Mad Priests on Madmortem

On the US-boards, I found another post with “priest issues” in both PvP and PvE – however, I do not really think all of these are really vaild. Sadly this is examplary for what a lot of the priest players on the blizzard boards seem to think about their class, so I just could not hold back this time…

So, let’s just take things apart:

PvP Issues:
1) Any class can run a priest down without anything the priest can do about it. Priests don’t have stealth, invis, blink, sprint, speed chant, travel form, or any defensive abilities to prevent being run down and killed. All priests do is burn mana trying to stay alive, but that doesn’t work very well when the enemy can never be run away from.

Sooooo, we are obviously talking disc priest here. Well, take 500 resilience with a full disc spec and you may not be a primary healer anymore – but with (mass) dispel, mana burn, mind control, psychic scream, shield, prayer of mending, stam buff, shadow prot, etc, you are quite an utility – and can protect yourself better w/o running away, than a rogue with running away.
Oh, and of course of all classes except for prot palas/warris nobody takes less magic damage than you!
In the end, disc priests are sort of swiss tanks – this might be different from what we are used, but it sure as hell ain’t bad.

2) Priests only means of breaking from melee revolves around 30 second cooldown AE Fear which now can break for almost any reason if it isn’t outright resisted in the first place or the target is immune. AE Fear is NOT chain castable warlock fear. Even if it does give them a few feet distance before it is removed by too many means to count, they are usually slowed and can’t run anywhere.

Thats quite true…. We don’t run away. But neither do warriors?

3) Inability to remove movement impairing effects. Priests used to be able to dispel conc shot and so many other snare effects, but since BC they can’t. They have no means to free themselves, let alone anyone else from these affects which leave them easily in enemy hands.

“so many other snare effects” – as far as I recall hamstring never was a magic effect. And we still are quite capable of dispelling frost nova, root, slow, dragon breath. Hunters are OP – if played well, so lucky for us so many hunters suck at pvp.

4) Purge/Dispel is too powerful a weapon against priests as EVERY form of defense the priest class has is considered a magical effect and is removable.

Yes.

5) For some reason priests were linked to Spirit, which makes sense from a flavor point of view, but has nothing but limit the class in the end game. Currently 1 Str = 1 Agi = 1.5 Stam = 1 Spirit. 1 Spirit doesn’t even come close to these other stats in terms of end game gains, especially in the arenas. Yet priests have talent after talent based on this stat. Even the developers recognized the lacking aspect of spirit when they designed the priest pvp gear. Notice, NO SPIRIT. Paladins, Druids, and Shaman all have talent-linked secondary effects for INT which is heavily prevelent in PvP gear.

For some reason Disc is our real pvp-spec now. I remember exactly three talents which affect spirit: Divine Spirit (which I mostly spec for issue 5), Meditation and Enlightenment. Sure this is quite annoying – for pvp I would mach rather have 7.5% more stam and int than 5% on stam, int, spir – but as a wholy we should be able to take it quite well.

6) Priests can be completely shutdown by unmanned AI pets. With a pet chewing on them they can do so very little. For some reason pets always hit that 30% bullseye to cause pushback if the pet is not stunning them, counterspelling them, dispelling them, ect. FADE ISN”T WORKING ON PETS, or I should say it isn’t working as it does on mobs. A pet MAY break away for a moment, but then it turns back and attacks the priest.

Pets suck a lot – but they do so for all casters.
There is an even more important issue: Pets disallow leaving combat. Together with some other classes (druids!) focus on just running away and drinking, you get a really powerful “side-effect”. If you add the possibility of “protecting” a hunter’s viper sting with a scorpion or the power of the fel hound’s devour magic and spell block thingy you gain way more than just a bit of pushback.

7) This is more a general caster issue, but spell casting (heals in this case) is subject to ALL forms of CC other then root on TOP of spell casting specific CC. The huge range of ways to stop spell casting is currently ridiculous. Taurens and Bloodelves both have AE means to stop spell casting as a RACIAL ability for gods sake.

Root/Snare does not affect us much, but as compensation our spells can be countered – sounds fair. I would consider the splitting of our two schools - shadow and holy - into three schools: Shadow, Holy and the newly added Discipline school - hey, we already have the friggin thing in our spellbooks!
The real problem lies again with hunters, who just can not be cced without taking the fully out of combat using sheep/fear/whirlwind. Oh, and some of them can immunize themselfes against this.

PvP issues in Short:
Priests are easily enveloped and have no means to escape from both melee and being run down. Priests healing ability is easily shut down by both pets and player abilities. The defense of priests due to its magical nature is too easily bypassed by dispel purge. Priest’s stat of Spirit is lacking at best.

