We need to be able to damage large packs of enemies on demand and beyond 6. Our class simply isn’t design with any thought around this fundamental necessity for any DPS spec. Doing the Abundance event is an absolute nightmare for Shadow Priests…
Here are some solutions I posted a while back.
Give us AoE DoTs baseline. Merge all the damage and leach of SW:P and VT into a single AoE instant cast spell. Call it, it Shadow Word: Vampiric Touch or whatever. This spell will only be used when Tentacle Slam is on cooldown. Have it prioritize elite enemies in pve or players in pvp. Make it so that we can only have 6 active dots at a time so that they don’t get nerfed into the ground along with my next suggestions.
Keep Tentale Slam as is, it’s a fun spell and feels great to use. Maybe increase its effective width and radius.
Remove Psychic Link. It’s a terribly difficult talent to tune and keeps us from getting a real AoE class design beyond 6 targets.
Replace PL with Kamikaze Ghost, call it whatever. This would cause our Shadowy Apparitions to explode, dealing damage to ALL targets near our 6 DoTed enemies. Hense allowing us to do AoE to everyone around. And since there will only be a maximum of 6 ghosts launched at a time, it will be easier to tune.
Tune our spells to make up for the loss of Psychic Link.
Buff Shadow Word: Death. Give it back the proc to cast at full strength regardless of health. Remove the recoil damage, it’s outdated and I don’t want to hear the niche argument of “It breaks CC if you cast it a split second before.” Master Sheppard says no it doesn’t.
Allow Shadowy Insight to build up 2 charges. I currently don’t bother picking Void Empowerment as Voidweaver, since Shadowy Insight often naturally procs on it’s own before my Void Torrent ends.
Greatly buff the proc chance of Mind Devourer. We need more ghosts to explode.
Redesigned our talent pathing around this core Ghost Kaboom design.
Please please please just make Shadow Form an optional transformation. I’m tired of looking like a purple blob or a puff of smoke and losing time reactivating it in pvp when I die. Remove it from the top of the bar and just give it a toggle spell like Dracthyr Visage Form where you can have it activate when in combat or just stay off.
Significantly increase the power of Power Word: Shield for shadow but greatly increase its cooldown. A Void Shield talent perhaps.
Have Body and Sould last longer on Shadow Priest. Make it proportional to the longer cooldown. Currently there’s no reason to waste a GCD on this spell unless you’re just running to catch up in a dungeon and every other player is already miles ahead of you…
It just reapplies VT on the same targets most of the time.
Even if it had smart targeting and only applied on targets that aren’t DoTed, which it doesn’t, it would still be terrible because it still takes 30 seconds to gather 2 charges of Tentacle Slam. So once that pack dies, you are completely locked out of doing any AoE what so ever.
I’ve been complaining about this since they removed Mind Sear. You can’t go around hard casting VT individually on 20 mobs, and every time I bring this up, some troll who pretends we are still in Vanilla WoW accuses me of not understanding “skill expression.”
Like ya okay buddy, if by the time you’ve done casting VT on each target, it’s already run out of the first target, then you aren’t playing your class and you sure as hell aren’t doing damage.
The game is literally built around beeing able to damage mass amounts of enemies as fast as possible. The Abundance event at least makes that clear to players who don’t do dungeons or raid. Why isn’t it clear to the people who are in charge of class design?
If you take the talent “Misery” VT and SWP are cast together.
Tentacle slam. 100% does have smart application. It will apply VT (AND SWP if you took Misery) to 12 targets if you cast it twice in a row. (Assuming you have 12 targets to hit.)
Try taking Holy Nova for abundance events. It’s not going to hit hard but it’ll be great for gathering mobs.
I know what Misery is… You’ve litterally missed the entire premise of my post. And no Tencle Slam is not properly applying to only undoted targets and as I mentioned earlier, even if it was, it wouldn’t change the fact that Shadow’s AoE is completely unavailable for half a minute after using both charges.
This is why I kept arguing against the “Just give us another charge of Shadow Crash” crowd for the last 2 expansions. Because it doesn’t addresse the problem at its source.
The Shadow AoE problem IS: You simply can’t fight large packs of mobs in quick succession. That’s it, that’s the problem. People can pretend it doesn’t exist by saying, just save up your charges. But the fact is, there are too many fights that require killing a bunch of small adds in over and over again. That’s a fact, period!
Everyone who play SP knows it. There are plenty of threads about it like this one for example.
I agree with most of the OPs suggestions, but I think a lot of the issues right now are caused by the fact that we’re locked out of most hard content right now.
Things just die too fast for DoTs to feel impactful
The game needs better target capping, but your entire argument boils down to just gut shadow priest and make it like ret paladin. I don’t want to play ret paladin. I want to play a DoT spec with ramping damage. You’re optimizing entirely for shadow’s ability to do low HP packs at the beginning of an expansion rather than for the enjoyment and uniqueness of the spec. You are free to hate PL, but it’s at least a novel ability that makes shadow feel like not just a copy and paste or ret or ele.
Tentacle slam is great but it’s extremely loaded in its function right now
You need to use it in single target and for aoe. It spawns your idols, apparitions, void apparitions, applies your dots in aoe, and it dramatically shortens your opener.
There should be some other secondary way of passively spreading dots, imo. Even if it’s just a passive talent that makes your dots slowly spread to nearby targets.
Im all for keeping a part of PL, but lowering the impact of it so other AoE spells and abilites could be introduced.
Its obvious we suffer for not having any tools to deal with smaller pulls or pulls where mobs die to quickly.
