Why so many talent trees?

[Monkey]

{snip}
It seems like priests are in the same boat. Disc just totally lacks focus, because right now priests are either healers or face melters. I would guess that the focus of Disc was going to be the MC/soothe controlling aspects of a priest that never seemed to work out. It leaves Disc as a mishmash. Splitting it up between the other two trees could open up some real possibilities.

Thoughts?

Well, how about this detail from The Candle this week:

Players will be able to see [+healing changed to +healing & 33% damage] in action on the Test Realm fairly soon. I suggest that if you get the opportunity, that you download it and try it and the rest of the new changes out when it goes live. We're looking forward to seeing what the community experiences as well.

I suspect this will open up some new build opportunities for priests. Now there's actually a reason for a Holy PvP priest to pick up mindflay, for example.

[oldmandennis]

Lissa, unless you stop putting words in my mouth, I'm not going to reply to you any more. I don't want or need a god character or an uber-all tree. I don't have a horse in the race personally - my warrior is a PvP toy, while I have played around with prot and fury enough to get a feel for them, I have no desire to replace my druid in raiding. If you look carefully, I am actually proposing to nerf myself in the name of a better game. Eliminating Arms and moving MS fairly deep in protection would be a **nerf** to pvp warriors. You would need to weigh the damage against the debuff.

Sir_Dies, I'm not sure what your real gripe is about warriors not being the tank. 95% of guilds still think warriors are the tank and use them 95% of the time in the MT spot.

Alliera, that would further reinforce the PvP/PvE split. I guess some people see that as a good thing, but I don't.

Monkey, I don't think that a lot of people will be going for mindflay with 500ish damage since they have to drop the reduced cast time on mana burn and mass dispell. I predict the biggest change for pvp will be people picking up surge of light. Can mana burn crit?

[Taelas]

Alliera, that would further reinforce the PvP/PvE split. I guess some people see that as a good thing, but I don't.

Why not?

What's wrong with having a clearly defined "PvP-tree"? As far as I know, pretty much all classes have one. Some are more ambiguous than others, but there are some pretty obvious "PvP-abilities" in those specs. Soul Link, Eye for an Eye, Mortal Strike, Shadow Step, The Beast Within, etc.

Warriors - Arms
Rogues - Subtlety
Priests - Shadow
Paladins - Retribution
Druids - Balance
Hunters - Beast Mastery
Warlocks - Demonology
Mages - Frost
Shamans - Uh, I have honestly no idea. Never played a shaman even as far as level 20.

What you're proposing would mean an excessive overhaul of all those classes, as far as I can tell.

[Lissa]

Lissa, unless you stop putting words in my mouth, I'm not going to reply to you any more. I don't want or need a god character or an uber-all tree. I don't have a horse in the race personally - my warrior is a PvP toy, while I have played around with prot and fury enough to get a feel for them, I have no desire to replace my druid in raiding. If you look carefully, I am actually proposing to nerf myself in the name of a better game. Eliminating Arms and moving MS fairly deep in protection would be a **nerf** to pvp warriors. You would need to weigh the damage against the debuff.

Then why is it you continue to say that there needs to be two trees instead of three? What makes you honestly think that what you're proposing will in fact make Warriors even more cookie cutter? Right now any class has to sacrifice to give up things that would make them more powerful. By condensing the trees from 3 to 2, you're removing that sacrifice whether you admit it or not as there will be people that will analyze the trees to get the most optimal configuration to do their job in PvE or PvP. Right now you have a great deal of trade offs that have to be made in order to get the optimal configuration. Three trees is the perfect situation to bring about several play styles while having an optimal build, but will less possibilities you bring about less options.

So answer this question, why would having less trees make you less cookie cutter in your approach than having more trees? So far I have seen no proof from you as to why less trees is better than more trees while I have shown why having less trees is worse.

[Lissa]

Priests - Shadow
Hunters - Beast Mastery

I'd change that to Discipline, not Shadow. Sure, Shadow has some PvP aspects, but Discipline is all about dealing with interrupts and creating longevity which is king in PvP. (Shadow is about damage and a few interrupts, ie Silence, sooner PS, snare by way of Mind Flay, and lowering crits against you.)

I'd also change that to Marksman as Marksman has far more useful PvP talents now than BM or Survival.

[Kevin]

I'd also change that to Marksman as Marksman has far more useful PvP talents now than BM or Survival.

