Does HoL get interrupted on damage?

They should have left Heart of Life alone. It wasn't particularly overpowered to begin with, rather, it just helped a lot against stupid people. And there are a lot of stupid people playing the game.

They're 20 experiance. 

Grunts are 33, so they're less then that. Sounds great to me.

why would they lower the experience? that's dumb- they are harder to kill

im gonna not believe you teseer til more people say that

this just means more people will get the ring  personally i didn't find hol as a problem i found it harder to kill ub then oak

Why?  Upgrades should be *upgrades*

risk was a poor word, but not every upgrade should be grabbed first thing you can possibly get it. there still needs to be some rationale for getting them. With that gold, you could get damage upgrades for your troops - they could do more samage and not give any more gold or xp. then again, priests allow you to do more damage and heal, but for that they cost more and can give enemy more gold and xp

there have to be trade offs. lowering their xp value lower than grunts is way too much, maybe a lowering was in hand though

in all honesty, i still will probably never buy priest upgrades first, no matter how much xp or gold they are worth, they are too easy to kill, and they are too farmable

Yes, but the only trade off should be the GOLD used to buy them.  There should not be secondary negative effects that ONLY the creep upgrades carry.

Not necessarily. It would be nice to think of this as a standard RPG where xp is based on the difficulty of the opponent.  In reality however, each wave of creeps represents an amount of xp and gold the opponents get, as well as the pluses of having additional units in your attack waves.  It is a steady constant stream for the most part, thus you should treat it like one.

The important part is to balance the effectiveness of the unit, to how much gold/xp they give the opponents.  For instance, catapults have classically won on that balance beam because of how effective they are at ending a game, even without much DG help. Priests and angels don't do this nearly so well, so it makes sense they give significantly less gold and XP than a catapult does.

And lastly, the idea that upgrades should have strategic use... this is true.  Keep in mind that other than just the gold cost itself, there is also the opportunity cost of not getting something else.  Same way getting a point in Fireball has the drawback of you NOT having gotten a point in Circle of Fire. That is generally all the cost you should need.

This argument has a flaw. The priests are not replacing your default grunts. They are in ADDITION to them. Hence if your opponent gets priests, you still get to farm the regular grunts, but you get a bonus of killing the priests and getting extra XP. As it stands now after 1.1, priests STILL give an XP/gold boost to the enemy, albeit a lower one.

Honestly, to make priests an absolute upgrade would be to give 0 XP and gold for killing them. Angels too.

Endgame isn't what matters really.  I mean, the end of the game is predicated by the early and middle parts of it much more so than by what you can do in it.  Oak who dies more because he can't shield/heart is less likely to be a huge late game factor.

it might be less of an impact because the game is over if you have enough to get hol and shield, but why still leave that in?

as for creeps getting less xp, its stupid to me, xp is experience, priests shouldnt offer less than grunts, clearly they are a better unit. did they lower it for any other units?