Why does shadow form feel insignificant? Well here’s why…
It gives 10% spell damage.
In wotlk, it gave 100% dot damage, 15% damage reduction, increased overall damage and the ability to use Mind flay if i remember correctly it was a HUGE buff.
Now it’s kind of just standard. Feels like it should have some more passives added to it for that coolness factor
It gave dots the ability to crit. They already crit baseline.
It let vt and DP be affected by haste. Dots are hasted baseline.
It gave us 15% Dr. We have 15% Dr effectively baseline in most circumstances.
Mind flay was absolutely castable without shadow form. We learned mind flay at level 20 via talent progression, and shadowform at like 44.
Everything it used to give us is already baseline. It’s also learned at a much lower level and much less a part of the spec’s toolkit compared to back then. It effectively is baseline, we even have a healing spell that uses the shadow school to allow us to sidestep the old downside of being unable to cast our holy school heals.
Also you now learn shadow form at level 10. It’s not some momentous gain you get from talents or late into levelling progression, it’s the first spell you learn upon speccing shadow.
It could stand to be cooler, absolutely, especially visually. But idk what you could ‘add’ to it since every cool thing it used to do is just a part of the game.
A lot of people still want a holy/light caster that is an actual dps spec. I think that would be cool but not sure how blizzard could add something like that without essentially turning disc priest into a full fledged dps.