I think it’s really similar to the old Smite damage absorption, at which point I’d rather take the old Smite damage absorption.
I’d really like to have Clarity of Will back though.
Do you all think Spirt Shell will suffer that much as Evangelism since we will have a lot of damage in the first 5 seconds with Schism, Mindgames, Light’s Wrath and Penance? Because losing Clarity of Mind but gaining Indemnity will cause most of the same duration as CoM to SS but not as close as CoM to Evangelism.
I believe both will act pretty similar.
I see some people saying that pre-Legion Shadow had better spec fantasy. As someone who started my priest in Wrath and is playing a Shadow priest in TBC Classic, I don’t remember Shadow having a stronger or more fleshed out theme or fantasy than it does now.
Pre-Legion Shadow, for example, did not have a firm answer where Shadow draws its strength, whereas current Shadow does (the Void, Void Lords, etc.). There didn’t seem to be any priest lore basis for the vampiricism (Vampiric Touch, Vampiric Embrace) in Shadow’s toolkit (there still doesn’t seem to be).
The spells did have a theme of damaging the target’s mind, and suggesting that the damage manifested psychosomatically, but this fits well with a Void theme, which was more fully introduced of course in Legion.
What was the pre-Legion Shadow fantasy for you?
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Spirit shell won’t be taken. A huge portion of Spirit Shell even working was the mini-evangelism that CoM provided.
Without it that talent’s dead in the water (and honestly it shouldn’t have even come back in the first place in Slands). Hell Luminous Barrier would have more reasons to take it than Spirit Shell will in DF.
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I’m really not a fan of absorb healing in general because it ends up becoming more of a necessity when you’re initially undergeared for new raids and that extra health buffer is the difference between life-and-death. It was something the world first guilds talked about.
It’s the same kind of issue with damage mitigation in general. Basically every healer but Shaman, Disc, and H Pal brings damage mitigation. Raid utility ends up trumping raid healing a lot of the time, especially when fights are slanted towards only needing 3-4 healers (and you have 6 (soon to be 7) healer classes).
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I understand you, but SS fits the fantasy I have for discipline, so I try to bring this up when possible.
In our current state, with or without CoM, almost all of our damage happens in a 6 sec window (thinking venthyr to compare with DF). 2 sec extensions is basically CoM for SS excluding radiance, wich wouldn’t be a problem for the damage window;
SS in CN was broken, but now it is in a fair spot I believe.
But if you end up with 2/3 warriors rotating Rallying Cry, or other buff like that, it is kinda of the same, or am I saying something wrong?
SS in it’s first debut was scaling with stamina and had a 1 minute CD within a raid with 1 minute CD timers. Now SS and Evang are not in a great spot because of the healing profile for sepulcher (excluding some fights), but without CoM and Kyrian, I guess they’re going to be similar with our current DF tree.
I started raiding in Shadowlands so I don’t have the perspective of older raids regarding past expansions, but since I started WoW in MoP I always loved the shielding part of discipline cause it feels pretty unique.
For sure, they do have a theme of damaging the targets mind.
Something I don’t get though is why is Insanity centered around the Shadow Priest? 8.3 brought the concept of sanity. You have these Horrific Visions where you have to go through Orgrimmar or Stormwind and clear it fast and avoid certain damaging spells or it’ll eat at your sanity and turn you insane, and you’ll ultimately die.
If Shadow Priests spells attack a targets mind, why aren’t we turning others insane from the magic we use? I feel like that should be the theme of Shadow, it fits because they draw their power from the void, which is connected to the Old Gods and Voidlords. (who have proven to be capable of turning others insane with their influence)
I think it’s fine if Insanity is used as a resource for Shadow Priests (since they are the ones risking their sanity using this dark shadow magic) but I feel more insanity related effects should be introduced for Shadow to use on their enemies. (looking back to Thing From Beyond, Echoing Void, Void Tendrils, etc.)
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I think that would honestly be cool for them to expand even further on that theme. Like…what if part of your damage in M+ results in a proc that, for 5-6 seconds, causes mobs to go so insane that they start freaking out and attacking each other, and that counts for part of your damage as a Shadow priest? Of course there is Mind Control, but that’s not really what I’m going for here…I mean something that is part of the regular rotation.
