Focused Priest Feedback

We're requesting focused feedback on the current state of each class. We're particularly interested in suggestions on how to make the classes more enjoyable, such as improving tedious abilities to be more user-friendly. Balance issues are always a concern, but numbers tend to spotlight those issues, while it's easy to overlook problems that simply make the classes less fun than they should be.

We do read your normal forum feedback, but we have had the most success with feedback during betas and in the testing forum. However, it's difficult to address existing class issues when the focus is on new additions. The idea here is to put the focus on the classes as they exist on live, including everything from the new Prestige Abilities to the spells and combat arts granted at early levels. We're going to close this thread at the end of next week, but we'll do more focus feedback threads if they are successful. The goal is to get some improvements to live with the next game update.

Thanks!

Some feedback for Inquisitors:

Our Prestige tree is pretty nice. The left side is not that amazing, the only thing redeeming it is Fanatical Devotion proc'ing off heals. As for the right side, really satisfied with the ward and damage from Interrogation. Just 1 thing that is pretty disappointing, Hastened Interrogation. Feels like it's just a filler and that not a lot of thought was put into it. Also I've mentioned this in Beta feedback a few times, but the stat conversions need to be switched. We should be getting CB from the DPS side (right side), not the other way around.

Now for our abilities and spells, change Inquisition!! I say this every time I feedback anything about Inquisitors, and it hardly gets acknowledged. Inquisition needs to be completely different if you want people to use it. It is just not worth it at all to cast in it's current state. It heals for nothing.

Also something to consider, changing Divine Recovery to something desirable again. Who needs cast speed, really? And ability recovery is 'meh' at best. I know the endline adds potency to it, but that's not enough to make people (or most people) want it. Add something else useful and I'm sure people will start speccing it again. This is if you want people to have different specs (that make sense anyway), again. Instead of everyone just using 1 general AA spec.

As for balancing issues, it's getting a little silly that people cry for nerfs for Inquisitors, when you're letting Wardens roam around with like 5 death prevents or so. Which is fine, I'm not saying anything should be changed, it just puts things in perspective for some people I hope.

My main is an Inquisitor, and I think Inquisition works quite well, actually. It isn't an instant win button, but it does its job of giving me the wiggle room to cast other spells when things get tough. Divine Recovery is also a good spell as it is. In some fights, cast speed is a key factor in keeping the group alive with rapid heals or burning a mob quickly with fast attacks and slamming on debuffs.

Where I would improve inquisitors is actually with the punishments. The ability to proc heals off punishments is based on distance, when it would be far more useful if it prioritized the fighter and then the lowest party member if the fighter is full health. Because of the extension of melee range, sometimes the fighter isn't actually the closest to the mob when there are other melee classes in the party. I think it would also be fun if punishments were something you could spec more heavily into, so that they could be relied on primarily. This would mean AA choices making them deal even more damage and proc better heals.

Odyssey! Let's make this a portal that any party member can click on, just like the druid and wizard portals. Having to cast it one at a time to send people home is annoying. Yes, it is a minor thing and I'm probably the only person that ever uses the spell, but it has always bugged me.

No. Just... no.

Warden-
Healing Grove and Fairy Ally need to be upped on their healing ability, as it is now, they are barely worth casting in their current state as they provide marginal healing on their best days.

Tortoise Shell-most aoe's seem to completely nullify this ability, making it useless, make it REALLY block AoE's again.


Defiler/Shaman-
The dog, it needs some serious survival tweaking and hit rate increases. We get 1 group heal, with the dog and its procs as a supplement to help with that, including the other bonuses in the dog AA line, but the dog simply cannot survive ANYTHING in its current state, and is largely not worth trying to keep around, the aoe avoidance AA on it isn't even useful as the AoEs can't be avoided in most cases.

Casting speed can be easily capped just from mastercrafted gear on the broker. It's ridiculously easy to cap with solo/heroic/raid gear. Don't really see how you can justify needing a group casting speed temp at the expense of the other options in the cleric tree.

And yea, Inquisition is useless. You may think its helping, but it's more likely something else you aren't thinking of. Changing it to radiate a small ward would be much more useful.

I agree on the healing grove and fairie ally.. they're mostly useless AND if an AoE goes off while they're up they're pointless.

I disagree on the Tortoise Shell comment. There are a few AoEs that are scripted to target everybody in the raid directly, undoubtedly to specifically by-pass all AoE blockers (not just tortoise shell). I've never seen a mob with more then one AoE that does this. Tortoise Shell still remains incredibly useful and vastly reduces the amount of time I need to spend curing and healing damage from DoTs. It's not too hard to figure out which AoEs directly target everybody and watch for those casting bars to either pre-cure or be ready to cure as soon as they hit.

Casting speed is easy for priests and mages to cap, it is NOT easy for scouts and fighters.

