Disc/Shadow Feedback for 9.0 and Beyond

Classes Priest
1

So, there’ve been other posts on the subject and I thought I’d toss in my own thoughts and opinions.

For anyone looking for any sort of lofty credentials on my part…sorry, I’m basically nobody. I’m not a top Priest in really any category, I don’t do a lot of M+, I haven’t really touched structured PvP since Wrath (when I was a DK), and my guild doesn’t have the people to run Mythics. I think the easiest way to describe me in the context of WoW is an average, middle of the road raider. I’m going to talk about things from a PvE perspective. I’m not an authority figure, I’m just a guy.

As such, feel free to correct me on anything, tell me anything I might be missing, or ways in which I could improve this. I will fix things if you present me with a good enough argument.

I’m going to mostly talk about Disc and Shadow as those are the two I have the most experience with. I haven’t played Holy much this expansion, so I don’t feel comfortable commenting on its issues. I recently had to pick Holy back up after it was becoming apparent I couldn’t keep up with the other healers as Disc.

Before I get into that there’s one thing I want to talk about:

Numbers, Mechanics and Flavor

The above three things are what define every spec in the game and aren’t strictly reliant on one another. I think this is something that can kind of get lost in a lot of discussions.

  • Numbers are how well a spec performs.
  • Mechanics are how a spec plays.
  • Flavor is all the spell effects, ability names and background lore surrounding a spec.

The three are connected, with numbers and mechanics being tied very closely to one another. That’s not to say that good numbers = good mechanics or vice versa, just that changes to mechanics or numbers can and will influence the other. A spec can perform very well but still feel like garbage to actually play. That’s not purely Blizzard’s fault, players can and will take the fun out of our own gameplay for the sake of better numbers.

That said, I’m mostly going to try and focus on mechanics. Flavor is malleable and interpretations of it can be extremely varied. Numbers are also easily changed and modified, but also not really touched on in the new expansion cycle until late in the beta.

Mechanics, meanwhile, cannot be easily changed or modified. That’s why we don’t usually see large scale changes to spec playstyles outside of expansion patches and why I believe it’s important to talk about this now rather than in alpha/beta.

With that said, on to the show.

Shadow

Void Form is an issue. Essentially the issue because it’s the only mechanic Shadow really has. If we didn’t have VF, we’d have essentially the same DPS rotation as a BC era Shadow Priest.

My main issue with VF is a matter of how it feels. We fall into a rigid, repetitive cycle, low and slow to start, accelerating to ludicrous speed before falling back down. In theory, I think that’s neat, it can work and when it does it can feel great. In practice, it frequently falls short.

For starters, being ‘naturally slow’ feels bad when you’re not engaged in content that allows you to experience a full cycle. Uldum and Vale dailies, Visions, leveling (in both dungeons and open world) and low M+ all feel bad. It all pretty much comes down to this: stuff lives just long enough for you to get into VF, but not long enough for you to actually experience VF outside of rares and bosses.

Once you get into content that does last long enough to get you through at least one cycle…the game’s not really going to make that easy for you. If something goes wrong, if you’re targeted by a critical mechanic at a bad time, you’re pushed out of the cycle and it’s back to square one.

My Issues

Lingering Insanity and Chorus of Insanity

I think LI and CoI pose some genuine problems to the spec. I will admit, it feels good to not lose all your power when you drop out of VF, except it puts even more emphasis on having good VFs and means we feel even weaker when not benefiting from either (i.e. when just entering combat). They don’t themselves cause any issues and are, to an extent, necessary for the spec as it is now, but they exacerbate a lot of the other issues I have.

A lack of meaningful decisions

VF gameplay isn’t very complicated. The decisions I have to make are typically, ‘will this add live long enough to justify applying DoTs,’ ‘will I have to refresh DoTs,’ ‘can I move’ or, more typically, ‘what do I do on the next global.’ In other words, microdecisions. I rarely feel like I have the ability to make any kind of large scale decision based on what’s happening around me.

Delaying VF is about the biggest choice we could make, but it feels very rare for the answer to be ‘Yes, delay.’ Even with LotV, we can’t delay for very long without capping on Insanity and wasting further resources. Even if we had more Insanity capacity, we lose stacks of LI/CoI the longer we delay. By not delaying, we lose out on Void Eruption damage on whatever I’m considering delaying for, but in exchange we can start generating VF stacks and have a good chunk of haste by the time the thing we need to ‘burst’ shows up. At worst, VF falls off in the middle of a burn phase, a problem we would have to anticipate 30+ seconds in advance.