What if you are attacking a raid boss, and you use a cooldown that splits the target’s mind in two, and one of the two “mind fragments” manifests as a shadow that attacks the raid boss, so the boss is effectively attacking itself?
I feel like Blizzard could benefit from going “all in” on various class/spec themes, but it would take some courage and risk-taking to do it.
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Not with Light’s Wrath it won’t be.
SS did far more than Rallying Cry has ever done. In fact, atonement windows in general do. Converting our healing to shielding is always better without drawbacks. Disc when shielding is good becomes an absolute mandatory spec for every prog group, and it being there can either completely negate mechanics, or leave no room for other healers to really heal at all. It also just… ignores some boss mechanics (IE: Hungering Devourer - SS shields were applying to the non-healable raid members).
They don’t need CoM and kyrian for standard spec. Disc is looking fine in DF because it has big penance support, Light’s Wrath and Mindgames. The current Disc build will have penance hitting harder than mindgames, too - and our CDs will line up way better without boon being a thing.
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Legion started this entire Spec identity era where they wanted to really focus on what each spec did and what it was all about.
But now moving into Dragonflight, we see a more of a step back and they are trying to find or define what the class is with the new class talent trees.
If you go to far into ones spec, you eventually get lost in it.
Survival Hunters is another spec that has had its issues and is also hard to build a class tree around it when it’s other specs are range based.
With Priests, we are already the only class with 2 healing specs. That alone causes a divide in approach to our DPS spec.
Then we have the class spell school usage. Holy and Disc use Holy and Disc and Shadow use Shadow for the most part. This further divides Holy and Shadow while also propping up Disc as it can tap into both.
Then we have the resource cost. Holy and Discipline use mana while Shadow uses an entirely different resource.
To review…
- 2/3 of the class is focused on healing
- tapping into different magic schools based on spec
- resource usage different based on role
Those 3 main points cause building anything that works for all 3 specs to be very difficult.
Only since legion did we have that level of scarcity when it comes to using similar things across the board.
If anything, I think Mana should matter to Shadow again. With WoD, we still used mana as a resource only that we had tools to regenerate it quickly that disc an Holy did not.
So the idea of going fully more into a spec theme while also trying to make a class talent tree work across all specs just seems like opposing goals and would further divide what little similarities we currently have.
Just food for thought.
We are Priests first. We must define what being a Priest would mean. Then specs come after.
We are not a cultist / occultist.
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I was thinking Schism, Light’s Wrath, Mindgames and Penance, with no haste is about 8 sec. Does castigation increases penance time?
They have been making some progress in this, like necrotic for M+ that decrases it, and shields have those drawbacks of not receiving value from increased healing abilities though.
Oh I agree, what I meant is 15 sec atonment windows through evangelism don’t produce a lot more healing if we cast most of our damage spells in the first ~6/~7 seconds as venthyr. Kyrian always has damage spells for 10s at least, then you would still enjoy a penance after all that. I do not want any other covenant for priest cause not every spec can use those efficiently.
Well I mean, cultists pretty much share a ton of fantasy in almost any game. The difference tends to be ‘good god’ vs ‘bad god’. Even DnD (which pretty much invented the ‘class system’ in gaming), clerics can be clerics for occult deities.
It’s not unreasonable at all to take a spec that is dabbling in darker magic and theme it more towards the occult. Especially when one of the class feature spells even as far back as Vanilla is literally ‘mind control.’
It might not be the fantasy you like, but it’s certainly WELL within the realm of a class titled ‘priest’.
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And how’s that working out over the last 3 expansions?
I see it as a failed experiment.
The way wow has been up to going into dragonflight, it was taking step after step over time in developing and flushing out what each class and spec did. But now with class talents becoming a thing, it shows a glaring light at all the problematic issues each class that has opposing spec identity’s have.
I would argue that the specs with the most similar specs themes have very well designed class trees.
Wow and the classes are built in a way that needs to work in different forms of content with varying approaches.
This works well enough between classes. But having a different approach for the same class makes it ever more difficult.
Add in the other points I made and it further exasperates the problem.
