10.1 Shadow PvP Update

Classes Priest
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Wanted to make this thread because I’m not giving up on pushing for changes, we’ve had a good amount of time to get a feel for the class on PTR there’s still some things that hopefully get changed.

To get a full rundown of things that I’d want changed please see:

But since we aren’t seeing any of the changes I preposed I’m going to reduce the list to the major hitters I would like to see changed.

  • Spell Redesign Vampiric Touch: A touch of darkness that causes [ 155.51% of Spell Power ] Shadow damage over 21 sec, and heals you for 30% of damage dealt. If Vampiric Touch is dispelled, the dispeller flees in Horror for 3 sec. The dispelled gain malediction magic debuff for 8 seconds absorbing healing taken. Caps out at 50,000 healing taken.

I think it’s time to change the dispel protection of this ability. Currently it’s an outdated negative effect that most healers done really care about. Especially if we are moving Spriest into a more dot focused play style we need to make our dispel protection relevant.
It also adds to the problem of the game that is Micro CC’s, which everyone would like to see get removed / move away from. This micro cc mostly only effects healers, which as we know is already an under represented niche. As a second string Disc player I’d rather play my character and have to do a bit more extra healing rather than get Micro CC’d for dispelling my teammates.

  • Instant cast Void Eruption / Dark Ascension.

Why are we forced to cast our burst cooldown. Right now it feels like a warlock doing our pregame rotation to do burst. Hearthstones / pet / sac / gate / port all before the other team gets to you and trains you into the ground.
PI / bender / DA / DP all before you start pumping your damage into a target. And hope that no one stops you.

DA first and you waste 3 seconds of the buff getting out your other abilities.
DA last and risk someone kicking you and you waste your PI.
Or even the fact that our PI is dispellable. Mages vacuum it up or we are getting spam purged till it’s gone.

  • Remove Mind Melt, Bring back surge of darkness.

At least in a different form we don’t need to have store procs but make it so we can instant cast our Insanity Mindspike(s). I’m all for making Mind Spike a choice node with Flay, (let the people decided which they want to play as) and make it so insanity flays are cast-able while moving.
But for the love of Old Gods spriest don’t care about Critical Strikes. Stop trying to make us. Our Mindblast hits like a wet noodle, crit or no crit.
Get. Rid. Of. It.

11 Likes
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Bumping my own thread :upside_down_face:

I guess I’ll go Futher explaining these requested changes. And why I think these are important. We are less than a month out from getting the rework and Shadow has its downfalls in pvp bad and doesn’t make the spec feel fluid to play at all. You’ve moved a lot of our damage into DoT effects. Not that this is a bad thing, but while how currently easily it is to shut down DoT specs It’d be nice to see some adjustments.

First off Shadow is seeing a HUGE amount of nerfs towards our insanity generation, And this is getting doubled down with how hard you guys are trying to make
Distorted Reality of any value. And while I personally don’t care for making our spec very DoT damage heavy its something I can live with. But dispels completely shut the spec down. We’re seeing this first had with how judgment of the Pure interacts with vs shadow priest. (Glad its finally not a teamwide dispel, but still makes killing the ret VERY difficult.)

So we, 1. Have much of our damage being moved into over time effects. And, 2. also getting a damage nerf because of the interaction of our mastery. While most Spriest in PvP are stacking haste, we do still gain value from the mastery we have which can be anywhere between 5% - 10%. Meaning we can do anywhere from -15% damage to -30% damage.

On top of this Vampiric Touch dispel adds to the game one mechanic that is universally hated which is the Micro CC’s. Along with this it is very unimpactful in everyway. If it gets dispelled, our DoT’s get removed and we lose a good majority of our damage anyway. And most healers worth their salt will do something prior to make sure the dispelled player will be safe during the 3 second horrify.

Shadow Priests dispel protection is old and outdated. Its an unfun mechanic needs to be reworked. It wouldn’t be that difficult to balance because similar to the UA dispel blizzard would always be able to adjust the number value of the preposed changed. Please please please either change the dispel debuff or Make Devouring Plague Un-dispellable which I also don’t like because I do think counter play should be a thing. But its so one-sided right now its non enjoyable. And for how much our damage is being tied into DP along with the unneeded insanity nerfs, a change is needed.

I really don’t know why this just isn’t a thing. In so many arenas currently Void Origins (VO) is MANDATORY. Spriest is the primary target in most arenas right now due to the lack of mobility the class has, we are easy to stick to. The only comp I’ve seen where VO is not taken is Shadowplay, because letting a warlock free cast is the only thing threatening enough to cause us not the be the target.
Being forced to cast our BURST cooldown kills any fluid setup the spec has to do damage. On top of that if we are running Dark Ascension the spell itself doesn’t even do any damage to add to the burst. It only Amps our casted single target spells and SW:D. The spec already feels clunky to set up your burst just having to: Manage Dot’s (15% damage buff), DA / VE/ PI / Mindbended. All before casting ANY damaging spells. You actually can spend your entire duration of Psychic Horror Setting up your burst before you do any damage. OR you start your pre-burst rotation and they have 3 seconds to react to it and pop a defensive before you can horror.

Shadow hasn’t prioritized crit since ____ ?. Stop making talents that revolve around it, its okay for a class to have 1 dead stat. Bring back Surge and make the changed modifiers above, every Spriest is looking for something to do while moving. Also WHY not make it a choice node? let the players decided what type of filler ability they want to see. literally 0 impact on how it impacts the game.

