Game-Changing New Powers

[Monkey]

Like the Steamvault, Arcatraz is a showcase of the power of Prayer of Mending. I sometimes read the WoW Priest boards and see Priests posting there about how useless PoM is and I can't help but wonder what they're smoking. We have the best heal in the game and they don't "get it."

Last night, I went with a group of 68s (with one 70 to tank) to run the Dark Portal event AKA the Black Morass. Our group was 70 Druid, 68 Mage, Rogue, Priest, and me (druid). After some negotiation, I ended up healing with my exceedingly feral druid. Initially, I got whacked trying to use Healing Touch. Then, at the suggestion of our shadow priest, I started opening with Lifebloom. It was not sufficient for me to keep people up, but dropping initial heal aggro on the tank kept me mostly out of trouble. For remaining aggro, I used root and sleep--cyclone would have been helpful here, too.

Unrelated, I have found Flight Form to be FREAKING AWESOME. From death-defying leaps off high precipices to dropping onto mineral nodes for mining, to crossing Shattrath in a heartbeat, it has really been helpful. One nice thing is being able to go AFK while traveling, you just have to be high enough and set your pitch and direction correctly. Anyone know if there are mods out to display current pitch? I've just been eyeballing it.

[Alrin]

I'm still a bit on the fence about Intervene. Far too often the friendly player is either too close to me, or the biggest problem for me is that I intercept to where the player WAS standing when I hit the button.

At which point, 1) its a pug and he's running away from me, along with the mob that keeps beating on him merrily because by the time I get there hes out of range for taunt or, 2) its a group buddy and he has sense to run towards the tank (me) at which point intervene puts me (again) out of taunt range and the mob proceeds to pummel him.

So yeah, it (to me) seems to still has a few issues that they need to work out - like, maybe make it an auto-taunt/intercept move that dont give you that oh-so-familiar immune-to-stun intercept scenarios that I'm sure all us warriors can remember fondly.

[Trien]

Anyone know if there are mods out to display current pitch? I've just been eyeballing it.

As far as I know there's no way to get your current pitch, however, if you shift out of flight form mid air and then shift back into flight form, it will put you at a level pitch. Just make sure you're high enough, and that should keep you from running into the ground. Or if you want to play it self, angling upwards never hurts:)

[Artega]

I'm still a bit on the fence about Intervene. Far too often the friendly player is either too close to me, or the biggest problem for me is that I intercept to where the player WAS standing when I hit the button.

At which point, 1) its a pug and he's running away from me, along with the mob that keeps beating on him merrily because by the time I get there hes out of range for taunt or, 2) its a group buddy and he has sense to run towards the tank (me) at which point intervene puts me (again) out of taunt range and the mob proceeds to pummel him.

So yeah, it (to me) seems to still has a few issues that they need to work out - like, maybe make it an auto-taunt/intercept move that dont give you that oh-so-familiar immune-to-stun intercept scenarios that I'm sure all us warriors can remember fondly.

I'd love it if they got off their lazy asses and fixed the Charge, Intercept, and what seems to be Intervene pathing bugs. I'm sick of over or undershooting my target, especially if they resist the stun.

Shadowstep and Feral Charge work. There's no legitimate reason for not fixing our abilities.

[Quark]

Shadowstep and Feral Charge work. There's no legitimate reason for not fixing our abilities.

Oh? You have extensively tested these abilities, then?

[Monkey]

Oh? You have extensively tested these abilities, then?

I rolled a fury warrior second and a pvp druid third, so I can say: Feral Charge today does not fatally bug like Charge used to bug while I was grinding. That is to say: my client's location is not out of sync with the server following feral charge. Since I leveled the two characters (mostly) at two different times, I can not give a comparison between the live charge and live feral charge, only historical.

However, Feral Charge is not perfect. It does frequently fail to put me in melee range just like intercept used to on my warrior.

[oldmandennis]

I played a warrior to 55 pretty close to when the expansion was released. On my client, with pretty bad ping, I didn't notice any real difference between charge and feral charge in PvE.

[TheDragoon]

As far as I can tell, the pathing for Feral Charge and Intercept is the same.