VF's average duration and uptime

The duration and uptime are a complicated issue. It’s not just that it’s really long, which it is. An average, no-CDs VF will last around thirty seconds and a really good one can start pushing over sixty. It’s also that it’s even more ramp. The urgency and, well, insanity of VF doesn’t kick in until the insanity drain starts to out-pace your insanity generation which, depending on CDs, can take a while to get to.

There’s a lot of ways in which that feels bad. In solo content, as mentioned before, only a few things are actually going to live long enough to make use of VF (and whatever does typically won’t let you get a good one). Outside of that, it’s extremely fragile at its best point. One mistake, one badly timed movement mechanic or CC effect and it all falls apart. If VF weren’t the bulk of our gameplay, I think I’d be fine with those weaknesses, but it’s our one thing and we can spend upwards of 80% of our time in VF in a long fight.

Survivability

It’s bad. Specifically in the context of solo content.

It’s been worse, like before Dispersion got unnerfed. It’s still very bad. We don’t have pets to tank for us, we can’t kite anything, we have to just tank damage and we’re not very good at it. I’ve talked to guildies about this and it might be just a general caster problem, but it’s still a problem.

I’m not really going to go super deep on this one, but it’s another problem compounded by VF’s issues. If we had more front-loaded damage, it would be less of a problem, but because I have to ramp up all the time it’s consistently annoying.

Suggestions

I’m going to spitball some small changes that, in my opinion, would help make the spec a little less unsatisfying.

  1. Remove lingering buffs from VF (LI/CoI) or make them static, not scaling, bonuses

So I know I’m in the minority on this one. If all that happened was the removal/reworking of LI and nothing else, nothing would be resolved. Like I said, it’s not the cause of any issues, it’s just masking the fact that our gameplay outside of VF is awful. By letting us spend as little time in it as possible.

  1. Start VF at a ‘high’ level of haste and insanity drain

The goal with this would be to lower VF’s uptime but still get us to the actual fun parts. It’d help remove the feeling of constantly building up to something by making the transition into VF feel much more dramatic and impactful.

  1. Add some procs and/or situational abilities to the baseline spec

Adding procs and situational abilities on top of everything else is just gravy. It can’t hurt to spice up the out-of-VF rotation. Especially if we leaned into shorter, less frequent but more impactful VFs, as our relatively larger amount of time spent out of VF would start to feel boring.

With just those, we’d have less severe penalties for ‘failed’ VFs, cut out a decent portion of the build up to the fun part of VF and start to turn the out-of-VF experience into something independently enjoyable. I don’t think I’d be fully satisfied with this, but it’d be something. We’d still be stuck in the cycle, but we’d get to the good parts of Shadow with less of the bad.

If I could push a bit further:

  1. Add an insanity spender (or two) aside from VF

With this, we could start to break away from the cycle we’re locked into now. The idea being that you spend your insanity on something else when VF won’t fit, will be interrupted or could be better used against something that you need to wait on. The optimal strat (in any long fight) should still be to use VF as often as possible, but you’d have options if things weren’t going your way.

There’s a danger there of running into other issues. For example, if the margin between using VF and not-VF is too small, some people might just drop VF entirely because it’s more vulnerable to mechanics. We could also end up in the same camp we’re in now, where we don’t use not-VF because VF is too good. It’s a delicate balancing act. Worse comes to worst…you could make VF a cooldown. I’m not super in favor of that, but maybe that hits the right balance.

TL;DR

Void Form’s fundamentally a house of cards you have to build over and over again. Modern raid fights frequently shake the table. Solo content doesn’t give you time to build.

I like the concept, it’s unique among all the DPS specs and I think it’d be a shame to remove it entirely. But it’s rare that I get to actually have fun with it and I don’t think there’s a way to really fix that by just adjusting the numbers on it.

Discipline

I don’t think Discipline is necessarily flawed in its design. It can and does work and it’s fun. Even if you’re not doing well it’s pretty fun, just smacking dudes and doing healing. I do think the spec has some issues, but not on the same level as Shadow.

Disc is one of the most complicated specs in the game. It’s incredibly demanding of your ability to process and act on information. When you have a plan and can execute that plan, things go great. Your best fights, without fail, will be the ones with very little random damage and several big, predictable bursts. The problem comes when fights become less predictable and/or when you start to make mistakes.