Forgive me if I'm totally wrong on this, but isn't that mainly due to the advent of unblockable aoes in the majority of Hardmode fights, so it's all aoe blockers that are useless for them? I've seen stuff hit through bladedance, benefaction/opitulation etc, which is why the mage mythical ear from avatars was done differently.

Also I'm not in great gear but I'm almost capped on cast speed in raid on my bruiser alt. What, 50% self, 15 from coercer, some from the bard, if you have a monk in raid that's even more, procs up it too etc.

Right, because reforging a few pieces and acquiring cast speed adorns is so HARD.

Because they have so many other things they need to get and they don't have all the spell weapon <stuff> on every piece of gear to give them something to reforge OUT of. They can have gear where they don't have anythigg to 'get rid of'

A few ideas for Wardens:

Ward of the Untamed -- There are barely any encounters that have elemental aoe's, it would be great if Ward of the Untamed was a group ward for everything rather than just elemental, or at least add noxious to it.

Hierophantic Genesis -- Please add a ward component to this. Warden heals only heal up to 100%, not above.. so most of my regen heals are honestly just rotting on the targets they're on.

Healing Grove/Faerie Ally -- I haven't casted these two spells since TSO, needless to say they need a nice upgrade to this. Possibly aoe cures or something else creative.

Winds of Growth -- This doesn't work consistently. Also, on the description of this spell, it says ally's, not group ally's so it should work raidwide rather than just group.

And finally, the Warden prestige left side isn't even worth considering. A few upgrades there would be appreciated.
Thanks for your consideration.

With no reforging at all my fighters and scouts are all at or over 50% cast speed. Without sacrificing any needed stats. Add in buffs, it's not hard to reach a point you don't notice if your CAs are casting at .28sec or .25sec.

unblockable aoe's is the problem with aoe blockers, great tools, if they were useful, but its not just HM fights with them, its all levels of fights.

Templar:

Wrath Of Divinity/ Purification: It would be really nice to see one of these or both of these procs made group wide. Allowing some real form of group utility to the class would allow a templar to remain viable through-out an entire expansion, and currently we are the only priest without a group wide damage proc. Gear procs no longer crit, and most are unmodifiable. It's about time we got something to compensate for how lack-luster blessings has been these last couple years. I feel like a broken saying this again, as i have been strongly suggesting this since early DoV part 1, but we need group utility.

Divine Light (myth Clickie) Is currently healing atleast 80% of all mobs in this current expansion. I pmed a dev about this, but can provide additional screenshots if needed.

Sheild Ally: Is still not being effected by range increases. Will only work if 19 meters.

Smite Wrath: Since we are by far the lowest parsing priest, either removing the 7 second restriction whenever we cast a beneficial or greatly reducing the time.

Enhance Divine Strike/Divine Smite/Blaze of Faith/Smite Corruption/Warring Deities Each of these enhancement spells in the templar tree increase CB by a small amount, and give the ability additional casting speed and reuse. We have been long capped on these stats and they greatly need a face lift. Would be nice if we dropped the cast/speed reuse stats and gave us potency instead, and increased the base damage.

How the entire right side of our prestige's work:

During beta you mentioned that our right tree was intended to be for the "OT templar" I know myself and many templars in the community were really confused by this for a few reasons:

A very large majority of raiding guilds who actually maintain a templar only utilize them in the MT group. They arn't exactly viable from an ot perspective., mostly due to encounter design, massive tank survivability, and no real form of utility.

For nearly all content your reactives simply don't trigger within their duration making any additional points you spend in that tree not viable. I would suggest maybe allowing a gradual increment system. Each time a reactive triggers you get a small version of the effect you speced for. Caping out at 5 increments.

Unlbockable AE's are an issue to all classes with AE blockers. Warden/Fury, Guardian, Dirge, Chanters all thier AE Blockers are really hit or miss until you experiment with them and learn only 30% of AE's are blockable. I have to joust one of the Commanders AE's unless I am tanking him because if both me and the Brawler tanking him are hit, we die because there are not enough wards to cover 700K damage across 2 tanks.

Some thoughts as a warden:

