Remember when Ghostcrawler straight up argued that we were going to have scaling issues in 3.1? Come 3.2 and we were bottom tier DPS? It took 3 fully filled threads for GC to even acknowledge the math we were presenting that was ultimately right for over a year?
Blizz has a long history of ignoring shadow feed back dating back to the Wrath Alpha when they gave our top talent as a defensive.
fair enoughâŚmightâve pushed it a bit to far. not to proud to admit it. Will remove it.
Thank you for that.
We started off on the wrong foot, Heylaa. I apologize for getting heated. There is no need. We both love WoW. If we didnât feel that way, we would simply unsub and not bother with the forum at all.
I am not Nyelle. I am nowhere near that good! Also, the writing style is different. I am kissing his/her butt because I felt a relief to see that somebody else is enjoying the gameplay as well.
There must be a way to keep the frantic excitement of Shadow Priest and class fantasy while addressing the ramp-up problem.
There are numerous ways to do that, but itâs not really our place to answer that question, weâre not here to tell blizzard exactly how to do their job (They wouldnt respond well to it anyway). The main two things I see people enjoy about shadow are the pace it reaches in legion / late BFA, and the cadence / smoothness of having a gcd based rotation.
Both of those things I personally think are great, and would want to keep them within a new mechanical shell that addressed the voidform ramp up problem.
To me, that is removing voidform, even if you still have voidform doing âsomethingâ. The core underlying mechanics would have changed. People have obbviously suggested moving back to a framework they considered to have worked in the past (WoD Shadow Orbs) but the point is really that the way in which voidform works canât continue to exist.
Yes, I was angry and a bit aggressive I admit and apologize for it but in my defense we spend months discussing VF and its faults. We have stated millions of times that its not about whether you like it or dislike it. People (including you) have put so much work and effort into compiling and writing a very clear constructive feedback about the faults with the mechanic and then you get people who just show up in a boosted character and turn the whole conversation into âJust because you donât like it doesnât mean it doesnât workâ totally negating and degrading all the time people have put into these constructive feedbacks to it simply being that we donât like it.
kiss 
Have you played shadow before Void Form was part of the spec?
If so, what makes the previous iterations better and worse when compared to Void Form. Why do you dislike those versions compared to Void Form?
If not, why do you think its a bad thing to go back to a previous iteration when if you looked a bit into it, you can clearly see it has a massive amount of flexibility and can be built upon and expanded. Where as Void Form is stuck. No way to improve it without removing the core issue which then in turn just makes Shadow look like it did prior to all the revamps.
Itâs also worth noting, shadow has always been a haste junkie in terms of what it wanted, what felt good, and how the spec was designed. It was one of, if not the first (Along with ret paladin) to receive abilities which cooldowns were reduced by haste, and has consistently wanted / found additional ways to gain haste from gear or its own spec mechanics.
Voidform might have pushed that to the Nâth degree in Legion, but that was scaled back in BFA. Voidform isnât even giving that much baseline haste anymore.
I first played Shadow Priest many years ago. I donât remember the exact expansion. It was either Cataclysm or WoD. There was no voidform, correct? I felt weak, like Superman but forced to stay in Clark Kent form forever. It seemed like a watered-down Mage that was balanced that way because of our self-healing ability. After a few months, I switched to another class because I wanted to feel more impactful. That was when I fell in love with Subtlety Rogue.
I feel that if Voidform could go indefinitely but takes more and more skill as each second passes, it would balance itself. It would be the top DPS but only the best players could unlock that full potential.
I didnât say that I hated the prior iterations! I just happen to enjoy the current one.
So is it time to quit the game? Iâm a holy, but the way I see it: With Blizzard trying to go for class fantasy instead of spec fantasy, I could see them ignoring all priest specs because they canât fix Shadow.
Iâll never stop playing Priest, and if I have to stop playing Priest because itâs a completely broken class, Iâll just quit WoW altogether. Is there any hope in yâallâs eyes?
my advise, you might want to skip this expan or atleast the first year. pick up another game, i enjoy ESO and i just cancel my sub and switched it to FFXIV and its pretty good, however long gcd on low level feels bad until you are high enough to get you off gcd abilities.
So you want to just do DPS and not have any thought into being âpriestlyâ in that you also provide support for your group where you drop out and spot heal, grip, mass dispel, normal dispel, mind control, shackle, fear bomb, horrify stun, clutch VE timing, silence etc.