My Issues

Things That Aren’t Burst AoE Healing

I can’t think of a better way to phrase that.

Disc is really good at burst group healing. Straight up amazing. We can drop a raid CD level of healing every forty seconds at minimum. Seriously, Schism-Penance-Solace alone does as much healing per target in a raid as a Divine Hymn (before Mastery) and if you’re doing it right, it does the healing in half the time and you only have to stand still for 1.5 seconds of that.

Part of the problem is that that burst looks impressive but isn’t really all that much HPS when you take into account the setup time. Atonement bursts are basically a backloaded HoT, like Curse of Doom but with healing. When the situation doesn’t call for that, we struggle.

We don’t really have the tools to do much else with Atonement than blast out big bursty heals. If the situation requires heavy single target healing or spot healing a few random targets, we pretty much just have defensive Penance and PW:S/Shadowmend. If we have to do sustained AoE healing we can throw out PW:R for a bit, but once those are out we’re back to PW:S/Shadowmend.

So ideally, you just don’t insert yourself into those situations, you have other healers that fill the roles you can’t. It’s pretty much only an unavoidable problem in M+. It’s fixable, but not everyone will always have an organized group to play with, so in my eyes it is still a problem.

Mistakes

Making mistakes as Disc feels awful. If you miss, you miss hard. You burst into only slightly damaged health bars and do the equivalent healing of like two PoHs. The worst is if you’re too early, then you just get to spam Shadowmend into a raid of injured targets. It’s a bad time for you.

Again, fixable on a personal level, but I’m not sure if ‘you must git this gud to play this spec’ is something that should be left entirely alone.

Suggestions

Again, I don’t think Disc is broken, it is perfectly functional as is so it doesn’t really need to be remade. The one big thing I’d like to see is it made more accessible. If I could ask for anything else, it’s for Disc to have more options in how to heal, explicitly at the cost of burst healing. The best way to achieve both is pretty much entirely through talents.

So, for example, let’s imagine we add Legion-era Contrition (increasing the duration of Atonement) back but we put it on the same tier as Schism. I’d also shuffle Shadow Covenant down to this tier, give it a cast time, make it spammable (and probably make the healing absorb personal) and I think now you have an interesting choice. You can stay with Schism and stick to Disc’s burst heavy playstyle, you could grab Contrition and have longer windows to use Atonement in but smaller bursts to compensate, or, finally, you could pick up Shadow Covenant and get a reliable means of AoE healing outside of Atonement. I think that’d be pretty good.

Beyond that there’s a couple things I’m thinking about but not necessarily advocating for:

  1. Shuffling Spells into Talents

One of those things, and I know how this sounds after the SW:D issue, is rolling some baseline functionality of Disc now into a talent in the future. I’m thinking specifically of PW:R here, as PW:R is probably one of the key factors in Disc’s difficulty. The idea would be to add some other easier to use spell in its place and then add PW:R as a talent that would replace that new baseline ability. My gut instinct on what that replacement would be is essentially a version of PoH, applying a ‘lesser’ Atonement that transfers less healing, but lasts as long as a normal one.

  1. How Atonement Works

Also might be worth considering changing how Atonement works on a fundamental level? This is really breaking from ‘Disc is fine, don’t need changes’ and just delving deep into wild spitball territory. The timed nature of Atonement is difficult to balance, there’s a lot of factors that have to be taken into account and it’s at the core of a lot of Disc issues. Like maybe it’d be better if it had a much longer duration but capped the amount of healing that could be transferred instead. I dunno, it could work, but it’s a bit beyond the scope of what I’m going for here.

Again, I’m not seriously advocating for those last two paragraphs, but maybe it’s worth thinking about.

TL;DR

Disc is fun, but difficult. I don’t think it needs to change too much for the people who are already successful with it, but it would be great if there were some options that made it more accessible or allowed it to do something else than just burst heal.

9 Likes
2

I agree with a lot that’s being mentioned. I personally can’t speak to Shadow since I’ve rarely used it outside of the occasional solo content, but I definitely agree with the Disc points.

The thing is, I really like the concept of Disc, that’s why I switched to Disc from Holy throughout the vast majority of Legion. I have no issue with a spec being hard, but I feel that Disc is just too reliant on your group being good in order to actually be effective. The entire point of the spec is that it’s built around anticipating damage, but especially in a PUG, you can’t magically assume no avoidable damage is going to be taken.