Actually a hunter depends on what type of PvP and what your arena team has for team mates if arena. I'm actually staying survival with 21 marks for arena on my hunter especially with the sting dropping to instant cast. I haven't done the respec yet, but for our 3v3 team it should be the best bet. And beast master still pretty much rules the BG's but if I was mainly doing 5v5 I would be Marks.

[Treesh]

I'd change that to Discipline, not Shadow. Sure, Shadow has some PvP aspects, but Discipline is all about dealing with interrupts and creating longevity which is king in PvP. (Shadow is about damage and a few interrupts, ie Silence, sooner PS, snare by way of Mind Flay, and lowering crits against you.)

It depends on what your goal is in PvP. The holy PvP spec is fantastic for PvP healing. Circle of healing is of marginal use in raids, but it's a FANTASTIC PvP skill - AoE healing on the run without any worry about breaking CC and with a better efficiency than holy nova as well. In battlegrounds and arenas, it doesn't really matter if you are the focus fire target or not. Those are instant cast heals that can't be dispelled and are very, very rarely interrupted. Silencing effects and stunlock is about it. It's got a fairly wide range on it too. Good throughput on it to last through most of the burst in arenas and still have some staying power after the burst is over. And this is without Taiza having good PvP gear.

[Monkey]

Monkey, I don't think that a lot of people will be going for mindflay with 500ish damage since they have to drop the reduced cast time on mana burn and mass dispell. I predict the biggest change for pvp will be people picking up surge of light. Can mana burn crit?

To the best of my knowledge, Mana Burn can't crit.

Let's not look askance at +500 damage; Although it doesn't make the damage of mindflay like that of a 'real' shadow priest, it does pair well with the kiting aspect of Mindflay to be a little surprise followup to fear for rogues, feral druids, etc. Does it outweigh the value of improved mana burn? Excellent question--we'll see what the Arena decides.:)

[oldmandennis]

What's wrong with having a clearly defined "PvP-tree"? As far as I know, pretty much all classes have one. Some are more ambiguous than others, but there are some pretty obvious "PvP-abilities" in those specs. Soul Link, Eye for an Eye, Mortal Strike, Shadow Step, The Beast Within, etc.

Warriors - Arms
Rogues - Subtlety
Priests - Shadow
Paladins - Retribution
Druids - Balance
Hunters - Beast Mastery
Warlocks - Demonology
Mages - Frost
Shamans - Uh, I have honestly no idea. Never played a shaman even as far as level 20.

What you're proposing would mean an excessive overhaul of all those classes, as far as I can tell.

Judging by arena ratings, you are way off in most cases.

I think rogues are combat maces (not sure on that), priests are thought to be strongest as 28/33/0 manaburners, though shadow is not bad and is really nice in 2v2 with a lock, pallys are nearly all 41/20/0, resto druids are destroying 2v2 and are mediocre elsewhere, afflocks are very strong but I don't know which is most popular right now, elemental shamans seem to be the most likely, but resto is possible.

But yeah, what I am suggesting would require closely looking at all of the 20-ish trees that remain to make sure that they remain competitive in PvE and PvP.

To me, a clearly defined PvP tree makes the game less fun. When I was gearing up my warrior I would often respec prot to run heroics. While I was in that spec, a whole section of the game was essentially off limits. PvPing as a prot warrior is just unbelievably not fun unless you are in a really tight group - and to the extent that they make BG's more competitive, it will make sucking at them less fun. With respecs at 50g talents doesn't stop people from optimizing or make people more unique - it just makes the game less fun.

Right now any class has to sacrifice to give up things that would make them more powerful. By condensing the trees from 3 to 2, you're removing that sacrifice whether you admit it or not as there will be people that will analyze the trees to get the most optimal configuration to do their job in PvE or PvP. Right now you have a great deal of trade offs that have to be made in order to get the optimal configuration. Three trees is the perfect situation to bring about several play styles while having an optimal build, but will less possibilities you bring about less options.

