Priest Runes - Specifically Spriest into Phase 2 (How to make SWD more interesting)

[Zarkul-senjin]

For S-Priest:

First suggestion for the current Shadow Word Death Rune:
Make it return 50% of the damage done as mana. It would play into that idea of risk/reward for pushing the button.
Do you utilize that mana to pre-cast a Power Word Shield on yourself, and have to mana manage to have that resource available beforehand?
Do you hit yourself then use that mana to cast a heal on yourself, and decide which level of spell/mana cost to recoop the hp you need.
Do you just straight up eat the damage and make your healer take care of you so you can utilize that mana for more damage?

Either way, it makes the rune far more interesting in the decision making and depending on the group and whose willing to help.

Other options:

1. Rune that augments Vampiric Touch, which we will have access to in p2.
   Instead of all shadow damage healing for 10% of the damage, it simply returns mana to the entire party/raid instead. (Suggestion party, so that more slots are open for other priest friends )
   This would give S-Priest flexibility in raid composition to either put them in groups to provide health back for their damage or mana. Gives them flexibility in raid set ups.

The mana would need to be adjusted so that they don’t outweigh things like Shamanistic rage, and since this is a very manageable DoT to keep up, it needs to be viewed more as… well we got an extra 4 - 5 casts out IE having an Spriest equates to chugging 1 mana/hp potion during that encounter that wouldn’t have been available due to the GCD of a potion.

2. Shadow Fiend
   Not only does it do shadow damage to the target/have a cleaving attack every few seconds. Every time it deals damage, it also provides mana back to the shadow priest. I believe a version of this existed at one point? Either way it gives the shadow priest essentially their own Shamanastic Rage while also providing a damage boost to themselves AND with Vampiric Touch applied, it gives them MORE ways to proc damage to heal their party/raid. I would suggest a 1 minute cool down on it so that it can be utilized 2 - 3 times depending on encounter, and used “intelligently,” as the priest gear scores. It isn’t just a static rune, it actually takes some brain power to decide when to optimally push the button as you grow in power/depending on your raids capabilities.

Things I would just like to see for Shadow Priest:

1. Void Form/Void Bolt - Only don’t worry about all the fancy changing of everything with the current mana versus insanity. Simply give us a 2 or 3 minute cool down where we enter a form for roughly 10 - 20 seconds (our personal version of a Power Infusion) and during that time we get access to infinite mana AND a button that lets us throw out an instant shadow damaging spell that hits mega hard. Totalling in 4 - 5 casts (of void bolt) during that period. This would allow us to line up some trinkets/cool downs, make sure we have pre-DoT’d or maybe even stacked up 5 shadow weaves BEFORE we push this button and optimize that window. And if we are reading the situation correctly, IE, not needing to move (so we can channel Mindflay/cast Mind Blast) between utilizing the instant cast of the Void Bolt to reposition. We could truly think out our pre-rotation and rotation during that time period to get off as many casts as possible and ramp our damage up so our typical rotation numbers start bringing us down, but allow our median before boss is killed to technically raise us overall.

This would also help for fights where there are specific burn phases IE Kelris as an example. So we can be the type of dps that has, “Big Buttons,” that we can push and help with raid specifics that need people with “Phase Pushing Buttons.”

And aesthetically, just give us the giant dark wings that used to exist for…God I forget… there was that entire way of playing shadow priests where you utilized shadow orbs…and having the dark angel wings out was like the whole thing behind it… so long ago.

2. Void Tendrils

These models continue to exist and show up… we got them in Murlock shadowboi fight. Maybe give our mindflay a % chance per tick to spawn a tendril that also channels mindflay for the total of 1 or maybe 2 mindflays?
That way we could either expense the mana for MORE mindflay or decide to utilize our mana elsewhere/start wanding because it can help “buffer” our damage out. With that random chance that we just get a ton of tendrils out of no where and start blowing stuff up. Again, I like RNG mechanics

3. Shadow Crash

Make this one SMART though. However much time is left on Shadow Word Pain, it automatically blows it it up. This would help with AoE cycles that quite honestly don’t last very long/gives us a way to suddenly BURST and see returns on the DoT when we used things like Shared Pain.

~~

General Priest Rune:

1. Angelic Feather - We all know it, we love it, and our friends…especially our fleeing friends in PvP, thank us

2. Leap of Faith - Same reasons… only we get to also Troll our friends… and open world enemies!

[Tyra-shadowstrike-au]

@Zarkul-senjin

Rune that augments Vampiric Touch, which we will have access to in p2.
Instead of all shadow damage healing for 10% of the damage, it simply returns mana to the entire party/raid instead.