True – and yet wrong. Spirit is weak for any class doing PvP, and our defense is easily dispelled, but then again if you specc all those funny “if you hit me I gain another magic buff!” talents, it costs an unbelievable amount of many to keep our defense down. The most powerful defense gets activated on every crit – and with 500 resilience on 12.8% of all normal hits as well!

Adding more healing abilities is not going to help if we can’t escape from being damaged. Even when priests had spammable prayer of mending they still died because we couldn’t escape and eventually ran out of mana if they weren’t owned by Mortal Strike and/or Wounding poison.

Disc 1on1 is really hard to lose against warriors, rogues, mages, shadow priests, ret palas.
Warlocks and Druids can beat us if using the right tactic (which surprisingly few seem to know!)
Shamans and Hunters usually should win.

All healing-specs may eventually outheal us.

As soon as we get healing (i.e. 5v5) we do better against ms than ANYONE else.
So, just maybe, running away is not the solution we need?

PvP Suggestions

1) Make Psychic Scream a horror effect.

That would be sweet against warriors and undead – against rogues it would not change a thing (Insignia / medallion of the alliance will dispel either). Additionally it would help against shaman totem and our very own fear ward.
Sure a sweet buff – but hardly something that makes or breaks the game!

2) Increase the range of Mind Control to 30 units and make it function like the MC helmet on enemy players. (As in it will place enemy players under AI control)

So, how do we get to tell the AI player to jump of the bridge?
I would like to see some sort of improved spell-pushback protection though.

3) Allow all undead spells to affect demons for both pallies and priests.

I guess the idea is to shackle the demons. This would probably fail in practice due to the annoying fel hound first playing pushback with your cast and then countering your Shackle Undead. Oh, you did know that Shackle Undead is in our holy school?
Well anyway, I fear Hunters more than warlocks…

4) Add to fade that while faded the priests suppresses all movement impairing effects (snares/roots).

That is something along the line “I wish my warrior would cast frost bolts so i can better get in range!”
Something that would be cool though is to change fade mechanics insofar as to make pvp enemies lose targets like they do with a hunter that feigns death.

5) Change Inspiration so that the inspiration buff not only increase armor, but also allows all heals on the player during that time to ignore Healing debuffs (Mortal Strike, Wounding Poison, and Mortal Shot).

No. That would reduce me to spamming flash heal (low rank) just to get inspiration up since this would now be more important than the actual heal. Bad idea.

6) Fix Spirit by increasing the amount of mana/life regen per point and allow spirit to reduce spell damage taken (much like agility reduces melee damage taken) … then put spirit on priest pvp gear.

Actually nice idea – just, 10% reduced spelldmg + resilience already solves the magic damage problem for me pretty well… Even less spelldmg taken would just cause mages/warlocks/etc to (rightfully) whine. Spirit mana regeneration is actually quite powerful and misunderstood – since the last changes spirit started to be competitive again, well at least in PvE content. But improving spirit mana regeneration without overhauling the whole model in the direction of MP5, would seriously overpower Spirit in PvE content.
Increasing the really laughable health regeneration might actually be an interesting option to give this stat PvP viability.

These changes grant the priests class solid CC options, addresses priest’s mobility issues, fix priests so-called primary stat, and will allow the priest class to once again be sought after for healing in PvP rather then just mana burn/mass dispel.

So, should we change the shadow tree as well to make shadows sought after healers?
Sorry, but I got a third option to play my priest and I am not going to give it away

So, to sum the pvp-part up:
There is a lot of whining about wanting to be a healer in the arena, since being something like a tank does not suit all those people who rolled a priest to heal. This is actually (contrary to what might be interpreted into my comments above) a valid point: People don’t get what they want.
However, all those people who have managed to accept their role in arenas are having a helluva load o’ phun [s.i.c.] – my guild contains three more or less highly rated deep-discipline priests.

One thing I personally would like to add is how we seem to be incapable of using our hardwon arena gear about anywhere else except for fleshing out those primal mooncloth stats if your raid leader yells at you for not having your 8k health at aran – don’t mind that usually I am the one flaming people who did not manage to bring gear with enough stam on it

Now, for my favorite part:

PvE Issues:

Wh00t, we have issues in PvE? This must be about shadow priests! Holies do not have any real issues…

1) Priests mana regeneration method is by far the worst in the game. Shadowfiend is a duration pet that can be completely ineffective should the target be missed, dodged, parried, and should the target be shielded at the time. Also, the pet moves at normal player speed and often I see it outrun.

Sorry dude, are you playing naked?
If played well, a priest does not lose mana any faster than any other class.
Oh. And:
We do not go OOM.
NOT AT ALL.

