Why do you enjoy playing priest?

Old post but similar to what others have said, discs offensive healing is just too much fun to give it up for one of the “better” pvp healers even if that means being trained by melee and being one of the weaker specs atm.
I enjoy the complexity of playing disc especially in arenas, having to juggle between attacking, direct healing and using the right defensive cooldowns all while having cc capability through fear and one of the most unique ccs in the game (mind control) makes for really fun gameplay.
Its playstyle requires much more situational decision making than other healers in my experience, knowing when you should play defensive vs using offensive pressure as your defense or when to go for cc is challenging but thats what makes it enjoyable for me. Gameplay with other healers feel much more scripted.

The community I’ve become a part of.

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I’m not enjoying playing priest.
I get rejected by 20 out of 21 groups. I feel disgusting and actually astonished of how bad my class is. I can’t play mythic dungeons without premade group, and this is really f@#$!ng frustrating dude. I’m done with this class brb leveling druid

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Who wants to be just yet another rdruid? :man_shrugging:

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Except priest isn’t a bad class at all? All three specs are doing well in raids atm and are perfectly capable of doing m+, even high keys. It’s the community’s perception in m+ that gets people declined and that’s not just priests. Anyone who isn’t a resto druid, havoc dh, prot warrior, outlaw rogue, ww monk or unh dk gets the same treatment.
Can’t speak for PvP though, as I don’t play it, but in PvE priest is strong right now.

I can’t speak for other specs, but as a Shadowpriest it’s the same old story of hitting like a wet noodle at the beginning of a new xpac and requiring big stacks of haste and high item levels before the spec becomes “fun” to play (as in: “I don’t have to fire all my CDs just to survive”).

There’s also the old issue that Shadow as currently designed by Blizzard doesn’t really leave much room for error, so you either pull off your rotations perfectly or your effiency plummets fast.

As for PVP, I feel that as long as you can stand on the sidelines and are not directly engaged by enemies, Shadow can be quite helpful - dotting all targets, mass dispelling, slowing down with Mindflay, the occasional Silence or Psychic Scream and tagging whole furballs with Void Eruption can be decent fun.

But any warrior, DK, DH or rogue will faceroll through you with perma-stunlock while you just stand around, because movement is the ultimate nemesis for any Shadowpriest.

Also paladins, shamans and druids just seam to heal themselves quicker than you can fire off damage spells if you don’t have all your instant CDs available and both your main CC spells are on their ages long cooldowns.

So TL;DR: Yeah it’s fun now with iLvl 410+, but you have to be on top of your rotations, have all enchants, gems, the absolute correct Azerite traits and whatnot - most other classes seem to give you more for much less effort.

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I rolled Shadow mainly for the lore/concept. The spec mechanics suit me fine, too. Gotta say, though - I may have expected more DoTs than what I got. DoTs and HoTs are my jam, but here most of the damage is direct, unlike with Afflock. Maybe it used to be different, not sure why I had this picture of a DoT machine.

I do arenas mostly with my holy priest. It is so enjoyable to be able to destroy their bursts :slight_smile: and heal over those. I like the mind game I have to do as holy priest and find out windows for greater heal.

I loved the concept in tbc and WotLK for shadow. Nowadays I play priest because I like how holy performs and I like the toolkit. I just can’t get my head around shadow though.

you know there’s not a single spec that can kill a healer 1v1 nowadays

I found the Shadow Priest to be an overall enjoyable experience.
I enjoy the playstyle, I love the class fantasy and I’m crazy for Void and Old God lore.
I also enjoy fighting epic PvP battles on mountain tops and forcing other players to throw themselves off a cliff to their doom. :slight_smile:

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Spent so many time on my priest. I tried to create another chars but i just dont feel them. I hate melee, unless its a tank, fire mage desing is sh!t because of 0 crit builds and lol talents making it worse, another healers dont fit me. Generaly casters are punished much more in m+ than melee.

I play discipline and offspec shadow back from cata.
Shadow was good in cata, mop, wod. I loved legion high risk high reward spriest. Now spriest is about 4 buttons rotation. Boring.

Discipline on the other hand is my love. It always been. I rediscover this spec twice every expansion. Disc do crazy damage on bosses during weeks like this ( forti, grievous, bolster). I love playing with offensive build, trinkets and traits. If pulls are under control, and tank know his job well i am able to do crazy overall dps.

Disc is so underrated. Its sad. Druid healing is much easier, but i still enjoy disc and in my opinion its capable of playing high keys.

Ye i didnt made very high keys, because noone want us in his group. But the 16 i made was like a walk in the park.

Actually made this one shadow now, I honestly never really played it much. Reason is purely essences, I got 2 healers, and those essences take a sh**load of my game time to get, and I will simply not do that more than 2 times.

Am liking it thoughm this feels more to what I’d think of when I’d play a warlock in an RPG, dark sorceror sort of thing.

I don’t. I’ve abandoned the class. They’ve changed it too much from what I enjoyed. Before the holy words. Now everything is about the holy words, you barely have any healing outside of them. My 365 shaman heals almost as much with healing surge as my priest at 414. Like 17k healing surge vs 18k flash heal. What the hell?

They need to move away from the holy words and move healing back to the ordinary spells.

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Back in a day I choose priest for healing purposes. My fisrt class was a warrior and I get bankrupt on plate repairs, so decided to roll a clothie (cheap repairs) that also has healing abilities and this was very liberating expierience from a warrior point of view. Then I played as shadow for a while, then holy again for raiding.
As a shadow I remember the time when mindblast had a chance to stun, spirit was a thing in game, it was such a joy when spirit tab proc’d, lol that was a time. Maybe shadow priest was a bit OP in pvp, but the sheer joy of melting faces is what kept me with priest class.
Later when I stopped raiding i started the druid for better soloing abilities, but that’s another story.

[edit]
Forgot to mention great time in TBC where disc priests were OP on arenas :slight_smile:

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