it’s about to be a day late and a dollar short for the devs
Correct me if my memory is wrong. But i seem to remember start of SL and shadow got a work over and the changes were generally lauded and other classes wished for such a work over as shadow got. There was the warnings from the female shadow priest streamer, starting with N, cant remember her name now. She got shouted down. She made passionate posts from memory.
It kinda boggles the mind that we got from there to here
The changes Blizzard made to Shadow in SL Beta was the “Band-Aid” some of us speak of.
It didn’t really fix / appease either side of the argument, it tried to strike a middle ground in that we get control when to enter Voidform so its not automatic thus causing you to go into Voidform AFTER a group of mobs die and as such wasting it so the next group you come up against, you have to restart from 0 once again (The primary problem as to why Shadow was so bad in anything but long fights) and it removed the draining mechanic of Insanity.
In making that change, a lot of the talents we had that supported the old Voidform model were a bit pointless and so they added new talents to replace them & then reintroduced Devouring Plague to have something to spend Insanity on.
Shadow was in such a poor state in the overall game that even with the changes they made only plugged some holes, but it did not address the core issues that we all shared multiple times over. The changes that were done were followed by they don’t have enough time to go into extensive changes regarding major reworks like changing our resource mechanic and other deep rooted things that were at Shadows core.
This is another reason why people providing Shadow Feedback now are SO concerned, we were supposed to get some major changes in one of the patches in BFA, then a major rework in SL and now with DF coming… we are wanting the changes to finally manifest as its the right time with the new Talent trees.
Not to mention that you can clearly see they are design bankrupt when it comes to Shadow. The talents that are new are not well thought about in how it interacts with shadow as a whole and the rest were just copy/pasted from old iterations of shadow (Post Voidform) that bring nothing to the spec.
Mix the design bankruptcy with the shadow specific utility talents and the poor layout and pathing results in a VERY horrible Shadow Talent Tree.
Edit:
Actually I think Void Eruption being manually casted and going into Voidform was implemented in BFA. But the draining mechanic still existed.
I cant recall all the different variations of Voidform as I just think of it as a bad fever dream that I hope to wake up from soon lol.
3 Likes
Shadow is da poop! NO MORE!
2 Likes
Yeah i going to disagree. I remember all the excitement about DP coming back etc. you might call it a band aid fix in hindsight but i rememeber at the time spriests were excited, there were videos done, i think even by preach.
I remember the vitriol thrown at the female streamer as she got shouted down because people were excited by the changes
Hindsight is an wonderful thing. I suppose its just interesting how things turn out.
My post kinda servers no purpose except a trip down memory lane and a be careful what you wish for /shrug
Search old posts if you want to see what the community was talking about when they implemented the now SL iteration of shadow.
Here is an example of a thread that discussed the issues.
So disagree all you want, but it was NOT widely accepted… it was reluctantly accepted due to time restraints.
Edit:
Devouring Plague was one of the better things that came from the SL changes. But… it was still a “band-aid” in that it did not “Solve” the underlying issues that plagues Shadow.
1 Like
Interesting. Now did you find any positive posts to balance out the negative ones? found some vids but its not important enough point to argue. Maybe im wrong but its a sense i had
You are welcomed to find them and post them yourself.
I just searched for posts that had “Devouring Plague” in them that we posted before 2021.
I also included other posts to give more context to the changes.
So again, your welcomed to show me the other side as it were.
1 Like
You may be referring to Nyelle - https://www.youtube.com/c/NyelleUnbroken
I was generally skeptical of any shadow changes going into SL, but after seeing them I thought the changes sincerely seemed like a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, they repeatedly nerfed Devouring Plague throughout the expansion.
There’s this idea some streamers have mentioned that if Shadow’s raid niche is going to be single-target, it needs to be among the best single-target in the game. The reasoning is that, because it lacks the utility other DPS specs provide that a heal-specced priest couldn’t also provide, it needs to prove itself by primarily by throughput. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me.
Yes thats it. Thank you muchly for that. I felt sad for her at the time but thought she was wrong because i had hoped we were going back to basics.
1 Like
I think the whole problem with shadow priest utility would be nicely fixed by significantly reducing the cooldown on Vampiric Embrace and returning the mana return component from old BC.
Spriest needs utility that holy/disc priest cannot provide, just as feral and balance druid need utility that guardian/resto can’t provide, otherwise the healer/tank overlapping utility always makes the DPS one irrelevant.
If VE were a 1 min CD, and Mindbomb were returned to its old AOE stun status, spriest would be in a good utility spot for M+.
AoE kit still needs significant help and SN needs to not require a mindsear channel to cast. Make Shadow Crash apply VT to all affected targets and make Mindsear automatically spread SWP to affected targets so we don’t have to ramp up insanity for SN to do so.
