I was really disheartened to see no sign of the talent we had in WoD that replaced Mind Flay with Mind Spike. That was the only era I really enjoyed Shadow and I’d like to see it return in 10.0! Please Blizzard consider adding an additional talent branch off of Mind Flay that replaces it with Mind Spike!
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Blizzard has fully abanonded all aspects of class design from the Cata/MoP/WoD era 
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I really hope they’ll reconsider that.
I miss being a Priest “Shadow Mage” spamming a nuke rather than a channel. Warlock doesn’t give me the same feeling that i got as a Shadow Priest in WoD.
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I agree to bring back Mind Spike as a burst tool. But we should always keep Mind Flay. It’s always been part of our core toolkit and I think it serves a great purpose as it frees up those “moments” during its use for us to look around for opportunities to use our other toolkit utility abilities like Mind Control, Shackle, Psychic Scream, Vampiric Embrace, Silence, Leap of Faith etc.
I included Mind Spike in my take on how I would approach the 10.0 talent revamp.
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Having a talent that replaces Mind Flay with Mind Spike still leaves us with the option to have Mind Flay. If they just put Mind Spike as another button to hit and not a nuke to replace Mind Flay, then it’s not what I want. I don’t see anything wrong with having an alternative (and entirely optional) playstyle through Mind Spike replacing Mind Flay.
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More trouble then it’s worth.
Mind Spike by its very design intent is for killing targets that won’t live long. To balance that with our dots, it caused them to be stripped from our target. Only time this didn’t happen was under the effect of Surge of Darkness, but even then, it only did partial damage if you had dots on the target.
By design, we are a dot class with some burst capability. Our Mind Flay fills the roll of dots after the target has our set and forget dot spells already applied. Our Mind Blast is our burst ability for fast on demand damage.
Since the inception, we have only expanded those 2 interwoven approaches to additional dots, and burst capability while enhancing what we already have.
If you remove 1 or the other, the specialization suffers as a whole. Looking at the current iteration of Voidform, our burst is locked behind a cool down, no longer can we charge up a hard hitting Mind Blast whenever we want, we have to spend time to build into such things if it’s at all possible or use cooldowns to achieve this. That highlights the downside of not having on demand burst. But I would wager we would see similar but different effects if we loose our filler dot ability as well.
In conclusion, we need Both on demand burst and our filler dot spell. Not an either or.
If you don’t want Mind Spike then fine, but I want both. I don’t want to suffer 1 side or the other. That means Mind Flay should be baseline and Mind Spike optional.
The playstyle I had as Shadow in WoD with Mind Spike as a nuke replacing Mind Flay didn’t strip dots and was the most fun for me so that’s what I’d like see return. If you’d prefer something else, then you of course can ask for that, but I made this topic to ask for what I want.
Here’s the talent as it was back then:
- Mind Spike
- Level 100
- 40 yd range
- 1.5 sec cast
- Assail the target with shadowy spikes, dealing (44.8% of spell power) Shadowfrost damage and leaving a spike embedded in their mind.
Mind Blast will detonate these spikes, each dealing 200% of their original damage to the main target, and 100% to all nearby targets.
Generates 4 Insanity.
Replaces Mind Flay.
My request keeps Mind Flay baseline and Mind Spike an optional alternative.
I have no idea where you took that from.
But that is not from WoD.
This is…
Surge of Darkness
Requires Priest
Your Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague damage has a 12% chance to cause your next Mind Spike not to consume your damage over time effects, be instant, and deal 50% additional damage. Can accumulate up to 3 charges.
Here’s where I got that from and that’s how it worked when I played Shadow During WoD.
When it was a talent in WoD, Mind Spike was not a baseline spell. You only had it if you took this talent and it replaced Mind Flay.
Again, I don’t know where that came from. But I can assure you, that was never in WoD.
These are your WoD talents…
Priest
There are a bunch of talent changes for Priests. Only the talents that are new or have been replaced are shown here. For all the other changes see our Priests in Warlords post.
The level 15 and 60 talent rows have been swapped.
Level 15:
- Void Tendrils is now a level 60 Talent and is replaced with Desperate Prayer, which will heal you for 22% of your health.
- Psyfiend is dead and has been replaced with Spectral Guise, which lets you becomes a stealthy shadow for 6 seconds while your true form remains behind.
- undefined replaces Dominate Mind, which is now a level 60 talent. Attacks that bring you below 30% trigger a personal absorption field.
Level 45:
- Talent #1:
- Discipline and Holy get Surge of Light: Your healing spells, and Smite, have a chance to make your next Flash Heal free. Can accumulate 2 charges.
- Shadow gets Surge of Darkness: Damage done by both your Vampiric Touch and undefined has a 10% chance to cause your next Mind Spike not to consume your damage over time effects, be instant, and deal 50% additional damage. Can accumulate up to 3 charges.
- Talent #2: All specs get Mindbender, as before.
- Talent #3: This is basically the same talent as before, but with a new name.
- Discipline and Holy get Power Word: Solace
- Shadow gets undefined.
Level 60:
- Void Tendrils replaces Desperate Prayer.
- Psychic Scream replaces Spectral Guise.
- Dominate Mind replaces Angelic Bulwark.
Level 75:
Talent 3, Holy keeps undefined, but Shadow and Disc get new talents.
