Shadow needs a big buff to its dots & mind blast, and it also needs an AoE rework.
How long do we have to wait at this point? We lack mobility, cc, reliable kicks, please just buff our damage already…
11 Likes
Wholeheartedly agree. Terrible place in raids, terrible place in low keys. Mediocre in higher. It would be nice that if we’re going to be relegated to having inconsistent and restricted AoE damage that we at least bring valuable utility to groups in dungeons. Pick a lane and carve a niche because we’re starving.
5 Likes
Or, if they aren’t going to buff our damage, I would also accept a significant buff to Vamp Embrace/healing so there’s a reason to bring an Spriest. Embrace feels so week being on such a long cooldown and only healing yourself + 1 other target at a time. Shorter cooldown, make it party wide at a lower percentage, something to make it not so terrible…
3 Likes
I agree we need buffs. I also would not mind if the plan is to make shadow priest like the 2nd augmentation spec. Reduce PI cooldown and embrace also maybe out dots to debuff targets to do more dmg etc it would be nice and a reason to bring spriests to M+.
4 Likes
I’ve been asking the same question. How long and how many people actually have to complain before a lightbulb goes off in someone’s head at Blizzard. SP is atrociously bad right now and has been for quite some time.
7 Likes
True priest need a buff so bad
1 Like
Hell no. I play spriest to dps not be a support role, we have other healing specs do not give them this idea
7 Likes
I hope they do not do this, horrible idea. The idea of using the void to buff your team is just yuck.
3 Likes
Just started gearing up my Priest after Shaman and Lock. Please Buff Shadow a respectful amount. Stop with the baby buffs that don’t even move the scale.
And while your at it… Make Shadow Crash a 10 sec CD or give it 2 charges (and increase the bad 8 yard radius).
Blizzard claims they are listening to feedback yet ALL the Feedback around this talent has NOT been heard. And Void Crash doesn’t solve ppl’s problems.
5 Likes
Our damage is really not where our biggest problems lie, though i will admit in ST we could still use a few more bumps, our problems are in
-our out of date utility,
-complete lack of mobility,
-our aoe rotation having 0 failsafe if Shadow crash misses or doesn’t hit all the targets,
-PI being factored into our power budget while not actively displaying in any metric that’s playerfacing, leading to us providing arguably a fair bit more than we are shown to.
A few damage buffs will move the needle and put us back into S2 and S4 DF, where we’re played for being overtuned, but the fundemental class/spec design is still hot dog water and will inevitably return to feeling terrible upon returning to normal tuning.
Fix. the underlying. issues.
5 Likes
Agreed^^^ 100%
And on another note. you are looking good my friend.
2 Likes
same to you friend! This lass is always proud of how her wolf looks ^w^
3 Likes
I would really like to see any amount of communication from Blizzard on the state of shadow priests at the moment. I’d be happy with “We’re working on something”, would be less excited to hear “We’re happy with the state of shadow”, but the silence is painful.
4 Likes
Seconded so hard. If they don’t want us to be a #1 cranking DPS that’s totally fine just let us make up for it by bringing more utility to the people around us.
Every time the patch notes come out every class/spec gets a novel written about the changes. These are all the changes that Shadow Priest has received in the last month:
9/24/24 - Increased all damage by 4%
9/17/24 - Increased all damage by 6% / Decreased psychic link damage by 5%
9/3/24 - Voidweaver Shadow priests’ Void Blast damage increased by 20%.
Actually insane that in 30 days that all of our changes are boiled down to 3 bullet points, and one of those bullet points applies to a hero spec that less than 1% of spriests play.
5 Likes
Their silence is deliberate at this point. Priest has received effectively zero changes (Mindgames’ removal is only a factor for shadow and they could have simply removed that branch from the tree and it would’ve been welcomed more warmly than the replacement talents).
I’m going to start on the copium.
I am going to convince myself that they didn’t do anything at all to priest during development and are very obviously omitting only priest from 11.0.5 changes is because they don’t want to talk about a sweeping class overhaul so they can demote priest whining to regular whining just like they did with shaman. The reason they didn’t release it during beta like shaman is because the scope of the undertaking is significantly larger and they weren’t ready.
I have no reason to believe this other than I can’t believe Blizzard thinks it’s a good strategy to leave a class in the state priest is in when the high level perspective of classes trickles down as completely as it does in WoW.
Is that a compelling reason? Absolutely not.
But disdain is the only other reason for priest to be the only class to go without extensive updates immediately before or during an expansion launch even though its a design problem so notorious they nuked it from orbit and reworked other classes because of it.
4 Likes
Regardless if they are absolutely deft and blind to the issues surrounding Priest or they are keenly aware is still no excuse to even at the bare minimum throw us a bone as to what direction or feedback or just the vision they want to take priest in.
But then the more problematic issue could be at hand…
They both know the issues surrounding Priest, however… they have absolutely no idea what direction or vision or anything at all figured out to even share with us the little teaser tidbits in order to gauge our response. They might be totally creatively bankrupt and are still trying to figure out how to properly salvage Priest without looking like a clueless surprised Picachu face if they accidentally let it slip that they have no idea what is going on or what they are going to do lol.
That is a scary, terrifying and somehow would track with everything we expect based on everything we’ve seen and witnessed.
3 Likes
More likely explanation: they forgor 
More likely their team morale is low due to layoffs and any staff who would be responsible for communications have been let go.
This is almost certainly the reality of the situation, which is why their revisions to alpha Dragonflight priest did nothing but reduce problems priest has that radiate to the rest of the game (Mind Sear being insane AoE for no effort, Mass Dispel trivializing their dungeon design, Mind Spike giving priest mobility in PvP) or ease pain points with the existing design (rolling Schism and Shadow Covenant into Mind Blast and Shadowfiend) without changing anything tangible about what the class does.
Again, they admitted they rushed priest out the door completely unfinished and without any real consideration as to what it was supposed to do. They literally did zero work on priest all of Dragonflight alpha and did a single revision addressing nothing but the most egregious, unacceptable flaws in the alpha trees near the end of beta and then posted PW:GFY.
They definitely know how big a mistake that was and they’ve clearly spent every second of time allotted to priest since then doing nothing but making sure priest’s design flaws don’t harm the rest of the game.
I’m sure they spent next to no time during Dragonflight addressing priest’s problems, but they’d have to be utterly and completely incompetent to leave such a massive problem untreated for such a long time. We know they are listening because priest have been clamoring for years about every time Blizzard touches priest it’s a failure. Shamans have extremely minor complaints by comparison, and Blizzard didn’t say a word until they knew they were going to finally answer the questions the following week.
Priest is a dramatically greater problem to solve than shaman was. All shaman needed was some minor changes, not unlike the band-aids Blizzard put on priest during Dragonflight. Priest’s foundations need to be rebuilt, and Blizzard must know that given their pattern of simply containing the priest problem to the class, going so far as to reworking other classes to have healthier play patterns because that’s far easier to do than fixing priest.
It’s hard, but I’m convincing myself that they’ve been hard at work on priest since 10.2.x, aren’t ready to talk about it, didn’t want to devote more time to temporary changes, and 11.1 (or maybe 11.0.7?) is going to be big for us. The only alternative is that Blizzard is genuinely malicious about the class, which makes no sense.
Think about it - Shadow Crash got new particles in beta only for them to be removed. They probably didn’t mean for those particles to be revealed. They’re definitely working on something - it’s just a matter of how extensive it is.
2 Likes