Priest Q&A Released

It’s time to close out the class Q&A feature with the Priest class having the spotlight. This feature is meant to answer questions about the thought the development team has for the class going forward. As usual Ghostcrawler answers the questions for the community. You can find the Priest Q&A here.

priest

Priests are not a jack of all trades, master of none healer. Priests are strong and versatile healers and the only trade off is knowing how to manage the many spells that priests have since a lot of them have these small niches.

Shadow priests used to just a leveling spec which didn’t do enough damage. Then in TBC they were better damage dealers but traded damage for utility. Now shadow priests can do comparable dps to other dps classes.

Blizzard would probably want to change/add shadow talents so that they affect all damage spells and not just DoTs. This should help solve the problem of their damage needing some time to get the ball rolling dps-wise.

They think vampiric embrace damage is fine but could look into the threat even if it isn’t something they think is a problem.

They could look into changing the Mind Flay glyph to increase range without losing the snare.

Reducing the mana cost of shadowform so that it’s easier to pop out of it to heal or do holy damage is an idea they’ve been discussing.

Blizzard is considering changing shadow word: death so that it doesn’t have a backlash when the target is in execute range. They’re also thinking of changing it so that the backlash damage isn’t affected by things that would increase your damage.

Blizzard would want to improve on the mana efficiency and burst healing of the Holy tree.

Their intention is that Greater heal is the default heal while flash heal would be the heal to use for emergency since it’s fast. Such really isn’t the case now with flash heal being valued for its speed over greater heal.

They will not collapse dispel magic and cure disease into one spell. They feel that would make the dispelling game too easy. They have also expressed that dispels missing isn’t something they want in the game but would need a code fix to solve.

Inner fire will not have its charges removed unless they can think of alternatives for it just like mages have molten armor, mage armor etc. Removing the charges would make it a passive armor buff that would essentially make a cloth wearer have the armor of a leather wearer. At least mages have to make a choice.