Fixing Shadows AOE

Classes Priest
1

I saw Publiks video and he had some great ideas but I wanted to expand on a few ideas. Shadow Priest lacks AOE burst and is capped at 8 target. So a few quick fixes:

  • Uncap shadow crash dot spread
  • Square root for and shadow crash damage beyond 8
  • Remove CD of shadow crash
  • Have shadow crash ramp up, so say every 2 seconds increase it’s damage by 40%, capped at 400% kinda of like holy nova. So using it once every 20 seconds is more of an AOE nuke but also if you miss or need to dot a second group it doesn’t feel bad. But spamming it should be a dps loss.

I also like the idea Publik had which was to make shadowy apparitions explode on impact making that choice node with psychic link.

2

I would just like to reiterate that even with your purposed changes to Shadow Crash… it still remains shadow crash.

A spell that requires you to target an area that has travel time. Having either is bad enough, having both just compounds on its issues regarding missing targets completely due to z axis issues as well as targets being moved around by following tank or other methods.

Shadow Crash is just a very mechanically poor spell to use for dot spread management.

Cascade or Unholy Nova would be better because they are target based and instant. Then a bonus feature with Cascade is that it can bounce around and end up getting more adds with dots as it is not beholden to an area of effect (Radius) mechanic but instead a target (bounce/split) limit.

I would personally like to see Mind Sear be a choice with Psychic Link.
With that, you have the choice to do spread and consistent AOE or more area focused but forced to cast the AOE spell (Mind Sear) manually.

Honestly, I think since we already have Shadowy Apparitions talents leading into Idol of Yogg-Saron, I think it would be best to redesign Yogg-Saron to make Shadow Word: Death spawn Shadowy Apparitions for each target affected with Shadow Word: Pain and now all Shadowy Apparitions will deal like 10-15% damage to up to 4 additional targets.

Doing this will make Yogg-Saron really Shadowy Apparitions focused with them being spawned more often and doing AOE damage.

If each Shadowy Apparition dealt 100 damage, then if it did 15% of that to an additional 4 targets, it would deal 60 additional damage total.

But let’s say you have 5 targets total with Shadowy Apparitions being spawned for. Each Apparition dealing 15 damage to each other target would look something like this… 15 * 4 * 5 = 300 damage to each target each time you spawn a Shadowy Apparition for those 5 targets.

Or another way to look at it…
Primary target = 100 damage per Shadowy Apparition
Secondary targets = 15 per Shadowy Apparition. Multiply that by 4 other Shadowy Apparitions from the other 4 targets = 60 total damage per target * 5 = 300 total.
Which means a total of 800 damage done. 500 single target damage and 300 cleave damage or 37.5% of the total damage done would be cleave damage.
Or you can also just have square root scaling damage for the AOE Shadowy Apparition damage and have them deal damage to everything within the determined radius.

So I think it’s decent AOE damage without scaling out of control.

1 Like
3

Baneling apparitions will always get my vote.

3 Likes
4

Revert Psychic Link to the burst AoE enabler it was in Season 1 and keep Shadowy Apparitions and DoTs as our method of sustained cleave.

5

I’ve been saying forever. Just give our dots an AoE cast.

-Misery should be changed to merge the properties of Vampiric Touch into Shadow Word Pain and make it AoE cast. This would make our dots instant cast and remove buttons bloat. There’s literally no reason for me to have SWP on my action bar at the moment.

-Shadow Crash should be changed to an AoE spender with a faster missile fired at a target instead of on the ground. Put it on a choice node with Psychic Link.

-Mental Decay should increase the duration of dots on enemies near the target as well like Shadow bolt.

I notice that they are buffing us next week. But as I’ve said repeatedly, numbers tunings won’t fix our flaws AoE mechanics in short fights, add spawns or moving targets. Our class needs another rework, but these 3 changes would fix our AoE unreliability.

6

I do feel like it makes sense to carve out the 2 play styles.

Wings, direct damage, psychic link, cleave.

Void form, dots, apparitions, exponential AOE.

I honestly feel like shadow AOE is perfectly fine as it is now assuming you run void form. But shadow crash can still be annoying to use.

