I get the ST damage is kind of garbage, but doubling down on how Shadow operates isn’t doing anything for anyone.
San’layn made into sanguine teachings removing the cdr on vamp embrace, only to give you 3% leech? What?
Mind flay insanity, void torrent… these are both awful talents and just make you a turret forever. Including these into a st rotation feels awful. It just feels like we were yet again cast by the wayside. It doesn’t seem like the beta forums were listened to at all. Nothing flows.
Shadow is okay, but it doesn’t feel good to play. Especially with mind sear being a spender.
The CDR on vamp embrace stays. Taking the talent now ALSO makes Sanguine Teachings increase your leech by 2% more (up to 5%). This also means Sanguine teachings is going somewhere, probably up where vamp embrace is (meaning vamp goes baseline?) but we don’t know quite yet since these are datamined and we don’t have the talent trees updated or the client to look at.
Vampiric Embrace is now a choice node with 3% leech for Disc and Holy that can’t get value from the spell like Shadow can. This part is overall a great change and there are no downsides to it.
I disagree about Mind Flay: Insanity. It actually makes Mind Flay feel good to press. I don’t get the feeling at all that it makes us a “turret forever.”
I have no problem with some casters feeling like turrets. What I have a problem with is the developers introducing ever more garbage mechanics into the game that make turret casters obsolete in content. Players complain and the only solution the developers can come up with is to devolve turret casters into mobile casters. This game needs more play style variety, not less. Give turret casters better abilities and talents that allow them to avoid or mitigate mechanics that punish standing still.
Void Torrent is just a lackluster ability, though. It feels like another empowered Mind Flay. It doesn’t really add anything special to game play other than button bloat.
Agree that trying to cast spells with multiple ground effects and other things to dodge is so frustrating. Shadow feels a lot less mobile than it used to due to how much time we spend channeling various spells. And if you have to clip your void torrent, mf:i, MD proc mind sear, it feels so bad because it’s just lost damage.
I don’t really want dungeon or raid design to get simpler so it’s not a problem. But most other caster specs have ways to deal when heavy movement is required, eg mage’s ice floes/shimmer, shaman’s spiritwalkers grace, evoker’s hover, etc.
The original post links 10.0.5 changes. You know, the mini content patch where druid, the other class that was unfinished at launch, is getting a number of talent reworks for its specs…. Given how terribly shadow plays right now, the state of our talent tree, and the multiple bugs, it would be logical that some changes are made for shadow too.
Like, if shadow has to wait until 10.1 to give devs time to sort out a good design for shadow, that’s fine, but it would be nice to know they’re working on it, at least.
Buffs are all well and good, but dps is a small part of the problems with shadow right now and I’d like to know blizzard recognizes this, instead of just tuning repeatedly, which gives the impression they are happy with the design.
That’s subjective. Is it clunky? Yes. Is it terrible? I wouldn’t go that far. IMHO we don’t need a complete overhaul. If they tweak our reliance on Shadow Crash, fix the few weird bugs we still have and prune a couple of steps out of our rotation, I’m fine.
I can agree with this. Blizzard devs suck at communicating. I feel every now and then, they do a good job for like 1-2 month stretches before they go back to radio silence on everything. I would like to know what they have planned for us, but for next week, I’ll settle on a buff to our single target damage - it shows they at least are aware of our biggest problem right now.
I think my issues, or I guess moreso confusion? come from how bliz seem to say one thing and then do another. One of the major pain points of Shadow’s Single Target rotation for the first patch of DF has been the sheer number of active spells it involves, even moreso because of the bug with screams pushing us away from builds that could potentially rely on more passive talents. Blizzard has in the past stressed this as button bloat and generally tries to shy away from super button heavy rotations.
On top of this the changes being made in 10.0.5 to psychic link and buffs to Mind Spike add not only void torrent but mind spike to shadow’s AoE rotation, as well as Halo or Divine star to the Single Target rotation. It feels like players are asking for some clarity in the talent tree and what we’re getting instead is more convolution.
Honestly, I would be fine with that. I already made the decision to swap to mage for raiding this tier. If their message is “we like shadow the way it is and don’t plan on making substantial changes to the tree,” at least I can make the decision to give it up for good instead of continuing to hope it gets fixed and constantly being disappointed.
I’d of course love it if they said, “we plan to redesign the spec for 10.1,” but at this point any insight into their direction would be welcome.
It’s hard to make good decisions with only assumptions to go on.
ST changes are welcome, not going to turn down a buff but still no addressing our wonky AoE is pretty annoying. Shadow crash when it hits feels good but has so many situations where mobs can be completely moved negating damage to that of below tank levels.