I’ll play around with it once the PTR is online. That’s a pretty chunky DPS boost though for M+.
Still scratching my head why they think a 9 stack PoM is a good idea though.
From an SPriest PoV:
I really don’t like having Insanity gain being tacked onto these abilities as a band-aid fix to partially offset the massive Insanity generation nerfs we received a few cycles before Beta ended.
If there are large tuning changes well before 10.0.5 (because God knows Shadow is in desperate need of buffs right now) these might be fine, but these slight buffs don’t come close to offsetting just how many major problems this spec has.
11 Likes
The holy fire splash damage change is one of the cooler design changes they’ve considered. Along with the rhapsody holy nova talent and the general improvements they made to divine star in SL finally feels like hpriest has some nice AoE options. They could even give rhapsody a damage buff, too.
Not really sure why they keep piling on PoM buffs, though. Do something with the rest of the toolkit already! 
Holy’s damage has fallen a bit off in keys since they made Empyreal Blaze a 1 minute cd. I can do about 8-10k overall depending on how heal intensive the dungeon is and other heal specs are doing 11-15k. This buff puts us in line with them.
Our single target damage is going to go down, but its made up by the AOE which imho is a lot more useful.
The PoM buff to me is a little confusing because it’s roughly 20% of our healing and 2 extra charges pushes it up to like 25%. Personally I’d like to see them focus on other talents that are a bit underwhelming, but I’ll wait for the PTR to come online to post more thoughts.
Also, the PTR calculator = https://www.wowhead.com/ptr/talent-calc/priest/holy
1 Like
My understanding of the PoM change is that it isn’t actually increasing the stacks per cast, but rather changing how many stacks PoM can get up to. So it’d mean that it’d be able to stack up to 14 with 2 points invested. As an example, this would allow us to double cast a PoM on someone before it starts bouncing without wasting any of its stacks. While still a buff, it’s much more subtle and more of a value protection sort of thing.
Granted, I have no actual way of verifying this and I may be totally wrong, but the wording is rather specific in the notes.
3 Likes
Hmm, after double checking the description you might be right. PoM only stacks up to 10 on retail and it could be 14 on the PTR. I’ll log on the PTR and take a look once its up.
Also, I was forced to log off, and I’ll be posting on my official horde character now.
Disc PvP feedback from mainly solo shuffle perspective:
Protector of the Frail vs. Pain Transformation - There is simply no choice here, having a double charge of pain suppression completely outshines a meager 25% hp that is affected by dampening. The number needs to be higher maybe like 50% and make the heal ignore dampening to be competitive (for PvE too!). That way you can really choose between frequency or a big, impactful save during dampening.
Solace changes - seem mostly irrelevant as disc is extremely global starved in pvp and solace itself does pitiful damage, mana regen, and atonement healing to be worth pressing. If you take harsh discipline MAYBE you can get a big penance every minute or so from solacing on CD but seems unlikely. Will still likely skip out on trying to make solace work with harsh discipline and stick with expiation for better global flow and burst in kill windows.
Side note please bug fix expiation damage not scaling with schism - really hurts the burst!
Shadow Covenant changes - expensive spell from both mana and costing a GCD but being able to have a shadow school penance that heals could be nice. One problem however is if you get kicked on holy penance or its on CD you still can’t use dark reprimand. If shadow covenant reset the cooldown then it could be a great button to press in an emergency for a double penance or when kicked (which happens mainly on penance) but for now likely won’t be able to get much use out of these changes.
Dark indulgence - this seems to be an undocumented change replacing the 20% buff to power of the dark side with an extra mind blast charge and lower mana cost. This would be a big nerf in pvp as losing out on 20% of dark side penance healing will really hurt throughput. Power of the dark side should get buffed to compensate for this loss or maybe baked into a PvP talent
1 Like
Shadow:
I don’t see how making these abilities generate insanity is going to help the class from doing tank damage. We were told the goal is to cut down on the button bloat. So that prompted devs to remove shining force, leave healing priests as the only class without a spell interrupt, promote conflicting filler spells, and now as of this .5 patch, encourage more bloat.
Sure, I get that the dev who worked on priest and druid quit the job in the middle of development, but how is it wildly OK to re-work only druid when the only DPS priest spec is in complete shambles.
Instead, the guy we get assigned to the class gives backhanded responses to the Priest community feedback during beta and were left to either reroll or unsub due to an unfinished and undertuned end product.
May we please get someone qualified to help design/tune priest? How about we swap for the person doing rogue?
9 Likes
In the beta they said they were working on druid and mistweaver overhauls, but wouldn’t have them ready for expansion. Thus why they’re slapped out in 10.0.5.
This is what I did. I really wanted my Shadow Priest to be my main for this expansion. No other specialization had me as excited as Shadow Priest. I absolutely love the cosmic horror and mind manipulation theme.