• Winds of Growth only works on group members and not non-group raid members, but the way it is worded states only "ally" (which implies anyone in raid). I prefer it to search group first for people to heal, but it would be nice if it would apply anywhere in raid if no one in group needed it. If not, it should at least be re-worded to make it clear it's in-group only.
• Wrath of Nature is shared by wardens and furies and yet to this day cannot be stacked; instead it simply overwrites from person to person, meaning a maximum of one druid per raid can use it effectively. Is there any valid reason for it to be this way anymore? It's one thing to not have two of the same DPS class, having 2 druids total in raid is not particularly uncommon and it's a class-based ability rather than subclass.
• Tortoise Shell has lost a lot of utility in high-end raiding by having all the major AEs on HM fights unblockable. We get that you don't want to trivialize the encounters by letting players use too much AE avoid, but you give us something else out of it, even if it's just letting us block the power drain only AEs (more of a design issue) or giving a 25% reduction to AE damage instead of making it outright unblockable. Or even just make it so we don't have to waste so much AA to get TS in the first place when it's losing it's usefulness in such cases. Heck I'd also be happy to have it make beneficial spells uninterruptable when TS is up, that way we can at least cure or heal what we can't block with it.
• Healing Grove and Faerie Ally are garbage and need to be replaced or otherwise majorly reworked. As it is now they're not even worth a spot on my hotbar and just sit in my book. Spells should never be that bad. Nature's Pack is much the same way, seeing as the damage it does is minimal and they die incredibly easy.
• The +% power consumed mechanic on a lot of PoW-type fights is pretty lame as a Warden. Our power regen method is casting (primarily group) heals, and when those cost ~5X as much it makes a successful proc a wash and a no-proc a major hit in power. There's certainly ways of playing around it and it's by no means debilitating, but it is something that I find makes fights with those high power drains less fun when you're forced to rely on other sources of power. Especially when those fights also have other major power drain mechanics that can quickly drop you down to zero power.
• 10m range on Windblade remains too small for a group buff. When the mob's have 10m+ hitboxes, it's very easy for either tanks or casters to not be in range of it and thus receive no benefit. It's not so powerful an ability that it needs to be made short range like it is.
• The druid "Rebirth" AA needs to be brought up to date in it's mechanics. Make it a castable self-rez that only works within 30-60 seconds of death instead of an auto-rez 5s after death and it'll be useful again. The AE avoid on the SF modifier AA really doesn't do much when the AEs that will really kill you are unblockable (see above).
• Regarding Ward of the Untamed... the power of this and the similar Fury and Templar abilities when the damage type matches the AE can be amazing. At the same time, when it doesn't match the damage type they are positively useless. I'd be happy seeing these made to be 50% specific and 50% any magical (eg and old 20k elemental would equate to 10k elemental + 10k any non-physical non-focus damage). 75% old / 25% generic would be fine as well (and maybe a bit more balanced), at least it'd give us something when we use these on non-matching AEs so that some players don't get totally screwed by ward priority on standard shaman group wards. The non-specific portion could even be made non-regenerating to keep it from taking too much power.

Some more general feedback on enjoyability and things that hurt it. Not specifically what you requested Xelgad, but I think these are fair enough that they can be passed on to those that handle the design:

• Please stop making the trash in zones be far more annoying than the named. Groups of 3 trash mobs that cast an AE that does decent damage plus prevents all hostile action are not challenging, they're annoying. It was bad enough when they would all AE at once, instead now we get AE, 5s pause, AE 5s pause, AE, meaning we either cure them all to save maybe ~5 out of those 15s or we let em hit and cure them then. Ditto mobs in solo zones that use long-duration daze effects to punish melee damage only. If you want stuff to take longer, give it more HP: that's less irritating in the end than all the junk control effects on trash.
• Along that same line and more referring to actual encounters... forced interrupts on AEs are purely annoying. Some classes are able to get a significant amount of focus skill, at least let us use it.

Mystic:
Dog needs looking at. She's a fun, interesting, unique part of the class and nearly useless. Dies to a fart. Annoying.
Wish we had more damage abilities, even if its adding damage to our debuffs. When i'm doing trivial content (like lower-but-not-grey quests), it gets pretty annoying to only have a few buttons to push and then sitting around till more are up.
Being able to group cure more often would be nice too.

Otherwise, I find mystics an enjoyable and fairly balanced class. The main thing that bothers me is that I'm stuck as a "good" class. I'd rather be neutral, so I can live in Freeport, and roleplay my character as she's intended to be roleplayed. Can we please use this opportunity to remove the final 8 faction restricted classes??

Mystic feedback:

I actually don't have much trouble keeping my dog alive in the content I do, however I will say I haven't raiding since TSO & have not done any of the heroic content in COE yet.

I do find Slothful Spirit & Lunar Attendant spell lines desperately need some reworking.
Slotful spirit is just another damage spell really, the power drain portion of it never seemed to do much even back in DOF when we got it.
Lunar Attendant, while I love how they look & always have they really are fragile & don't heal really heal for much.

Other than that, I find the class great. I really enjoy playing my mystic. I feel like the class is is more balanced & fun than it has been at any time since release now.

As an inquisitor a change on Inquisition is long overdue. Honestly, I do not think that it should be a castable ability on the mob. Coming from a player that has played the inquis for nearly 9 years and also played all other healers through out the past. One thing that Inquis lack compared to others is passive healing abilities or group augmentation. Personally, I believe that Inquisition should be changed into a constant heal proc buff. Something around the lines of when a member of the group receives damage it has a 5%-10% chance to cast Inquisition of target of damage healing for 1xxx-1xxx.

Aside from that with the Cleric Line the only issue is Divine Recovery has become mostly useless.

Inquis get enough, you have Combative Healing from AA's , thats a horrible suggestion.