electricwizard wrote:
I'm no pessimist, I'm not one of those O-board qq'ers who makes a topic everyday saying priests are dead/useless etc. However I do realise that a 25% heal/20% damage reduction while good (pretty damn good) is NOT going to fix our class. Could things be worse? of course, can they be better? definitely.
And I did not say our class has more problems than others so please don't put words in my mouth.
I simply don't think our class is weighed down with problems that need fixing. I think it has deliberate limitations to balance its obvious strengths, or it would be overpowered compared to other classes.
Take, for example, our defensive buffs. Like many buffs in the game, they can be dispelled...by Priests. And Shamans, and Hunters of course, but one of the many reasons Priests are so desired in all PVP brackets is their dispelling abilities. To give us defenses that could not be dispelled while allowing us to wipe away other folks' buffs would be a little too good.
Or take Mindflay. It's an incredibly powerful PVE spell, amazingly efficient at dealing damage/mana, scaling admirably with gear. Its limited range gives Shadowpriests a PVE restriction that keeps them nervous about drawing aggro...which is just about the only downside to playing a Shadowpriest other than gear scaling. And good god, giving it a 40-yard range in PVP and a talent that prevents spell pushback would be a death sentence to melee.
Or take Psychic Scream. Delicious AOE fear! It must, absolutely must have a substantial cooldown; anything under 20 seconds would be far too strong, and you can get it down nearly that far with gear and talents.
The class does have some padding in the talent trees--you mention Lightwell, which would be a perfectly good ability if others in your raid could use it properly. Improved Fade is perhaps a better example of a useless talent. Sure, Blizzard should replace it with a talent we might actually want, and do the same for every class in the game while they're at it (and I'd also like a pony, please, Blizzard.) But this is a problem you can fix yourself...don't take Improved Fade.
I apologize if my tone sounded hostile to you, by the way. Your perspective on the matter is perfectly reasonable, although I do disagree.