This isn’t a hero shooter where the class I want to play is bad, so I swap to a new hero and start playing the game…
We invest a lot of time into our characters, not everyone has time to roll FOTM or keep up with multiple characters. They want to play the class they love, and to see it pushed aside with no patch notes again and again is very disheartening. Being gapped by over 1.5M or worse by other DPS specs is unacceptable from a balance standpoint. Not mentioning having to press 10-15 globals before I can even start my rotation. Just looking at the top logs of every class our damage is 30% below avg right now, HOW IS THAT ACCEPTABLE?
The lack of support for us really does make me wonder if the rumors of you trying to kill the spec is true. If so, great job! I hate the class now especially with the gear upgrades the gap is increasing with no end in sight.
I can’t wait for the “shadowpriest retrospect post” even though the post will probably just sugarcoat how down bad we are. I feel sorry for everyone having to swap off SP.
Blizzard has been doing the minimum possible shadow maintenance since BFA alpha. The current situation has been the situation for about 8 years with the only thing that changes being if their half-baked changes accidentally make the spec strong for up to a season.
Shadow… Holy… It’s a Disc world and we’re living in it. Disc is so broken right now that nobody wants to play with any other Priest spec. It’s not even close, they have so much sustained healing and shielding that they are a “cozy” healer spec. Just mindless soakage of damage for much easier keys. Most of the top Holy Priests have already caved and made the switch because they are heretics.
You just invoked the most powerful spell we have!! A god among men!.
But it’s honestly sad to see the current state of Shadow Priest.
Personally it’s even more difficult to play as Shadow, unless we are over performing to be brought their is so much weighing against us it’s pretty unfair.
Shadow’s utility and interrupt is horrendous vs other dps classes/specs, not to forget to mention we are battling ourselves as Priests, we are the only class to have 2 healing specs which if either are remotely meta essentially removes us from the pool in M+, and with only now 7 total healing specs the chances of the Healer being a Priest is insanely high.
Really it’s like a 30% chance a healer will be Priest (28.5% to be exact), this clearly is higher or lower depending on the meta, but it honestly works against us in M+.
I’d say we are suffering like Evokers did during Augmentations dominance, Dev and Pres really didn’t have a chance as Aug brought everything they did and stacking the same class is redundant.
Shadow Priests need help, they need not only buffs in dps to be justified being brought but utility aswell, Silence being a 2 point investment not just to get the ability but to make it 30 seconds is pretty outrageous.
Even our defensives are lacking, Mages essentially have Dispersion on steroids with Ice Cold and pump even more dps.
I strongly believe that there is a tiny little space between being meta and being ridiculously bad. That space is where I’d like us to be, not on this roller coaster.
Honestly, like 90% of our frustration could be solved by:
reducing Shadow Crash travel time
increasing SC radius and target count
giving us a 2nd charge of SC
buffing a bit of our damage, let’s say reverting that 3% nerf we got at the beginning of the patch
I never played any seasons outside of this one. You can check my raiderio. I’m also not asking for my spec to be meta but to be fixed/on par with other classes. The gap is outrageous, Aug was essentially in the same spot and got two bloodlust sized buffs and are am doing more dmg than us, even more so no body wants to bring a SP if they want an Aug.
My point is don’t worry, you will likely see a massive buff just in time for S3. If you don’t want to switch to disc now then you wait because being meta again (not just on par) is inevitable.
The conditions that made shadow meta in Dragonflight no longer exist.
Blizzard has largely moved away from full-party magic debuffs, dramatically nerfed Mass Dispel even if they hadn’t, Mind Soothe’s practical function is just Shroud that only works on humanoids and dragonkin, Vampiric Embrace was gutted, and shadow received no new tools or capabilities going into TWW, unlike nearly every other damage spec.
Shadow being meta was entirely dependent primarily on Blizzard accidentally making priest utility useful for the first time ever, and secondarily on shadow being overtuned during season 2 and eventually being tuned to being good enough or strong again in season 3 and 4. Priest utility is near useless in TWW dungeons, and shadow has been tuned to be middling or weak all expansion.
My god, man. This post is so irritating. Shadow is priest’s only dps spec and it sucks to play in nearly all content. Nobody cares if it was strong in expansions where nobody was playing the game. It needs changes now.
