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.
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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 canât 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 donât 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 spiritwalkerâs grace every 2 mins and frost shock+ES+lava surges+Stormcaller+gust of wind; Evokers got Spiritwalkerâs 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 wonât, they wonât 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 youâre constantly having to try and dump insanity in a button thatâs 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 weâre at it, letâs combine Misery with Damnation and unfurling darkness, because why not?
Thereâs a ton of overlap in these talents and on top of that itâs 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.
Itâs like they saw Spriest was having an issue and then wondered how they could make that issue worse intentionally.
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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 RBGâs. I had a blast.
HoweverâŚ
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.
Youâre 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 itâs pretty telling as to players expectations, and frustrations with the design direction / lack thereof for priest that âWe made a startâ received as much praise as it did.
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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.
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It also started far too late, I think thatâs 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 theyâd have continued where they left off. Instead it feels like weâre exactly where we were, if not going backwards.
Meanwhile weâre seeing coherent and evolved designs for other specs, albeit with some issues here and there.
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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
My personal feeling is that for what shadow currently has in the spec and class trees there wasnât even any effort to try. They just dumped everything the spec has in SL (Conduits talents legendaries) all in at once, added 1-2 passives that mostly contradict the design intent outlined in the release post, and said go.
I really cannot stress how much of our tree is copy pasted from sl borrowed power and talent trees. They didnât cut anything, it all feels like placeholder.
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From my perspective, I was initially happy so got anything at all.
But overall the issues I wanted fix werenât addressed
Pvp wise and theme wise.
Void form still lingered, so I had to play around it all the time. I hate having a good portion or my dmg locked out on a cd.
Another issue is that we still donât have access to holy spells. Even though we are shadow spec, we are still priest at the core.
We have some holy spells that have gotten a shadowy side, penance, why canât we have the opposite happen?
No mobility still.
And or Defense is to pretty much be a punching back for melee cleaves.
Over all, before launch occured, I figured shadow would be strong in pvp due to bloated numbers at start but the current mechanics was not for me so I ended up Manning warlock aff first then went back to priest towards tier set timeframe.
So far for df, I see similar pattern reoccuring.
Mind blast build will be strong but will get heavily nerfed again. While still holding onto the band-aid mechanics
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I think it would be cool if we had holy school spells that were infused with shadow/void, but at itâs core itâs still a holy school spell. Like how penance works with itâs dark pennace itteration. That would make one feel more connected to the priest theme at the core without losing the shadow
Spriest in WoD was so much simpler and was fun to play. The devs literally created tech debt for themselves with the complete redesign of classes in Legion. Hopefully they begin to address much of that debt before it becomes too costly.
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I had a brief look at the shammie trees and that coupled with evoker showed some imagination at trying something interesting so i agree with you there⌠I feel disc and holy is in a similar boat but not as, hmm, affected by it. They can still do their jobs but the talents seem to lack a certain flair
edit: Dont get me wrong. I can work with the disc tree. Im excited to use it but even i can see its stick and paste and not much imagination was put into it
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Only real issues I have with Shadow atm is having to sit on all cds until power infusion is up, having too many cds to press at once, and searing nightmare night-and-day difference with aoe damage whilst being the most clunky caster aoe ability.
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Just to preface, I donât have Alpha, I donât play holy, and I only do arena/pvp so my feedback is skewed towards that.
Class Level (No specific Specs)
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Twins being 1 pt is fine in my opinion. Whatâs not fine is that as a healer you need to spec into it to get down to the middle nodes which are fairly important across the board. As a healer thereâs times where I donât want to have PI for myself, I just want to put it on my teammate inside their goes. In my opinion Twins should be on a leaf node where if you want to spec into it, you can without needing to do it across the board. Obviously as SP you need this node to exist.
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Shackle is awkward because in pvp thereâs definitely a place for it, but as mentioned above, it will likely never get selected, even in niche situations based on all the other stuff you would want/need to pick. Iâm not sure even if some of the 2pt nodes were dropped down to 1pt if it would still get picked over some of the other situations. Double that for Dominate Mind.
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Wording on MC is concerning. If this doesnât work on players outside of a pvp talent, this is a step backwards.
Shadow
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DP being on a leaf node under Mind Flay seems really awkward considering itâs basically your only spender. I would swap this node with Mind Sear. Since in PvE Iâd imagine youâre like to always pick DP and Sear, but not in PvP youâre less likely to take sear. As it stands now itâs a point used on something thatâs super niche in pvp but required due to what it leads into.
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The amount of CC you can get is actually fire.
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Glad Misery/Damnation/Unfurling Darkness is sticking around. Real nice synergy.
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The bottom end of the tree seems extremely bloated to the point youâre actually not able to hit any of the new talents. Idol of Yshaarj has the potential to be really good in pvp but you need so much higher up that youâre not likely to hit there, especially when you have to put 3 pts into Sanguine Teachings which just feelsâŚâmehâ.
Disc
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Inner Light and Shadow being a talent is really nice. This was a must have PvP talent, so is a net W for disc.
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Pain Suppression being locked behind the choice of Shield Discipline and Solace feels super weird. Right now you donât really use either, but PS is spec defining so itâs basically as if you made PS 2pts and half as effective by proxy. Personally Iâd move PS in place of the choice, with Protector of the Frail under it, then leading to the choice node.
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Never got to play w/ Lights Wrath, but this could be really fun.
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Divine Star/Wickedness - It feels like in one of the builds the developers sucked the life out of this combo and I donât believe it was documented in notes? Initially this gave Divine Star some increased throughput but also provided a bouncing 2 second silence. Now this just increases the damage via adding a dot and allowing it to ramp up to 10x for 10% increase. Full disclosure, on a 15 sec CD this combo was absolutely broken. However, now the only real way you take this is if the damage is absolutely broken anyway. Thereâs no substance to the ability and lacks âknobsâ to tune around, in my opinion. Like, even if the damage ended up being mediocre I think the value in having the bouncing 2 sec silence would be beneficial in PVP and M+ in some situations. Now, if the damage is mediocre, thereâs no real value as thereâs other things you would likely pick over it. I feel like a better solution to pull the combo in line would be to increase the CD to be 30-45 sec on Divine Star when specâd into Wickedness.
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Iâd agree with all of those, but also that general⌠Lack of design direction? Is biting us hard when it comes to new things we get or how our spec evolves from expac to expac. Instead of sort of lurches from one thing to the next with bits of bobs tacked on that donât really feel like theyâve got a place.
Even if you think blizz has mostly built a good iteration of shadow now (which is a valid thing to think) itâs still pretty clear thereâs no plan for what happens next.
Meanwhile you have trees like ele which take the good things from sl, iterate and improve on them, bring back the greatest hits of the previous expansions designs, and overall feels like a clear evolution of what the spec was in shadowlands.
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When the Discipline tree literally has two capstone nodes that do the same thing (Atonment applied by PWS, Atonement applied by SM lasts two seconds longer), then you know they are creatively sapped.
I could come up with better capstone nodes than extending Atonementâs duration by 2 seconds. Such a lame idea.
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