How did people feel about Legion Shadow Priest?

Classes Priest
1

It seems to me that the Legion Shadow priest was one of the coolest classes in terms of gameplay in the entire game. It was very punishing yes, especially with surrender to madness, and resulted in polarizing experiences, but if it went well it was also extremely rewarding.

Now, I don’t have that much experience playing with it despite this, so I’m very curious about the opinions of people who mained this spec during legion.

My primary point, in case there is a significant number of people who feel like I do, is this:
One side of the Shadow Priest tree should provide you with abilities/passives to bring back the Legion playstyle. Talent trees for some classes currently seem to be divided between single target and AoE halves, but to me they are better used as gameplay options you can choose between, and lean into preference as well as what the fights might require from you.

Frost DK is a great example of what a talent tree should look like: It provides gameplay options between Breath of Sindragosa and Obliteration. While one side of the tree leans significantly into AoE, you can easily skip Breath, and take a mixture of both sides to still build a seemingly potent AoE build (Icecap + Frostwyrm Whelp)

I would love to see something similar with shadow priest, with old surrender to madness and old voidform returning towards the end of one side to bring back this playstyle as an option.

1 Like
2

Ever since the whole Voidform became a thing and destroyed what Shadow was and capable of prior, the spec has been plagued with issues in every iteration.

In Legion, the spec only really did well in Raids and prolonged fights… or High level M+.

In PvP, they got gutted to be literally worthless… They got a PvP talent called Edge of Insanity that made it so you do a little more damage if you have max Insanity and you don’t go into Voidform anymore. Doing this forced you to not be able to use 3 abilities (Void Eruption, Void Bolt & Void Torrent) yet it was still a better option in PvP because you just get silenced or stunned or CC of anytime while in Voidform and it drains away forcing you to loose that window of damage regardless.

The entire idea around Voidform only works in a perfect situation where you are not moving, no external factors preventing you from casting and on a long fight that allows you to fully play out your rotation and them some.

  • Doing world content caused you to nearly die if you tried pulling more then a few mobs.
  • Doing PvP caused you to be a free kill target
  • Doing any PvE content that forces you to move fast a lot (M+ / 5 mans) caused you to take forever to kill things compared to the rest of your group thus when you finally ramp up and getting started and popping off, they already killed everything which makes your DPS meter questionable as it appears you haven’t contributed… when is essence you really didn’t.

Then when it comes to scaling and balancing… it was an entire mess because when you were actually on long fights and able to free cast, you start scaling out of control which caused a balance nightmare cause the higher you scaled, the more the “base” DPS of the spec needed to be nerfed for “balance” which just made all the problems I listed even worse.

I cant tell you how awful the feeling was when my WoD Shadow Priest was able to decimate an entire raid of opposite faction of people easily with the tools I had prior to Voidform in Ashran. Then comes pre-patch and I cant kill a group of mobs questing without nearly dying. It was freaking sad and pathetic I just couldn’t handle it and moved on from the spec to play my Demon Hunter. The very sad part is that from the way past experiences went, when Pre-patch hit, you typically feel MORE powerful, not less.

Then in BFA it just became an even worse version and still had scaling issues which caused even more nerfs and causing more struggling in PvP and in any content when things die fast.

Shadowlands seemed like a step in the right direction in limiting the scaling potential from Voidform. But its still not an elegant spec and still had some scaling and balance issues.

If anything, the 10.0 talent trees need to figure out what it wants to do with the Void crap, push that to 1/2 of the tree and then use the other half to bring back WoD playstyles or even Wrath playstyle where we mainly focus on dots and Mind Flay, Mind Blast or both… which my version of the talent tree approach to 10.0 accomplishes all of the above and them some while still allowing you the freedom to pick other things that push you in the direction of…

  • More Spirits play
  • More Dots play
  • More Mind Spells play
  • More Void play

In conclusion, Voidform is a mess and I would argue a failed experiment when you compare it to WoD and the capability Shadow had at that time.

My Take on the Class and Shadow talent trees.

