Which was only after continuous Holy Priest buffs. When was the last time a RWF had any Holy Priest?
They were running Disc in every previous tier.
Say what you want about healing priests, but saying they havenât been raid viable is just wrong.
Iâm gonna be honest as I can, Max is right when looking at it from a perspective of raid viability (which is what heâs obviously going to do as someone who literally only raids).
The base class tree leaves a lot to be desired in terms of customizability, and Holy priestâs talent tree is wacky as heck with how it actually plays out. But they arenât WEAK trees. And Discâs spec tree is is rather good, actually.
We could use changes, and Blizzard has already said they want to avoid situations that pop up in spec trees where you can take a talent you gain 0 benefit from (because you donât have the skill it affects). So if theyâre honest about that, weâre going to see some layout changes no matter what in later builds.
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WoD single target damage wasnât bad, but it wasnât top either.
Voidform single target damage has been met with wild volatility up and down swings since itâs inception.
WoD shadow orbs didnât work well?
It was simple and reliable coming from 2 base sources in Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death and taking AS then from spirits. It was used on DP and on physic horror. But it could have been expanded upon. We came up with a lot of ways last time in SL beta on the priest forums.
Insanity is even worse. Too many abilities granting a little insanity here and there that sometimes you donât get enough and others you get flooded and canât spent it quick enough, made worse with free DP procs.
Burst AOE did not exist, but our dots did exist and do good damage.
Now with the void rework, dots do so very little damage and we have no burst AOE⌠except with searing nightmare that everyone hates.
I like that they stated that dots is shadows form of AOE and weâre okay with that.
Seems when you compare what was and now what is⌠you only got better single target performance at the sacrifice of everything else.
I donât think we are in an improved state.
Also I do find it comical that the only option in shadows last talent tier in WoD that was never picked for anything was wait for it⌠void entropy lol.
It was a âVoidâ spell that was horrible and then they doubled down and make Shadow a more Void spec. That just tickles me.
Finally, they do recognize that Shadow is priests only DPS spec and they wanted talent options to allow you to shift your priority in dealing damage. They did accomplish this very well with CoP for single target and AS for AOE.
Yet since then shadow could only have 1 style of play and if it sucked in anything other than it was designed for⌠your boned.
Now we have the new talent system, they can fix it⌠they better lol.
It was bad fot the investment required. Fully Mastery geared, a class trinket, Clarity of Power, and you still performed middle of the pack while losing your multi-dot potential.
Insanity can be 1:1 mapped to Shadow Orbs: Increase DP cost to 60. increase MB generation to 20, increase SW:D generation on cast to 20, remove Insanity generation from all other spells.
Shadoworbs had no room for more generation, as the generation by MB, SW:D and especially Asp. Spirits already took care of whatever number of Orbs you could realistically use. Insanity allows for smaller increments here and there and therefore has more design spaces. While Shadoworbs didnât have the overflow problem, you couldnât do much more with them. That is the primary problem they had.
VT was dropped pretty quickly for AoE. You applied a few SW:Ps to generate Apparitions for Asp. Spirits, and then went with DP â Mind Sear: Insanity. Thatâs really not much different from the number of DoTs you apply right now in AoE. Then you used Cascade and let itâs magic happen.
If we had Mind Sear: Insanity right now, AoE would play rather similar to WoD.
Iâll be honest, I am in a pretty unique situation in that I have BARELY played my priest since WoD. I tried it a little in Legion and just could not enjoy it. It actually just made me pissed off and disgusted as to how bad it became.
So My memory when it comes top how WoD Shadow plays is relatively fresh for me as my experience hasnât been altered much since the Legion change.
Negative.
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Single Target / Raid BossesâŚ
For Single Target fights like most Raid bosses, Shadow did just fine. We never topped the charts, but not everyone can top the charts and that is OKAY. Nothing wrong with that. ITs better to do consistently well then to have massive extreme hill/valleys that most classes have and ESP shadow Post Legion redesign and thus getting nerfed over and over and the spec just performing the worst in every other type of content that is NOT raiding. -
5 Mans & PvPâŚ
I vividly recall starting each fight with dotting up all the high health mobs except for 1⌠maybe 2. MY dots will proc surge of Darkness and while thatâs procing, I am instant casting Mind Blast and Instant casting Mind Spikes into a low health mobs and then double tapping SW:D and getting a massive influx in both Shadow Orbs and + Damage from Twist of Fate and using Halo/Cascade and unleashing my DP on the other mobs and maybe reapplying dots on 1-2 targets if they above 50% HP or else I just still lay into them with all my instant cast procs.