This doesn’t make too much sense.

Vampiric Touch is a DoT that gives 5% of damage you do back as mana for your party, it doesn’t give healing. It is from TBC, and is not confirmed to be coming next phase

Vampiric Embrace is a talent that give 20% or 30% (depends on talents) of shadow damage you do back as healing. Classic level 30 talent

Because you are talking about healing I assume you meant Vampiric Embraced and if so, you wouldn’t need to have a rune to augment it, they could just add Vampiric Touch as a rune and that would fix mana issues.

@Zarkul-senjin

The mana would need to be adjusted so that they don’t outweigh things like Shamanistic rage

I feel like it should outweigh Shamanistic rage because they have relegated Shadow Priest main purpose in TBC which is mana battery. Why take a Shadow Priest when you could just bring more shamans who on top of having totems (amazing party/raid utility) can also pop an ability that gives mana back to your party/raid(another amazing party/raid utility ability).

Shamanistic rage should be more like the TBC version and only restore the users mana

[Baldnbrash-wild-growth]

@Tyra-shadowstrike-au

This doesn’t make too much sense.

I think the OP was trying to say “Don’t give Vampiric Touch, as-is in TBC, as a rune; instead, give a rune that removes healing from Vampiric Embrace and instead makes it replenish mana instead of health.” Either that or having the rune transform Vampiric Embrace to Vampiric Touch, in which case it would do nothing if you weren’t talented into Vampiric Embrace.

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As for OP:
Shadow Word: Death is intended to be an execute that punishes you for not killing your target with it. I’d probably leave it as-is. Maybe increase damage a bit even, though with it doing more damage with more spell power, Shadow talents, and Shadowform in the next phase, I don’t know how hard it’ll actually hit. If there was any type of mana replenished, I’d recommend it replenish if you kill a target with it, similar to how Shadowburn for a warlock refunds a soul shard only if you kill the target with it.
(Add.: Because these abilities that require you to deliver the killing blow start to wildly get out of hand when you get past more than 2-3 people even attacking a target, let alone 5, 10, 20, or 40, I’d recommend maybe a 1-1.5 second grace period for that replenishment.)

As for all the void stuff: Turning “shadow priest” into “void priest” was one of the stupidest things, imo, both from a narrative and a mechanical standpoint, from Legion onward. That having been said, they’re already working toward that, as seen by the void-touched profession gear and the associated quest line, so there’s not a huge point in dying on the hill of “no void crap.”

That having been said, anything that gets infinite mana - especially for such a long period of time, as a shadow priest in Classic can burn a LOT of mana in 20, even 10, seconds - I’d give a heavy “no.” A way to trigger Spirit Tap in-combat, maybe DoT procs? Potentially. An ability similar to Innervate or Evocation? Possibly. Straight up infinite mana for 10-20 seconds? Hell no. And that’s without even considering the Void Bolt part.

Dark Archangel wings: If it’s just aesthetic, I really don’t care enough to argue against it.

Void Tendrils: I’d prefer not, especially if it’s RNG-related. (And this is someone who played ele shaman with the casino build in M Antorus; I’ve had two separate occasions where I procced Earth Shock refunds back-to-back 12 times in a row, a 4.096x10⁻⁸ chance of occurring, so I don’t think I’m that averse to RNG.) I’d be fine with void tendrils in one of two ways:

• Replaces Psychic Scream to instead terrify enemies to stand in place, rather than flee, and the tendrils are just cosmetic, or
• Functions similar to the MoP/WoD version, an AoE root (with or without a target cap, I’m not sure) that breaks upon any damage.

Shadowfiend: If you tuned down the power of the Homunculi debuffs a little bit, you could get away with just tossing the Shadowfiend effect into it and call it a day. But a 1 min CD? Shadowfiend has generally been a 3 min CD, with Mindbender introduced as a talent in MoP to make Shadowfiend a 1 min CD, but MUCH weaker on hit. The more I think and the more I type, the more I think if anything, just what I first stated: bake it into Homunculi, and nerf the debuffs of Homunculi a little.

“Smart” Shadow Crash: It seems like there’s a pattern here, of bringing up ideas from later expansions that have to be thought out (at least a little bit) ahead of time and dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator of player, while also increasing the efficacy of it. So, Shadow Crash? Potentially, but not with any less setup than Flamestrike, Rain of Fire, Blizzard, Hellfire, Starfall, etc. (Yes, I’m aware some of these are on-demand damage with cast times and some are channeled. I’m saying all require you to determine a position - even if it’s point-blank, i.e. Hellfire - and spend a little bit of time focused on the area of effect.)