I don't know what's so magic about the number 3. It seems artificial to me. This talk of "great sacrifice" doesn't ring true to me. Warriors are limited mostly by the number of points, not by which tree things are in. If you just merged all the arms talents directly into fury (with the exception of MS) it would free up a total of about 5 points of junk from the bottom of arms, and allow one DPS warrior to do optimal DPS while handling blood frenzy. Call it an 8% buff. I think they can tweak warriors back into line after that... or take 8% worth of cool talents and sprinkle them into prot somewhere as goodies for offtanks. Note that you will still need to make *some* sort of pve/pvp/solo choices - there aren't enough points to do max dps and pickup goodies like imp charge and imp intercept. If you give prot MS, maybe the axe/mace/sword spec, and imp hamstring (with a bit of a buff) then you improve their ability to solo and pvp. Neither one of these specs would be overpowered, to the extent that they gain 5-10% in power they can be tweaked back into line somewhere else. Each spec has a clear theme, and can play in all facets of the game.

Let's not look askance at +500 damage; Although it doesn't make the damage of mindflay like that of a 'real' shadow priest, it does pair well with the kiting aspect of Mindflay to be a little surprise followup to fear for rogues, feral druids, etc. Does it outweigh the value of improved mana burn? Excellent question--we'll see what the Arena decides.

Ferals will shift out of it. Your arguments sound like 1 on 1 arguments - If the priest is allowed to cast, then manaburning the healers would be a better choice then mindflay 85% of the time I'd say, and a single target snare doesn't help much if you have 2-3 people on you.

[Sir_Die_alot]

And I'll reiterate what I said to Oldmandennis, you want to be Uber, sorry, it isn't going to happen. What your asking for is to make Warrior the best period. You want to tank and do high DPS, how soon you forget with what Feral Druids were like early on in tBC and how they were rightfully nerfed. This is a road that should not and cannot be re-explored. The ignorance here isn't from me, it's from you wanting to have a god character. WoW, and MMORPGs in general, are ment to be a group game where you play as part of a team. If you want to play a character that can do everything themselves, go back and play Diablo (2).

Sorry you're still wrong. You probably didn't even bother reading my other posts since you couldn't reply to a single point I have made. The ONLY thing adding BT/MS/SS would change is allowing protection warriors more ability to deal damage and dps warriors more ability to tank. THAT'S IT! You still have to go deep into trees to get the "meat and potatoes" talents for your intended role. MS/BT are good abilities but they are not THAT good. You aren't losing to warriors in dps/pvp because they have mortal strike/BT. It's because they have mortal strike, and impale, and deathwish, and enrage, and cruelty, and 2 hand weapon mastery, and (insert weapon spec here). Yes, if all these were trained abilities where you could grab the whole prot tree to boot warriors would be the strongest class in the game. Stupidly so! However you can't. MS/BT are good abitlies but they are not THAT good by themselves. It's only when they synergize with other talents, that should remain talents, that they become the excellent damage tools that let them compete with other "pure dps" classes (although as I pointed out, there is no such thing).

As for feral druids I remember well, and I don't see a warrior with 25000 armor 35%+ dodge 15k+ hp ever being anything but deep prot using a shield. Sorry, I'm just not worried about sword and shield warrior being OP because he can use mortal strike or a dps warrior with all the cool +damage modifier talents using shield slam to beat someone down anywhere near as fast as a warrior can do now anyway. I'm not looking for buffs to any rage sink ability aside from making them avalible to different specs. The flaw with feral druids was (and to an extent still is) their hybridness, they were good at everything. An all in 1 class, they could tank dps and heal all at the same time. I don't think warriors should have a heal ability, to the point I don't particularly like the small talented ones they have currently as it takes something from the "flavor" of the class.


@Mav, I used to respect you. Even think you kind of a passing friend. That reply was well beneath your mental ability and the respect I had for you as a person. I've seen better posts come from official WoW forum trolls. You could at least try to poke holes in my argument, hell even chastize spelling. Your post added nothing but show you to be much weaker person than I remember. If you think I'm wrong show where! Lay out some overly long theorycraft nonsence if you have to. A reply that is no better than "QQ more kthxbai" isn't worth the time it took to type.

[Lissa]

I don't know what's so magic about the number 3. It seems artificial to me. This talk of "great sacrifice" doesn't ring true to me. Warriors are limited mostly by the number of points, not by which tree things are in. If you just merged all the arms talents directly into fury (with the exception of MS) it would free up a total of about 5 points of junk from the bottom of arms, and allow one DPS warrior to do optimal DPS while handling blood frenzy. Call it an 8% buff. I think they can tweak warriors back into line after that... or take 8% worth of cool talents and sprinkle them into prot somewhere as goodies for offtanks. Note that you will still need to make *some* sort of pve/pvp/solo choices - there aren't enough points to do max dps and pickup goodies like imp charge and imp intercept. If you give prot MS, maybe the axe/mace/sword spec, and imp hamstring (with a bit of a buff) then you improve their ability to solo and pvp. Neither one of these specs would be overpowered, to the extent that they gain 5-10% in power they can be tweaked back into line somewhere else. Each spec has a clear theme, and can play in all facets of the game.

