i disagree here. priests will help your minions push through the enemy waves to towers, but at towers, they one shot pretty much everything, so it rerally doesn't help, especially if they have the first tower upgrade

so you have to baby sit each wave, and i understand that can help take down towers, but ultimately, an upgrade should be good for the team or not good for the team, it should not benefit the other team and tha's what priests do. they feed gold when you don't sit with them. even them pushing hurts, because if you are not there the fights get closer and closer to the enemys turf, and it's esay for that demigod to take out your waves, then if you come, run and quickly be back at his own health crystal

i'm not sure how this became a double post

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

It's bad vs Oak too because he can get some big regen off killing the priests since they have much higher max hp than the minotaurs and archers.