6 Likes
3

Voidform (and Legion’s SP playstyle) needs to be dropped and forgotten.

This is not a positive outcome.

4 Likes
4

I agree that it was a difficult playstyle that was affected significantly by external disruptors. But that’s what I think makes it a good fit for a talent tree that might have room in one corner for it. You would only take it if you were very proficient with the style and the content permitted it.
The idea of focusing on a small niche - massive sustained dps when given time and space and executed with a lot of skill - is very intriguing to me
Then again, if a majority of spriest players feel that it was frustrating it’s definitely not worth it.

5

The entire reason we are at this stage with the mess that the current 10.0 Shadow Priest talent preview has is a direct path from the Legion Shadow Revamp problem…

And you want to return to that problem…

I don’t understand how you don’t see that as well… a problem.

If and I mean “IF” (Its not going to happen) but IF they brought back the Legion version of shadow and it was “contained” and “separated” from the balancing issues the rest of the spec and talents provides, then it would be SEVERALLY underpowered as they have to account for the MAX potential you can squeeze out of that playstyle. That means if you can for example scale to 100x from your normal base state… they have to nerf your normal base state so that when you are 100x… you are only THEN equal to everyone else. That means when your are not at 100x… you are ALWAYS playing second fiddle and playing catchup.

That is the ONLY way you can get what you want that is equivalent to Legions Shadow priest without bringing back all the balancing nightmare.

You basically have to be like a mob out in the world that has no special abilities in your base form in order to not be OP when you do everything perfectly in the perfect fight setup.

2 Likes
6

Another home-run post by Aneurysm…

1 Like
7

Legion Shadow should return as a new spec. Its gameplay experience was too unique to not exist in this game.

8

Unique doesn’t necessarily mean enjoyable.

As mentioned, it polarised the player base, and was removed for that reason.

It cannot exist as a talent as it would jeopardize the tuning of the remainder of the spec. Legion Voidform is dead and gone.

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You’re too jaded to even read what I wrote. Come back when you’re done tunnel visioning.

10

Likewise…

The first 2 paragraphs were in direct response to you…

The third paragraph was for the OP…

But go ahead and assume everything is about you :roll_eyes:

11

I never liked it. Personally I thought TBC/Wrath Shadow was great because you were a mana battery for the raid as well as a buffer for healers (you would keep some periodic damage topped off for them to focus on bigger chunks).

1 Like
12

I don’t believe this is necessarily as difficult as you make it sound. It has always been in WoW that some classes require a lot more effort to do decent damage than others. A talent that increases your spec difficulty and makes it so that it is harder for you to do damage is not an inherently bad thing if there are people who want that challenge or enjoy that playstyle. WoW isn’t just about “how can I do the most damage with minimal effort.” It is okay for a Legion Shadow Priest to perform at 100% only to do equal or slightly more damage than a much easier class.
It is less okay for that to be forced onto the people. What I am suggesting has minimal cost - Imagine on Row 8, you have a column of talents splitting off. The only other change that needs to be done is move devouring plague in a spot that makes it not completely mandatory in the path.

  • Madness of the Old Gods: Your void form grants stacking haste for its duration, but drains increasingly fast. (You can also put a “But X, Y, and Z spells do % reduced damage” to make it so that people who don’t like the playstyle don’t feel pressured into it)
  • Lingering Insanity: Haste from your Voidform persists after it ends for X seconds.
  • Surrender to Madness: All your insanity generating abilities generate 100% more insanity, and you can cast while moving until you exit voidform. Then you die. Horribly.

This still leaves room for shadow priest to be something else - it is entirely opt in.

13

I have to disagree… this is not healthy. Blizz will not go back to this again.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/10

Edit:

To be clear, I am not saying to get rid of Voidform… I think that is not in the cards as that ship has sailed.

But what I am saying, is that the iteration that Voidfrom was in, in Legion… thats not happening. So if you want that back, I really don’t think it will happen as the data and contention is not on that side of the argument.

However, to make Voidform “better” without creating an infinite scaling problem… so NOT be like Legion, then I think that can be discussed.