Personally, I feel Disc is too proactive. I would gladly trade some proactive parts of Disc in order to better and more efficiently be able to react to unpredictable damage.

As a side note, I’d like to see the Bursting affix redesigned, as Disc suffers from it uniquely harshly. There’s a reason why when most people ask what Disc can do during Bursting week, the response is “Play Holy.” Likewise with Grievous.

3 Likes
3

I have several pain points with Disc outside of what I mentioned in my previous post:

  1. Rapture takes too long to set up. If it’s Mythic+, and I want to set up for a spike of damage using Rapture, I have to spend six GCDs beforehand, all the while regular damage is going out. In reality, I have to see the predictable damage coming about 9 seconds before it hits because by the time you PW:S the last person, some time has ticked off the first person PW:Sed. I feel Rapture needs some sort of redesign, or replace Rapture with Luminous Barrier baseline.

  2. Lenience is the absolute most boring talent in the entire game. It’s naturally helpful, but for a level 100 talent, it’s extremely boring and doesn’t change anything about the way you play Disc.

  3. Castigation is currently out-performed by Schism in both burst and sustain. There’s no reason to take this talent whatsoever, as Schism is flat out better in every aspect. They buffed Schism going into BFA, but forgot to compensate Castigation.

2 Likes
4

Agreed on Rapture. I didn’t really get into it but it taking a global to kick in does feel pretty bad. It’d be nice if it just applied Atonement and a shield to ourselves just to alleviate that somewhat, that’s really all it’d take to make it feel nice.

I was considering adding an entire section in Disc about talents. It turned out too wordy compared to literally every other section, so I ended up cutting it.

I think a lot of our talents feel pretty dull. Lenience is definitely at the top of the boring list and I’d slot in Sins of the Many just below it. You’d at least notice if Sins was removed, but Lenience is easily lost in the noise.

There are six talents that I would consider to be good just in terms of design: the entire 45 tier, Schism, Evangelism and Shadow Covenant.

The 45 tier is great just because you get to choose your level of engagement with your mana regen. You can either let it happen passively, actively or very actively. The only downside is it’s kind of solvable, which can remove some of the choice, as people will trend towards the ‘best’ choice.

Schism and Evangelism both interact with Atonement in a really satisfying way. They play into the burst playstyle in different ways, but both feel good.

And Shadow Covenant…I realize I’m one of like five people who actually like this, but I do think it has potential. That potential’s never been realized, but it’s there.

5

Shadow had some of the gameplay you’re mentioning here back when Devouring Plague and Mind Spike were a thing. Mind spike would eat your DoTs off the target but deal high burst damage, and aoe. So you could use this instead of dotting trash or low health adds to do needed burst. There was also a talent that procced an instant cast mind spike that wouldn’t eat your DoTs.

I think perhaps mind spike or devouring plague could be added back in as insanity spenders, perhaps with mildly different effects.

Mind spike for aoe or trash, and comes with free procs to spice things up.

Devouring plague as a strong single target damage DoT?

Probably bad ideas as they sound too similar to Elemental or Affliction, but it’s worth mentioning. Uniqueness purely for its own sake does not guarantee enjoyment!

There has got to be simpler, more engaging mechanics that give the player more meaningful decisions and power over their resource that Blizz can think up.

I think shadow word: void having 2 charges should be baseline, perhaps just give mind blast the charges so you don’t lose the iconic ability, but it’s a similar issue that elemental shamans have with Lava Burst. It just feels awful to play without 2 charges and the issue is even more pronounced with Shadow Priest because mind blast will always line up with void bolt unless you take SW:V.

I don’t like the feeling that they take essential gameplay and strip it out to make it a talent like that, instead of giving us smooth gameplay and then coming up with an interesting talent to affect what we have.

Overall I love Shadow Priest, I don’t mind the void stuff or how the spec has transformed, but I feel like the gameplay mechanics, while they seem dynamic at first glance, as you said are very rigid and end up feeling stale and repetitive (if you talent optimally). Even if you just gave mind blast 2 charges, changed the talent where shadow word void is currently, added shadow word death back to baseline, the spec would feel much better.

2 Likes
6

I guess a bit of a bump? I would like to see some more discussion.