I did this consistently in every 5 man Mythic at the time. The ONLY slow down is on boss fights as because I had Surge of Darkness, I didnât have Insanity and thus my Dotweaving was not that powerful.
It can⌠and It should. I agree. I think that would be much healthier.
However, the interface of Shadow Orbs was much simpler to understand. As it was just a number of 1-5 (Visually represented).
With Insanity, You cant âvisuallyâ see how much you have compared to how much you need. You will need to have a âNumberâ value shown on the Insanity bar resource. So now all of the sudden you had the Shadow Orb system that was a very visually appealing resource system vs a number value slapped on top of a purple bar.
Take away the number so you can only see the purple bar and you have no idea if you at 45%, 50%, 52% etc. You would be guessing each time and then doing internal math calculation in your head in order to plan what your about to do next in doing another Mind Blast or is to time to do a Devouring Plague. With Shadow Orbs, if you had 5 Orbs, you know you need to DP before your next Mind Blast. If you donât see a number on an insanity bar⌠maybe 1 more Mind blast might over cap your Insanity? Maybe not? Who knows because you donât have a clear visual indication.
Its just sloppy.
Check out Preaches Video on Shadow in MoP and WoD and listen to him explain how well it plays and interacts with the Shadow Orb system. I linked 4 of his vids in this post belowâŚ
I will link you some examples the Priest community came up with last time in SL Beta.
If we can come up with interesting interactions, Blizzard can too. They just didnât want to. Its not about can they⌠it was about will they and they decided not too.
There are more ideas in that thread and others. You can search around if your curious.
As I mentioned above with Surge of Darkness, there was other ways to do multiple mob pack damage and do it quite efficiently. I did use Mind Sear when after I put my dots up when not using Surge of Darkness though. But I only NOT took Surge of Darkness in most raid fights. But PvP and 5 mans it was Surge of Darkness & Clarity of Power.
With CoP and SoD you could get 90% Mind Spike enhancing damage and an additional I think 15% dmg at the time from Twist of Faith. When you crit I chunked mobs and players down FAST.
Every Raid tier Izen Hart does a video listing out the classes who are the most likely to dirt nap. With constistancy disc is always top dead for healers and mostly top 3-5 for all classes. Now most people raiding at a level know why that is, so i propose some uitilty.
Spirit walkers grace for priests. 1.5 min cd fits in nice with our ramps/dps, useful, not overpowered and wil help us squishy classes live a little longer
Just riffing on this comment for a moment with the shadow spec tree and associated class branches.
Shadows talent tree on live is one built around redundancy, what I mean by this is that most of the rows are themed around the same basic function / idea and the question you ask when you talent into them is âhow do I want do X?â be that AoE, buff voidform, generate additional resources etc etc.
This works fine in the mop-sl style trees, but it falls apart hard in df once you open up combinations of things youâd previously had to choose from. Of the 21 talents shadow has on live, all 21 can be found on DF trees, and 19 of those 21 can be taken simultaneously.
Other specs, whoâs trees in SL are far more varied in the role of spells on a given row, have been able to transfer those spells more effectively onto the tree. Even saying that though, having every single talent good or bad added to the df tree for a spec (Especially one built like ours) smacks of a lack of direction / understanding of how Shadow works. The tree contains every SL talent, every conduit, and every legendary besides painbreaker. Either itâs completely placeholder, or nobody knew what to get rid of, let alone replace or redesign.
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Nothing I disagree with here.
HoweverâŚ
Your not fooling anyone, you and I both know whatâs going on haha.
This is an example of a design hurdle created because of spec vs class identity. Spell lockouts are an issue, but why do they exist? Historically, it was both a mechanical trade off because shadow form was actually relatively strong, and a flavor choice, you couldnât cast holy spells as a shadow being.
Currently shadow form exists almost entirely to give you access to Dev plague. Thereâs not really much mechanically that warrants the restriction, but it remains because itâs thematic.
