Phase 7 Priest Feedback
T3 Tier Set Bonuses
- Priest - Shadow 2P Bonus Your Shadow Word: Pain ability deals 20% more damage.
Similar to other 2p bonuses for other classes but kinda underwhelming. Just a little damage increase.
- Priest - Shadow 4P Bonus Reduces the cooldown on your Mind Blast ability by 1.0 sec.
I assume the thinking behind this is that you would be able to put the last point in our Improved Mind Blast talent and you would have Mind Blast up a whole GCD earlier which is indeed what would happen, but this isn’t a positive.
Going from 4 GCDs between Mind Blast to 3 just squeezes our rotation to be even tighter than it already was. Now instead of having that extra 4th GCD to either add some variety when we don’t have to move with SW:D, or being able to get two full Mind Flays off with our T2.5 4p, Now we just lost a whole GCD. This means if there is any movement and we aren’t running T2.5 2p, we lose Mind Spike stacks for being able to make our rotation work.
While yes, in a non-movement fight this would make us be able to use Mind Blast more often and increase the DPS from it, any kind of fight that requires any kind of movement immediately renders this set bonus useless, and if anything, hurts us as we want to use Mind Blast on CD and having less Mind Spikes we can stack means less chance to crit. There are already some fights with enough movement to make us not be able to get full Mind Spike stacks in AQ, and this set bonus just makes it worse.
Overall, this set bonus is more of a set negative as with any movement it hurts us and for more casual players will just make them stressed/confused with what to press after any type of movement when they have mind blast up but not guaranteed crit chance. A better set bonus that keeps the spirit of the bonus but instead flips it upside down would be:
Increases the cooldown of your Mind Blast by 3.0 seconds, Mind Blast now does x% more damage (To compensate for the CD increase), and Mind Spike stacks over 3 increases the damage of your next Mind Blast by x% stacking 3 times.
This would give us 2 more GCDs to play around with by either doing another whole Mind Flay/Mind Spikes with T2.5, SW:D, or more Mind Spikes AND give more breathing room for having to move during fights. This also helps Mind Blast from being out scaled like it was close to being last phase by Mind Spike.
-Priest - Shadow 6P Bonus Your Mind Flay, Mind Blast, and Mind Spike abilities deal increased damage to Undead targets equal to their critical strike chance.
Lots of damage but 0 change to the gameplay. This is fine though as for the shoulder enchant we can run either T1 6p or T2.5 4p and then wear T2.5 2p with slightly different gameplay, but as of right now it would just be the same that we have right now but we have 1 less GCD to use between Mind Blasts. Overall a very powerful tier set bonus that will 100% be taken over other options.
Shoulder Enchants
- T1 2p: Useless
- T1 6p: Likely needs a buff to be considered but would be a fun set bonus to have
- T2 2p: Not powerful enough to be considered
- T2 4p: Useless without 6p which you would need to get this from gear in order to get rendering it useless
- T2 6p: useless without 4p which requires 4 of your gear slots to be taken and using this opens up 2 gear slots that don’t need to be T2. That being said, I don’t see a world of this being used with less stats on gear and more likely a damage loss when compared to using 6p T3 which you wouldn’t be able to use with this as you need 4p T2.
- T2.5 2p: Unlikely to be enchanted and more likely to be worn
- T2.5 4p: Likely to be the best option for Shoulder Enchant to go with 6p T3 + 2p T2.5
- Devouring Plague: Not powerful enough to be considered
Spriest Overall
T3 2p: bit more DoT damage 5/10
T3 4p: REALLY bad, actively makes the spec harder/loses value from any kind of movement 0/10
T3 6p: Really powerful but doesn’t augment how the spec is played and just a large damage increase, but helped by being able to run a previous set bonus as a shoulder enchant. 7/10
Likely gear for Naxx BiS with current tuning: 6p T3 + 2p T2.5 + 4p T2.5 shoulder enchant