Wow is simply not set up with this flexible idea you bring from a totally different medium. Just because some sliver of lore elsewhere non related to wow has been established does not make it a viable candidate to take that square peg and force it through a round hole.
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Again, I completely disagree with you that theming is a problem, here.
Theming can guide mechanics, but mechanics are the be-all-end-all. In fact, the start of legion was very successful for Spriest. It was just very clearly overpowered. They’ve been reckoning with trying to balance that rework and make it more of a traditional DPS since.
They could bring back literally WoD’s EXACT PLAYSTYLE and still have it be void themed by messing with a couple spell animations and renaming shadow orbs to void orbs.
The void isn’t the problem, the mechanics of the class are - and they mostly arose from trying to reign in a completely ludicrously balanced spec, finding out that when it was reigned in the spec didn’t bring anything for most fight design, and trying to re-design that same old spec design to fit it into the current encounter design. There’s a ton of failings here, but void is not a part of any of it. You are straight up just villainizing a word and pretending it’s this massive problem - and that clouds real discussion about what’s actually wrong with the spec right now.
But let’s stop pretending here that WoD shadow was flawless. You may have liked it, but it had VERY CLEAR problems in small group content, and with small group content being one of the major branches of WoW now, bringing it back as it was would have just as much disappointment when it comes to balance.
Ok, but they’re not doing this? WoW’s lore makes total sense for Priests to have void magic. Like this is not some out of left field theme like "oh well actually priests celebrate the lollipop lord and now use candy-magic!’
Void was an established theme, it used shadowy magic, it used mind-altering magic. Priests also did that. It made sense that tapping further into Shadow’s magic school would lead it closer to void casting.
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The way things like Evangelism and CoM increase your burst HPS is not just by giving you a larger atonement window on ~70% of your atonements, but by allowing you to increase the spread of atonement on your raid for your damage window. Without Evangelism you would only be putting damage good damage into ~16 targets, with one less every cast.
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This is very disingenuous.
In RAIDING it was… and was overpowered at the extreme.
Soloing world content was trash, PvP is was trash, dungeons was trash… ANY non long form content it was trash. THIS is a fact.
Why was it trash?
Because you couldn’t control when you went into Voidform and usually it happened right when you killed something or was about to kill something and the next time you had a target to unleash your empowered form on… it ran out.
So I don’t buy that argument for a millisecond. You are flat out wrong here my man.
Which I stated as much already. But those “Mechanics” were introduced with this new “Theme”. I would argue that the “Theme” would either go away or take a back seat if we fix the mechanics. At this point, the broken mechanics of Shadow are all of a result of the new “theme” they created. As you mentioned, if they just changed the mechanics back to WoD and kept the “naming” to be all void like… sure it could work, but I simply just don’t see it as a “Void” theme based on the mechanics. The “Theme” around “void” or rather “Insanity” was to capture the goal of ever going insane. They built the mechanics around the theme. Fix the mechanics and the theme goes away… at least mostly.
I think it stood up well enough giving the tools we had. But I would argue that we just didn’t have a proper AOE button… in that Mind Sear prevented other buttons being pressed and Cascade / Divine Star / Halo each had limitations that causes them to be better / worse given the way you want to AOE in number of targets and spread or not and Divine Star didn’t really hit that hard with its short cooldown.
I don’t think that’s a mechanical problem with the spec, that’s just a lack of a good AOE button as we still have now. So going into Legion and onward did not “fix” the problem Shadow has as we are still lacking a GOOD AOE button.
So beyond that, Shadow in WoD worked really well. I would argue that setting up damage in AOE still worked well enough… but you had to set it up with multi dotting, proccing down low HP targets to proc Twists of Fate and them hitting Cascade followed by Mind Sear and you did decent AOE.
But its not anything used by either Holy and Discipline. When trying to create Class tree, you need concepts to bridge the specs together… not further separate them. Holy and Discipline can tap into “Shadow” but this “Void” stuff they have nothing to do with it.
So why bother force feeding “Void” when its to the detriment of the Priest as a whole in regards to how WoW is currently moving forward with a step back to a more “Class” Focused compared to a “Spec” one.