7

could include boom kin in that as well. I agree with 99% of your post. but to add to it. I’ve been playing boom kin lately for change of pace (that and gold farms on druid are 100x better then a priest) and casting sun-fire to dot everything instant cast. is what shadow needs for pain. Would just need to replace dark void in the talent tree.

another thing that i think really needs to be brought up is that our mastery is extremely lackluster. even if we weren’t completely locked into haste/crit right now. I would like to see something that changes game-play slightly. I personally want Twist of fate as our mastery but I don’t foresee it happening :stuck_out_tongue:

as for voidform… I don’t think it’s going away. I would like to see it work in reverse, where you get a bunch of haste to start with and then it drops off over time. so that the mini game isn’t how long you can stay in voidforms. but how often you can meaningfully reset it. think of it as your insane thoughts are going everywhere and as you start to regain control your thoughts start to be more coherent and slow down. I hope that makes sense. so your talking about small burst windows constantly for fast pace. It would be perfect for M+ as you would get a voidform every trash pack with max dps burst at start of pack and leveling off towards end. Shadow would benefit from this in PvP greatly too, as it gives a burst window to kill something in CC chains. instead of playing the long game.

One can dream right?

1 Like
8

The reverse void form is actually a beautiful idea

9

I hadn’t thought about reversing VF before, I like the idea. It’s another (technically) small way to alter the way VF works that would make it more effective in a lot of content.

There’s a couple major questions regarding numbers you’d have to ask, like what % of haste do you start off with and how quickly does it fade, but it’s definitely a good start. You get to start off with a VF that feels good and do some burst in that time, burst you could align with adds or burst phases or anything else, then return to normal.

I don’t think I’d be happy if that was the entire thing, but I feel fairly confident that it’d feel better than what we have now.

2 Likes
10

Actually I never thought it through. The other question besides how much haste is. Is there a CD or is it like now that you can pop at xx% insanity.

Probably not going to happen thou…

I think I’m giving up on priest unless things change for first time since dragon soul

11

2 charge MB Baseline and castable while moving (or instant). Also, lets get DP as a proper cd (like 2 min) that would be used at highest VF stacks.

1 Like
12

There ought to be a tier of talents that has you choose between gaining benefit from long void forms and exiting void firm as rapidly as possible.

The current stacking haste buff with lingering insanity baked in could be one talent and something that increases void eruption damage and provides a buff to insanity and damage after exiting voidform which decays with amount of time spent in void form. Shadow word death could be used as a way to dump sanity by making it castable in voidform regardless of target HP percent but having it drain sanity as a cost.

1 Like
13

That was a good read! My feedback is mostly regarding themes and fantasy though.

One thing that bothers me immensely is the artistic shift from spriests to basically become “voidpriests”. It practically killed the spec fantasy for another thing and while it might be appealing to some, it’s kind of a letdown to others that enjoyed the previous flavor.

Since the “old god expansion” is done with, and the next xpac is more similar to how the shadow spec used to be (theme shadow, death, etc), I’d love if they reverted the spec flavor, but offering a way for people to maintain the void theme if they wanted through one glyph. (Glyph of the Void: Your shadow abilities resemble void magic).

Another thing that I’d love regarding class fantasy is how each race priest had an unique ability. Maybe that can come back with each race’s nuke Smite spell being customized visually? (With a glyph to keep the original if wanted).

Also, PLEASE… Take the sparkles out of levitate’s animation, because it’s really jarring in shadowform. Or at least let us glyph out of it.

2 Likes
14

Please make the glitter from levitate go away in shadow. Even if it’s a glyph… I used to love levitating around as shadow. It was ominous and thematically cool. Now my scary shadowpriest has care bear sparkles around his feet. This is my most hoped for change in shadowlands.

1 Like
15

So wa-hey, alpha this week. Time for a bump.

Mind Blast charges would be welcome assuming no other changes to Shadow. The conflict between the MB/VB CDs has been an issue since Legion, and not an issue anyone has ever really been quiet about.

DP as a CD I’m not super in on. It’d basically be another Shadowfiend (assuming it’s basically just a high damage DoT), a DPS cooldown that adds damage, but doesn’t really change how we play.

That’s definitely high on my list. I’ve always been a big supporter of offering differing playstyles, but I understand the difficulty that poses from a design perspective.

With multiple differing playstyles, time does have to be taken to make sure they’re balanced. I don’t think they need to be aggressively balanced against each other in terms of numbers (certainly balanced against other classes and specs), but I understand not everyone feels that way and Blizzard still has to take their balance seriously.

I didn’t talk about flavor, but I definitely understand what you mean. I don’t dislike the old god/void fluff, but there are some things I’m not entirely pleased with.

Going back in time a bit, I was not a fan of Shadow Orbs. They were…basically meaningless in terms of flavor. With stuff like soul shards and rage and holy power, you could get a sense of what they were in either a physical or magical sense. Shadow orbs never really felt like anything more than a game mechanic to me. They could have renamed them to ‘Shadow Energy’ or something like that and made it a less discrete system I would have been fully on board, but them being orbs, created and expended in specific small numbers, it was too gamey.

That said I do think there are things about the Void fluff that could be improved upon. Insanity as a resource name isn’t something I’m a fan of. I get the Lovecraftian vibe, the ‘deeper into the abyss you look, the more power you gain’ and all that. Again, you could call it ‘Shadow Energy’ and I’d be totally on board. Abstraction and vagueness help a lot in this sense - Shadow Energy you can imagine any way you want, Insanity is too specific.

1 Like
16

I couldn’t agree more with this if I tried.

4 Likes
17

A good idea for an insanity spender is bringing back Shadow spike!

18

So, Shadowlands updates. I’ve written bits and pieces here and there, but I’m back to try and break down my thoughts on what we’ve got so far.

The Covenants

Boon of the Ascended, as I understand it at the moment, is pretty neat. It’s a high DPS/survivability CD as it’s currently implemented. I have a couple issues with it. First, for Shadow, it doesn’t appear Blast/Nova generate Insanity, but I feel like it should. Second, it reintroduces haste breakpoints. At 0% haste, you can fit 6 Blast/Novas into the timer, 5% gets you a 7th, 20% gets you an 8th, 35% a 9th and 50% a final 10th. Less an issue for Shadow, but for Disc/Holy it might factor into your decision.

Mindgames, as is, is also not a bad choice. Shadow gets a bunch of insanity out of it and Disc/Holy can try to capitalize on the damage reversal. I doubt it’ll be the choice for raiding, but it’s not bad.

Unholy Nova is the utility king. Huge amounts of healing for one global of investment per minute. Lowest DPS as it currently stands, but just an amazing amount of healing.

Fae Blessings strikes me as the 5-man pick, but it’s kind of an odd-ball. Shadow can use this to turn PW:S into a way to extend VF (as it grants the target 20% resource, in this case Insanity), on top of providing some random DR to a few friendlies and cooldown reduction to the whole group. For the healers there’s a little more choice in it. This one was datamined and not included in the official dev update, so very subject to change.

Right now they seem to all fill a certain content niche. BotA for main spec raid DPS, MG for PvP, UN for main spec raid healers and FB for the M+ crowd. You can make some arguments for using others in other areas, FB seems to be the one on the shakiest legs but all the rest you can justify in some way. I’m not a huge fan of that sort of breakdown, but tweaks could absolutely change my assumptions.

Shadow

So it doesn’t look like we’re getting away from Void Form, or breaking the cycle we’re locked into. For my tastes that’s pretty unfortunate, but there’s still things that could be done that could help.

New Talents

Death and Madness could be a good pick for M+, but M+ is still an awkward place for Shadow. I don’t do a lot of M+, so I’ll hold off on commenting further.

Surrender to Madness is getting revamped again. I don’t dislike it, this version lends itself more towards soloing, which is one of our weak areas. I don’t think a 2 minute cooldown is going to turn my perspective from ‘soloing as Shadow is a chore’ to ‘man this is great.’

Other Changes

Shadow Word: Death is back! To be honest, I didn’t miss it that much. I missed it while leveling and soloing, for sure. That extra bit of instant damage is amazing when it comes to finishing mobs off, but in other content…not so much. Won’t complain about it becoming baseline again, but it was never my break point.

Void Bolt can, presumably, be cast during Mind Flay. I’m okay with this, the constant MF clipping in VF is a big source of annoyance. I dunno how much it helps and, as others have mentioned in other threads, it means we no longer get our little moments of free movement, except for the addition of SW:D.

We also got Power Infusion as a baseline CD. Others have pointed out that it will just be used to extend VF, which is true, but to me it feels nice to have a cooldown that does something. Shadowfiend generates a small amount of Insanity, but it never felt like something I planned around or thought about in any serious capacity.

Overall

The lack of any real changes to the functionality of VF are a big sour point for me. I’m not going to retread that ground, if you want to know what I think about VF, just re-read the OP. I’m pretty liable to switch to another class because I just don’t think I’m going to be satisfied with another couple years of dealing with the frustrations of VF.