Angelic Feather: Not really necessary. This was part of the homogenization of classes & specs, and I’m not a big fan of that. Also, people are already full of piss & vinegar when it comes to stacking priests in BGs because of player damage being nerfed by 20%(and an extra 5% flat damage and 5% chance to be crit with the WSG helm), but healing and shields having full efficacy; good luck at not having this board’s collective head explode if these priests now give not just themselves, but party members movement speed buffs like this.

Leap of Faith: This is one of the worst abilities in the game when not in the hands of a skilled and coordinated priest. If it was only usable on enemies and functioned like a Death Grip, it wouldn’t really make sense for priest to pull an enemy into melee, but I’d be more fine with that than the way at least 4/5 priests seem to be absolutely horrible with this spell.

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To be at least a little bit constructive: Shadow priests do have major mana issues in Classic, and in P1, there’s nothing to remedy that whatsoever. I do think there should be ways for them to manage mana at least somewhat, but outside of Vampiric Touch mentioned above(which is probably better to be its own rune, and unless Shadow is doing significantly better damage-wise, should probably be party members get 1% max mana over 5/10 seconds if you cast Mind Blast with Vampiric Touch up like in Wrath/Cata, rather than the 5% Shadow damage is replenished to party members as mana like TBC), the suggestions would give so much mana that you may as well not even have a mana pool. Either that, or you do so little damage that you’re only providing Shadow Weaving and being a mana battery - which is not a great option, especially once your raid members can make it through a fight without you being a mana battery, as you now have zero use.

Which brings me to the point about shadow priest damage: I haven’t played shadow priest in vanilla/Classic. I never touched priest above level ~15 before TBC. I don’t know how much damage will “come online” at 40 compared to 25. However, I see people going back and forth about how much damage they’ll actually do - especially sustained damage in a PvE environment - with level 40 gear and talents. Besides mana inefficiency (which I can somewhat imagine just by looking at how much mana you can have unbuffed at level 40 versus the cost of Shadow spells at 40), there’s the issue that their primary damage lies in DoTs, which, in Classic, cannot crit, and even if spell haste were prominent, they wouldn’t benefit from that, either.

People would say the simple solution is to just allow DoTs to crit, or scale up the damage, etc., but I’ve seen many people who play shadow priests say this wouldn’t be enough. My constructive criticism, therefore, is to revisit a rather (in)famous spell added in Cata: Mind Spike. Mind Spike:

• is a spell with a quick cast time,
• has generally been mana efficient (and if it’s a rune ability that costs a percentage of your base mana, it’ll almost DEFINITELY be far more efficient than Mind Flay or anything in your spell book),
• does direct damage(read as: can crit, though it’ll only crit for 150% damage, not 200%, as shadow priests don’t have a crit damage talent; this could have an exception coded in the Mind Spike rune, though)
• and historically, has placed a stacking debuff on the target that increases the damage dealt by your next Mind Blast.

It wouldn’t need to function identically to how it has historically - it has been through several revisions between Cata and its current state in Dragonflight as is - but you would, at the very least, have a filler that can crit, won’t destroy your mana pool on its own, and would probably have some interaction with your existing toolkit, rather than feeling completely out of place in Classic. (At least no more out of place than warlocks having Incinerate & Chaos Bolt.)

This is just one possibility that I personally thought of. There are endless ideas to brainstorm upon.

[Starla-lone-wolf]

Just chiming in to say that I’ve been playing Priest and while I’m not too mad at their current power level (Shadow will get better in later phases, not surprised it isn’t performing in phase 1), I do think the runes they have are pretty boring. Hope they get some interesting runes that mix up how they play in later phases.

[Mini-firetree (Mini)]

Completely unrelated but do you think they’ll give priests shadowmend?

[Sacrilesia-arthas]

I’d like if they did something that made shadow able to fill a legitimate healer spot like arcane mages, as well as if they’d add other raid support elements like mana regen etc.

I feel like we’re going to get continuously shafted in the dps competition department so they should at least make us into a support dps that justifies a raid spot with unique utility.

[Starla-lone-wolf]

I’d rather Shadow stay damage oriented. Priests already have two healing trees. I’m personally more interested in seeing some of their other “implied” roles get fleshed out some. For example, I think Priests were initially supposed to have access to a melee build of some kind (which is why there’s like, agi/str/spir cloth in early dungeons and why inner fire exists, among other things), I’d like to see that fleshed out some. Or smite/holy fire priests getting fleshed out some.

