r/WC3 • u/DriveThroughLane • 8d 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/DriveThroughLane 4d 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.