Ok, let's take your situation and let's merge all the arms talents into Fury and move MS and Imp MS into Protection at the same levels.

Now you have the following potential for a DPS warrior:

5/5 Cruelty, you have now satisfied what it takes to get to tier 2, this means that you have now been able to skip a good number of worthless talents in the arms pool at tier 1 that don't help your DPS that much or are oriented toward tanking.

5/5 Unbridled Wrath, you now satisfied what it takes to get to tier 3, you have just gotten around a good number of junk talents in Arms at tier 2.

3/3 Blood craze, 1/1 Anger Management, 1/1 Improved DS, you have satisified what it takes to get to tier 4 and avoid a good amount of junk again, while taking one potentially junky talent.

5/5 Enrage, 5/5 Dual Wield, you have now qualified for tier 6 and gotten two very useful talents.

5/5 Weapon Specilization, 5/5 Flurry, 1/1 Deathwish, now we're up to the potential of getting Tier 9 talents.

Congratulations, you have just given Warriors to totally cherry pick the Arms and Fury trees getting pretty much all the useful DPS talents without taking more than two junk talents.

Now is it clear why merging the trees is bad? If the trees remain as is, you cannot get everything you want, you have to sacrifice at various tiers and lose some talent points here and there. With your merging, I just showed you that you sacrifice so very little to get to the really big DPS improving talents. What's honestly different here in your assessment of going to two trees for Warrior and merging Arms and Fury together or merging half of Arms into Fury and half of Arms into Prot? There's no distinct sacrifice that you pay if the trees remain seperate.

[Lissa]

Sorry you're still wrong. You probably didn't even bother reading my other posts since you couldn't reply to a single point I have made. The ONLY thing adding BT/MS/SS would change is allowing protection warriors more ability to deal damage and dps warriors more ability to tank. THAT'S IT! You still have to go deep into trees to get the "meat and potatoes" talents for your intended role. MS/BT are good abilities but they are not THAT good. You aren't losing to warriors in dps/pvp because they have mortal strike/BT. It's because they have mortal strike, and impale, and deathwish, and enrage, and cruelty, and 2 hand weapon mastery, and (insert weapon spec here). Yes, if all these were trained abilities where you could grab the whole prot tree to boot warriors would be the strongest class in the game. Stupidly so! However you can't. MS/BT are good abitlies but they are not THAT good by themselves. It's only when they synergize with other talents, that should remain talents, that they become the excellent damage tools that let them compete with other "pure dps" classes (although as I pointed out, there is no such thing).

As for feral druids I remember well, and I don't see a warrior with 25000 armor 35%+ dodge 15k+ hp ever being anything but deep prot using a shield. Sorry, I'm just not worried about sword and shield warrior being OP because he can use mortal strike or a dps warrior with all the cool +damage modifier talents using shield slam to beat someone down anywhere near as fast as a warrior can do now anyway. I'm not looking for buffs to any rage sink ability aside from making them avalible to different specs. The flaw with feral druids was (and to an extent still is) their hybridness, they were good at everything. An all in 1 class, they could tank dps and heal all at the same time. I don't think warriors should have a heal ability, to the point I don't particularly like the small talented ones they have currently as it takes something from the "flavor" of the class.
@Mav, I used to respect you. Even think you kind of a passing friend. That reply was well beneath your mental ability and the respect I had for you as a person. I've seen better posts come from official WoW forum trolls. You could at least try to poke holes in my argument, hell even chastize spelling. Your post added nothing but show you to be much weaker person than I remember. If you think I'm wrong show where! Lay out some overly long theorycraft nonsence if you have to. A reply that is no better than "QQ more kthxbai" isn't worth the time it took to type.

And I restate, you want to be Uber. That's all you want, I read your posts and that is still the exact thought I get from reading your posts. What you are talking about doing is not taking things like Banish or Sheep or other spells and throwing them into the talent trees, what you are instead talking about doing is taking things like Demonic Sacrifice, Presence of Mind, and Leader of the Pack and giving it to respecitive classes that have those talents. If you want to off tank as a warrior, you have to sacrifice. If you want to DPS as a warrior, you have to sacrifice. It is the same with all classes, if you want to play your character in a certain way, you have to sacrifice other things to play that way. You don't want to sacrifice, you want it all! I think every person on this forum reading your responses would agree and if I posted things you said on other formers else where, like Elitist Jerks, you'd honestly get laughed at and told the same thing I'm telling you now. You want everything a Warrior can have and don't want to give up anything so that you can do everything!

