1/2 and buff spells. at least remove swarm and buff spells 25%
rejuv, lifebloom, regrowth, swarm, efflore, cenarius, wild growth. maybe more i forgot 
Not as silly as it looks, on Dreamcast I always used controller and mouse in hands and used the keyboard at my feet, I only ever used the spacebar as one extra button but one extra is one extra. I now use Scythe USB footpedals, it’s just 3 basic pedals that I use as my Alt/shift and the other just used as a standard keybind. Being ASD I have never been able to get my head around WSAD, I have to assign all my actions onto the Numpad so the footpedals make up for the lack of Alt/shift in that area of my keyboard.
Yes, another epic fail by community.
Unprune classes! We want to play class, not spec! Legion pruning bad! We want many buttons like in MoP. etc…
How many times so called “community feedback” has to backfire until devs learn damn lesson and start ignoring “community feedback”.
Well there’s something novel. Another thread about button bloat.
I wonder when the regulars on this forum are going to start understanding that this is actually a problem.
I think it is a problem, but only for a couple of specs. I can hardly say my frost dk or guardian druid have too many buttons. And since i am not playing all specs i can’t speak for all of them, also not for all healers.
that is a pita to learn and addons shouldnt be required to play, game should be designed to be played without addons and addons should be quality of life thing not mandatory
Then you make the macro’s yourself with [mouseover]. It isn’t really an addon thing. Type /macro and good luck setting them up.
Sorry for trying to help you out. Will not make that mistake again.