Focused Feedback - Priests

Hey guys!

Now that the expansion has launched, we're going to do another round of focused feedback. We're looking for feedback on anything you find frustrating, annoying or think could be better.

As with the last time, we intend to focus mostly on Quality of Life adjustments and things that make the game more fun to play.

We'll be keeping these threads opened for a bit while we gather your feedback and then look into making adjustments.

Thanks,
Xelgad

General: all item procs that proc an increase in healer beneficial stats stats (pot, cb, amod) and that don't proc on beneficial spellcasts. 50% (if not more) of what a healer casts are beneficials. why should we only get half the procs that other classes get (100% of who's casts are hostile)? Really, most of these procs should be "on any spellcast", or at least "on any hostile or beneficial". This applies to the Eye of Drinals, Ethereal Strikes and other effects of this sort.

The same is true vice versa... if we have an item that ONLY procs on a healing spell or beneficial spell, then half our spells aren't proccing it.

For the items that have an attached damaging proc that requires a hostile target - that's cool, that part doesn't need to proc on beneficial. But the +pot/cb (Which is all we really want) still should.

A change to some of the channeler's conduit abilities would be nice to make more of them worthwhile. As it stands now 60% of them are almost never used. Pre-ToV it was easy that channelers were getting less utility than other priests but were going to get the highest dps. Right now half of that is true, we sure don't have a lot of utility outside of afk healing tanks, the the second group buff and the change to souls hot being group only was a nice change.

Do you have specific changes you're interested in seeing? Or specific conduits?

List from Lemilla a couple months ago of the usefulness of conduits. For the never used, they are either just bad ( Mis of Poison needing like 8 targets or something to be more useful than poison bolt. The reactive pet heals being almost useless, Hidden Reserves only being useful if the pet drops to under 25% hp ever 45s or something. Stuff like that.

There was a separate post on the priest DIs, but I wasn't sure if this was going to be addressed based on it: any of the DIs that prevent a tank dying and leave him with a set amount of HP, they need to leave the tank (or whoever) with like at least 50% hp and not the piddly amounts they're set to now (the defiler one is like 6k). This should apply to all different healers.

Ancient Spells:

If i'm reading the census data correctly (and i might not be), then Defilers don't get our group ward as an Ancient Spell. How is that remotely possible given that it's our #1 spell. Instead i see we get Defile, while certainly cute and has our class name in it and everything, but it's not even a Top 10 spell. ST Ward + Maelstrom as the other two are good.

Okay here are some of my thoughts that I posted on Beta regarding the Channeler class:

We need some utility...like pretty badly. We heal and we dps okay. But honestly so do all the other healing classes. We need something unique that we bring to the raid. There are a handful of slot 4-8 abilities that just aren't used very often. Maybe we could get something like:

1. Flurry buff/temp;
2. WDB buff/temp;
3. A short duration stoneskin (more than 2 hits - something like 5s);
4. A short term (8s buff) temp that adds one additional melee/ranged auto attack hit for the group - basically for 8s everyone that uses an auto attack does one additional hit in addition to their normal multiattack/flurry; and/or
5. A construct sacrifice that affects the whole group buff - something like the bell tolls but only for the group.

Also, for the principle benefit of the channeler we could use:

1. Another dissonance reducer;

and - unless we get some real utility (because it has been stated before, we give up utility for being a higher parsing healer even though right now we are basically even with mystics/wardens but they bring a ton of utility for the group...);

2. Increase the damage of our CAs or
3. Increase our auto attack multiplier to be higher than the other priests
Finally, and this may be just me, but I think healing arrow/barrage should be straight group heals (like how soulshot is now). Its a nice niche to be able to heal outside of the group, but its not overly practical. Being able to just heal one's own group consistently would be more useful.

As a druid i m getting tired of having to be over-reactive, and our new group heal is again about that.
Instead I would have like some ability allowing us to relax a bit.

Could we have anything that last more than 10 second (only Hierophantic genesis last for some time) ?
Also my hotkeys got two new slots, as if if I had not to many already.

@ Kalika

Assuming your wanting longer tic times on hots , or I guess atleast 1-2 of them?

But we must assume the over all heal potential is balanced fairly good. So to stretch out the duration , would of course lower each tic.

As a warden myself , I certainly don't want to see longer hot durations , and think its a pretty good balance now.
Besides Heirophant , we have the tree , fairie and spores. Plus healing through mele which acts pretty much like another hot tic.
However , an ability to optionally stretch out tics (opposite of our compression) might be nice.

Xelgad how long are you intending to keep the threads open for feedback....I probably have an encyclopedia sized list of issues I've been keeping notes on that remain unaddressed but would like to flesh it out abit.

For Inquisitors:

- It would be nice if an up front damage component were added to the punishment line of spells (Vengeance/Repentance/Heresy/Smite Heretic) so they trigger procs/refresh Unyielding Retribution. Even a single point of damage would do the job, but if you wanted you could add the damage with the Perfect Timing prestige ability and have it scale with points spent. Changing the triggering mechanism of this line would also be helpful since oftentimes they aren't fully consumed, making the the prestige enhancement pretty worthless. Making them trigger when a mob swings, regardless of whether a successful avoidance check occurs, would be one way of solving this.

- On a related note, the Punishment AA in the EoF tree is severely outdated, still using the old mechanism where the mob triggers the heal using its stats. In addition to scaling with the inquisitor's stats, I'd personally like to have it turned into a group heal as well.

- Remove the health restriction on Prepared Defenses. This restriction sort of made sense back when wards were the premier heal type, but with pulsing AE damage becoming practically ubiquitous it's becoming an increasing burden, especially when inquisitors are on the low end among priests in terms of group healing output.