Youâre not taking what Iâm saying in itâs full context. This was part of an example of possible questions to ask about priest in general. Iâm not making anything up, Iâm asking what are the focuses of shadow? Because our class feels like 2 very separate classes and itâs about time for priest to feel like priest as a whole.
Put a different way, how do you make a build in any other tree that doesnât feel like your class fantasy? If I take any part of the left side of the tree as shadow, Iâm not a master of light and shadow, Iâm a strobe light flicking on and off whenever I cast a holy spell.
If I take points from the right side as holy or disc, Iâm not a master of light and shadow, Iâm a master of light who knows how to summon a little shadow guy.
Youâre missing the point. Thatâs a choice that can be made. It can be for anything. You conveniently ignored the part talking about having a first mage and feeling comfortable without root totem, so you take something else like AG or wind rush.
I think youâre really going out of your way to misinterpret blizzard here. Like the druid class tree is supposed to be where you get your utility and feel like a druid. Dk class tree where you get to feel like a DK, etc etc.
The mage thing is kind of my point. It doesnât make sense for a âfireâ mage to pull from frost, but it does make sense for a mage to have mastery over both fire and frost. Thatâs something mages have been asking to have back for a while, because people like to feel like their entire class. Hell mages might be a prime example of themes that donât really match up functioning together. You wield the power of the arcane, fire, and frost no matter what spec you are and though you have your specialization, nothing is preventing you from drawing on the power of the other schools.
Fire and frost are opposite, but they arenât directly opposing each other. Thereâs nothing about them that would prevent you from using both together. You are your class not just your spec.
Holy and shadow are the same. Life and death, selfless power and selfish power, morning and night.
But void doesnât fit that, because void and shadow are not the same thing. They are not interchangeable.
We need our trees to be better, so we need more abilities, and in order to do that we need to define what makes our specs shine. To me, shadow shines because of our control and self healing abilities, so thatâs where we should look into creating utility. Theme leads to function.
Iâd love to play around with spectral guise, class wide VE, a version of the old VT mana battery. Things like halo/cascade/divine Star and wickedness, or class wide silence. We have holy and disc utility in things like MD and leap, we could still probably use more, but we are lacking a real shadow element for all priest. Itâs fine if you only care what abilities do and not what they are, but this is an opportunity to really define the priest class.
The void theme, in my opinion, limits the creative potential that we need in order to get our class and spec trees functioning. We can talk about both mechanical and identity issues at the same time.
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Maybe Iâm misinterpreting âriffingâ but I agree with you?
That part of my post was about the combinations of shaman utility being done well. Thereâs lots of options and different directions you can go. Like thunderstorm knock up, root totem, double stun totem AoE cc machine, something that wasnât possible before. The priest tree doesnât have that, and the shadow tree is, like you say, redundant.
Just taking a comment you said and applying it to another context / taking it in a different direction to further the conversation.
Does it? IF it were true that theme guided the mechanics of shadowform, well then maybe we should pull back from Shadowâs theme, and weâve guided mechanics too much as a result of the theme. The solution isnât to double down into the shadow theme, but to pair back on theme when it comes to mechanical playstyle. Because make no mistake here, shadowform is not âvoidâ themed any more than Shadow word: Pain is.
Okay, and Iâm saying that has nothing to do with the void aspects of the class. The âvoidâ things are the theming of DPS cooldowns, specifically. Thatâs something you wouldnât give any healer class anyway regardless of theming. Shamans also have DPS cooldowns, and they arenât sharing them between specs either. The difference is Shaman is drowning in utility spells between all three specs, so their class tree is full of random utility.
CLASS fantasy? Or SPEC fantasy? I donât think there is a way to do this with priest CLASS fantasy. The only time this becomes a problem is when you imagine that the Holy Priestâs SPEC fantasy is that it only works with the holy side of things. That is when mind blast/bender stops making sense (though itâs also when SW:P doesnât make sense too).
If weâre talking SPEC fantasy, then yeah, you can do that in other trees:
Shadowdance for a combat rogue is a pretty wild step away from their spec identity.
Barrage is a very weird one for Survival hunters (and thereâs a case Kill command is quite off for a Marks hunterâs newer identity).
Maelstrom weapon is pretty strange for Ele or Resto shamans to have
Etc.