This thread is specifically talking about “Legion” iteration of Voidform. THAT is what I responded too. Something different than legion… I don’t mind discussing.

1 Like
14

What I like is the feeling of this ramping and increasingly faster playstyle that you know, if you mess up, will kill you. This is the “Legion playstyle” I’m referring to, but obviously not exactly as it was then.

There might be ways of preserving that in some form without recreating as polarizing an experience as Legion shadow priest. I don’t claim that it was healthy for the raid environment - especially because it could do much much much more dps than any other class (The problem would at least be mitigated if it was more in line with other classes at its peak - which now would be more fair because shadow priest players don’t have to opt in to it).

But it was very fun and rewarding.

That could mean capping the maximum haste you can get from voidform but still giving it a ramp so that it can’t go too crazy, or some other half-way solution I can’t think of right now.

15

Whatever “cap” you put on it, everything that you can use while “speced” into the talents and others… will NEED to be balanced around that MAX potential. Meaning if you don’t hit that MAX, you will ALWAYS feel bad.

So what this does is once again make it so you need the perfect scenario of not moving, long boss fights and not interrupted in order to do what is “expected” of you. While everyone else do not have those restrictions.

Either way, you are subjected to your MAX limitations as is everyone else. The more you have the capability to inflate you potential, the more you will be required to always be in that state or be considered trash or subpar.

Edit:

The Risk is too great and has the potential to spread and effect / contaminate the rest of the specialization and bring they entire thing out of whack be it for the upside or downside.

At this point, I could care less if Blizz would even entertain the idea of trying a Legion 2.0 with Voidform. But I would bet against it.

1 Like
16

it wasnt one of the coolest classes though. it was cool in raids sure. in every other aspect of the game it was awful. nice idea. good attempt. terrible design.

17

youre conflating difficult and bad design.

18

This is why people with only a portion of gameplay experience be it JUST PvP or JUST Raiding or JUST M+ have a very narrow and short sighted view when they try to suggest or implement ideas that has MASSIVE risks in every other type of content that those “ideas” didn’t think about or consider.

I firmly believe that whoever lead the Legion Shadow redesign NEVER did any type of PvP or 5 man content. They were only a raider. I am POSITIVE that anyone who spent just a decent amount of time doing PvP and 5 mans would have found very quickly that the Voidform integration of shadow was AWFUL in everything but Raiding.

Voidform was designed specifically with raiding in mind and that’s all there is too it.
Extremely short sighted.

Its why I smh when I see raiders making suggestions or PvPers making suggestions about shadow that totally mess up the other side… this is coming from the so called 1% folk… gah awful. Play all aspects in order to get a proper understanding of the class / spec or don’t come to the table with the position of you knew exactly what the class / spec needs.

2 Likes
19

This is how classes are already balanced. Arcane mages can lose their entire burst by getting interrupted by mechanics. There was actually a discussion around Rune of Power in the forums - which is a much much lower requirement to get the benefits, and yet there’s still complaint that mage is balanced as if you’re standing 100% on your Rune of Power.

Making it harder to get to max output - the same max output as everyone else - is not inherently bad. Imagine in a world where every DPS, when played perfectly, does the same damage. Not everyone would play BM hunter, just because it’s much easier to hit that max damage. Sometimes there is inherent value in opting in for a challenge for the fun of it.

The only risk is if it is THE BEST way to play shadow priest. That would force everyone to play it or quit their class, which is obviously very bad. Shadow priest shouldn’t be balanced around an old voidform build.

20

I should clarify I have been a pretty active M+ player and raider in the past several expansions. Obviously, old Surrender to Madness in M+ is unplayable. But that’s why it can work now, while being poor design in Legion. You drop a talent. Done.

Breath of Sindragosa isn’t great in M+ - or rather it’s risky. There are many potential interruptions. There are other examples of things that are not good in some content, and great in other. Back in Legion, all shadow priest had was this playstyle. It’s obviously terrible in M+. It makes no sense in PvP. But now, you can just pick anything from the rest of what looks to be a fairly expansive talent tree when you’re not raiding.