[Artega]

Oh? You have extensively tested these abilities, then?

I've worked closely with a Druid (primarily kitty, but in all the times he's used FC, I've never once seen him out of melee range with his target) and gankstep Rogue since I got the expansion. I've never seen either ability fail to deliver, whereas Charge and Intercept place me a significant (10 yards, possibly more) distance away from my target close to half of the time. If I'm snared or my target is under a speed buff (particularly Sprint and mounts), it becomes much closer to 75% of the time.

I'd rather have the interrupt+root effect than a stun if that means I'll actually be in range when I use abilities so critical to my normal functioning.

[Monkey]

I've worked closely with a Druid (primarily kitty, but in all the times he's used FC, I've never once seen him out of melee range with his target) and gankstep Rogue since I got the expansion. I've never seen either ability fail to deliver, whereas Charge and Intercept place me a significant (10 yards, possibly more) distance away from my target close to half of the time. If I'm snared or my target is under a speed buff (particularly Sprint and mounts), it becomes much closer to 75% of the time.

Sounds like a bug with immobilizing/slowing effects and not with intercept? Because shapeshifting and vanish remove those, right?

[Warlock]

Sounds like a bug with immobilizing/slowing effects and not with intercept? Because shapeshifting and vanish remove those, right?

That could be part of it. I also think part of it is simply lag, with the charge (etc) moving the character to a position requested by the client based on the where the client sees the target. I know that I've been out of melee range after a feral charge many a time.

[Artega]

That could be part of it. I also think part of it is simply lag, with the charge (etc) moving the character to a position requested by the client based on the where the client sees the target. I know that I've been out of melee range after a feral charge many a time.

Obviously, they can't fix my lag or that of the other users' (it's thoroughly annoying to have a sprinting gnome rogue teleporting all over the place), but I don't think it would be terribly hard to improve the coding for the abilities. Even if it would be, it's not like they couldn't just throw money at it until it fixed itself:)

[Warlock]

Obviously, they can't fix my lag or that of the other users' (it's thoroughly annoying to have a sprinting gnome rogue teleporting all over the place), but I don't think it would be terribly hard to improve the coding for the abilities. Even if it would be, it's not like they couldn't just throw money at it until it fixed itself:)

Sending "I am charging this target" to the server instead of "I am charging this location" might help. I do wish the server sent positional updates more often - such as when it's just reported "not in range" when I'm well inside the mob on my screen. Any time the client tries a skill that fails due to positioning an update on that target should be sent along with the error message.

[Bolty]

Dunno why you think this will be nerfed so badly.

I think it's gonna be great and I think it's already been balanced for.

And there's the nerf to Prayer of Mending. 20 second cooldown.

The fact that a good portion of the Priest community expected a nerf from the get-go is probably more sad than the inevitable nerf that happened. So while our Power Word: Shield continues to scale incredibly badly, they continue to nerf our survivability in PvP.

Yes GG, I know you were referring to the aggro mechanic, but the fact's still there that Blizzard nerfed it. And unlike so many past nerfs, this one's got me pretty upset. PoM was the one spell that helped to separate Priests and make them worth taking on runs over other healers, and now that's getting hit hard.

-Bolty

[Monkey]

Yes GG, I know you were referring to the aggro mechanic, but the fact's still there that Blizzard nerfed it. And unlike so many past nerfs, this one's got me pretty upset. PoM was the one spell that helped to separate Priests and make them worth taking on runs over other healers, and now that's getting hit hard.

Adding a cooldown to PoM is a nerf to the PvE applications of the threat mechanic as well--you're not going to be able to take advantage of the threat mechanic in any substantial way anymore. Sure, if the tank gets a big hit before they have aggro, you can cast it once--but how is that substantially different from pre-shielding the tank before the pull? It's reactive instead of proactive, that's all.

[Quark]

And there's the nerf to Prayer of Mending. 20 second cooldown.

The fact that a good portion of the Priest community expected a nerf from the get-go is probably more sad than the inevitable nerf that happened. So while our Power Word: Shield continues to scale incredibly badly, they continue to nerf our survivability in PvP.

