So now that I’m dropping mage, I’m thinking of picking up shadow priest. I just played with it on PTR and I actually like how it feels now. Little more insanity generation, and more buttons thanks to shadow crash being a real AoE button and void torrent.
Are the changes an overall buff, or should they be neutral, or what?
'cause my shadow gained ~500k DPS (at 653 ilvl) going from 3.3M on a 5 target 5 min sim (no buffs) to ~3.8M. My shadow build is within 6-7% of the WoWhead build on the current patch, I donno how that stacks up for next patch.
As long as I’m not more than 20% behind, I think shadow might be my answer.
Depends on what you mean by buff. I think they removed a little bit of the clunkiness by removing mind spike and give crash 2 charges, except crash now only affects 6 targets. They also gave mind blast a huge buff but then nerfed the effect of insidious ire. They also added several crit damage talents which should shake up our secondary preference slightly. I think numbers wise we’re more or less in the same spot, but playability is a little better now. Personally, I’m looking forward to the changes, though my biggest gripe the removal of unfurling darkness.
Careful, you told Neko they removed an ability, now they won’t touch the spec with ten foot pole. And if they never knew, they might’ve played.
This toon is i677 and no where near 3.3M DPS 
You said it feels good, so yes. They buffed the fun.
Sim it for 5 targets. 
True. And shadow is cool looking and I like the spooky whispering.
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So on raidbots set the number of bosses to 5?
I usually just leave it at default so mine compares to everyone elses.
but if everyone is using 5 bosses I’ll try that
Well I sim for the purpose of M+, so single target sims are kinda useless.
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Yeah that looks a lot more reasonable. xD
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You’re in luck. The class writer for priest frequents these forums. He’s probably busy right now I imagine, but will probably come by eventually, so you can spar with him about parses and tell him how much the official spriest optimal build sucks in person 
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Right now he’s probably asleep or just waking up. It’s 7 AM in Cali, and a Sunday.
My only gripe with shadow right now is that we changed deathspeaker into a passive boost to SWD damage instead of being RNG like it was.
And I miss mind games.
Writers tend to be up all night type people, so I consider ‘sleeping in’ part of the whole process. He’s busy, even if he’s sleeping.
Looking forward to the eventual exchange. 
Hopefully the priest writers see that many people want a light DPS spec for priest too lol, or at least a paint job over that purple unholy magic every time an honest priest want to do quest or something lol.
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The Boss fights are just as important as trash so you should sim both.
A lot of shadow’s issues were left unaddressed by the changes. It’s mostly a misdirection meant to distract people with ‘ooh new things’ rather than doing anything major.
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Somewhat true, though the 11.2 changes “feel” better in rotation. Though, as someone who mained Priest since Cata I feel like the bit in the Simpsons where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes.
“Oh, we’re meta healers?” Oof [hit with nerf bat]
“Oh, we’re good at DPS now?” Oof [hit with nerf bat]
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Very few boss fights have zero trash.
And what issues would those be? “I have too many buttons to push wahhh!”?
I didn’t know that shadow mage was a class
You learn something new every day!