[Sacrilesia-arthas]

@Starla-lone-wolf

Priests already have two healing trees

problem is i see tons of people, blizzard included, justifying shadow being lower on the dps totem pole because of this. unless they buff our damage significantly (allowing spells / talents to scale more, crit bonuses, allowing dots to crit), we need utility that justifies a raid position rather than being told to just spec holy or disc. a rune that modifies or replaces vampiric embrace to be similar to the arcane mage runes, or converts shadow weaving to a flat magic damage debuff.

alternatively, an improved shadow form (or voidform) rune that locks you into shadow form as long as the rune is on, preventing you from dropping it to cast holy spells etc but improving damage by a significant amount to compromise with the “high dps shouldn’t have healing and utility” narrative.

i’d argue to have both options, mutually exclusive (in the same slot) to let people choose to play as an actually competitive dps, a raw healer, or a support dps (like an arcane mage). player agency is a good thing.

[Starla-lone-wolf]

I do not think Shadow will stay bad in later phases. I think of all the damage trees in this game, Shadow is the most reliant on talents later in the tree for DPS. No caster is doing great, but shadow is the most talent reliant caster spec in the game maybe next to Frost.

[Baldnbrash-wild-growth]

@Baldnbrash-wild-growth

. . . My constructive criticism, therefore, is to revisit a rather (in)famous spell added in Cata: Mind Spike.

Hey, it’s being added after all.

[Tyra-shadowstrike-au]

Well done on that prediction, but I’m quite sad that it might replace my trusty Mind Flay. I would have preferred they added ability that didn’t replace the ones we have currently but instead improved the ones we have already.

[Baldnbrash-wild-growth]

@Tyra-shadowstrike-au

I’m quite sad that it might replace my trusty Mind Flay. I would have preferred they added ability that didn’t replace the ones we have currently

Reading the text of the Mind Spike rune in the blue post several times, it doesn’t say that it replaces Mind Flay. If you meant that it would be used and Mind Flay wouldn’t, then I misunderstood.

Regardless, we’ve seen Mind Spike as a belt rune and Pain Suppression as a boot rune. The Blue post says that the runes shown are some of the runes coming in P2, not all, so there might be options for Mind Flay still.

Add.: I wouldn’t really call it a prediction. I thought of a spell I always thought was cool that no one ever used because, when it was a talent in WoD/Legion/BfA(I think it was a talent in BfA still?), it was, apparently, one of the talents that’s a downgrade over no talent in that row. Thought it might be nice to give it some time to shine, but wasn’t anywhere near convinced they’d go for it.

[Tyra-shadowstrike-au]

Sorry for the misunderstanding, the fact that they gave us a new filler ability makes me think that Mind Flay would not be used anymore because Mind Spike will probably be super mana efficient (Similar to SS costing 4 mana). Instead I wish could have done something to buff Mind Flay by making it cost less/free and/or do more damage.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, I have never played a Shadow Priest outside of Classic so I have no idea what will happen.

[Baldnbrash-wild-growth]

When I came back to the game in the last half year or so of WoD, shadow priest was one of the most fun class/specs to play. I also unironically liked Mind Spike. It didn’t fit in great with the Shadow Orbs system and didn’t really have synergy with DoTs, but for that matter, Mind Flay didn’t really have synergy with DoTs that couldn’t be reworked to be as effective with Mind Spike.

That having been said: I seem to be the outlier of disliking shadow priest ever since the Legion rework, where you’re now essentially a “void priest,” not a “shadow priest.” I didn’t like the insanity & voidform mechanics, really. (Before anyone says something: I could keep up with the insanity drain with no problem; I didn’t like it thematically in comparison to shadow.) I’m also aware of Mind Spike having pretty much always inferior to Mind Flay, and still liked it.

If I disliked void priest and liked Mind Spike - something I only got to play with for a couple months - and I’m in the minority on both of these, you may want to take my enjoyment of the spell with a grain of salt. I think the determining factor of if Mind Spike will be used by a lot of people is how efficient it is vs Mind Flay, and how much damage per mana you have using Mind Spike in place of Mind Flay. If it ends up being really weak, and you just have a near guaranteed crit with Mind Blast(which is a mana hog), then it’ll probably be DOA and people will stick with Mind Flay.

[Mewniz-crusader-strike]

I’d very much like a rune that removes the increased threat from mind blast and triggers a X seconds (3? 4?) spirit tap on crit

The other option could be a shadowfiend/mindbender on the same rune slot for those who like more of a dot gameplay

[Sacrilesia-arthas]

Looks like they’re doubling SWD damage while making it do 50% to yourself.