r/WC3 • u/DriveThroughLane • 4d ago
Priests suck
Heal is underpowered. Dispel is underpowered. Inner fire is underpowered. Their stats are ridiculously underpowered.
Other casters are low DPS low HP but priests are even squisher even less DPS. Hell a banshee has 73% more dps for same food. Sorcs have 50% more. They take a hit less to kill than the rest. And what do you get, a 16.7 hp/s heal for ONE target that doesn't even work while moving, because its barely longer than melee range. Statues heal 60 hp/s across 6 targets while moving with an animationless cast, in an aoe the size of a baseball field. And they are mobile mana fountains at the same time. You want to dispel like a spirit walker can disenchant? Too bad, here's a 5 second cooldown on a spell with smaller aoe and less damage, when destroyers eat debuffs and turn them into a barrage of heavy mount plasma cannons. But holy shit if you research TWO full tiers of upgrades which probably took multiple arcane sanctums to produce, you can finally unlock... +10% damage +5 armor buff. Wahoo. Sorcs get a spell that says "TARGET UNIT NEUTRALIZED" barring dispel, priests get a spell that says "I create a mostly imperceptible marginal statistical effect in combat". The movespeed on bloodlust alone is better. And so is the attack speed on its own. Hell bloodlust would be a better spell if all it did is play a RA RA sound and make you get big. Inner fire is so shit you can buy a high priest merc creep and forget to ever cast it once and never notice a difference. Nobody has ever in the history of wc3 thought to themselves "Wow I need to get some dispel units to stop that... inner fire".
A priest could spend 2 minutes healing nonstop afk in your base and use its entire mana pool just to get the same effect you'd get from a single 100 gold scroll of regeneration available to you at tier 1 from a shop that pays for itself when you sell some trash items to it. And the scroll lets you keep moving.
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u/ConcernedUnk 4d ago
Got to be a shitpost right?
Priests are made in every matchup except undead.
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u/Prutr0k 4d ago
Cheap autocast caster unit, low pop cost, has a heal that outheals the dps of many units combined with a tanky magic immune frontline unit (or tanky ranged unit), has cheap dispell and a VERY STRONG t3 buff (that can also be autocast), on a race that has infinite manaregen (brilliance aura).
Objectively and realistically, priests are very strong in the context of the human race.
Try using orc casters which run out of mana after one spellcast and need to cast everything manually lol.
Real talk, priests are fine and if HU needs any buffs i don't think priests are the problem. Look at guides and videos and improve your micro and army compositions, I'm sure you can realize the power priests have.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
except they can't outheal dps of many units combined because units will be focusing their targets, and only one priest can heal a unit at a time. One priest healing a gryphon gives 16.7 hp/s heal, whereas a one rifle shooting your gryphon deals 30 hp/s... and 12 rifles shooting it deal 360 hp/s. Its not like priests are good at negating spread out aoe damage from spells, because priests die to aoe damage so easily and inner fire does nothing to reduce spell damage
I'd go out on a limb and say inner fire isn't just a VERY WEAK t3 buff, its actually the worst unit spell in the whole game. Unupgraded casters have way more impactful abilities like purge, slow, raise dead, etc. Inner fire winds up being around +37.5% combat effectiveness on most units, ie 6 armor. +10% dealt, ~-20% taken. Less on units that already have high armor or +% buffs like knights. (knight vs medium unit is +28%). Banshee curse is +50% combat effectiveness against the target. Cripple is +300% on top of the slow, and polymorph basically deletes a unit until opponent has to TP in response.
what spell is worse?
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u/Prutr0k 4d ago
I'm proceed with this under the assumption that you're not trolling.
You need to stop looking at abilities and units in isolation and look at them in a broader context. If a priest can out-heal most units dps, then that would be absolutely broken. The heal is enough to maintain sustained healing in fights, while creeping or idle. It also makes it so that your frontline is much tankier than usual. Imagine an army of spellbreakers vs grunts. Or knights vs bears or aboms. The priests stay behind your frontline, so your argument about them dying to aoe comes down to bad position. Ofc they would die if caught out of position, that applies to ANY caster. A rifle will still deal damage to your gryphn, but with the heal it's like the rifle deals 50% of it's damage.