[Taelas]

Judging by arena ratings, you are way off in most cases.

I think rogues are combat maces (not sure on that), priests are thought to be strongest as 28/33/0 manaburners, though shadow is not bad and is really nice in 2v2 with a lock, pallys are nearly all 41/20/0, resto druids are destroying 2v2 and are mediocre elsewhere, afflocks are very strong but I don't know which is most popular right now, elemental shamans seem to be the most likely, but resto is possible.

But yeah, what I am suggesting would require closely looking at all of the 20-ish trees that remain to make sure that they remain competitive in PvE and PvP.

To me, a clearly defined PvP tree makes the game less fun. When I was gearing up my warrior I would often respec prot to run heroics. While I was in that spec, a whole section of the game was essentially off limits. PvPing as a prot warrior is just unbelievably not fun unless you are in a really tight group - and to the extent that they make BG's more competitive, it will make sucking at them less fun. With respecs at 50g talents doesn't stop people from optimizing or make people more unique - it just makes the game less fun.

I didn't say whether or not they were effective trees. I simply said they were obvious PvP-trees (due to special abilities, such as Eye for an Eye, Silence, The Beast Within, Mortal Strike, Call of Nature, Shadow Step, Ice Block, etc. etc.). The majority of those talents only really become effective in PvP-environments. I didn't mention arenas at all.

And there are ways as a Protection warrior to make PvP fun. (4k Shield Slam crits, even under controlled conditions, are impressive -- at least to me.) There's just no proper gear for it, with stamina, resilience and shield block rating.

It's pretty moot, anyway -- Blizzard seems to be moving towards the PvP-tree approach, and not away from it.

[oldmandennis]

You assume for some reason that a fury warrior currently has a bunch of junk talents. A basic fury warrior really only has 5 points of junk, which is parry. If you assume another warrior in the raid has TC, you could consider that another 3 points of junk, so 8 total. You could use those 8 points to pick up axe/sword spec and blood frenzy, with one left over for precision - a total buff of 10%. It's not hard to slip a 10% nerf in somewhere.

Now you have freed people up to make some actual choices, instead of just respecing a couple of times a week. If you wanted to do a little PvP, you could drop precision for intercept, or if you want to solo you could pick up charge.

I didn't mention arenas at all.

And there are ways as a Protection warrior to make PvP fun. (4k Shield Slam crits, even under controlled conditions, are impressive -- at least to me.)

It's pretty moot, anyway -- Blizzard seems to be moving towards the PvP-tree approach, and not away from it.

Well I'll trade you moot point for moot point - Blizzard has made it quite clear that arena's are the future of PvP:P If you take the arena out of it and consider BG's, even more specs become possible - pure holy priests can sit far enough back to not worry about getting focused, bears can run flags, etc.. I don't think the real question is if there is one spec that may seem more pvp oriented to new players, the question is are there specs that are so overwhelmingly good for certain classes that playing any other way is just unreasonable? For warriors, the answer is overwhelmingly yes. 4k SS may make you happy in the pants, but for me fun is progress towards winning, and prot doesn't really cut it.

[Lissa]

You assume for some reason that a fury warrior currently has a bunch of junk talents. A basic fury warrior really only has 5 points of junk, which is parry. If you assume another warrior in the raid has TC, you could consider that another 3 points of junk, so 8 total. You could use those 8 points to pick up axe/sword spec and blood frenzy, with one left over for precision - a total buff of 10%. It's not hard to slip a 10% nerf in somewhere.

Now you have freed people up to make some actual choices, instead of just respecing a couple of times a week. If you wanted to do a little PvP, you could drop precision for intercept, or if you want to solo you could pick up charge.

