Looks like with the latest build, Mindgames is no longer in the talent tree. I may have missed it if it was removed earlier, I’m not in the beta, but can anyone else confirm that it has been removed entirely? They didn’t make it baseline or a PvP talent, did they?
It’s a PVP talent now. I’m a bit surprised that people don’t seem to be as hyped as I am for what Blizz (in part) replaced it with in the class tree: +15% range of spells.
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Yeah, no, I like the change. It makes sense as a PvP talent, glad they kept it in for that. Thanks!
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Fo sho! 
/10char
Continuing the discussion from The War Within Beta Development Notes:
This is beyond bad. Let’s conpare shall we
Mind Games was a 1 minute cooldown which could further be reduced with talents. At level 80 it was turning around 128k damage instead into healing and also generated insanity.
Cauterizing Shadows is something you might see proc 16-20 times per dungeon for 7-8k healing. So in an entire dungeon run you will heal the value of like one Mind Games or a single shadow flash heal and generate 0 insanity.
Health pools are in the 3-5 million range and this thing is healing for 7-8k. Unless they massively buff the heal this is a dead talent.
2 talent points for 2% DR is bad value taken to the extreme.
Hard to be hyped with gaining like 6 yard range to get these two gems for talents.
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I’m personally not sad to see mind games go. It always seemed more tuned for PvP. In PVE it was just a beefier mind blast on a much lower priority in an already very fast-paced rotation, especially during void form. It didn’t really add much and the heal to damage conversion was rarely ever useful in PVE.
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I will dance on Mindgames’ grave forever. I never liked the ability and they obviously didn’t want people using it in Dragonflight, so I am gleeful it’s gone even if they displayed their typical disregard for priest feedback by leaving it there the whole expansion.
But Cauterizing Shadows has always been a terrible ability at a fundamental level. I get that it’s not supposed to be a reliable heal, but a talent for half a single Renew tick when you refresh SWP is possibly one of the weakest effects in the game. Manipulation is extremely weak for the investment, but that can change. Phantom Reach kills all hope I have for movement parity with DK and paladin.
This is better, but it’s still really bad.
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For me personally, I just don’t see it as a loss for Shadow. Mindgames, for Shadow, cluttered an already cluttered rotation (especially when Inescapable Torment was meta and we were weaving SW: Death into a Voidform rotation) and barely did any real increase to your damage. It is around a 0.5% increase in DPS - if that - over the course of a dungeon run. You can see examples of that here -
warcraftlogs…com/reports/18YCZyw9dR2gQ6KJ#boss=-2&difficulty=0&type=damage-done&source=2.
The healing was virtually useless in a PVE environment, especially since the spell was used rotationally and not in a targeted manner toward specific damage events - and if it were saved for being used in a targeted manner the damage throughout the course of a raid or dungeon would be even less impressive.
I agree Manipulation or Cauterizing Shadows aren’t impressive in terms of overall throughput in a PVE rotation over the course of a dungeon run or raid, but again, neither was Mindgames. Also, you don’t have to take either to get Phantom Reach. When I spec Shadow, I’ll generally be taking Translucent Image + Improved Fade.
Mindgames will still shine where it has always shined most: in a PVP environment.
The range isn’t as much a help in PVE as it is in PVP, but it still helps. You do far less DPS to targets that are out of range, even for a second, and you aren’t DPS’ing on GCDs you are spending on speed boosts to get in range, so in practice the range increase is a DPS increase.
The range increase is a big help for healing in all content, though. And it also helps with situational but high-impact abilities like Lifegrip.
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This is really my take as well. I see these changes as a net positive, as we’re removing a redundant spell from our rotation that’s really not providing a big benefit over the replacement spell that would be used.
I always liked the concept of Mindgames, but wanted them to lean much further into the reversal part of it rather than the damage. Make it a powerful utility spell to use, not just something you press on cd, to really reinforce its identity.
I agree that the replacement abilities are a little lackluster, but I feel like there’s more flexibility with the points now. So again, I see it as a net positive.
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Absolutely. They freed up 3 talent points at the bottom of the tree and removed an ability tuned to uselessness or to be a flavorless redundancy, depending on spec, and that’s a win. I doubt that Cauterizing Shadow will ever be anything other than a tax to get damage reduction below it, and if they bring that up to a reasonable point investment then that’s probably fine, too.
The unfortunate thing is that this is the only core priest issue that’s been addressed during all of development and we all know they’re shipping whatever they have in 5-6 weeks. I understand that it would be embarrassing for them to ship with priest having effectively 1.5 appealing hero trees so their work on oracle and archon are necessary, but it really shouldn’t be coming at the cost of addressing priest’s class-wide issues and running out of time before yet another expansion, especially when they’ve dialed in hard on reworking mage less than a year after a full rework when they’ve thus-far failed to keep their promise to revisit priest after DF beta.
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Par for the course at this point lol.
I’ve already come to terms that we won’t see any significant changes until the next major content patch in TWW at the soonest if not even later or not at all.
It’s a sad reality but what can you do that hasn’t already been done Ad nauseam countless times.
Now that the Hunter has received their rework, I think all that’s left is Druid, Shaman, Priest and maybe Demon Hunter? Other than that, I think every other class got major talent changes or reworks in this TWW Alpha/beta cycle. But Demon Hunter has gotten one recently for both specs so I don’t think they really need one? Not too sure for Druid and Shaman with the state they are in.