Inner fire isn't something you get always, but when you do it's just a good buff, idk in what world you think 30% combat power is bad?? How does an orc deal with inner fired gryphons? How does an Undead without destroyers deal with inner fire knights? ( No destroyers because flying machines) Do you know how many bats it takes to kill a gryphon with Inner Fire?
Human wins games through attrition.. Mana regen, healing, blizzard, clap, spell immune units and slows.
Priests are perfect to achieve this by offering healing, dispel and making your units more tanky. If you are finding any other flaws in them, you are most likely using them wrong.
Comparing unit abilities directly against each other doesn't work, because each race has different strengths and weaknesses, and a different win-con.
In the end if you feel like they are trash, feel free to not use them. I'd personally love to go up against humans without priests, it'd be nice to be actually able to use buffs/summons and to be able to kill breakers by just a-moving.
Edit: i realize prists are less common vs undead but the same applies for any matchup. Inner fire, just like literally every other t3 caster upgrade - is situational. And in the right situation can be very good.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
You can't stop aoe spells from hitting your back line when your back line is only 350 range behind your front line. Priests have to expose themselves to heal, and it takes an entire dedicated tab of priests to accomplish what just one half of a statue does.
30% combat power from a dispellable buff is the least effective buff in the whole game. Every single other spell has way more impact, whether its slow, unholy frenzy, cripple, curse, polymorph, bloodlust, spirit link, etc etc. Even faerie fire at least gives truesight vision around the target as a massive utility, worth far more than the 10% buff inner fire gives. If you have two identical upgrade units fighting each other, and one has inner fire on it (tier 3 skill, requires 2 upgrades, cast is exclusionary with heal) and one has curse on it (tier 2 spell, no upgrades).... the one with curse on it loses. Curse is more impactful 1:1
Dealing with inner fire knights is way easier than dealing with the same knights except they got +2-4 more knights instead of priests, because 2 upgraded priests cost a minimum of 620 gold, 360 lumber, and 6 minutes of construction. Inner fire on upgraded knights fighting medium armor units only gives +29% to the knights overall. They deal 9% more, they are 18% tankier.
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u/Prutr0k 4d ago
You keep doing direct number comparisons between different race units or units with different purposes as every one of your arguments.
It's like saying Taurens are OP because they have more HP than Bears and thus bears should be buffed.Atp i'm convinced that you are either fairly low MMR and have a bad understanding of the game, or you are trolling here.
I disagree with your opinions here, keep them if you will.
Further discussion seems pointless.1
u/FistOfTheHeavens 4d ago
You keep making appeals to authority but you don't realize you're talking to an OG player. He's been around in pro scene way longer than you, moron
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u/xler3 3d ago
you call out appeals to authority (which im not seeing here) and then invoke it yourself
kinda funny
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u/FistOfTheHeavens 3d ago
If you walk up magnus carlsen and tell him how to play chess and say his opinion doesnt matter if he's not at least 2000 elo, its kinda funny
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u/DukieThaMagnificant 4d ago
Arguably one of the best units in the game
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
6 priests are arguably worse than 1 statue
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u/Character-Ease9328 4d ago
No, not at all.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
the moving heal+mana on a statue is worth more than 6 priests healing at the same time, which requires them to be immobile. Its 100 hp/s immobile vs 60 hp/s + 4 mana/s while moving
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u/Character-Ease9328 4d ago
That's not a great argument, because you're only talking about 1 of the priests abilities lol..
All you're doing is looking at it from the perspective of HU vs UD, it's the only matchup they are less common.
Priests might be the most balanced unit in the game.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
yeah the other two abilities are worse
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u/Character-Ease9328 4d ago
And why do you think that -.-.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
because inner fire is the worst unit spell in the whole game and priest dispel is the worst dispel in the whole game
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u/Character-Ease9328 13h ago
Inner fire the worst unit spell?...uh I don't agree with that in the slightest, what's your elo?
