All the regular players I play with agree that early priests are a terrible move, and Ive heard "gg" many times from the opponents when one of their team has bought priests. I cant remember a single game where I would consider buying priests early has done anything except feed the opponents (or feed our side as the case may be). Unless you're one of the few characters without an aoe, then a wave with priests die just as fast as a wave without, and perhaps I missed it but I havnt noticed them as being particularly useful as taking down towers.

I wont say they are completely useless. Sure when theres a wave nearby you can go and hit on a tower for a while and the creep soaks up the damage, or maybe you might get tossed a heal from a priest. I would however say that no game Ive played so far has their benefit outwieghed the benefit to the opposition.

Pity we dont have some sort of meaninful ladder and have some expert opinions to defer to. Unfortunately the current statistics are meaningless, as you can avoid a loss just by quitting.

 

This is another problem which people seem to keep ignoring. On a map like prison where you dont get lanes to yourself, the creep farming becomes extremely difficult when your creep beats theirs.

Taking towers down gradually is extremely inefficient, use burst abilities along with a teammate instead of wasting time on small pushes with creeps. This way you end up having to deal less total damage due to tower regen.

Getting a beast to spit + reg using mines for example will down a tower very, very quickly during the mid game.

Vlad makes a good point, and even on a map like Cataract, if you need to be right at the enemy gates to farm, you have a very long way to run if trouble comes your way, and a thus higher chance of getting killed. Ideally you want to be able to farm just in front of the flags, away from their towers, and getting priests certainly doesnt help with this. When you want to push, you can AoE all the enemy creeps out of the way at little cost and hit towers as a team for much greater effect than allowing the front to shift due to creep upgrades and gradually wearing them down.

Yes priests give you some small benefit in term of firepower and healing, but they give your opponent a giant sack of cash they can spend on better items to kill you with. If you can't stand toe to toe with your opponent becauase his items are a lot better than yours, you are in trouble. Yes you can run around capping flags and backdooring, but a decent opponent will not let you do that to any effect. Eg. on Cataract, once one team has a decent combat advantage they will take the health flag and the opposition gold flag, and these may well remain locked for the rest of the match. This happens if you buy priests and give your opponents a gold advantage from them...

.'. don't buy priests until you're ready to win. They are good for pushing the enemy citadel in conjuction with catas, not for pushing towers early/mid game.

Maybe those of you who say priests arent so bad early/mid play the game completely different to me, but I have to say every time someone buys early priests I end up many many levels ahead of them and my team inevitably gains total control of the game once we have all bought mageslayer/other stuff from all the gold we've farmed. My experience is therefore that buying priests before you're ready to backdoor and lock -> end the game is not beneficial.

As soon as you bought the first creep upgrade, you should "baby sit" the waves, in order to use them even more efficiently. That's the case for any creep upgrade. Nothing wrong with that.

If the fight gets closer to the enemy citadel, then you have alredy used Priests very effectively, giving you a major advantage in Warscore and finishing the game with Catapults or Giants. Unless you screw it up somehow, it doesn't really matter how much gold you fed the enemy. Once you can take all portals and have at least Catapults, they will have a hard time getting rid of all the creeps. Depending on the map you also got more Gold by capping gold mine flags with your priests that would otherwise belong to the enemy.

its an easy turn around scenario, the enemy is gaining gold while my minions are killing theres, and he can easily kill me while i ant kill him

 

and you should not have to baby sit each wave, pushing with a wave is different than baby sitting. i shouldnt have to run with them to scare off demigods so they dont farm waves

Why should you not have to run with waves? Creeps aren't just there for your amusement and gold/xp. And how is that different from "pushing with a wave"?

you are saying no matter what i do i should be with a wave of creeps, then a whole bunch of flags would never be captured

with priests. if you leave them then the enemy benefits way too much

 

 

i dont hate priests, but their gold value is way too high

The enemy will not win, simply because you aren't in every wave because you were capping a flag...

 

yes they will, a wave is giving 1000 extra gold now. a wave with 5 grunts and 3 archers is 44 gold, but then with priests, that' 143 gold

so 10 waves of back and forth flag grabbing can either be 440 gold, or 1430 gold to your enemy

 

that's a major increase that will feed the enemy gold very very quickly, so you do have to baby sit each wave if you don't want to have a third as much gold as enemy

You have to consider a lot of things before buying priests.  The number of enemy AOEs is probably the biggest factor - if they have a Torchbearer, a Regulus and a QoT then buying priests is just feeding them XP. Then look at how much long-term staying power your team has. If your guys keep having to retreat to the citadel for HP (not uncommon on an all-assassin team) then you can benefit enormously in staying power (and therefore XP) by having priest heals on the field. 

Yeah.. some people seem convinced that priests are an auto-loss move and will rage if anyone even talks about it.  Nevermind that the enemy team hasn't displayed a single AOE, or that you are already destroying many of their towers.  PRIESTS WHAT A NOOB LOL.  Ugh.

The most annoying aspect of this is when you are on a losing team and the other guys all buy artifacts before even considering priests.  You've lost the game already but the other side won't seal the deal by buying portal upgrades.

 

It's likely that only one of the enemy DGs will get the gold for minion kills because of the 25% requirement.  Most of a teams gold comes from the gold mines, the citadel mint, and player kills.  The additional XP from priest kills is much more important than the gold they give.

You have to have angels and/or catapults out for the gold from minion kills to start really affecting the game.

Indeed. Also there won't be any back and forth of flag grabbing, otherwise you would have used Priests wrong in the first place.

i understand they still can be good, but you are still missing the point, upgrades should be good no matter what and they should NEVER help the enemy

 

priests are not good the majority of the time, if you are pushing well you don;t need them and that's the only time they are good

they feed enemy gold

 

so they aren't needed the only time they are good and they directly help enemy

I don't post much, but I've seen more than enough complaints hehe. 

But like I said, upgrading to priests has never been a negative game-changer for me.  So, I don't see a reason to prioritize a fix for this "issue".

 

Just my opinion.

In my experience:

If two teams of equal skill face off, and one get priests and the other does not, the one that got priests will lose.

If the two teams are of unequal skill, than priests will hasten the defeat of the weaker, no matter which side got it.

 

Where does this viewpoint come from? Upgrades are strategic decisions and like any other strategic decision it can turn out to be a really bad one for you.

Done, end of debate.