Shadowlands - Priest Discussion

We released a beta version of the simulator today and all three priest specs are fully functional including all Covenants, Conduits, and Legendary Effects.

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The rotations are not complete. And in case you were wondering, no, the rotations are not complete. This beta version is not sufficient for you to make detailed comparisons between covenants, conduits, and legendary effects. You can get a rough idea, but you will want to optimize the rotation more to get better comparisons. I will, of course, be doing my own round of rotation optimizations - but I will be doing that after all classes and specs are functioning in the simulator.
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For now, healers are using the same scripts we have been using in BfA. We do not plan to keep using those scripts as-is for gear optimization in Shadowlands. We may use them for initial gearing strategies at launch - but we will be quickly developing a new set of scripts for healer optimization. I will also be adding a pure DPS rotation for each healer spec, as we will be supporting a “slider” like we do for tanks that lets you balance how much you care about gearing for damage vs healing.

Feel free to post any thoughts/ideas you have in this thread! I’ll offer some of my own thoughts later on once I can tinker more with the rotations.

Some initial impressions: Priest really got the short straw when it came to Covenant design. Two of them require you to move up close to targets to get full effect (unholy nova and boon of the ascended) - which is something that I do not like. I don’t know any priests out there who were saying: you know, I love holy nova, could you give me more holy nova? Fae Guardians are really not good, or maybe I lack the creativity so far to make them good in the rotations. Right now Boon of the Ascended is the only one that feels cool in-game and it has good numbers… you just have to move up close to enemies to damage them. Mindgames works well with Discipline especially, so that one is a decent option. Unholy Nova has an irritatingly short range, but it is powerful in AoE.

Shadow is swimming in insanity… and right now most of the legendary effects help you generate even more insanity. I think we’re going to be seeing more balancing passes at insanity generation.

The Shadow rework feels good in general to me. A lot of the new talents are very fun and powerful. Pyshic Link, Damnation, Searing Nightmare are all standouts for me, personally. Legacy of the Void doesn’t work very well at all anymore. I think that the legendary powers may have been designed before the rework… so hopefully we can get some changes there. They all seem very single-target and insanity focused, which isn’t what shadow needs.

Holy Priests have great healing output, as usual… but I still see them as a spec that will specialize in raid healing. Discipline right now looks like it could struggle to keep tanks alive in mythic+ situations until tanks become largely self-sufficient.

I’ll add more thoughts as I get into heavy rotation development in the weeks to come!

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