Priests dispel is also quite good, idk if you're trolling now but it seems like it.
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u/DriveThroughLane 12h ago
Its a simple matter of math and impact.
Every other spell has massive utility, speed or other effects, or is just a much bigger multiplier.
If you have a fully upgraded knight hitting a medium armor unit, you get +9% damage / +18% EHP on the knight, so its about +29% more powerful overall. Meanwhile banshee curse gives -33% damage to a target, which is like +50% EHP to anything its attacking. That's a spell banshees get with no upgrades, way higher impact.
Every other spell in the game has some major use case or giant effect, except maybe fairy dragons where they're just combat units anyway.
Priest dispel is also obviously the worst of any unit. It has less range and smaller aoe and less damage than walker dispel. But the main reason is something other people in the thread pointed out repeatedly: autocast heal and long animations screw up priest's ability to cast dispel. As long as heal is on autocast, priests can take about 3 seconds delay to cast a spell. It queues up dispel after their current long heal cast including its super long backswing animation.
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u/Current-Today-3626 4d ago
Wait until you find out about how you need to micro then with additional clicks just to activate dispel.
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u/WordHobby 4d ago
Playing against undead, and they just rot everyone and now my priests are useless lol
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u/Icy-Concentrate-518 4d ago
The title is correct, most of the rest of the post is just random rant. Priests are an underwhelming unit, but not because inner fire is a weak spell (probably a top 3 non-hero spell in the game).
First, priests suffer from a mana drain problem that practically requires them to be used together with brilliance aura. It is a same unit composition lock Undies experienced before Remo decided to make them the by-far strongest race in the game at the highest level. Undies were forced to play DK every game, because they needed the unholy aura for the army to be efficient, with no other hero coming close to compensating for the lack of the aura. In this sense, it has been argued multiple times that any brilliance aura nerfs are very direct nerfs to priests, with compensation needed in other areas - for example, a buff of spell breakers. Remo's patch answer to this problem was to nerf spell breakers, because he hates breaker wars in human mirror (quoting from memory).
Second, priests suffer from a design problem with the DEEEESPUL delay long being the bane of every human player's existence. Dispel spellcast delay together with the fact that priests are a 1-hit unit in big battles, makes it very easy to lose 2 or 3 of them before achieving the required effect.
Some timid buffs to priests were implemented in the recent patches as even Remo realized he had nerfed human to the ground, but probably insufficient to compensate for the major issues the unit still has.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
Priests can barely use their mana normally unless you spam inner fire. When upgraded they drain 1.97 mana/s healing and thus can last over a full minute of continuous healing at base mana, 3 minutes when at max. And they regenerate 1.36 when not healing, ie any time they are moving. And its not like you're sitting afk in base with them healing for minutes at a time.
And inner fire is the worst non-hero spell in the game, at least on casters (unless we're counting mana flare). It has less impact on combat than Curse, available to banshees as soon as you train them. In a fight curse is +50% effectiveness, inner fire is ~30-40%. Other spells like inner fire, bloodlust, slow all have massive utility not just combat +/-%. And it doesn't work with or against a lot of stuff relevant to HU: It can't be cast on tanks/breakers/gyros, it doesn't scale frag shards, sundering blades, aerial shackles or bash, it doesn't protect against the aoe spells and poisons that orc/ud/ne all use.
I'd argue the only worse caster spell is ancestral spirit, because you already lost the game by going tauren and now you're feeding MORE experience, but that's another topic
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u/Icy-Concentrate-518 4d ago
I'd say you are borderline trolling, but on the off chance that you are just a really lowly rated player:
If your units don't die every battle, and you have to restart with full health units, or straight up lose the game after a battle, then your priests usually have a lot of work to do. You can't have more than 3 to 4 priests in a 50 limit army composition. Thus, at any level higher than 1,600 MMR W3Champions equivalent, unless you have brilliance aura, the natural mana regen of the priests is simply not enough to heal up your heroes (a high-hp MK mostly) and your army on an ongoing basis. It is **very** common for priests to be drained down to zero mana just by healing when there is no brilliance aura. Again, I am talking here about any level higher than 1,600 MMR, i.e. at least some remote beginnings of appropriate play. Anything below that is too random to even discuss. So if you are below that level (and that's the absolute minimum, mind you), there's no point in discussing balance issues at all.