Make Psychic Link baseline for mindblast to cleave targets, reduce void eruption to 1 min cd, and make void bolt cleave up to 3-5 targets with preference for targets with VT on them.
Void Eruption or PI should allow movement while casting, kind of outrageous most specs have an answer to movement; mages have a ton of instant casts and teleports, shamans have spiritwalker’s grace every 2 mins and frost shock+ES+lava surges+Stormcaller+gust of wind; Evokers got Spiritwalker’s Grace on steroids.
The only casters as badly hurt by movement are destro warlocks, affliction warlocks, and balance druids.
Shadow needs better tools to deal with movement if the damage of DoTs is not significantly increased (it won’t, they won’t make shadow/affliction/balance the gods of council/split raid fights again).
If only 
Yep, its how i felt dpsing keys. ST i felt ok, especially before the necro nerf but aoe it felt bad unless you had the tank gathering a lot of mobs
As ive stated i want a priest version of Spiritwalkers grace. Would allow all 3 specs to live a bit longer and be very useful since all 3 specs have times they need to plant their feet
I mean personally moving into SL I thought Spriest would be OK - but we were dealing with a totally different amount of insanity gen, and D.plague was a pretty good button to dump into.
The spec still felt a little broken but there was hope there that with iteration it would feel better because at the time D.plague was carrying it, and the spec was more about getting the insanity to drop plagues out.
They then nerfed plague several times, and insanity gen got a bit higher, basically reversing the polarity and creating the awful loop we have today where you’re constantly having to try and dump insanity in a button that’s actually not that good versus your builders which are also constantly refreshing and you have too many demanding globals all at once.
There was some hope of that maybe getting fixed, but with the trees they made for DF, they just… exacerbated that problem even more? Like throwing Spriests EVERY insanity gen talent, and also every OTHER talent they had is just not great. Like really what are we supposed to do with Vtorr AND auspicious, AND shadow crash, AND Death and Madness generation? While we’re at it, let’s combine Misery with Damnation and unfurling darkness, because why not?
There’s a ton of overlap in these talents and on top of that it’s a LOT of buttons with short cooldowns that all generate insanity that need to be kept off CD but you need to spam plague too at the same time, also we need to mind flay more because THAT came back to the spec in the form of monomania and eternal call for seemingly no good reason.
It’s like they saw Spriest was having an issue and then wondered how they could make that issue worse intentionally.
3 Likes
It would be nice to trim a couple of buttons
Well im glad that my memory wasnt far off then.
Yeah the issue i found in raiding and keys as shadow with SFP was if you got the mindblast procs your dps went up, if you got unlucky then you were in trouble. Old shadow was more how you played determined your dps more and procs a lot less.
Im not going to call for cata Spriest back which was when i main specced it, times moved on but i agree shadow could do with some streamlining and buffing core part of our spec.
Cata was indeed fun times as Shadow. I went hardcore into Heroic 10 man raiding to get Leggo staff and Hard core RBG’s. I had a blast.
However…
The fishing for Shadow Orbs was so painful and it felt so bad when it might take 20-30+ sec at the beginning of a Raid fight to get just one Shadow Orb to then consume and get your DOT damage enhance buff going lol.
So I get why it was changed and agree going into MoP and then getting additional Shadow Orbs and CoP and AS going into WoD to really complete the way the spec can handle various situations.
The best era for Shadow imo.
A great many people were happy the drain mechanic was gone, a lot of positive feedback was given in good faith because something happened but we all knew it needed more. SN many, including myself, underestimated how bad it would feel with more gear because we were testing with max 25% haste on alpha. Many noted at the time also how left over so many of the talents that were left in were, redundancy between new apparitions design and psychic link, s2m still existing.
You’re right, hindsight is 20/20, but a lot of positivity in SL beta was based on the presumption of further iteration, that never came.
Honestly I think it’s pretty telling as to players expectations, and frustrations with the design direction / lack thereof for priest that “We made a start” received as much praise as it did.
3 Likes
Well, part of the reason of lack of further progression is that the person who redesigned Shadow Priests in SL ended up quitting the WoW team.
1 Like
It also started far too late, I think that’s where a great deal of the frustration is coming from now.
We expected with how long df has been in development, with all the known issues and unfinished aspects of what changed in SL, that they’d have continued where they left off. Instead it feels like we’re exactly where we were, if not going backwards.
Meanwhile we’re seeing coherent and evolved designs for other specs, albeit with some issues here and there.
4 Likes
Do you feel its because we have 2 healing specs? Makes shadow unique in setting up trees, or they just dont know what to do