#0 - Sept. 14, 2007, 2:33 p.m.
Posted by: Kesla (US)
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1531076503&sid=1
Q u o t e:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PvP Suggestions
1) Make Psychic Scream a horror effect.
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)
3) Allow all undead spells to affect demons for both pallies and priests.
4) Add to fade that while faded the priests suppresses all movement impairing effects (snares/roots).
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).
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.
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.
PvE 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2) Reduce the mana cost of priests healing abilities so that they are competative with paladins for mana efficiency.
3) Increase the scaling of PW:Shield to 100% of +Healing -or- remove the weakened soul debuff.
4) Greatly reduce the mana cost of PW:Fort to reasonable levels for what it does.
5) Make Fade a perm agro reduction.
6) Change Spirit as mentioned above.
I am not much of a PvE player, but I think this coverers all PvE issues.
What do you think?
