I would like to start a thread on SP changes based on the week one DF ssn 3 changes here: PvP Tuning Incoming – November 21
- A flat 8% buff is welcome but doesn’t really fix the problems with the spec. The biggest change that needs to happen is (still) that Mind Blast needs to do damage. It has charges and a proc like lava burst, but does negligible damage. Before the buff, it was doing around 28k damage in honor gear. If it did damage, then casting mind spike to guarantee a crit on mind blast would feel really good with Mastermind and Insidious Ire. I’m thinking it should do around 60k base and scale up to 162k with a crit with both mentioned talents.
Some other issues:
- The MD and PI nerfs were probably a mistake for shadow, but if that’s here to stay, an acceptable compensation would be to make shadow closer to a standalone caster like a warlock. Shadow can’t tank/avoid damage/heal well enough in the current meta to fit it’s current masochistic tanky hybrid fantasy. If I’m using defensive globals, I should be as hard of a target to kill as a lock that is using their mobility wisely.
- The tier set currently just helps the enemy team kill us faster and doesn’t do enough damage to compensate. If we are going to be killing ourselves, doing so needs to make us tankier or something. This is reminiscent of Surrender to Madness, and the argument against it is the same. We shouldn’t have to kill ourselves to do damage that’s on par with meta specs. That said, if we are compensated for Deathing ourselves with tankyness or healing (super fat shields and/or dam reduc, for example), maybe it’s fine the way it is.
- Many (all?) of our builds are very global intensive. Currently shadow needs to chain tons of globals together while mult-dotting, so getting trained/interrupted is the difference between an A+ spec and a B- spec. The way the current meta works, you have to take advantage of short windows to do big dam. The previous solution to this problem was to have shadow be an instant-casting global min-maxing machine, but we were recently made to cast more while still being expected to get a bunch of globals off right in the enemy’s face. One solution that doesn’t require patch-level changes is putting more damage into mind blast, mind games, and void torrent, so that getting precog and a long stun on the kill target is scary. Not chaos bolt scary, but actual kill pressure within 3-4 globals. MG into Mind Blast proc into DP into void torrent shouldn’t tickle people who are stunned. There are other solutions, but none that I see happening until next expansion. If you need to nerf the haste stealing into the ground to make a free-casting shadow priest less oppressive with the mentioned buffs, that’s fine.
Edit after playing with the 8% buff
I still feel some slight adjustments are warranted, but as long as OP classes are brought down a peg, this is feeling a lot better.