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It was a very popular spec regardless? IDK why you’re calling me disingenuous, when half the people I knew playing priest were playing Shadow near legion’s launch and having fun with it. Shadow’s always sucked in dungeons in particular so no point in pointing that out. Really world content sucking is the major one, but it wasn’t as bad as you’re pretending either. I quested in shadow for most of legion, I know how it felt.
This isn’t inherent to void, it’s just the direction they chose. This is more an insanity theme than it is a void theme. Void lords and old gods don’t go insane because they use shadow magic, do they? No, they focus mostly on making other people go insane. The void as a theme is not insanity itself.
Nobody - even people who like Void magic - thinks Surrender to Madness is fun or good. That should tell you that people who are saying void isn’t, as a theme, bad - aren’t talking about specifically the theme of ‘going crazy’.
I’d argue it should. And to be fair, mind-bender/shadowfiend ARE kind of void creatures. So there was an attempt to bring it in, I think.
I don’t know what people liked about it other then the fact that when you are standing in 1 spot for a long period of time and playing a mini game of whack amole to stay in your ever increasing scaling stats state… I guess?
But outside of LONG fights…
Tell me, how can you not agree with me when you are starting out at 0 insanity and start attacking things… that by the time they are dead or nearly dead, only THEN did you get FORCED to enter Voidform and then see your insanity drain to ZERO before you get to another mob or next dungeon pull. How can you POSSIBLY think that was “Fun”.
I find it hard to believe you can say that scenario I just illustrated DID NOT happen. It happened often… and even more often the more you got geared up. What then resulted is that you are constantly feeling like 20% of your true power 80% of the time aside from long fights. THAT is horrible and getting more gear only slightly boosts your non Voidform damage and as a result the more gear you got, the less it seemed to matter outside of Voidform because your base form has to be nerfed over and over again to compensate for the endless scaling of Voidform.
You claim that I have some memory issues regarding Shadow as it was in WoD… I would argue that’s completely opposite. I haven’t played much of Shadow since WoD, so my memory is not obstructed with the degenerate nature Shadow became since Legion. But I would argue that those that see legion as a “good” design are only looking at a small sliver of content (abet the most popular one at the time) and don’t understand that the core issue still remains in that all the power is still locked behind Voidform and it just feels bad outside of it… just like in BFA and Legion.
And how do you get this “theme” you are trying to push within the context and content of WoW while avoiding any type of “ramping”.
To have something like “insanity” be it a resource we have to manage or some debuff that we impose on others suggests that there is a balance between being sane and becoming insane. This would need to have some type of ramping mechanic to fit the “Theme”. To achieve this mechanic, it doesn’t come across that well if you can make targets go instantly insane and have whatever effect you want by defining what going insane would result in. So as a result, in this fast pace version of wow where everything is go go go mentality, it makes any sort of ramping mechanics feel very out of place.
Shadowfiend was introduced as a way to regenerate mana. It was to solve our mana issues as a class. It was called “Shadow fiend” not “Voidfiend”.
I would categorize the “creature” itself as some manifestation that attacks the targets mind and makes them hallucinate. At least that’s the way I like to see it.
But the point being, it was introduced as a method to solve a problem for “Shadow” as Holy and Discipline both had mana regenerating talents while in combat and they didn’t need to cast at that point in time of the game unless healing was needed. So it was okay to not cast. But for Shadow as a DPS running out of Mana was a big issue. Later when Mindbender was added, I would agree they were leaning more so in that direction. But I don’t think that is the “intent” of the class design, that’s just the result of a solution to a problem.
Where with Shadow, they made a HARD attempt to change shadows theme to this Void stuff just because they wanted to… NOT to solve a problem. Because they didn’t really solve any problem, they just introduced new ones.
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Ive long hated this swap from Shadow to void themeing while also leaving Shadow as a base. They are trying to do multiple themes at once
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NO, NO , NO. I DO NOT WANT THIS THREAD TO TALK ABOUT SHADOW PRIEST THEMES AGAIN. Give me something more interesting to read rather than “void stuff this” or “wod shadow that”. Talk about functional changes to the spec and ongoing problems, themes can be revisited after the function of the spec is laid out.
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