Remove Shadowfiend from the class tree

Classes Priest
1

Seriously, it’s worthless. Remove Shadowfiend, replace it with Mind Blast since holy doesn’t seem to care about having it, and just let Mindbender be how you access the ability in the discipline and shadow trees.

Does this make Mindbender a mandatory talent in the class trees? Probably. But at least Shadowfiend can be put out of its misery after years of having a talent make it 3.5x better for years and tuning could potentially mean people who want fewer pets, or none at all, to live that dream.

Also, assuming no mechanical changes will be made to the Idol talents, move Idol of C’thun to the upper part of the middle tier where it belongs - a random proc that does damage over 20 seconds has no business being a capstone talent - and change Idol of Yogg-Saron to summon Living Shadow instead of the Thing from Beyond. If we absolutely must have multiple procs that do damage over time, at least make it so that they’re not all a non-interactive pet spawning.

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2

Maybe you missed it but so far at least Jak’s guide is saying to take Shadowfiend, and if it wasn’t necessary before for the damage and mana it’s certainly gone way up in value now that Blizz just torpedoed holy with a flood of nerfs and then nerfed all healers by 40% in the relative value of their heals, which means having to spend more time healing, which means even more of a strain on mana, which… you guessed it - Shadowfiend goes up still more in value.

So no, holy should care about it.

3

What I actually meant was that holy doesn’t seem to care about having Mind Blast, and adding Shadowfiend to holy’s kit is probably going to cause more problems by virtue of its availability to holy. Of course holy takes it right now - it’s a cooldown added to the kit for no investment. It’s a no-brainer, even with how bad Shadowfiend is.

As it stands its essentially a mandatory point for holy because the value is high but all it does is add another low-value cooldown to the spec that doesn’t change gameplay and a frustratingly underwhelming bloat cooldown for shadow and discipline (though at least for discipline it lines up with cooldowns). If holy has mana troubles, it would be easier to tune without accounting for the assumption that Shadowfiend was taken.

4

I don’t see why. Shadowfiend was around in the priest class for a long time before the whole misguided pruning. I don’t recall any problems around pushing a button on CD. Believe me, holy has a lot more troublesome “use on CD” abilities than some 3 min damage/mana return that’s not even a priority most of the time.

Or, instead of inventing some arbitrary passive you could just leave things as they are. And in any event your solution doesn’t account for the fact that holy sorely needs all the DPS it can get after Empyreal Blaze and Mindgames and Divine Word:Chastise were nuked badly.

EDIT: Anyhow it’s a moot point right now. Blizz has declared release candidate so they’re not going to be in the mood to delete any currently working talent or try to code something brand new at this stage of the game. And again, all mana tools like Shadowfiend just gained a lot of value with the changes Blizz made in the last 4 days so it’d be nonsense to delete a perfectly fine long-established talent like this.

5

Okay, then how about this - put Shadowfiend in the holy tree, maybe as its own node or as a switch with Enlightenment. Shadowfiend fills the same role, so it could be there to provide some more damage with mana regen rather than passive mana regen.

Shadowfiend just feels terrible in discipline or shadow when Mindbender exists. At least if Shadowfiend didn’t exist for those specs there’s the potential to opt into a playstyle that doesn’t involve minions. These trees are supposedly there to expand options - offering a minionless option for those specs is something that should be available, especially with the mental gymnastics that’s being used to justify stuff like Mind Spike.

6

Yeah, shadow remains messy, agreed. And so does holy, sure. And certainly Mind Spike doesn’t feel right.

I don’t know we can expect much for at least the next few months. A release candidate for software usually means “feature complete” which means they’re not going to do anything drastic to the code like ripping out talents or coding new ones in their place at this stage, which means they probably won’t for the entirety of 10.0 at least.

Everyone dissatisfied with their specs is really left to hope for borrowed power band-aids or number tweaks for a long while, I fear.

7

And that’s all well and good - maybe this could be something done in 10.0.5 or 10.1. I have no expectation that Blizzard will do anything meaningful to improve specs after DF launch. They’ve never done it before, and they’ve given us no reason to believe they’ll do it now despite them saying it’s their intent.

But if they do surprise us, this is something that seems like a no-brainer, especially with how weak Shadowfiend is and how many shadow players don’t like having Shadowfiend/Mindbender at all, especially when Blizzard’s only ideas for shadow appear to be making them spawn non-interactive minions.

8

Actually that could be really cool.

You know how holy has Divine Image, the old Legion talent that procs T’uure, the Naaru on a stick that mirrors the spells the hpriest casts?

Give shadow their own Shadow Image or whatnot spawning X’alatath, and maybe she’s a little crazy and a little random with her DPS and also provides some colorful commentary… that could be an hilarious addition to the spec.

