Yep. I want there to be at least one non-CD oriented burst rdps in the game so I can play it. I feel like mm hunter is the closet right now.
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Thatās one thing I used to love about shadow and Ranged survival, they just did very consistent damage with small spikes here and there and it was my favorite specs. Now neither of them are really in the game anymore 
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And they were targetable and can be killed before they did anything as they slowly walked towards you target, not float lol.
For PvP I opted out of that talent in Cata as I quickly found out that warriors can build up rage by auto attacking them while they are coming for you and get a full fury bar to punch you in the face with lol.
They were so stupid in their first implementationā¦ I donāt think they got updated into the floating spectral version till WoD if I recall correctly lol.
Iād argue itās Ele Shaman at the moment. With the tier set making the elemental last forever, what CD do they have? Stormkeeper isnāt super notable on single targets, so all thatās really left is your covenant ability, none of which are that strong. Frost Mage would probably be the runner up, with Icy Veins being up 100% of the time and so their only real CD is Rune of Powerā¦ which is up a third of the time or more anyways.
Why the two crit oriented (2.5x modifier vs the normal 2x, among other mechanics) casters are more consistent damage than the two premier dot castersā¦ who knows. Mind boggling design choices.
Well, maybe thatāll be a thing more for m+ then. As the idols bellow it seems more interresting in that type of content (at least to me)
Alright letās continue with Sanguine teaching then. Just because this is such a ādelicateā subjectā¦
Letās also assume we take Body and Soul because hey, I need that shield to be up as much as possible.
Now, letās take vampiric embrace and Sanālayn stuff to optimise our mental fortitude. Letās take hallucinations assuming we need the insanity because I donāt know if insanity genetation is going to be like it is right now. Why not. All of these are interracting well toguether.
Now to the real subject. Letās go down to living shadow. This little guy allows your apparitions to animate for 10 secs when you consume vampiric insight, and they cast a similar spell than you when you cast something.
Meaning these little guys should shield you when you pw:s yourslef. I donāt know how often youāll consume these as itās different than right now, but assuming itās as decent as SL, decently enough. Meaning you should have better shields pretty often.
Now assuming you know damage patterns of the encounter, and are overly cautious of your hp, sw:death cast, pw: shield casts, you could be shielded for a fairly good % of the fight.
Will those numbers be good enough? I donāt know. Will this be fun? Well it seems fun on paper to me. I tend to be overly cautious of those things because I heal a lot too, so it sounds fun, on paperā¦
Donāt know what the exact intent should beā¦ but what currently happens on Alpha is they only do some damage when you do damage. They do absolutely nothing in regards to any other type of spell and doing a āsimilarā version of it.
But even if they did as you are theorizing, thatās a lot of wasted points to maybe get something that might do something sometimes.
Sounds like Blizzard knows exactly what their doing alright.
I meanā¦ you canāt be serious, this is stretching a lot of maybeās and sometimes and possibilities to make something worth spending any points let alone all the points in all those talents when you could just not and easily be way better off.
They need serious work that a talent shuffle or pathway change will not fix.
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Sanguine Teaching is terrible. Even if you dedicate every talent you can to maximize it, even if you dedicate every global you can to PWS yourself, even if the fight has minimal AoE damageā¦ itās not good numerically. In fact, itās particularly horrible in those āeven ifā cases precisely because of all the additional talent points/GCDs youāre sinking to make it work.
At best, itās 15% damage to your DP/VT for 3 talent points. Thatās the absolute best case scenario. How much are your DP/VT? 25-35% of your damage (and thatās being exceedingly generous)? Youāre getting less than 2% damage a talent point. And thatās giving it every possible benefit of the doubt. By comparison, Druids have a 2% magic damage/point talent in their class tree. Shamans have a 2% crit/point one. Etc. Itās inferior to thoseā¦ and thatās if you ignore all of the (many, many, many) limitations that make it so much worse in reality.
To each their own, but even if you ignore the numbers, Iām not sure what about the talent makes it fun?
The thing is, even if it was worth it, weāre not going to shield ourselves on GCD and sink another half dozen talent points to prop it up. Weāre going to have the healing priest in the raid cast PWS on us whenever they can, because a global for them is less lost damage than a global for us. It wonāt even affect our play, but what healer isnāt going to hate that?
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You are probably right with tier sets. Iāve almost given up on avoiding cooldown reliant dps and settled for specs that have a short major cooldown like demo and BM
Again with the exagerationā¦
And the whole point is to get to the idol behind so wtv. Iām just explaining how I would play with it. Your opinion on it being terrible doesnāt mean a thing right now before there is any real tuningā¦
Well Iām not talking about casting pw:shield on cd. Iām talking about casting it when needed after dmg events and on movement.
Healers like to pad the meter to show good numbers. Because thatās how they show off. Even if it doesnāt really mean its good healing. So, Iām prety sure you donāt need to shield on cd (which would be bad if you take body and soul if you shield before you need to move)
All Iām saying is that it could make for intertesting intetactions, and with the basic priest toolkit, which seems to be a concern these days. So yeah maybe it will end up like you guys are saying and be trash or be trown in the dumpster. But Iām trying to see how I can make this work and see the potential rather than just taking the talent into a vaccum and crying because daddy blizzard is a meany.
The design of the talent alone is bad. Itās an incredibly mediocre dps increase with an absolutely ridiculous conditional attached to it. If itās worth pressing it just makes PW:S a core part of our rotation, which isnāt fun, and if itās not worth pressing, itās a bad throughput ability that we donāt ever think about or interact with in a meaningful way.
Itās not about ādaddy blizzard is a meanyā, itās about the fact that it doesnāt interact with the toolkit in a healthy way, and odds are that it will be something that isnāt worth interacting with at all.
If it stays the way it is, you can move it out of the way and we can ignore it (why even have it) or you can keep it in the way and we canāt reluctantly take it. Itās not redeemable in the opinion of almost every piece of feedback Iāve seen.
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Today would be a great day for a blue post. I can forgive bad design as long as there is communication.
There is a real opportunity to knock it out of the park, but if you ignore the feedback and dont interact it will absolutely backfire and it will be another expansion were no one enjoys playing spriest.
I emplore you, please take the example of the rogue and hunter dev and interact with them. Go to streams, discuss with publik, go to spriest discords. PLEASE. Visibility is good.
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itās 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 āBand-Aidā some of us speak of.
It didnāt 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 donāt 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 comingā¦ 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.
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Shadow is da poop! NO MORE!
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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 acceptedā¦ it was reluctantly accepted due to time restraints.
Edit:
Devouring Plague was one of the better things that came from the SL changes. Butā¦ it was still a āband-aidā in that it did not āSolveā the underlying issues that plagues Shadow.
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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 āDevouring Plagueā 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.
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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.
Thereās this idea some streamers have mentioned that if Shadowās 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 couldnāt also provide, it needs to prove itself by primarily by throughput. It doesnāt seem far-fetched to me.