There should be a difference between playing Shadow in a Single Target enviroment and AoE enviorment. Sitting and doing the same rotation with basically no decision making is boring, and the entire rotation feels flat.
In one of my older post I suggested putting Psychic Link on a choice node with with the new Exploding Ghost talent so as to give players the option.
I’m just sick of PL in general, it makes tuning our class a nightmare to balance because it forces Blizzard to have to either nerf our single target damage or nerf PL. So either you do too much damage in 6 mob fights and too little in single target OR the complete reverse.
Every time somebody tries to improve a class, some contrarian tells them to go play Ret Paladin.
I remember when Mind Sear was a thing. Psychic link only showed up half way through Dragonflight so don’t accuse me of trying to destroy Shadow’s identity.
Did you get so bored trolling Demonpahn’s thread that you decided to do the same here. Good thing I post forum threads on my priest or else you’d accuse me of having right to share my opion. Or that I don’t have the “brain power” to play shadow.
Why bother engaging with whatever this is, to the ignore list with you. So in the words of someone else.
[quote=“Demonpahn, post:4, topic:2264551, username:Demonpahn-stormrage”]Thanks for offering nothing to the discussion. Every class should be viable in the end game content.[/quote]
Adding back mind sear and getting rid of psychic link are two separate things and I am addressing your concerns directly. Note I didn’t call you a troll, or that you were being disingenuous. You’re making up insults on our own for yourself. I’m not going to let you throw a stick in your wheel and then accuse me of pushing you over. If you can’t handle someone disagreeing with your opinion the forums ins’t the right place for you.
Shadow already had too many buttons, post prune it’s finally in a good state. Adding in more buttons like mind sear which was a boring button that had almost no differentiation with mind flay doesn’t solve anything, it just reintroduces old problems.
Class differentiation is also a serious issue, and so it’s when you’re saying things like, just make shadow’s AoE function like outbreak or remove the core mechanic that keeps us from spamming AoE button then brining up that this makes the class play more like X class is a valid concern.
This is a massively conflated statement. Viable != optimal. There were still shadow priests getting the 0.1% M+ title in TWW S3. If someone can do it, it must be viable. If you care more about optimally pushing than playing shadow, then you shouldn’t be playing shadow at all. The game is not designed so that every spec is a homogenous blob of aoe burst so every spec can push m+ equally well for good reason.
Exactly, that just compounds the AoE unavailability problem and makes the terible bandaid of “saving our charges” feel even worse.
I love tencle slam. It’s great, feels great to use as cooldown in single target. Having our capstones proc from it is cool. The problem is being unable to apply AoE dots on demand as a baseline.
There is no good reason for SW:P and VT to still be two seperate spingle target spells. Having 2 dots is just a legacy of an older game design and doesn’t actually effect gameplay.
Merge all the damage and leech into a single AoE instant cast spell. Call it Shadow Word: Vampiric Touch or whatever. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about using up Tentacle Slam and we wouldn’t be locked out of AoE after successive packs of fast dying mobs.
Its always funny when someone makes a statement like this, when they are more than guilty of doing the exact same thing constantly for weeks. When did this clueless moron get to dictate feedback?
Exactly. Like ive said numerous times, “unique and different” doesn’t make something good. There’s a reason why other classes have simple, on demand AoE abilities.
What I would love is for SW:D to be a DoT “Execute” – Similar Concept as Touch of Death on Monks. - But with some Shadow Priest Identity and Flare.
My Rework would be:
Shadow Word: Death - 2 Min CD - Casting Cost: 25% Maximum Health over 10-seconds - Instant
Inflicts the target Mind with the Impending Fear of Death - Dealing 2.5% of the Shadow Priests Life every second for 10-seconds – If the target dies while affected by Shadow Word: Death - 50% of the CD is refunded and the Priest is healed for 100% of the Damage Dealt by SW:D. - Generates 5 - Insanity per Second
There is awesome synergy with other spells in the kit – You could sacrifice Desperate Prayer for additional damage, and you also want to make sure that your Fort is always applied. - Damage is offset by Leech and VE if needed.
It balances well, since it is directly affected by Life Total. A Talent can be reworked to allow damage to add to and be affected by Mastery.
It fits a SPs identity perfectly - A Direct Psychic attack on the persons mind that becomes a battle of will – If I win, I steal your life, if you win my lifeforce was lost with yours.
Balanced for PvP - Since the SP is also taking Damage as a DoT. It can also be adjusted where the damage breaks certain CC.
Honestly, I can’t see any scenario where I would want to us this is PvP. It’s hard enough to stay alive, why sacrifice my hp just to deal the same amount of damage to an enemy.
Most the classes have spells that can knock off 40% or more of a player’s HP in an instant without having to sacrifice hp to do it. Much less trading 25% of my own HP to do that same amount of damage to the enemy and over 10 second. It’s no longer an execute mechanic at that point. It’s just a terrible DoT. There’s no upside.
I made a suggestion in my Frost DK thread about how they could rework Soul Reaper for the entire class. Maybe they could just make those changes for Shadow Word: Death instead.
Shadow Word: Death rework. Deals upfront shadow damage followed by a powerful 5 sec Dot. Triggers Shadowy Apparition.
Give it a 20s cooldown that resets if enemy dies within the DoT window. Have the CD reduced by haste.
If casted on target above 35%, it does not apply the 5sec death DoT. This allows Voidweaver players to still be able to cast it to break barriers, they just won’t get the full punch if the tagert isn’t under 35%.
Even without talking about how effective spriest is at AoE it just feels really weird and bad to basically have the same rotation for AoE as for single target. I haven’t played anything else yet so maybe they did this with all classes and specs. Either way though it just removes any variety.