- Shadow gets Shadowy Insight: Your Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Spike damage has a 5% chance to reset the cooldown on Mind Blast and make your next Mind Blast instant.
- Discipline gets Spirit Shell: For the next 10 sec, your Heal, Flash Heal, and Prayer of Healing no longer heal but instead create absorption shields that last 15 sec. 60 sec. cooldown.
Level 100:
1st Talent:
- Discipline gets Clarity of Will: Shield the target for 20 sec with a protective ward.
- Holy gets undefined: Heals an ally for up to 100% and heals up to five nearby (within 10 yds) allies for the same amount. Replaces Prayer of Healing. 2.5 sec. cast time.
- Shadow gets undefined: Your Mind Spike, Mind Sear, and Shadow Word: Death deal 40% additional damage to targets not affected by your Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch. Also reduces the cooldown on Mind Blast by 3 sec and makes it instant cast.
2nd Talent:
-
Discipline and Holy – undefined: Heals and shields grant you stacks of “Word of Mending.” At ten stacks your next direct heal or shield also casts Prayer of Mending at the same target.
-
Shadow – undefined: Consumes up to three Shadow Orbs to do damage over 60 seconds. Could be interesting in all longer fights. Not so hot for short fights (lasts too long,) but nice for duels & bosses.
3rd Talent
-
Discipline & Holy – undefined: Instantly heal a friendly target for a big chunk of their max health, but your healing done is reduced by 10% for 10 seconds and this stacks up to ten times. Cast this one a few times and you won’t be doing much with the other heals. Might be worth it in some situations, such as when you need a big heal right now” and can afford the lessened heals afterwards.
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Shadow – Auspicious Spirits: Your Shadowy Apparitions grant 1 undefined instead of doing damage.
It’s right there on the wiki, but my timing was off it was in pre-patch going from WoD to Legion.
Patch 7.0.3 (2016-07-19): Redesigned. Changed from a level 44 ability to level 100 talent.
It replaced the Clarity of Power talent.
And then in 7.1.5…
Patch 7.1.5 (2017-01-10): Removed.
I know what I was playing, and it was Mind Spike replacing Mind Flay and it was fun.
This is crude, but it functions enough to display exactly what we had in WoD regarding talents.
https://wod-talent-grid-maker.appspot.com/talentgridmaker
I stopped playing my priest and moved to my replacement main Demon Hunter when Legion Prepatch came out and butchered my poor priest.
So, if you recall picking that talent up in WoD, then you never actually played WoD, you only played the 1st iteration of the Void themed clown show that the Shadow Priest is now lol.
Whenever it was, I enjoyed that playstyle with Mind Spike replacing Mind Flay and I’d like to see it return in Dragonflight.
Well, I would encourage you to learn how Clarity of Power worked as that is your replacement for Mind Flay.
Essentially you didn’t need to Mind Flay with that (short lived fights like dungeon packs) you can just dot up the high hp targets and Mind Blast and Mind Spike the lower health targets till you can Shadow Word: Death + Devouring Plague spam everything into oblivion.
But I can assure you on high health targets, you need Mind Flay.
Reason being they took out the talent your linking so quickly is because of it replacing Mind Flay makes the entire spec fall apart on long fights. If they buff Mind Spike damage to be comparable on long fights, then short fights it would simply be over powered. This is why it has the stripping dots mechanic to balancing things out.
They removed the Mind Spike replacing Mind Flay talent as a “oh crap! This is a horrible talent” reaction to the butchered state of shadow “Void” abomination they created.
Mind Spike can return and I hope it does. But Mind Flay NEEDS to always be present in our toolkit regardless if you love/hate it, it serves a great purpose as the filler spell while also being a dot so it gets ticking damage faster from haste which. Also affects our dots.
We are built around that, it’s why people like the priest and rolled one so long ago. Lets get back to the roots of what we are.
It’s not my replacement for Mind Flay because Mind Spike isn’t returning so far as we can see. I’m asking for what I want, not what you want, and nothing you say is going to change my request.
You can want whatever you want.
But What you want would break the entire specialization.
That’s all there is to it. This is why it was removed so quickly. It Broke The Spec.
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I wish there was a website that had all versions of old and outdated talent trees from each iteration. Obviously, you’re not wrong that Mind Spike was a talent at some point very early Legion. It must have been before the “remake.” but I’d like take glance at that talent tree cause I am drawing a complete blank. Like apparently Shadow Crash was also a level 100 talent at some point which is like… Why? Like it looks like https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_7.0.3_(class_changes) Mind Spike, Shadow Crash (although this https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_7.1.5 says Shadow Crash didn’t become a level 100 talent until 7.1.5) and Legacy of the Void were the level 100 talents, but what replaced Mind Spike when it was removed?
I believe in 7.1.5 the lvl 100 row was:
Legacy of the Void, Shadow Crash, Surrender To Madness
Prior to that the lvl 100 row was:
Legacy of the Void, Mind Spike, Surrender To Madness
Here’s an image of the talent tree prior to 7.1.5:
Shadow Crash replaced Mind Spike in the lvl 100 row and Misery took Shadow Crash’s old spot in the lvl 90 row.
Patch changes
Misery
*Patch 8.0.1 (2018-07-17): Moved to the level 45 talent row (was level 90).*Patch 7.1.5 (2017-01-10): Added.
Interesting, in the wiki’s I posted, they have Surrender to Madness listed as a level 50 talent.