Post#119 » Tue Sep 22, 2026 9:52 pm
The spec remains incredibly fragile, a single knockdown is still sufficient to have your character being killed, and a bunch of rDps in scenarios just annihilate you
A Witch Hunter I have in a defensive set up is far more tough than my shield warrior-priest, despite not having block chances : the 7 second immunity to all magical damage, the 3sec invisibility to evade several enemies that are hard focusing you, the 15 second duration AoE detaunt, the mix of knockdown, silence, disarm and stagger, to prevent enemies from harming you, the morale 1 confusing movements ; even with a defensive set and renown points investment, you can deal decent sustained dps through spirit damage DoTs effects ; you have no burst, but enough survival to gradually eat the health of the enemy
As a shield warrior-priest, you have rng block chances that can be bypassed from flanking, a 5 second aoe detaunt, a silence, the morale 1 buff, a single target detaunt ; obviously you can self heal, but if under the effect of a control or not in range to hit the enemy, or heal debuff is being applied to you (outgoing + incoming eventually), your health drops dramatically ; you basically lack of a backup cooldown, and have nothing to protect yourself from range damage dealers, you're just a free target they can snare and punt while dotting and bursting while also running away from, it's impossible to compete
The amount of toughness you have is below 200, initiative is roughly at 200, you need 800+ str for your heals to have some impact, and you can no longer combine Divine Fury + Fanaticism for increased damage output and parry chances because of base heal ; since you can no longer increase crit and parry chances through Fanaticism, you have to obtain them from renown, meaning you end up with a rather high chance of being crit as you lack the renown points to invest in Futile Strikes ; if you go full Futile Strikes renown, you then end up with roughly 5% crit chances, which greatly undermines both offense and healing ability
The single target absorb you unlock as top ability from Grace tree remains very underwhelming, it only boosts your next Healing Hand, which is obviously not helpful when being bursted down, and doesn't feel relevant in its effect as something that should be the best Grace ability to unlock, it basically does not feel like a Grace ability at all, since it only benefits abilities that are outside that spec that do not scale off strength except for one. The absorb it provides is easily eaten by the enemy since they crit you a lot and you have low toughness
I really have no idea what was the point of the entire rework that has been made in early 2025, since hardly anything that was problematic regarding self-survival has been adressed. I might argue that it's even worse than it was because of the removal of the channel protecting you from range, and Fanaticism as I've said being unuseable, requiring crit and parry investment through renown points now which prevents you from investing these points into Futile Strikes/Deft Defender.
The only thing that has improved is the possibility to use Unstoppable Wrath. The newly added tactic in left tree, Divine Warding, obviously would have paired up very nicely with Fanaticism, but you can't do that because of base heal being affected by healing output
And if I want to slot Divine Fury to deal some assist damage, then I end up being somehow forced to slot Exalted Defenses to make up for the healing loss, meaning I only play with three tactics, which I fail to see how is this an improvement over how the spec used to be in terms of playability