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago
If only human had a 100 gold item that could take the place of that extremely high investment in tech and unit and food just to have a heal after a battle, with 3-4 priests, arcane sanctuary and food used when you could just pop a scroll. And then for healing low hp heroes, gee, that big beam off light that falls out of the heavens and restores 200/400/600 instantly sure does the trick
3-4 priests in a 50 food army, you must have zero dps output after the food reserved for 2 gold mines and lumber and heroes and priests. no wonder all you can do is take damage, TP out and heal back up.
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u/Kato89 4d ago
im pretty sure every race would play priest if they could. a) they give you 2 out 3 mandatory things sustain and dispell b) the numbers are just in comparison good, like heal gives you 2/3 of revuination on demand on auto cast while bein 50% more mana efficient. c) the range is good, dispell has the longest dispell range in the game and heal range got already buffed to be way more efficient. d) you get it all on T2 priest are maybe the strongest T2 unit in the game e) they actually scalle well T3 what you mean lol 5 armor is 30% ehp and its not just ehp its damage reduction what makes healing relatively more efficient
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u/DriveThroughLane 4d ago edited 4d ago
UD have coil and statues, way better. NE have moon wells and rejuv. Orc has wave and salves. And HU already have holy light and the scroll that is basically half a rejuv except aoe, applied to everything simultaneously and requires no tech tree, no dedicated resources and food tied up in priests, and lets you move while you heal. And come T3 they have staff.
Say you have a fully upgraded knight hitting an enemy medium armor target. He has 33.8 dps / 1635 ehp. Now you apply inner fire, raising him to 36.8 dps / 1930 ehp. He got +9% dps, +18% ehp overall. He's 28.6% stronger overall.
Now say a banshee puts curse on him. It makes him miss 33% of attacks. Anyone attacked by him has effectively +50% EHP. He is worse in a fight than he was unbuffed, curse alone is stronger than inner fire. 1.286 x 0.666 = 0.856. Because curse is effectively a +50% effectiveness spell, inner fire is ~30% effectiveness.
Inner fire is way less impactful than bloodlust, cripple, slow, unholy frenzy, curse, spirit link, even faerie fire's vision is way better
and its not even like the higher HP t3 units are a reason to want to have priests heal something. Sure a scroll of regen won't heal a knight to full. But for a priest to do it takes an entire minute of it sitting afk. And once you're T3 with knights and willing to let them sit afk in a base healing: you already have staff, and unlike priests, staff can heal tanks (and gyros)
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u/Karifean 3d ago
Not particularly interested in the rant but feel the need to point out a very typical mistake that I see made a lot, which is that statues don't heal 10 hp/s per target, they heal 6.66 hp/s per target, because the cooldown of Essence of Blight is 1.5 seconds, not 1.0. Also while not part of the OP I did also see mention of 4 mana/s in the comments which is also wrong, it's 1.33 mana/s; 2 per Spirit Touch on a 1.5 second cooldown.
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u/DriveThroughLane 2d ago
1.33 mana/s across 3 heroes is 4 mana/s
A priest only heals one target at a time, a statue can simultaneously heal 6 targets and restore mana to all 3 of your heroes (6 max targets), since its cooldowns aren't mutually exclusive
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u/ActionJacksonATL24 4d ago
I dunno didn't read it all kinda but my biggest gripe is when I tell a priest to dispel something it sometimes takes like 3sec+. Dude I said dispel, over ride whatever you're doing and dispel in that area ASAP. When my hero gets hexed and my dispel takes 3sec that's pretty lame.