There's more junk there that those two. Most DPS warriors do not use HS because of the threat issue it represents as DPS warriors are already riding a thin line with aggro and presently have no way to drop it. So you're looking at up to 11 points of talents that you'd have to give up to get what you want. If, like I pointed out in the last post, you merge those trees, now you have no sacrifice of talent points and can throw those 11 points into something that will assist your DPS further. See why I say it's a bad idea, you're not expending talent points that are of little value to you to make your place style choice. Your merging of the trees basically turns Warriors into two hit wonders, a DPS setup and a Tank setup where as now you have a lot more variety with people running 2H MS/Slam DPS with 31/30/0, Fury DPS with 17/44/0, Off Tank with x/y/15, and True tank of 5+x/y/45+z (seen a lot of 11/5/45, some 8/5/48, and a few other variants of that). What you suggest makes less play style options and makes Warriors even more cookie cutter than they already are.

[Icebird]

Why is it that only warriors seem to be moaning so much in this thread?

Why have 3 talent trees? Variety. Talents are a way of customizing your character to distinguish yourself from other players. And isn't customiztion at the heart of the whole role-playing element of MMORPGs?

Let's take a look at the warlock. The warlock only has 1 role: DPS. And yet the three trees are quite distinct from each other, and boost the warlock in very different ways. Like to cast DoTs and rarely run out of mana? Affliction is for you. Like to nuke stuff with direct damage spells? May I direct your attention to the Destruction tree? Want to have a killer pet? Go demonology.

For hybrid classes, the talent trees obviously help them specialize in one of their possible roles.

But that doesn't mean that all talent trees are effective, or have a clear identity. The Priest discipline tree is a good example of a talent tree that offers lots of support to both Holy and Shadow Priests, but at the moment, the only people who go deeper than 23 points for Improved Divine Spirit are PvP-ers.

The 2.3 patch will make Pain Suppression targetable on other players, which is a pretty significant change, and I think desirable enough that it might convince some healers to sacrifice the deep Holy talents for some serious spot damage mitigation. Will we see the emergence of a class of Discipline priests that heals in a noticebly different way from Holy Priests (eg more Power Word: Shields, fewer Greater Heals)? I wait to find out.

If I had to characterize the two warrior DPS trees, I would call Fury the dual-wield spec and Arms the two-hander spec. If that shows my ignorance of the finer subtleties of warrior talent trees, so be it.

The major issue I see with the warrior talent trees is this: If you PVP seriously, you must have Mortal Strike. The 50% healing debuff is too important to do anything different. So instead of the PVP warrior having a choice between 3 talent trees (or at least two different DPS focused trees), their choice is between deep Arms, or hybrid arms/fury. I dont think there's any other class defined quite so much by one singular skill in PVP.

chris

[oldmandennis]

Most DPS warriors do not use HS because of the threat issue it represents as DPS warriors are already riding a thin line with aggro and presently have no way to drop it.

Not really. here here here

Your merging of the trees basically turns Warriors into two hit wonders, a DPS setup and a Tank setup where as now you have a lot more variety with people running 2H MS/Slam DPS with 31/30/0, Fury DPS with 17/44/0, Off Tank with x/y/15, and True tank of 5+x/y/45+z (seen a lot of 11/5/45, some 8/5/48, and a few other variants of that). What you suggest makes less play style options and makes Warriors even more cookie cutter than they already are.

Not any more then they are 3 hit wonders right now. You could have raid tank, full PvE dps, mostly DPS with the PvP goodies like intercept and second wind, nearly all DPS with TC/demo for debuffing, off tank with the debuffs and a little dps for threat when not being attacked, and of course the brand new mostly prot but has MS so its possible to PvP. All of those are equally valid in my setup as opposed to the current 3 trees, and some are much more possible.

Why is it that only warriors seem to be moaning so much in this thread?

It's just the easy example we latched onto. There's only one warrior really moaning.

Warriors only have one real choice in PvP - imp intercept is loads better then the top half of arms.

[Monkey]

Ferals will shift out of it. Your arguments sound like 1 on 1 arguments - If the priest is allowed to cast, then manaburning the healers would be a better choice then mindflay 85% of the time I'd say, and a single target snare doesn't help much if you have 2-3 people on you.

My tactics are out of date, I'll admit. And I've never PVP'd as a priest, this was just suggested to me by a priest with whom I used to PvP (and it sounded pretty interesting to me). But as a feral druid, I can say with certainty that I won't be "shifting out of it"-- as long as it's channeled, the snare continues. I might be able to shift out if I'm at the cusp of being out of range, but that's not what I'd envisioned.

More likely (was fighting a shadow priest last night), I'll charge through the mindflay and give the priest a "nice hot cup o'mangel". :shuriken: