The changes made to Shadow as of 10/5/2022 are atrocious. It seems that the developers are slowly ignoring the “build your own shadow priest” philosophy. For me, shadow priest is dead on arrival.
I used to be able to make builds that completely ignored the Void Eruption/Dark Ascension choice node and subsequent Ancient Madness node. It used to be the case that no other node required you to go through these nodes. This is no longer the case. Void Eruption/Dark Ascension and Ancient Madness are now prerequisites for Auspicious Spirits/Tormented Spirits. In order to make this horrible change to the placement of the Auspicious Spirits/Tormented Spirits node, the number of choices before the first gate on the tree have been reduced. Shadow Priests are now forced to take more utility abilities.
With fewer choices present before the first gate, players are being pushed more than ever to choose Mind Spike. Increasing the bonus damage of Mind Spike from 50% to 200% with Surge of Darkness does this too. Testing from others seems to show that using Mind Spike as a filler is better than using Mind Flay. One consequence of this is that Dark Ascension gains more value than Void Eruption. Something needs to be done to make Void Eruption more appealing. The developers took one step forward by having Insanity spending increase the duration of Void Form, but have now taken 2 steps back by cutting Insanity generation across the board. This is doing nothing more than solidifying Dark Ascension as the only viable choice.
I am very disappointed. For me, there is nothing to look forward to for both Arcane Mage and Shadow Priest. I am now only interested in playing Beast Mastery Hunter and Fury Warrior. However, with the way things are currently going in development, I wouldn’t be surprised if these specializations are both quickly gutted before release.
7 Likes
Well, you know, “we don’t use add-ons” and “all jobs can complete all content” was the FF14 mantra…
They make one slightly overtuned raid and suddenly, come to find out, everyone is using damage meters and logging their raids and their balance is even more out of whack than WoW is now.
I don’t know: I don’t think you can enforce player ignorance by just banning add-ons, You don’t end up with a utopia wonderland of “everyone is equal”, you end up with hypocrites that know very well who’s “more equal” than everyone else, pretending they don’t use add-ons or logs.
I am very pleased with the new pathing direction. There are still a few issues left with shadow.
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The idols are still in a very poorly designed state. Please adjust nzoth, yogg, and c’thun to provide more of a gameplay impact. They are still simple passive damage nodes and the mechanics do not justify the names.
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Why is psychic link still a 2 point talent?
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There are too many cooldowns and too many points in tier 2. The solution seems simple. Remove DA/VF or at the very least, remove ancient madness.
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The 2 point talents in tier 2 all feel unexciting. Remove maddening touch, dark evangelism, and whispers of the damned. No one is excited to buy into insanity generation. No one is excited to maintain dark evangelism stacks no matter how little effort is required to do so. I have previously provided alternative options and I will reiterate them here. Shadowy Recall (chance for SWP and VT to tick twice), auspicious spirits, and mastermind. These three talents all provide something much more interesting to pick up as tier 2 2-pt gates.
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Allow us to pick up auspicious spirits and tormented spirits for those priests that really want to lean into ghosts.
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Mind Sear is a bad idea and an unnecessary button. Please get creative with the tools and effects we already have access to before adding an aoe spender. Ghosts could easily fulfill our uncapped aoe damage role with a new talent unlocking their potential.
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Please nerf Mind Games damage by 75% before tuning anything else in the kit.
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DP needs more damage. 39% is not enough. Fully talented with derangement it is still dealing less than half the damage it did during its heyday.
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The nerf to the coalescing damage bonus is an excellent direction. Please apply the same treatment to insidious ire. I expect my mindblast to deal rough 35k damage unbuffed against a player with 200k hp. The amount of modifiers available for mind blast right now would make that a virtual one-shot. If these modifiers all ship with dragonflight, mind blast will have no impact outside of maximal buff windows and PvP will be in a similar state to shadowlands.
Ps. That tier 1 layout is lovely. Wherever did you find such a brilliant idea?
3 Likes
Yeah this is what happens.
As long as the content is easy logs dont matter, once content becomes more difficult then suddenly optimizing output becomes far more valuable.
And your bang on about enforcing ignorance. You can make the information harder to find but people will find it eventually, its better to be open and use player feedback to balance better.
measuring performance will always be a useful tool for progressing as a gamer. Ignoring flaws will just hamstring you and complaining that tools are available for you to get better just reeks of willful mediocrity.
I think wow became more fun to play when you start to optimize your gameplay. This game isnt a spammy action rpg or a shooter. The skill tests for this game is less reaction time like fighting games and less apm spam like arpgs or accuracy checks like shooters, its a lot more like playing sheet music perfectly, and having a tool to tell you when your off key or hit the wrong note helps a lot.
1 Like
Tier sets made their way in, and the disc 4 piece kinda seems like it sucks to play with.
It’s extremely odd because it seems like it just adds a flat value to the top and adds that value based on your actual damage/healing done. This even further incentivizes offensive penance (since we have so many modifiers to it), but it also creates this weird issue where you want to stack as much onto your penance as possible. So to get max value you need to use Schism then a PW:S, then penance (for the 2 piece and twilight empowerment procs) then use PW:S again on the target you wanted to do a big shield on. It feels so weird.
Does Mind Spike have an animation yet?
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It just seems like we have 2-3 half baked ways to do AOE. If we are supposed to focus on an apparition/psychic link playstyle, then the change to haste reduction CD on shadow crash and the target cap of 4makes it unwieldy set up for M+ situations. A 7 target cap might be feel better, even if we had a reduced dmg on our dots past X amount of targets. Dark void is clunky, nothing synergizes with SW:P so it just feels bad. Idol of N’zoth feels great - when it procs, but you could have an entire mob pack die with 9 stacks and get 0 value.
Yogg-Saron hits like a truck with the buffs, but the only way to get it up reliably/consistently is with lots of VT’s out, which see above issues. It also seems like this is a huge single target talent, but it takes about 3-4 minutes to get one out in a single target situation, and from my testing I end up having to either hold CD’s or stop mind blasting/DP to have it spawn at a better time. It also can be PI’d, which provides a huge power boost to it. Holding PI for this hard to control but very impactful guy feels bad but also like it’ll be the desirable way to play - I believe it was Publik who said make it so we can’t PI pets. What if Yogg did less damage, but splashed so that the way to summon him makes sense and he contributes to aoe?
New mind sear feels okay with the damage buffs, still not the most enjoyable way to do AOE. Almost liked it better as an AOE generator to build more insanity + spend on DP for apparitions. I’d rather have reduced mind sear damage, but maybe it procs apparitions on cast/ticks?
I know it’s to late now, but leaning more into the shadowy apparition gameplay I think would have helped our class fantasy/feel. Easier to spread dots, faster moving ghosts, maybe an explosion when they reach target for AOE? Maybe a single target talent that increases spawn rate of apparitions when dots are only applied to one target, or increased damage single target?
3 Likes
Granted, I’m not on BETA so I can’t honestly say how overpowered spriests might be in BETA.
But come on!!!
Were spriests so overpowered the devs needed to nerf Mindspike by 50% in the latest patch? And on top of that, Mindblast was also nerfed 20%. That does not sound like “fine tuning” the spec. Feels more like a massive overhaul. Sheesh…
I’m so glad I decided to avoid my priest and play a subtlety rogue this expansion. At least they are in an okay spot. Not the best but definitely not a mess like spriests.
1 Like
The 2 piece for holy… once again reduces CD on holy words… sigh
Hey, at least they got creative with holy for once and came up with a 4 piece that does something other than reduce CD on holy words… and instead it triggers when holy words come off CD… 
He should cast Void Crashes instead of Mind Spikes
Mind Sear in it’s current state is one of the worst buttons I’ve ever pressed in the game. Makes me physically ill to use it. The philosophy behind “byo Priest” aoe should be dot/rot/sear or MS/MB psychic link, but with sear being a spender and insanity generation so low, you’re forced to use psychic link no matter what as filler aoe.
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All the melees right now are pretty much one shotting everything, yet only shadow got hit hard.
Eeh right now I’m not too excited for DF pvp. Feeling really disappointed.
From my experience with raid testing they weren’t. Their damage was pretty average and 100% being balanced around the fact they bring an additional PI to the group. Sadly this is going to be the reality of the spec until PI is deleted.
2 Likes