Example for those who like to disbelieve me:
At Void Reaver we usually take up to five meelee damage dealer. These are all put into one group (usually group 2). If we have less than 5 meelee dds we fill this group up with paladins.
Why?
Because they are to stand at the back of the VR and never to run out of the pounding. Yes they take damage. We use exactly one priest to deal with that. And just to explain the paladins: They get to keep up mana seal and actually gain mana from the heals the priest throws at them. CoH makes fun.
So how does our mana regeneration suck?
Because I needed to throw a mana pot or two when doing this before gaining any TK/SSC items when doing above 30% of the whole raid healing?!

2) Priests group buffs have become obsolete. Players are running around with 800 stamina and buffs like Blessing of Kings now offer far more utility then straight fortitude. PW:F costs THOUSANDS of mana to provide less then 100 stamina while BoK costs a few hundred (at most) mana to provide ~80 Stamina on top of whatever adding 10% to every other stat offers. Shadow Protection … doesn’t. What is 70 Shadow resistance in this endgame and how does it really help?

The “less than 100 stamina” are actually 102
While the 800 stam tanks really do not profit that much from pw:f (“only” 1k hp…) all low-stam players (mages anyone?) will love you for it!
The shadow resist is really unimportant as far as, there are no real shadow resist encounters I am currently aware of. However if you generalise this, there is something really important: The 70 fire resist aura allows our warlock-tank to ease up on chosing resist gear at leotheras quite a lot.

3) Fade isn’t effective endgame. Even if it does work it is not permanent and the agro will come back as soon as the fade ends.

It is not permanent, never has been and probably never will be
Fade is not an aggro-reduce, but rather “o-shit light” – an ability that has saved me more often than I can count… But it won’t do you any good if you really overdo it.

4) Healing agro mechanics are unfairly biased. If a warrior walks over to a mob and hits it for (going to use crazy numbers to prove a point) 20k damage, none of the other mobs fighting in the area seem to care. If a healer lands a 20k single target heal every mob in the area, even ones that had nothing to do with the target that was healed, all charge the healer.

That is not quite true. Healing aggro is only counted against you on mobs which have the target of your heal on their aggro list. (This just means that distance is not an issues at all.)
However compared to “healing aggro” in arena/bg, healing aggro with mobs is a bit akin to summer holidays – it seems hard to stand up, when you’re lieing on the beach

PvE issues in short:
Priests are a cloth healer or a cloth nuker/mana battery. Not ever both because of how specialized you have to gear up to make one or the other actually effective in high level raids. A Healer isn’t going to waste anything to DPS and a DPS spec isn’t, or rather, can’t heal if it should suddenly become required. Yet priests are penalized for being some sort of Healer / DPS hybrid that can never be realized.

Well if you fill one role in a raid you’re gonna get equip for that role. Ask druids. Ask shamans. Ask warriors. Ask any class that can in theory fill up more than one role…

Priests mana regeneration method is bottom of the list in effectiveness, their group buffs have become obsolete, Fade doesn’t save the priest from agro anymore, and agro mechanics in general is greatly biased against healers.

Paladins mana regeneration suck even more, stacking mp5/spirit gives us great mana reg. Our group buffs are very important. Fade is less effective, but that is mostly only true in raid dungeons. Any good damage dealer will draw aggro from the tank way before I do, except for very extreme cases.

PvE Suggestions

1) Change Shadowfiend to be a charge based rather then duration based pet that will not fade until it has made X number of successful hits where each hit that returns mana eats a charge.

Might be useful. But then again, it might be useful just to learn when to use your pet.

2) Reduce the mana cost of priests healing abilities so that they are competative with paladins for mana efficiency.

Our group heals are unparalleled in mana efficiency – no other class has this many extremely efficient, spammable group heals.
Our versatility is extremely high.
Mana efficiency with Greater Heal is also very good.
But yes, in specific areas other classes outdo us. Trees HoT better, Paladins flash better, all have better survivability with their armor.

3) Increase the scaling of PW:Shield to 100% of +Healing -or- remove the weakened soul debuff.

I would be unstoppable in PvP – and i mean unstoppable!

4) Greatly reduce the mana cost of PW:Fort to reasonable levels for what it does.

Not quite unreasonable, but quite unnecessary.

5) Make Fade a perm agro reduction.

Would be nice – but only really interesting for shadow priests… Which is quite confusing, considering that everything else here seems to be about heal priests.

6) Change Spirit as mentioned above.

So how would reducing the spelldmg we take really buff our PvE strengths?

I am not much of a PvE player, but I think this coverers all PvE issues.

Yes, you obviously are not. But at least you have good, strong opinions…