Bro, straight up lying to make a point means your point is worthless. Following your same format and using Raider io as the source:
TWW S2 - Disc
TWW S1 - Disc
DF S4 - Shadow
DF S3 - Disc (shadow was ranked as 11th for dps, so 10 better dps options and definitely not the most meta spec for priest overall)
DF S2 - Shadow
DF S1- No priest was meta (healing was dominated by Druid, voker w/ holy coming in 3rd) - shadow was 9th on dps and just overall not meta. Disc was the worst rated priest spec, lowest healer by far.
SL S4 - Holy
SL S3 - Holy
SL S1 & S2 - No meta priest
BFA S3 & S4 - Same as above, no meta priest specs.
Ignoring your worthless strawman argument: all of the post’s grievances listed are just 100% true and easily fixed the issue is they ignore the spec entirely unless its to nerf them when they are already underperforming.
No one is saying make Shadow priest #1 at everything, its just things like: Blizz made massive changes to interrupts, but left Shadow priest requiring 2 talent points to have the worst interrupt in game.
They made back to back seasons full of massive trash packs far surpassing our 8 target cap, made the enemies weak so you cant ramp and didn’t raise the cap or help us do burst.
They changed fundamental aspects of the end game content and have made changes to every other spec to help them deal with those fundamental changes… except Shadow priest. There wouldn’t be a need to adjust silence if they didn’t make it so only ‘interrupts’ cancel spell casting. They could just remove the need for the second talent point, it would take such a minimal amount of effort, base silence CD is 30s and the second talent point has been removed. Band aid has been applied and the class is now slightly more competitive but wont’ be #1 dps by any means.
But instead they do nothing… well almost nothing, they do nerf damage.
Priests have been meta, at least one spec, for far too long. It should spend some time at the bottom like all the other classes have or do. It’s really not that hard to comprehend.
Someone should tell mages, demon hunters, evokers, druids, and paladins that they’ve been meta for far too long and should be bad so that other classes get to be meta.
All of them have been meta in all but one or two seasons since at least Shadowlands, while some, like demon hunter and druid, have been meta in all but a few seasons since M+ was added to the game.
Bonus points that Priests only have one DPS spec, so if it’s bad your whole class is bad for that role.
Seriously, priests need Shadow to be just genuinely solid off the cuff. You only have one DPS spec, it should be a glittering example other caster’s DPS specs should take at least a little inspiration from. I don’t know why it is the Devs handle things in such a backwards fashion. Logic to me dictates it’s a more pressing issue to mend and balance classes that, in order:
Perform poorly.
Only have one spec for that specific role.
Everything else.
Honestly, in my mind, shadow should be at least generally middle of the pack default for casters in all aspects. Mage should be more mobile, warlock should be heartier, shadow priest should be in the middle somewhere. What we have is Mage is the most mobile and tankiest, Warlock’s worse off but still better off than shadow, and Shadow’s back here pretty nearly bottom of the barrel in DPS as well as mobility. Survivability’s okay, I guess, but the play, DPS, and mobility need something.
Just a thought - maybe allow a mobility choice rather than that trash Life-grip. I wanna say it was Hazacostas (but it might have been a specific dev, I just remember the approximate quote) - “Nobody’d take life-grip if we allowed another choice.” Brilliant deduction Sherlock. Might be because Life-grip’s bad and we’ve been asking for another choice for several expansions now.
Shadow being meta for 2 seasons in the last 4 expansions being justification for the spec being awful is just crazy. A lot of DPS specs have been meta a lot more often.
So yeah, it’s pretty hard to comprehend because it’s a level of crazy most people are unaccustomed to.
Speaking as someone with supremely limited experience, but plenty of long-term interest in playing Shadow: its ongoing state is disheartening.
The aesthetic/fantasy/and spell design are top-notch and have done the most to draw me in, but those qualities mean nothing if it is not fun to play, mechanically.
DF Shadow was meta every season, maybe not immediately in each of them, but by the end the best comp you could be playing (Or one of in S1) contained a shadow priest.
Disc was also in one of the best comps in S1 DF too.
It’s not an excuse for the spec being as bad as it is now, but let’s be clear about how things were.