Yes GG, I know you were referring to the aggro mechanic, but the fact's still there that Blizzard nerfed it. And unlike so many past nerfs, this one's got me pretty upset. PoM was the one spell that helped to separate Priests and make them worth taking on runs over other healers, and now that's getting hit hard.

-Bolty

As a Rogue I'm annoyed because this is a huge drop in my survivability before the promised "anti-melee" review comes. They know they've got a huge problem on their hands, so they indirectly make it larger before doing anything about it.

As a player I'm not surprised PoM was changed (remember all those posts where I said I don't want anything but a Priest healer for over half the level 70 5-mans?), but 20 seconds is way overboard.

[Kevin]

And there's the nerf to Prayer of Mending. 20 second cooldown.

The fact that a good portion of the Priest community expected a nerf from the get-go is probably more sad than the inevitable nerf that happened. So while our Power Word: Shield continues to scale incredibly badly, they continue to nerf our survivability in PvP.

Yes GG, I know you were referring to the aggro mechanic, but the fact's still there that Blizzard nerfed it. And unlike so many past nerfs, this one's got me pretty upset. PoM was the one spell that helped to separate Priests and make them worth taking on runs over other healers, and now that's getting hit hard.

-Bolty

I find it interesting to hear the holy paladins say they don't feel they are worthwhile because they don't heal as well as priests and if they spec holy they can't do as much damage. I find it interesting to hear the resto shamans say the same things. Now I hear priests thinking they aren't worth taking along. So are druids the only healer class who feel they are any good, though they still have the rez issue. This is a serious question as I've heard it from all classes now. Paladins don't feel they can keep up with all the AoE damage because they have no AoE an they have no HoTs to fire and forget. Shaman are in a somewhat similar boat, though chain heal or the full T1 set helps with that, but they see the DPS that an enh or elemental shaman can dish out and they really feel gimped (a holy priest can still do a LOT of damage, they just have to drink all the time because it burns their mana pool, I've been on runs with holy/disc priest in a DPS roll doing over 450 DPS, that is significant). So really does any healing class feel they are up to par? I'm not sure Blizzard intended anyone to solo heal anything anymore, they seem to have intended that you have VE help, or Imp Leader of the pack help or a paladin or shaman that can help or a druid that can help.

And yeah it was nerfed, even the aggro portion of it. Of course if they cut down the 360 cleaves and other anti-melee stuff that would have nerfed that portion of it as well because it would have bounced less often. Not being spammable cuts it's effectiveness. 20s could very well be too long. I still don't see the aggro portion of it changing beyond the cooldown being added. I dunno I haven't seen enough of the end game content yet, but even a 20s cooldown PoM feels very powerful to me. Sure it becomes more reactionary now, but pretty much all heals are, even lifebloom since it's going off atfter a timer. It's still something no other healer can do, just like your shield (though the scaling issues with that are making that less powerful for sure and something will need to be done). The massive buff to tranquility kinda removes my PoH argument as well.

This does but a lot more value on chain heal though.

I'll agree healing isn't where it should be though. I do feel that a holy priest should be the best healer. Not at the expense of making other healers so weak they aren't viable (as long as they are also spec'd resto or holy or whatever, any class that has a tree like that should be a viable primary healer just not as good as the priest). Just like I still feel a prot warrior should be the best tank, but paladins and druids should be viable. They may have over nerfed druids too. But it was at the point where I did actually prefer a druid tank in 5 mans over warriors. I also preferred a druid for DPS over a rogue and I prefered a priest because they were still the most powerful healers. Now this being me when I say prefered it also means I would have happily gone on a run with an arms warrior, 3 rogues and a paladin/shaman/druid main healer and assumed we were going to beat the instance with no issues because I still believe very strongly in the skill of the player, not the power of the class.

I can't say if the balance is where I feel it should be. But I do think that a holy priest should be the strongest healer, if you have a priest no matter what the fight you should not feel that the priest can't deal with it. Resto druids, resto shaman, and holy paladins should be able to be heal every encounter but it's alright if players feel more nervous about the healing if something goes wrong. I don't think this is too far off. The priests bag of tricks still makes this happen. I don't care if there are some encounters where a druid or shaman or paladin healer may be better (I'm not sure how that could really be) but you should be confident a holy priest can deal with all of them.

