i have an ilvl of 587 and my dps is being beaten by people with an ilvl of 550. what the heck happened to this spec? its sooo lack luster. i dont think ive ever been top dps in a heroic 5 man this expansion.
skills are so wonky, i dont even have shadow word pain on my action bar because i can apply it with something else yet its one of our main spells. like what?
On the bright side, our 1.5sec cast of mind blast hits about half as hard as an ice lance
SW:pain is a great insta cast to use on the run and yes its better than nothing.
Much less than that.
and our mind flay insanity hits just under an ice lance ^.^
Shadow is not just worse than MoP. It’s worse than it has been at any time before shadowlands. It really makes me wonder if the talented class designers are truly all gone from the company.
1.3 seconds of silence for my shadow 
advise designers to take care of themselves，my shadow is about to release dark and heavy secret 
Pretty sure I read somewhere that Priest had a Dedicated Dev back in Legion. The one that came up with Surrender to Madness and Insanity, and he departed in BFA then we got another one and they departed in Shadowlands. Not sure if there was ever a replacement dev.
But With all the tech layoffs this year I feel there just isn’t a dev looking at it. And its compounded by the fact we know they know the state Priest is in. But then they rework Hunter instead. 
Uh what? My crit mind flay insanities hit for 950k a tick. What mages are you playing against?
When they first announced the Legion Shadow rework, they did it for no other reason than simply “because” as Shadow worked and played just fine… great even in WoD.
But they wanted to make the changes in Legion to fit with the weapon artifact system and instead of Shadow remaining mysterious and up for interpretation, they attached this whole void/insanity/old god tentacle theme to it.
In doing these alterations, they completely tossed shadow upside down in changing our resource system to Insanity instead of Shadow Orbs and made it drain by default alongside removing a lot of spells we had access to in WoD both rotationally and utility while introducing every other spell or mechanic centered solely around maintaining your insanity drain which overtime caused any talent that didn’t affect your insanity drain to become a worthless talent since it was the core mechanic that held everything in shadow together.
This insanity drain mechanic become a source of design restraint as they have now designed the entire spec into a corner of insanity maintenance. This is why stupid things like casting Dispel Magic eventually granted insanity because every GCD you spent that did not grant you insanity caused your entire damage to plummet.
That means in any high movement or fast paced gameplay where you are out of combat for any amount of time like between pulls in M+ or PvP or heck just doing world content, you had to ramp up your insanity which caused you to be extremely weak and vulnerable before you get enough insanity to put you into Voidform for which in areas like PvP or 5 mans means you are pretty worthless if you can’t get a cast off while in Voidform due to either movement or interruption which causes you to enter a negative feedback loop on insanity generation which just forces you to spend more time playing like you are short of breath as if your held under water.
It was I believe shortly after the launch of Legion that the dev who imo butchered Shadow left the company for whatever reason and the spec has been limping along ever since.
It was a constant struggle to get Voidform under control and into a state that walks the line between overpowered and negligible between all the patches throughout Legion and BFA through multiple tuning passes and slight changes but nothing in the form of major reworks.
It was then in Shadowlands alpha that after loosing Legions Artifacts and legendaries and BFA Azerite armor and artifact necklace essences that Shadow was in a poor shape and near the end of the development cycle did shadow finally get a mini rework with Voidform no longer having the insanity drain mechanic and the inclusion of Devouring Plague returning as your resource consumer as well as a handful of talents that interact with Shadow instead of solely insanity resource.
But then the developer that was working on that left after that announcement of changes.
Then in the DF alpha, the dev that was in charge of Druid and Priest left early into the process and we were left with nothing till the last month or so with very little time to test and provide feedback and in turn get updated iterations on the launch of DF talents for Shadow.
Then in 10.1 we got a revised or I guess “completed” Shadow tree with the caveat that more work is needed and to come but they don’t have anymore time.
Then 2 years later we are at this point in the events of no communication and seemingly no vision as to if or when we will see further updates.
It’s been a long rough road since the end of WoD for which I would argue over silly reasons leading to many dead end paths.
Hope to see some better progress in the future but I won’t be surprised if we don’t at this point.
The standard rotation we had for years is obsolete, now it’s use halo to stack insanity, and then resource dump while doing a spam of 7 mind flay insanity, with pi being proccesd 10 sec into void form to get more mind flay damage.
Sw pain is just magical grafitti, doesn’t even tickle.
Mind Tickle
Noticed same thing, reached level 80 on one of my SP recently, noticeably they seem weaker now. I have around 540 ilvl and getting whooped in PVE, I’m taking damage at like 125K or x3 that a second, and dealing out half or less and healing is like 1/8th of all that. Just lame. Renew “heals 105K over 15s” is nothing when one has like over 3M hp. Flash Heal doing 234K with 1.7s cast time, means it’s neither “flash” or “heal” lol.
They just need to take the L, and say insanity was a mistake, and that they are going back to orbs.
I wont rag them for making an announcement like that, in fact i would respect them more. We all make mistakes.
But they have been trying to balance Spriest since Legion and it just isnt hitting. Sure it does well at end of seasons/expansions due to stats…but Gameplay wise it is abysmal.
I could only offer suggestions for what they could change, my first one would be to buff Void Torrent damage, cus it aint there chief lol.
It’s because Blizzard doesn’t know the class and listens to the whiners anytime shadow does good, which hasn’t been in a while. SW pain doesn’t even feel like a pinch on a mob…its completely useless. Devouring plague is good, however either you’re dead or either the mob is dead by a party member by the time you have enough insanity built up to use it…Oh, I almost forgot…shadowy apparitions would lose in a race with a vegetable that can’t move because they are that slow. I don’t know, they may win against broccoli but any other vegetable that can blow in the wind is beating shadowy apparitions in a race. It’s a complete joke and so are the people that are responsible for tuning shadow priest.
lol…be honest. SW pain is like running into a mist on a hot day…it’s actually refreshing and that’s how weak the spell is currently. When I get hit by “nothing” it hurts worse than being hit by SW pain.
Torrent Damage should = Eye Beam ST, but we’re not ready for that convo yet.
2.8 Million without mastery or buffs.
That’s great, but shadow is literally the lowest parsing DPS spec in the game atm.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/38