So shadow is dumpster tier damage, but has great utility in raids, and is pretty dominant in PvP. Problem is utility doesn’t really matter with faster fights and better groups, + some of it like homonculi will go away in p4 with the arrival of improved expose armor. So how can shadow be structurally buffed without leading to terrible overall balance?
Rune of Void Torrent: mindflay is replaced with Void Torrent. Doing ~something~, (could be dot crits, could be mindblasts/mind spikes, something) builds stacks. These enable void torrent to be cast. At X stacks it will do a massive amount of damage.
Alternatively it could be baseline something like a 60 second channel. Each non instant spell grants one stack of insanity, crits counting double, and at 20 stacks it will be reduced to a four second channel that nukes the target.
This keeps shadow from being able to easily hit people with this in PvP, especially if stacks are built with casted spells.
Rune of Vampiric Hunger: Vampiric Embrace is transformed into vampiric hunger, causing you to leech the life out of your enemies, making them susceptible to your shadow magic. Vampiric Hunger causes enemies to suffer 30% increased shadow damage from the caster.
This is targeted at raids, and should have a utility counterpart, giving shadow priests the choice to be a competitive DPS or more proper support role
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If Shadow is desired for a Raid slot because of their Utility and Healing while also being very strong in PVP why do they need a damage Buff?
I could see if they were like Rogues and Warriors last phase where neither brought much utility and had mediocre damage so were never picked but that’s not the case with Shadow.
Because it sucks to play dps and do no damage, plus the majority of your utility is wasted by either a good group, or easy raid. A selling point of sod was that meme specs would be brought up from their roles as bench warmers or buff bots. None of your utility scales, gear feels meaningless, and I can parse a 99 while my buddy doesn’t even have windfury and doubles my damage.
The healing is the only meaningfully unique utility that will exist next phase, which is why my rune suggestion fixes this difficult balance point by making it a DPS boost. Homonculi will be outclassed by rogues imp ea, our curses are 2% better than locks’, and being a dispel bot is terribly unfun. Hell it’s not even that fun in the open world as you have no knockback protection
The thing is that top groups don’t desire Shadow for a raid slot because they simply don’t need the utility. Why bring VE if you don’t need it, and their buffs can be covered by healing priests running Eye of the Void / Homunculi. Now Shadow is doing less damage than some tanks. I don’t think any amount of utility a dps brings justifies it doing less damage than tank specs.
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