I'm in the same boat with a prot warrior. A prot warrior should be able to tank everything you should feel confident and comfortable with them there. Previously when there were several mobs to deal with on a pull I felt better with a druid around. A paladin or a druid should be able to tank everything in the game, and heck even be preferred for some encounters but neither should be the generic preferred choice. I think give T-clap to def stance pretty much fixed that. The issue with druid for me was more the DPS they did in bear form. Cat form is the druid DPS form especially since in general cat DPS talents = bear tanking talents. The heavy armor high DPS roll should be left to the arms and fury warriors. The issue of course is druids were set up to do a majority of their aggro via DPS. This ran into scaling issues. More scaling threat than warriors or paladins. A reduction in bear damage was fine. I don't know about the bear aggro reduction. They had the best aggro control in my experiences, that can be hard to judge as to if it's too much. But I saw DPS warriors end up as off tanks from the damage they did when it was prot warrior tanking but not when it was a druid tanking.

And yes I do believe that when you can change gear (not spec, just gear) and do the job of another class that means you can't be the best at something anymore. A feral druid can put on healer gear and main heal a 5 man at appropriate levels. A feral druid can put on DPS gear and compete with the best DPS classes. A prot warrior can not put on DPS gear and compete with the best DPS classes. Neither can a holy paladin or resto shaman or a resto druid for that matter. Something was broken there. Of course since I've seen a holy priest put on DPS gear and compete with the top DPS classes as well I thought something might be wrong there, but the down time the holy priest in a DPS roll has compared to other classes is a pretty good balance as it is more than anyone else.

Dunno. I got way off track from the PoM thing. The aggro mechanic wasn't nerfed, that doesn't surprise me. The spell itself being nerfed doesn't surprise me a lot, but I admit it could be overboard.

[igolg]

take your gold ad and go away. Not welcome here.

[Bolty]

So really does any healing class feel they are up to par? I'm not sure Blizzard intended anyone to solo heal anything anymore, they seem to have intended that you have VE help, or Imp Leader of the pack help or a paladin or shaman that can help or a druid that can help.

Well, nobody's going to solo heal a heroic instance. It's not so much the ability to keep up with incoming damage, since eventually with super gear that'll be possible; rather, there are too many mobs in there that have nasty CC effects or require lots of cleansing/dispelling that prevents a healer from actually healing. In heroic Mana Tombs, for instance, there are mobs that just chain-inferno like mad, forcing a Priest to play whack-a-mole dispel every time the GCD is up. Without a backup healer, the group wipes.

Priests dominate healing in a 5-man environment, and that's because it maximizes the power of our group AoE healing. The moment you put them in a raid, things change drastically.

Probably the most notable point of why Priests feel so maligned is that we're such paper healers. When Moroes vanishes and comes back, one-shotting you before a tank can pick him up, you know that a Paladin would have laughed at it. Yes, one-shot. I take a crushing blow with Inner Fire up for 9000+ damage and I hit the floor. I really feel sorry for any tank who has to freak out every time a raid mob so much as LOOKS at their healer. When trash smacks me around for 3000-4000 damage per hit, there's zero room for error. Keep in mind that Inner Fire has been nerfed; it provides 7% less armor mitigation at 70 than it did at 60 because Blizzard can't seem to do basic math. And this comes on top of the fact that DPS'ers do more damage than ever.

20 second cooldown on PoM doesn't hurt PvE *too* much. I think it's still too long a delay, but it's not the end of the world. It's in PvP that we take the shaft. It's in PvP where we've been taking the shaft for a while now. Tell me, as players' mana pools double in the expansion, why isn't Mana Burn scaling one bit? Are you aware of how totally useless it is now?

Of course since I've seen a holy priest put on DPS gear and compete with the top DPS classes as well I thought something might be wrong there, but the down time the holy priest in a DPS roll has compared to other classes is a pretty good balance as it is more than anyone else.