9

I would be all over a shadow that spawns shadowfiends, mindbenders, etc. and uses them to power their abilities in a way similar to unholy DK when they have their passive ghoul spawning borrowed powers active. I think that would be thematic and could maintain shadow’s feel without really changing its playstyle a ton.

The problem with shadow’s minion spawns is that there’s a ton of them, but you tend only to have one or two at a time, and there’s zero or next to zero differentiation between them, and they’re just tacked on - they don’t add anything to the spec. There’s essentially no difference between Living Shadow and Thing from Beyond in practice. Void tendrils are cool, but they’re not a capstone and they don’t spawn frequently enough for them to be fun. Shadowfiend/Mindbender only interacts with your kit if you have SFP.

The problem with how Blizzard has done shadow minions is that they have never defined gameplay or theme at all, but they constantly get stapled on as if they do.

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10

Removing shadowfiend does way more harm than good.

Shadowfiend was an amazing mechanic when it first was introduced. You can time it attack your enemy if lets say you get blinded or stunned/sapped/polymorphed etc. to keep the enemy in combat and maybe cause spell pushback.

You could also at times use it to bounce prayer of healing back and forth in a solo situation or sometimes used void shift (pending if it was bugged/allowed) on it to heal yourself.

It also added a great feature in Cata as a burst cooldown that synergized with shadow orb mastery in that each time it attacked, it granted 3 shadow orbs which enhanced your mind blast and mind spike damage immensely since shadow orbs were tied to mastery and ended up packing a huge punch if you geared right.

This isn’t even taking into consideration the granting of mana it gives per hit which was really good when as history shows, priests had terrible mana regen abilities. For the longest time we relied on passive mana regen from spirit. It wasn’t until later from Masochism affecting SW:D to grant mana from the feedback effect and taking damage from enemies and disperse granting mana back that we had a consistent way to gain mana back.

Point is, the idea of removing shadowfiend is short sighted when you consider what it has done before and what it can do again if just a little bit of care and thought was shown instead of it being ignored.

Now, does the current iteration of Shadowfiend suck? I agree that it’s lacking. But that just means it’s more of a blank slate for blizz to take it into multiple different directions if they just put forth a little effort.

Personally, shadowfiend should act as a DPS cooldown that would be very helpful for shadow, decent for Disc and okay for Holy.

It should take shadows old shadow weaving talent and passively apply shadow vulnerability to the target hit on each of its attacks. This would then enhance its and your own shadow damage making it valuable for each spec, obviously favoring the specs that do more shadow damage. This could have a debuff stack of 5 at 3% more damage and be magic debuff to also help with dispel protection. Since it’s a 3 min cooldown, I see this as a decent amount of time to work as a DPS burst cooldown.

But that’s my idea. It can be something different.

The DPS burst cooldown aspect could exist solely for shadow as a choice node with mind bender as well where you choose higher burst damage for a longer cooldown or higher insanity generation on a lower cooldown.

Again, I rather have more development on shadowfiend interaction than to just out right gut it.

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11

So take Mindbender. It’s ridiculous that they’re dedicating two talents to one ability when the natural form of that ability is profoundly underwhelming in all regards and the upgraded talent is the same ability but available 3x more often.

The whole reason I made this post is because Blizzard has let Shadowfiend be an almost entirely useless cooldown for expansions on end, and we’ve no reason to believe they’ll make it worthwhile now. It’s galling from a design perspective that there’s a pathetic cooldown that doesn’t synch with other cooldowns that costs one point to suddenly triple its power and make it synch with all your cooldowns at the same time.

A 3 minute cooldown that has 20% the value of SW:P shouldn’t be a 3 minute cooldown, and Blizzard knows that. That’s why Mindbender exists.

12

I personally hate mindbender.

I hate that it’s up as often as it is. I like the idea of shadow fiend being more for utility at its core in granting mana and keeping a target in combat so they can’t stealth or go invisible etc.

I like that shadowfiend is to be used in specific situations and not used on cooldown like mindbender seems to be more tilted towards. I don’t want to manage a pet and have near constant uptime like a warlock.

So no, I won’t use mind bender. I want to use shadowfiend. Just a version that actually competes with mind bender in a very unique and compelling way.

Frankly, I think mind bender should just be removed. But I know people like mind bender over shadowfiend for various reason, one being that it attaches itself and floats so it’s uptime it a lot more as it doesn’t need to travel and crawl like shadowfiend does. But I still prefer shadowfiend.

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13

I’d be right there with you if Shadowfiend were anywhere near good enough to warrant a 3 minute cooldown.

But there’s no reason for it to exist in its current state.

14

Am I on crack? Shadowfiends tool tip states it returns 0.0 percent mana per hit.

Only when i take mindbender does it gain the mana return on hit.

15

Mindbender isn’t and hasn’t been 3.5x better than Shadowfiend for years, especially since it’s always been a choice between it or another talent.