The ideas they introduced in the tree during alpha and the beginning of beta had a lot of potential. Many just needed to be iterated upon to be stronger or feel less clunky. Some of those ideas still exist in the current tree but they are weak or unreliable (the idol capstones in particular). The tree topology was pretty bad, but that could have been fixed. It looked like they were going to go into a direction where the burst window play style would be optional instead of mandatory. That was essentially thrown out the window as the current tree makes Void Eruption and Dark Ascension central. There is no way to improve your Shadowy Apparition damage unless you choose Void Eruption/Dark Ascension and Ancient Madness.
Shadowy Apparitions have been quite popular since their introduction and players wanted to see more of them and more ways to make them stronger or more interesting. Instead they removed some talents that improved them, reduced the number that spawn, and reduced their insanity generation. As I stated earlier, it was a very bad decision to lock Auspicious Spirits and Tormented Spirits behind Void Eruption/Dark Ascension and Ancient Madness.
Things really went down hill when they decided they would do a “greatest hits” and “build your own shadow priest” design philosophy. Instead of iterating on the new ideas they had, they decided to try and squeeze abilities from past expansions into the tree. We can still see today that many of these abilities such as Mind Spike, Divine Star, and Halo are fairly unpopular. All of this did nothing to address the button bloat complaints.
3 Likes
Absolutely loving the PoM changes! Thank you so much Blizzard!
I’m surprised to not see any changes to shadow crash. Right now, our AoE feels very good and does competitive damage once we have DoTs rolling on everything and are generating a reasonable amount of insanity and procs but this is only possible to do with shadow crash, which is on a 30 second cooldown.
If packs take too long to group up, additional enemies join the pull part-way through, or you’re just killing so fast that you chain pull quickly, you end up having to single target DoT every mob and cast fillers until you get enough insanity to start mind searing. By that point, you’ve basically forfeited most of your potential damage contribution.
I think the best fix would be some combination of reducing the cooldown substantially and possibly to give it a second charge to give it more flexibility where we can use it every pull and accommodate imperfect situations. To prevent the ability from becoming too strong in and of itself, the initial impact damage should be reduced considerably, to a fraction of what it is now. This would also solve the issue of it being a high priority single target spell which feels wrong. My goal is not to make shadow stronger in AoE, just less frustrating.
8 Likes
Its frankly ridiculous. Mythic+ is a massive part of this game and Spriest design basically screws them unless the tank specifically pulls for them. Shadow Crash needs to be available on every pull, though I would rather they just remove Shadow Crash all together and just give me a dot spread. Ground targetted skills suck so bad in MMO’s.
15 Likes
They just need to rework our Talent Tree and how Dark Void works and Shadow Priest be great to play.
Misery currently really is a must pick, Dark Void I can’t ever be seen getting picked in any content. This is my idea.
Why not completely scrap Shadow Crash, travel time floor AoE doesn’t feel good and consistent in this day and age of WoW, move Dark Void where Shadow Crash was and have it interact with Misery and make it instant cast and spreads the dots on the main target. So we now have a reliable skill, that targeted on the Enemy that spreads SW:P and VT.
So you’d VT into a Dark Void, bam all dots spread to the closest 8 targets, keep it on a 30sc cd but have mind blast reduce its cd by 1sec per cast.
This gives us a consistent way to spread our DoTs, removes the whole issue if targets move so really impossible to miss, and interacts with Mind Blast.
I always feel like if Shadow Crash had a few seconds shaved off it’s cd it be great so be just the same as Dark Void, so be up way more consistently during pulls.
7 Likes
Am I mistaken or are they bringing back Painbreaker Psalm?
This was my first question…PoM only stacks to 10, wouldnt the talent change be a waste unless they increased the stacks ?
Hope they open PTR soon.
I’m assuming the change is in regards to how many stacks of PoM a single person can hold. So with 2 points it’d go from 10 to 14. It’s not a big buff, but it’s still nice either way. The biggest buff is going to be towards our damage output. World content should be a lot easier as well as getting a chunky dps boost in M+.
I’m not sure if the PTR is going to open this week. If anything it’d be on Wednesday.
For me the PTR didnt reflect the Holy PoM changes
Check https://i.imgur.com/mcWMazM.png
This is it? Really…shadow priest must have no love in the wow dev team. Give us a little insanity gain through divine star and halo this must be a joke. Talk about single target and aoe. "It might not be healthy… what do you mean? Every other classes can burst/aoe right off the back without any build up. I can name them but would it matters? Shadow priest is only good during lust because we get to spam DP and Mindblast… pretty much it. After lust you are at the bottom of the list again. Have they not look at the dps chart during the race.
3 Likes