The thing with Void Form that i absolutely HATE is that I am always FORCED to not be a team player and using the toolkit I have used and was accustomed to for over 10+ years as any time I use a GCD to do so, my DPS suffers. Not just sufferers for that 1 sec⌠it suffers because it will cause a cascading effect that nose dives my DPS. Pre Void Form didnât have that issue as you can use your âfillerâ time to pull out a clutch supportive ability and the only thing you lost was our âfillerâ DPS as you can just pick up with your rational abilities right after the fact. You can weave in and out of being a DPS and group support. With Void Form, you are punished by doing what many of us enjoy doing and thus why we chose the Priest to play with and thatâs adding group support in addition to doing DPS.
Sure if you want to use shadow spells just to focus on DPS then roll lock. Or in your case, mage or rogue etc. Priest is not a DPS only spec. But making Void Form a thing in its current iteration forces you to do so or your practically worthless.
Very well put.
You are right. I rolled a Priest because I enjoy healing in dungeons, especially single-target healing spam heavy Holy Priest). Mage/Warlock/Rogue (my favorite classes) donât have a healing spec. I didnât want to have to gear 2 separate characters at max-level. I am playing my Shadow Priest like a straight DPS, rather than the versatile role that you are describing.
Does Blizzard view Shadow Priest the same way that I do?
I think we all agree shadow is a straight dps, we just dislike that our rotation and performance is disrupted so heavily if we want to use our utility kit. Shadow has been a straight dps since the beginning of warlords, after the removal of the hybrid tax at the end of MoP.
Perhaps.
But if they do, then thatâs probably why there is a massive disconnect and to be blunt. They need to get over themselves.
We are being handicapped because we are a âpriestâ.
Iâm sorry but that excuse doesnât work anymore when you have all these other classes that have all these niches that they can fill and yet their DPS doesnât suffer for using the toolkit they have aside form the GCD used to enact said ability. But Priest (Shadow) is balanced around optimum Void Form uptime and that runs counter to all the plethora of abilities the priest class as a whole has access to let alone the shadow specific ones.
So the message is just DPS and maybe you can not be trash if your perfect at it. But ignore all your priest class and shadow spec utility abilities as you are forced to just focus too much time on not messing up you rotational DPS priority to even think about using a utility spell and even when you do, your punished for it.
Wake the hell up Blizz.
Increasing haste has you FEEL the fight to stay sane, this also tricks you to engage more with this gameplay and feels rewarding to hit good stacks and push past what you have seen before. With a static voidform buff it shatters the glass and I have no impact on VF just a dps number- which is what is like other specs - predictable and boring outcome.
As for others who keep attacking me for some reason Iâve played this game 12 years and my priest is from 2009. I liked shadow in wrath, hated orbs as they felt like a rogue or warlock design forced on top of the spec in a very unatural way. Stop discrediting my pov, or anyone else for this matter- it shouldnât matter if you played priest for 12 years or one month.
its great that it feels rewarding to you and you enjoy pushing stacks. but while youre playing your mini game the rest of us would like to be useful to the raid and have fun doing it. fact is people who played shadow pre-legion had their spec literally deleted. dwindling number of shadow priests and the massive outcry on the forums along with tons of data over the past 4 years would suggest voidform was a bad change to shadow.
âhey guys! i got 50 stacks!â
âcool boss is phasing.â
all that ramp is gone. ya that feels great.
The more common scenario is
âYay I got 50 stackâ
âAdd spawned when you had 20 and you did nothing to itâ
There is still skill expression in how you use your time in Voidform, the same as today, and how you transition into your next.
There is also new skill expression in what targets to prioritize, and how to time-shift your Voidforms to align to parts of the fight.
As example, âDo I short voidform now so I can drop out of it early, and enter a long voidform at the start of the next burst phase?â
Which requires planning ~20-40 seconds in advance. This was skill expression we had with the Shadow Orb system, that we lost in Legion due to Voidform.
Time-shifting Voidforms to predict the encounter, I think, is far more interesting than the current skill expression: mashing your Void Bolt key really fast, or knowing your gear will allow you to delay Lucid Dreams until 30+ stacks, etc.
I did this on Mythic Nzoth with Lucid dreams
Shadow gameplay has a FEELING that Iâm sorry your system doesnât delvier on.
âA damage windowâ is what other specs do which havenât resonated with me as a player as compelling. You feel your performance as shadow, itâs feedback loop is unmatched in game design of other specs.