At least all 3 of those have a clear direction and fantasy to fulfill and center on.
But with Priest it’s still very ambiguous for all 3 specs aside from Healer, Offensive Healer and Deals Shadow damage lol.
In pvp mindgames actually has well… mindgames to it. You can time it well and get extra damage out of it or get a healer to kill their allies with their heals, and it’s a lot of fun.
Yes the button itself does good damage and a decent amount of healing in pve content, the problem is that it is incredibly boring and lacks the substance that makes it interesting in pvp.
99% of the time the gameplay of mindgames in pve is that you just press the button, set it and forget it. On very rare circumstances you can use it on an enemy that heals passively or something and get some extra damage to it. But overall the nature of pve being large boss enemies with big health pools means there’s little situations where you can like juke someone and snag a sneaky kill with a well timed mindgames, even with the full effect its not like you’re gonna one shot a boss with it.
On top of that the spell has no synergy with any of the priest spec talents or abilities. It doesn’t reduce the CD of holy word chastise for holy like smite, holy fire, and holy nova do. It gets buffed by shadow covenant for disc but it doesn’t proc the mindbender aoe or reduce the cooldown of mindbender with the current 4set so its a dead button in rotation. It doesn’t spawn shadowy apparitions or get buffed by Insidious Ire for shadow. It also only does multitarget for shadow priest with psychic link, only does single target for healer specs.
The viability of mindgames in dragonflight pve is soley dependent on
A. The tuning on it being high enough that it’s worth pressing despite having no synergy with the rest of your kit
B. Your rotation being dead enough that you have room to cast it
In the current state removing the talents for it is simply a damage decrease for shadow because it’s being replaced with utility and not damage talents. But the spell simply was poorly designed and did not fit well in the rotation for all 3 priest specs for basically the entire expansion.
I think the best solution is to stick with the new utility talents and just buff shadow’s damage overall by like 1 or 2% to compensate, overall this will be a big buff. Free utility, same damage output, cleaner rotation
If they really wanted to keep it in priest’s pve rotations they’d need to add kit synergy for it.
- make insidious ire buff mindgames damage
- make mindgames spawn shadowy apparitions
- make mindgames reduce the cooldown of holy word chastise
- make mindgames proc inescapable torment for disc
But let’s be real. The current solution is the easiest to do and probably the best
Which this is true, it doesn’t exactly matter because tuning happens within the context of what a spec is capable of.
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Mindgames could have been great. It just wasn’t. It was basically an extra trinket in pvp. People cried. It got nerfed. No loss to shadow. Maybe a bad loss for disc and holy as a kick bait
This. They’ve increased the damage of Void Torrent in this release as well, I imagine that probably makes up for whatever dps loss we have from the removal of Mindgames.
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All Mindgames did in the Priest General Tree was add an unnecessary extra button for Shadow.
Also, Cauterizing Shadows seems pretty busted. 8 of them going off at once would be like casting 3-3.5 Flash Heals on the party.
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Seems to also be another benefit to playing Shadow on bursting weeks. Cauterizing Shadows popping off one right after the other may help stabilize the group and supplement the healing required for bursting stacks.
Maybe a small help, but a help nonetheless.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m seeing that Cauterizing Shadows is 150% spell power for holy and disc and 23% spell power for shadow, so it would be about 65% of a Flash Heal when shadow refreshes 8 SWP and just over a flash heal for every two a healer refreshes.
Definitely a fine single-point talent for a healer priest, which is welcome. Not convinced that just over half a flash heal for refreshing a whole group is worth anything coming from shadow, especially since it doesn’t trigger at all if the mob dies before you can even refresh it.
I was on the beta testing stuff on Priest and really noticed the amount Caut Shadows says it heals for. I was floored. There’s no way that makes it into the game right?
I’m very happy they removed Mind Games from the Priest class tree and put it into PvP talents. Many of the Shadowlands spells feel like bloat. What I do wish though is that Phantom Reach was moved higher up in the class tree. Where it is currently, it feels hard to grab. Requiring 2 points into Improved Fade feels bad in my opinion, and Throes of Pain is something I typically never take since it feels very weak to me. Phantom Reach feels WAY too good to ever pass up on Priest. I don’t think I’d be able to live without using Phantom Reach honestly after it’s implemented.
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Eh, sad to see Mindgames go because I like the spell, it was just nerfed into complete uselessness for 2/3 specs and it wasn’t even interesting rotationally for the third. I’ll maintain that when it had its covenant support and actually was a beefy damage shield it was a pretty damn fun spell to use in PvE. I’ll always wonder why they went the route of making it completely awful for the healing specs.
I used Caut shadows in early SLands when it was first introduced as a leggo.
You’ll get it way more than that, especially nowadays as a disc priest. It counts when it gets pandemic refreshed from PTW spreading, and when targets die within that pandemic window, IIRC. With expiation you’d get it a ton.
But this is also such a nerfed version of caut shadows that it’s still not worth the point, lol. In true priest fashion we get something that was kinda cool in Shadowlands but nerfed way too much to be impactful at all. In Caut shadows’ case, it was weak in Slands too. No idea why they’d nerf it by 33% and make it single target.