Yeah, this actually creates some difficulty for me. When I describe how brutally painful farming is for me, other players note my burst damage output in DPS gear and wonder what I'm smoking. In group environments, this doesn't show, since I'm drinking after every 1-2 pulls. Solo farming, though, is when my need to drink so often really shines. I can nuke down mobs pretty fast, but when doing so against equivalent-level mobs, I'm stopping to drink every 3 to 4 kills. It's torture.

I could write a 20-page-long QQ post about how this PoM nerf upsets me so much. PoM is the spell they gave us that made up for all the other crap we've taken in the past 2 months as I get increasingly marginalized in PvP. Why anyone would take a holy Priest in an arena match after this patch is beyond me; I'd just die 20 seconds in and contribute nothing. Instead of plastering this forum with my whining, I'll just link to two threads that do it a lot better than I can:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...=79159761&sid=1 - first two pages are chock full of quality explanations, read em

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...=79208081&sid=1

-Bolty

[vor_lord]

Dunno. I got way off track from the PoM thing. The aggro mechanic wasn't nerfed, that doesn't surprise me. The spell itself being nerfed doesn't surprise me a lot, but I admit it could be overboard.

There's quite a bit I could say about your post GG (and maybe I should since I'm present in it).

Instead I'll just throw out a few things I think I think about holy priests. I just hit 70 not long ago. I'm 23/38, with all the damage talents you can take with that spec. I've got a decent set of TBC DPS blues from the 5 mans (self-buffed +610 dmg). My healing rig is about half pre-TBC raid gear (still no replacements for my T2). +1060 healing (5 man buffed), 350 stam, 475 int, 449 spirit.

Anyway now to the things I think:

1. I am very powerful--even godlike *blush* -- in a 5 man group. No other healing class can put out the DPS like I can while at the same time doing the healing. A balance/resto hybrid is similar, but I think I do it better. Of course I'm better geared than our two balance/resto hybrids so that might be off. I put on the healing gear for particularly difficult pulls or most bosses, but I play DPS monkey most of the time even without a backup healer. Shields, PoM, HoT, group heal, the priest has it all.

That said, GG exaggerates when he says I compete with the DPS classes. My burst DPS is excellent -- the zergier the run, the better I look in comparison due to 2 second Smites and Shadow word Death. But I've never 'won an instance' (as we say on Terenas) except for the one Ramparts run where I was 69 and everyone else was 62 and I did no healing. Even on that one our tanking pally wasn't that far away from me on damage done. I certainly do fine compared against other hybrid or healing specs, but no mage/warlock/hunter/rogue/DPS warrior/DPS shaman need fear me, let alone a feral druid.

This will never last either. I'm at the peak of my TBC power right now. As we get raid gear, my solo/DPS power will not increase since I will not be getting that gear.

2. I freaking BLOW at soloing. Only spec worse in my opinion is a full prot warrior, but they will scale much better with gear than I. I can't tell you how much gold I spent on water leveling to 70. I did make the mistake of rolling a BE hunter though. Everything they say about hunters is true -- EZ mode, overpowered... it's like a completely different game. It makes me sick to think about it.

3. PoM feels overpowered to me even in PvE. Seems like most fights (for example in Shadow Lab) I am torn between two things -- DPS, or entertaining myself by watching my PoM bounce from tank to offtank an back while everyone's health bars are full. And it's aggro free for me. Mana efficiency be damned (I have no talents for it) it's still aggro free, so I can spam it at the beginning of those big pulls without fear.

4. I am weak in PvP. I haven't done much since TBC, but the problems that plague holy priests have only gotten worse, not better. My shield and inner fire are actually worse, and my fear is as ineffective as always. Now my opponent just has way more health to worry about. My only hope is that my opponents are stupid and try to kill someone else first. Still waiting for that to happen... I'm very disappointed in the PoM for this reason, I was looking forward to being useful.

5. In raiding... well I can only speculate, but I think a resto druid will be a better healer than me. I'll hold my own. As Horde I can take comfort in my role as dispel bot until we get more paladins at least...