No, I feel like youâre missing the point. You can ALSO skip enlightenment. It would not be good to do, but it can be done. This is the same thing as skipping Wind Shear.
Itâs literally what they said:
âThe class tree contains a core set of abilities available to all specs in a class and has a higher proportion of utility choices. Itâs a place where you can, among other things, choose some abilities or passives that draw from the identity of other specializations to give your character some hybrid flavor, or simply to grab something particularly useful for certain content. The specialization tree is predominantly focused on bonuses that enhance your power in your main role. Keeping these separate is one way of ensuring that you have some choices in both areas without, for example, feeling compelled to give up all your utility or off-spec buttons in order to maximize main role performance.â
You know, except for years of lore that shows light can be just as domineering a power as shadow is. And the tons of light spells in the game that are anything but selfless.
They absolutely are in WoWâs current lore. But thatâs neither here nor there, you still havenât wrestled with the main point - which is that there is nothing void themed in the shadow tree that would even be useful utility for other priests (rather than just giving the healers DPS cooldowns - which Blizzard wonât want to do for a number of other reasons) besides a single idol talent which is totally new and could be named anything if they wanted to move it to the base class tree.
They have these, theyâre just not on the class tree. Again, Iâve not argued once that they shouldnât be moved to the class tree. Itâs just a position youâre attributing to me repeatedly. What I have said is that simply moving those talents to the class tree is not a large benefit to Shadow. Considering Shadow is our most broken spec by far, this is hardly a solution to all of it. Shadow would benefit more from a total re-do of their talent tree. The class utilities moving off of it in and of itself is great for Disc/Holy (who already are sitting pretty in the general class tree), but more needs to be done to fix shadow, or give it interesting choices. Moving dispersion to the class tree just adds another talent Shadow would pick there. It doesnât create an opportunity for Shadow to pick up more holy flavor - does it?
And in my opinion the void theme isnât doing anything to prevent mechanical changes to the class - but the mechanical changes are whatâs important to making the class feel good in the first place.
Blaming it on theme is inventing a boogeyman. Youâre asserting that the theme is the problem and is specifically what is preventing the improvement. Iâm pushing back on that to say Void AS A THEME is not the cause of these problems. In fact everything void-themed about the spec is not anything that would be on the class tree even if the whole thing was themed more as a âdark angelâ. The only thing preventing holy spells from being used (the biggest mechanical problem of mixing spec flavor) is something that existed before Void was integrated as a theme to Shadow overall.
Thereâs no evidence to suggest this is a problem.
This is my last response to you on this subject. Feels like youâre way more interested in just trying to prove me wrong than actually talk about our class identity in any meaningful way, or at least that class identity as a whole just seems to not be something you care about.
Itâs just detracting from the thread as a whole at this point. Cheers.
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Iâm not trying to prove you wrong as much as explain my position on our class identity.
I donât think the void theme is a problem. I donât think thereâs any evidence that is IS a problem. And I think the problems with shadow crossing over with holy existed long before any kind of void theme was introduced to the spec.
That is all I initially disagreed with, and I agree, the conversation got derailed into something about class trees - but I never intended it to go there.
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Maxâs Tweet on Shamanâs tree.
maybe if you werenât needlessly defensive, you couldâve had a actual productive discussion without feeling others are trying to âproveâ you wrong.
Yeaa, at this point iâm hoping they add as much flexibility that shaman has into the former trees. Would be nice.
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Iâm not sure Capslockfury will agree that the phrase âI canât believe how insane the shaman class tree isâ is good feedback though 
What is meant by âinsaneâ? Hmm 
Max will probably make decent feedback on stream and put in in video if its not already done thoughâŚ
I think this is a little unfair, people are prone to being defensive when they feel their opinion is being attacked.
I will admit, for my part, that I was maybe a bit aggressive with my wording. We ended up having a sort of âdebate broâ discussion when I could have instead steered it back to my original point, just as much as they could have.
Youâre right, I donât think itâs good feedback. Itâs a positive opinion, but it doesnât say much as to why he feels that way.
But does it need to be good feedback? No, not really. I donât think heâs claiming it is? Heâs just stating an opinion, and thatâs all it needs to be.
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Heâs got way more experience than you or I have in mythic raiding. Itâs not opinion, its expertise.