I’m not going to just abandon ship though. Instead, I’m going to harp on 3 of my 4 suggestions from the OP: 1, 2 and 4.

  1. Remove lingering buffs from VF (LI/CoI) or make them static, not scaling, bonuses

So half of this is already handled by CoI going away with Azerite. I still think LI is a problem child. Consider tweaking LI, perhaps making it so it’s not the default talent pick.

  1. Start VF at a ‘high’ level of haste and insanity drain

We’re already going to be suffering from the gear reset. VF with poor gear feels awful. Consider, instead of VF’s extra damage bonus, giving us additional haste instead.

I want VF to feel like a burst of insanity and a benefit to be in. I don’t want to feel like VF is my natural state and being outside of it is a penalty I have to suffer for brief glimpses at True Shadow. To me, that means shorter VFs that give you a lot of haste right out of the gate.

  1. Add some procs and/or situational abilities to the baseline spec

Please.

I’ve been playing my Warlock alt and my Paladin alt and oh man is it amazing having something positive happen to me outside of my control instead of it always being a negative experience. I never see a lucky string of procs as Shadow, I see a lucky streak of nothing interrupting me.

Could I take Shadowy Insight? Yes and no. The sheer pleasant unclunkiness of not losing MBs to the clashing timers of VB and MB in VF (and any movement outside VF) beats out having a few extra MBs randomly dropped on me that I have to use instantly or…lose MBs again.

I understand not everything I want is feasible. I know I’m not immune to bias and there are people who genuinely like Shadow as it is. It just feels like a spec where I never get an opportunity to say “Oh that’s nice,” but just a series of hurdles. There is no reward, just more hurdles.

I did find some new formatting options though. So that’s pretty neat. Disc to come…tomorrow. I don’t expect it to be as long though.

1 Like
19

I’ve been trying to think of ways that discipline could change, mechanically, to perform its intended role better. I think that the problem comes in with the fact that they can never do as much damage as a damage dealer, and their healing has to be balanced with other healers while being based on a percentage of damage but it’s difficult to utilize when random people in your group start taking heavier damage than you’re ready for.

Coming from a resto druid point of view, I find that a pre-emptive HoT style healer is usually more forgiving of mistakes because, if you have steady HoTs rolling on everyone in the group and someone takes a burst of damage, by the time you get around to casting a recovery heal on them they’ve already gotten back to a safe zone thanks to the HoTs.

So what if discipline’s atonements were changed to work more like, say, ignite?

Currently, you have to use shadowmend or power word shield and such to put atonement on a target, and then do damage to heal them. That, to me, is a lot of steps to take when someone has already started taking heavy damage. You’re spending at least one global just to apply atonement, and then several more to get some damage spells out in order to have atonement convert that damage into healing.

What if, instead of the current system, Atonement was a heal over time effect that stacked and amplified based on the damage you deal, and could spread to allies passively like ignite does? You’d no longer have to apply atonement via pw:s/shadowmend, but it would be a passive effect: you hit an enemy with a damage spell, and 60% of the damage dealt is turned into a short duration heal over time on any allies within 30 yards (obviously capped at, probably, 5 players, and prioritizing low health players), say over 6-8 seconds. As you continue to deal damage to the target, the value of that HoT goes up, just like ignite builds up on targets for fire mages. Each subsequent damage spell refreshes the effect and increases it. Your burst damage then becomes ever-stronger healing over time ticking away on your group members.

At that point, you wouldnt have to worry so much about constantly applying atonement to allies, and could simply focus on dealing damage and spot-healing with shadowmend or power word: shield where needed.

20

lvld Holy from vanilla up to WoLK. Loved it went to shadow during that time and found that quite fun. Left the game for a number of yrs and came back this past sept. Shadow while still seems somewhat potent struck me as being weak and easy to kill now with the slow limpish spells and void had me asking why. Holy pfffttt gone from being somewhat clunky to WOW wth did you do to them. close to useless for self defense. Figured hey why not try disc never played that spec. Love it. solo work while dmg can be ehhh slow the ability to survive is nice. While heals are not OMG they are decent and if nothing else can help offset main heal cool downs. there are things that could be tweaked on the class to up both dmg and healing but seems like every class can tend itself somewhat now and while IMO every class could stand some talent work.

1 Like