7

Tbh I miss the army of Shadow Apparitions I used to be able to summon during the final season of BFA. Shadowy Apparitions where just an incredibly cool way to do AoE damage, and it was unique to Shadow Priest. Sure we still got Apparitions now in Dragonflight… but it’s been gutted in favor of Psychic Link, which I think is super boring in comparison.

1 Like
8

Ready to fix Shadow AoE and fix Shadow’s fun levels?

Rework the Idols, and remove Shadow Crash.

Rework Furling Darkness talent. Set it to 10 second procs, and every 10 seconds when you proc it, your next Vampiric Touch is instant, and applies VT to all targets around the current target that you are in combat with. It no longer does direct/instant damage, just spreads your DoTs immediately and applies both VT and SW:P if you have Misery talented.

Reworking the Idols: Mindbinder Idol on the left goes away, that whole section goes away. Left Idol, instead, becomes: “Starting at 100% health, every 2% missing health from your enemies with your Shadow Damage over Time effects increases the damage and ticking speeds by 0.75% ticking speed and 0.5% damage per missing 2% health.” Basically, by the time the mob goes to 0% hp, your DoTs tick 37.5% faster and 25% harder.

Next idol is the Echoing Void idol. Rework this into: “Your Shadow Damage over Time effects now splash X% of their damage on to all targets within 10 yards.”

With these 2 idol reworks on the left side you now have a fully DoT committed side that makes your DoTs the star of the show and makes them do splash damage and do extra damage on top of even faster damage.

Rework the Thing from Beyond Idol into a Shadowy Apparition Idol, instead: “You now spawn double the amount of Shadowy Apparitions. In addition, your Shadowy Apparitions now deal X% splash damage to all targets near the target they hit.” With the paths leading down to it making it so the apparitions travel 100% faster, and also making it so your SW:P, VT and DP ticks have a 15/30% chance to summon them, with crits having a 100% chance to summon apparitions.

The tentacles idol is very cool and fun, make them spawn more frequently; give it a 5-7 procs per minute rate, and also make them spawn on the priest itself, so this way as you travel and move around they move with you, or make them follow you around or something where you’re able to keep doing damage while moving. Also, make them specifically prefer going after targets with DP up on them. They do not use Mind Seer, they just Mind Flay and they hit every target with a DP on them from their Mind Flay. An example: You have a group of 4 mobs, 2 of them have DP up and you spawn some tentacles, each tentacle would have 2 Mind Flays, 1 going to each target with DP up.

Also both Insanity things need to be fixed, too. Mind Flay: Insanity should be able to be castable while moving, and Mind Spike: Insanity should be instant cast when you get these procs. That or make both able to be castable while moving.

Now choose your playstyle: DoTs, machine gun apparitions or tentacles, mix and match.

You’re welcome, tuning can come, obviously as if they used my raw %s then it would be full on broken number wise. However, I do believe DoT specs should do higher raw damage because they give up a lot of burst for sustain damage, not to mention also that DoT specs should all have this caveat: “Beyond 2 targets, X deals 10% reduced damage.” “Beyond 5 targets, X deals 10% further reduced damage.” “Beyond 8 targets, X deals 10% further reduced damage.” X would be whatever DoT for all DoT specs. Like for Spriest it would be VT, DP and SW:P all do reduced damage. For Aff it would be Corruption, Agony, UA, SL, PS/VT, etc. Feral would have Rip, Rake, Thrash doing reduced damage. Idk bout Asn.

Anyways, I know and understand how out of control DoT specs can get with more mobs, so doing something like that would help reduce the insane scaling I think.

1 Like
9

Just go back to s1 s priest make a choice node between sear and p link so you cannot take both, put crash at 20 second cd, 2 charges, and add some better talent connections and s priest is pretty much perfect.

1 Like
10

It ain’t perfect because 3 of the 4 idols are literally some of the worst designs for this spec.

11

It’s better than now, that’s certain.

I guess they can improve idols though. Realistically i only really like cthun idol becauase of the insanity gen, n zoth is whatever, the mindbender one is a decent idea i guess, the yogg one is kinda whatever too, just passive damage.