- Our offensive utility has been falling behind other priests for the past several expansions, with Fanatical Devotion being our only relevant ability still. There are numerous ways of addressing this, but some ideas include adding a weapon damage bonus component to one of our group buffs (Fanaticism would make sense) and significantly increasing the damage and proc rate on Act of War.

Fury:
This class is still pretty bonkers, would love to see:
-Protective instinct fixed
-Rage of the Wild changed somehow
-Fae Fires damage increased
-Primal fury changed to base potency, 10% is very underwhelming
-Animal Form give something better/be group wide.
Warden:
-Damage increased to be in line with fury
-Windblade damage component increased

Indeed after thinking about it we need something a bit more proactive when big damage is incoming.

Hammerdaddy asked for protective instinct to be revised, it could be such a pro-active ability.

And for sure if the new prestige AOM druid end line was something pro-active it would be great.

For items that proc on a combat art or spell hit, it would be nice if they also proc on a debuff. A lot of times I am casting my debuffs in between heals and it seems like the majority of them don't count as spell hits since they don't do damage.

Also it seems like there are more and more stun/stifle conditions that our Voice of the Ancestors doesn't work on. It would be nice if it worked as advertised on the tool tip.

Death save seems more and more ineffective each expansion. I am not sure if it is being hit through or if it is just the tank surviving with such low xp that he dies instantly on the next hit.

While playing my Channeler today i was grouped with a Mystic and i made an observation.

It appears when damage is received, it is first "warded" and then "intercepted". this did not make sense to me. It seems it would make more sense to Intercept damage, and then have the remaining damage warded.

Also on a side note, Zavith Loa (SP), the lost caverns (i believe is what its called? Not the Caldera) SOLO and Advanced Solo, when you return to the entrance, the door is not clickable to zone out like in the Heroic version.

Ok since i saw all the nerd scouts doing this
FURYS:
Druid Tree:
Strength:
Nature Blade - Damage needs to be redone/haste increased
Natural Boon - Heal component should be more in line with storm-caller's renewal.
Primordial Strike - Damage Increased
Agility:
Fantastic, would be cool if wild regeneration gave possibly more potency.
Wisdom:
At the moment this entire line is outdated/not useful, the crit chance is not worthwhile to take this line and the immunity is no longer needed with adorns/howling/signets/pots/etc.
Wisdom:
Pterfect except for Heirophant Obfuscation
Intelligence:
Thunderspike - Damage Increased
Stormcaller's Control - 10% potency is pretty weak.
Stormvision - Perfect
Infusion - Perfect
Fury Tree:
All the damage increases are just 5% Crit bonus which is very weak,
Lots of outdated reuse reducers.
Natural Cleanse - Reuse is currently five minutes capped, would be nice if it could be 2 1/2 minutes capped reuse.
Shadows:
Make the Primal Fury potency increase give something better than just 10%.
Heroic:
Protective Instinct: One of the real BIG changes this class needs at the moment, prior to this expansion i used this ability as a clutch pre-preemptive ward which when i knew a big aoe was coming i would charge it and use it. At its current state it ward for roughly 350k in raids, which is less than the ability above it spirit of druidism does. A good change would be to make it scale up to the furies total health pool or make it scale off of crit bonus/potency to how high it can get.
Prestige: No complaints here, all good
Prestige (fury):
Rage of the Wild: Really weak endline, it's an heal with a 50 meter radius so i'm assuming its an emergency heal, when compared to the stuff the other two classes got and how weak protective instinct got and how wards matter again we really should get something, (Templars>wardens|Furies>everyone else for mage groups). If you want to keep it a dps ability make it much better(see illusionists we are basically the same tier of dps) or turn it into a ward/reactive. Something INNOVATIVE.

I mean, if you're going to nerd out... you should at least nerd out in color, kanyefriend. (Fixed for you... you get green for... leaves!)

Concidering this thread is supposed to be about Quality of Life improvements and not straight up class buffs ...


The current annoyances as a Channeler:

• Healing Arrow and Healing Barrage are very unreliable for healing. Even in heroics with people staying quite close to the named they don't always heal the entire group. Please do the same as was done for Soulshot and make these spells heal the channelers own group instead of a random 6 targets near the target.
  With the constant pulsing DOT's on most heroic nameds this expansion, having such spells actually work reliably is a lot more important than it was last expansion.
  
  
• Debuffs that reduce Potency or Crit Bonus also reduce our pets maximum health. This is fine. However, when curing these debuffs our pets current health does not go up. The result of this is that being affected by such a debuff for even a fraction of a second causes as much damage to the pet as it would get from intercepting many millions of damage.
  When our Potency and Crit Bonus change, our pets Health percentage should stay the same. Currently, only the Maximum health is affected.

Channeler:

The difference in DPS between between combat abilities versus using damaging Conduits is pretty bad; there is simply no comparison. Damaging Conduits are a waste of a slot. I went into a DM grind group to spam the Conduit AoE Dissonant Decimation, and there was plenty of stuff to cure to get my dissonance back down to keep spamming ... but the parse looked like crap. I don't think I will ever be using them again without some augmentation.

Furthermore, I hear the complaint that Channelers do not give enough group utility to be used in raid. We only bring in this healer when there is a huge spike damage fight; otherwise, they are sitting on the bench. The only thing we have is a Conduit debuff on the mob. We need something that procs CritBonus/Potency/CritChance to the group - or something - to make them more appealing.

DPS-wise, I haven't come anywhere near what a Fury can do. I'm a bit disappointed on the unfulfilled potential. I have to run defensive stance most of the time so I don't get to take advantage of what the class was designed for.

I disagree to a point. Your pet would be dead and you would be full dissonance the whole fight. Everything should eat into wards with a portion being intercepted. Padding your heal parse is secondary to survivability.