Finally
Get rid of body in soul in the priest tree and bring back Door of Shadows. Not only is it fitting of the theme of the class but it solves some of the mobility issues that priest in general have been having. It had counter play in Shadowlands and will continue to have counter play in Dragonflight.

Also many priest would like a glyph that makes shadowform less visual. Better than the current one.

Please guys if you have any rebuttals or even if you agree let it be known. We’re less than a month away from the rework and it seems like every change that I’ve seen the community suggest has been completely overlooked / ignored. We haven’t had any statement from blizzard about shadow priest other than the original announcement.

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The idea of this anti dispel mechanic is intriguing. It’s like a reverse Mind Restrain from the first Priest class talents in DF beta.

But with the shear amount of healing going out, especially in battle grounds, I don’t really think it would prove to be much of a deterrent.

My personal choice would be to incorporate a mana burn effect each time Vampiric Touch is dispelled. This would actually cause a moment of pause as you can quickly regret dispelling if you get zapped from mana each time.

This would also be a tribute to the original intent of Vampiric Touch to be an ability that grants mana to you and your party. Only now it would remove mana from the enemy if it got dispelled.

Oh and critical strike talents are not a bad option for playstyle choices… as long as they are actually flushed out and not have baked ideas.

Having critical strike based talents/abilities can create more interesting gameplay options. In Cataclysm Shadow had the talent Paralysis which caused you to root the enemy if you critically strike with Mind Blast for 2/4 seconds. This combined with the crit stacking in Mind Spike made this reliable and opened up many windows to nuke someone down with Mind Spike, Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death quickly without getting trained on as you can keep rooting the target.

Apathy is basically a worse version of Paralysis. Mainly because it’s difficult to get a reliable critical strike with Mind Blast while it only slows and not roots if you pull it off.

But if you had more critical strike interactions, it could prove to be a nice gameplay choice incorporated into the spec.

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I think this could be good. Part of the reason Mana burn got removed was because it was an un-fun mechanic. I think that the - Healing effect does essentially the same thing. Forcing the healer to use more mana. It can be easily tuned based off of just the addition or subtraction of the healing value.

Either way I think that doesn’t need to be said that VP dispel needs to be looked at because overall its pretty unimpactful.

I don’t disagree but as it is currently we just don’t have any / any that are good enough to make it worth stating into. Maybe if crits interacted some other way with our kits, like double insanity or something.

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Bumping my thread every week till 10.1 unless we see some Shadow PvP changes.

Please Blizzard it feels awful. I’d at least like to see our Dispel protection changed as well as instant void form.

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If this goes live, which it probably will. I’ll be benching my shadow. and it’s my favorite caster in the game which sucks.
Everyones like “oh the rework we’ll be busted”, no we won’t. We’ll be the biggest laughingstock of a wet noodle spec.
Bringing back our instant casts would be a solid start.

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Just unsub. Stop paying for this garbage.

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meh. I’ll reroll to destro or devoker if I do come back

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And yet here you are. Honestly take your unsubscribe nonsense elsewhere.
I enjoy the game despite its issues. It’s been a great Expac for Alts and I’m sure anyone who mains Spriest has picked up a good alt.

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My sub runs out in < 30 days. The glacial spike nerf juxtaposed to ret, the removal of spriest instant-casts compared to other casters, pushing degenerate precog onto players in lieu of maintaining engaging, fluid caster rotations, etc. gives me the impression that the pvp team is incompetent.

Other alts and aspects (no pun intended) of DF may still be fun, but after 10.07 I’ve lost confidence in the devs. You (along with other high ranked players like Stahp SP) have put effort into trying to stop this trainwreck, but your feedback will be ignored. As long as players remained subscribed, there is no incentive for Bliz to do better.

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Don’t say such hateful words.

Truth is I do agree with you on most things you’ve said. I really do want shadow to prosper and do well but most importantly, feel good to play. Being the working guy that I am, I don’t get to spend tons of time playing so when I get to play , I want it to be enjoyable.

I’ll continue to play, mostly because I am that guy and have a fully geared BM hunter that lurks in the background.

And MM is somehow always a random battleground stomp spec.

Sadly I think it will take 4 weeks into 10.1 before we see any Spriest tuning. So far this entire patch seems geared towards PvE and the only thing that’s happened to us in pvp is pvptalents. rip void origins

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How is it hateful when the track record proves that feedback being ignored is a status-quo for Blizzard?

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I’ll try and keep sarcasm to a minimum from now on, my apologies.

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Sarcasm usually has some kind of nuance behind it. Move those goalposts though.

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Lmao guy what moving of the goal post? You care way to much about some comment on a forum about a joke. Sorry you didn’t find the humor in it? (Jk I could care less)

Thanks for the bump tho. Gotta get them Spriest changes.

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I haven’t been on the PTR, but reading the changes for shadow it looks like the class is going to be complete garbage in pvp. In a melee dominant meta there’s no way this class is going to be viable with melee just sitting on you and Blizz’s making sure the class has to cast more. It’s a good thing I play discipline, at least it’s viable.

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Blizzard, PLEASE listen to your community. R1 spriests, casuals, and everything inbetween are all stating the same thing. There is still time to earn back trust after 10.07, but if you release two completely broken specs (just on other sides of the spectrum) two patches in a row it’s not going to be a good look.

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If the spriest pvp rework goes live, I’ll just go back to playing MM or warrior.
SPriest is the only caster I can actually compete on because it fits my weird playstyle.
SPriest is terrible in both forms of content(pvp and pve), meanwhile ret was DISGUSTINGLY busted(still is somewhat) and we get this bs.
It makes me sad. very, very sad.
But I expect nothingn else from blizz honestly. Just delete spriest at this point

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