Seeing Shadow Priest slide back down to bad

Seeing the constant changes, utility, and defensive removal/nerfs along with the wonkier build tree relocations I saw it early on as a high tier class and it seems to be sliding back to low tier. :no_mouth:

(Saw this on Hunter too)

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I will say; I was a little sad to see hunters and priests at each others necks.

Both have severe issues. They ruined hunter pets a while back, it sucks to have the best part of the class being hamstrung over their idiotic system to make pets “unique.” Their utility is questionable. Binding shot, while it is a hard pill to swallow for us priests is less useful than point-blank AOE stuns that are more responsive. Their pathing is all messed up, and MM is basically just “hehe hard hit” and is otherwise pretty boring.

So I get it. I’m not sure what their thinking is. I think what has us priests chapped, though is just how incendiary that dev post felt. It felt like he came by just to tell us everything we want is going to someone else and better luck next time.

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I stated this was coming before that second wave of changes came to the shadow priest spec tree. Everyone that wanted ‘old shadow back’ caused this along with the developer that isn’t specialized in shadow priest or overall priest development/gameplay. They gave the people what they wanted based on feedback and complaining about shadow and left everyone to figure it out with no direction. Now, not even voidform or dark ascension gameplay feels good to play. Feels so bad on ptr compared to live. You’ll start to see the crying about our dps and m+ viability again. Esp AoE cause its noticeably bad now. I’m just side eyeing everyone and the developer who wanted these drastic changes. We will be waiting till 10.2 or 10.3 if any at all. I’m over it. They can have it.
transforms into dracthyr

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  • Idol talents blatantly need fixed/tuned.
  • We need a reliable and efficient way to spready dots to multiple targets quickly for cleave/Aoe. Lower cooldown of Shadow Crash and increase target cap to 5-6?
  • We need something else for mass/burst Aoe - tune Mind Sear appropriately to fill this niche?
    Now, I don’t know if these things will happen before launch, but I think these things, at a minimum, makes shadow priest viable in multiple damage profiles. Is there a ton of more polishing they really ought to do? Oh, heck yea, but I think this would get shadow priest to a point I would play it in Dragonflight. If they can’t even fix these things, yea I might cast the same /transform Dracthyr like Sombre lol.
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I play holy mainly because it gets me into keys much faster to be honest and i grew to enjoy it :slight_smile: . So, with that being said has shadow ever been good? For me it feels like a whole lot of clunky spells grouped together just to get ok damge. There never gonna be in tier with mage ,lock,boomy’s because these are purpose built damage dealers. These classes do heck of alot more damge with less effort i think . I mean hell we are called priests

So for me hearing all this griping about shadow/void etc is pointless we are healers with dmg spells to support a group at best in whatever.

I tend to disagree. Currently, a shadow priest played well can contend with mages, locks and boomchickens. That’s not really the issue. You need to take a step back and look at the entire picture. When you look at the fact that every other class/spec in the game has been given useful utility in DF at this point, then look at what priests in general bring to the table
 Why would you EVER take a priest to any content? You can get everything they bring in pretty much any other class at this point.

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Fully agree with this.

Thing from beyond, in its current iteration
 is almost like shadowcore oil damage when seeing the meter overall. Whats baffling is its place on the tree; the very end. You need to spawn 50 spirits to proc it and it excludes counting more than one ghost per proc so regardless of how many you have dotted up it will only count one and after all this hassle it spawned and hit the target for 600-1200 damage per cast? lol?

Then we move over to the other idol, RNG tendrils
 RNG lets just leave it here.

Idol of N’zoth is the only decent one atm even though i still find its damage to be leaning more towards the mediocre side but the way its designed is less of a pain than the two i mentioned above.

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I agree with Pure: from my own perspective as a shadow priest (pve) - I don’t bring much that would make a group say: “I’m glad we picked a shadow priest over the other choices”. What I bring can either be brought by a healing priest, or it’s just not attractive enough.

Shadow was good before Legion, and in incredibly niche situations, it was “great” in Legion, and it’s been downhill from there.

Part of that is the absolute disaster that is Shadow’s design flaws since Legion, where they are constantly pulling back and forth between trying to scrap Voidform and all it’s attachments or trying to shoehorn it in without breaking the spec.

The other part of that is general game design that happens to screw over Shadow. Things like “balancing utility” which just results in priest losing utility or never getting unique utility because other classes “already have too much”. Another major one is Blizzard’s design philosophy around DoT damage, where they have for some reason sucked all the power out of our DoT spells.

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 somewhere along the way, they decided that DoTs shouldn’t be a huge source of damage, but just barely compensated half the classes that relied on DoTs as their main sources of damage. Spriest, Feral Druid, Balance to some extent, Fire mages got hit a bit, Afflock before reworks. Multi-dotting was “too strong” so dots got gimped, and with it, the identity/core element of several specs also got gutted with no meaningful compensation.

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