Shadow crash feels terrible in low dungeons or when the tank does a mega pull and only half the pack can be doted
Manually dot with VT, position aggressively so you aren’t late into combat after the tank already has the pull together.
And that feels terrible. Shadow crash can be reworked to make VT apply swp and spread to target + 4 others that aren’t affected. Then if u grab a pack of 15 you can just quickly throw 3 out and keep going. Or even a 2-3 second cd so u can weave it if you want more skill based on it.
The reason Shadow Crash feels terrible has many components to it, but in this case I will highlight the component of our Mastery.
With Shadows Mastery, our damage essentially is 1/4 as powerful without any dots on the target.
Each of our 3 dots unlocking another level of our mastery damage in the form of Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague
So as it would break down…
- 3 Dots = 100%(Max) additional damage done
- 2 Dots = 66% additional damage done
- 1 Dot = 33% additional damage done
- 0 Dot = 0% additional damage done
So with that breakdown, you basically have 4 levels of damage enhancements with no dots acting as your base form.
So if you end up attacking a mob without your dots on it, you are doing like 1/4 the damage you have the capability to do. Which needless to say feels horrible.
So when your doing content that is between trivial and high end where it makes sense to group up a lot of targets and AOE them down, Shadow Priest would struggle because if you manually dot each target, they basically die from your other party members before you can do anything else or you only damage a small quantity of targets compared to other classes or in the case if your solo, you basically just end up dotting every target 1 at a time while Shadow Crash is on cooldown if you don’t have something like Halo that can 1 shot them.
A perfect example of this is doing Torghast with my Priest to unlock cosmetics. What I found was doing the highest levels made my damage nearly 1 shot everything… if my dots were applied. Otherwise it was very low damage where I could not afford to wait for another Halo and instead had to manually dot up like every target between my Shadow Crashes and with the goal of Torghast, you don’t really want to wait around wasting time so you are just moving constantly and just trying to kill everything as fast as possible.
For Torghast at least, I found that the best way to go through it is not to actually damage anything and just get the Fear anima power where the mobs take percent% of health damage every second based on your maximum health. Now that Fear targets is unlimited and you can also bolster Fear to not break on damage and stack both that and the percent health damage done component, it made it easy to just run around and gather everything up and just fear and they all die and move on.
Contrast this with my Hunter and I use barrage and that just nearly kills everything in sight for miles which seems so stupid and funny when you compare to Shadow.
Back to Shadow, if we had Mind Sear, then that could hit unlimited number of targets and is not limited to a cooldown. But it would also be at the mercy of our mastery damage stacking as there is no way to get around that without our mastery having another rework.
tl:dr
Mastery makes any AOE on targets without dots on them feel really bad.
Targets between top end and trivial make playing Shadow with its limited AOE capability feel really bad.
The problem is that while you are manually doting the missing ones (to start your rotation) the other classes are already dealing effective damage to all the adds, perhaps reduced damage due to their cap but damage nonetheless, unlike the priest whose damage depends on the psychic link
And then you pull ahead because your damage is supposed to only hit 8 targets but it’s hitting 12, or you skip vting and just nuke 8 with crash to get your damage out while it’s relevant, or the pull gets spread out / you’re able to get dots up as the tank is gathering so you get to cleave while everyone else is still waiting for things to be stacked.
There’s pros and cons both ways. I’ve had keys where I forgot to spec shadow crash and was still competitive.
It sounds good, maybe instead of doing it with VT, cast devouring plage on a target affected by vampiric touch and SW pain spread the dots to 2 or 3 targets that are not affected by them