Shadow mend dev post

Ok so someone help me understand with the recent dev post, they talk about shadow mend vs flash heal.

To me, it sounds like they want to remove shadow mend entirely? Am I understanding this right?.

If yes, I don’t think I would want that. Flash heal,for shadow at least, feels so weak when used. I pretty much avoid it since I feel like I’m just burning mana.

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Shadow Mend is too weak of a heal to justify it being on a 15s cd for Holy/Disc. It’s also just another heal to add to your bar that’s made redundant by other abilities.

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Yup, this one’s bad.

They dismissed spell school lockout in PvP, but Disc has nothing valuable to kick in the shadow school with mend and potentially mindgames going - so it’s worse than they’re portraying. It’s also pretty much necessary for Shadow to heal inside shadowform. The utility was there to make it distinct.

It’s also just going to make Disc weaker in general because Shadow covenant Smends were going to be the answer to several damage patterns. This is a terrible decision for every spec but holy.

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It heals the most for me when in shadow. So I find it as a loss entirely. Flash heal isn’t currently doing much for me right now pvp wise.

This might be diff case for heal specs so I understand, but for shadow it’s a different perspective entirely. Pretty bummed. Shadow is losing so much self sustain now if shadowmend goes.

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For those unaware: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/1279512/238

That entire post was a complete dumpster fire. I’ll just go down the list:

1.) Removing Shadowmend and replacing it with Flash Heal goes against the theme of the spec, the purpose behind Shadow Covenant, and absolutely guts the spec in PvP. Flash Heal shouldn’t even be a Disc spell (nor should Renew or PoM for that matter).
2.) They’re forcing themselves to redesign Shadow Covenant because they refuse to make Shadow spells worth casting. Dark Penance was literally worse than regular Penance and now they’re talking about removing Mindgames???
3.) Renew/Flash Heal/PWS changes are trash.
4.) “We don’t think every spec needs an interrupt, so we’re going to give it to literally every single spec (including healers) except heal Priests.”
5.) “How dare Priests have any mobility at all.”
6.) “We’re removing Shining Force so that we can give Resto Shamans Thunderstorm.”
7.) “We’re not bringing back one of the most fun and requested abilities Spectral Guise because we don’t like how invisibility drops targets. But we’re not removing Stealth, Vanish, Prowl, Incarn Prowl, Invis, Greater Invis, Camouflage, or Shadowmeld.”
8.) “AoE stuns aren’t fun if everyone has them, so we’re going to give them to everyone except Priest.”
9.) Their list of personal defensives is a massive lol:
Desperate Prayer: Literal garbage
Power Word: Shield: Not a defensive
Angelic Bulwark: 15% HP shield on a 90s cooldown and it’s a capstone
Translucent Image: 10% dr is minor but eh
Spell Warding: 3% magic only dr

I was very happy with the original talent trees they released for Disc and was nervous about the “Power Word: Update.” Guess I was right at least in my opinion.

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Don’t forget about lighting lasso lol.

Yah idk this post was bad
No talks about dot/rot build
Devour plagued ignored
Shadowmend gone, shadow losing huge heals now

This is what happens when we lose 3 months worth of time to fix issues.

Pretty much. Jesus, idk man. That time constraint making them tho werid stuff. Why did they leave us dead for 3 months lol

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If they removed Shadow Mend from Disc I imagine they’re going to be getting some single target heal buffs. I.E. probably get Heal and Lightweaver like Holy.

Aren’t they focusing on pennace heal for disc? Looks like they are making it the main heal focus again.

What about shadow tho?flash heal is too weak and burns mana

It just shows how much Pvp balancing effects the fun factor of specs. Since as a person who has played pvp at a higher level before in Wow IF a healer like disc is unkillable/too many ways to stop the pound train on themselves its a very big problem. Like being sad They should have just nerfed the pvp potential of the healer specs by disabling some abilites in pvp or nerfing them.

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It’s really a catch 22 scenario with Shadow.

If you’re in a raid or dungeon… how often do you Shadow Mend?

In PvP you could Shadow Mend crit heal yourself for a donky portion of your hp. Pretty much everytime I watched somebody 1v1 a Shadow Priest most of the time they got put into a cc and the Shadow Priest full healthed themselves.

Maybe this is a different xpac but as a person who plays SP in pvp Shadow mend will barely ever full heal you with your own mana bar as a shadow priest due to its high cost+ and its low healing% to your int

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Well I can’t comment for pve, i only pvp.
For mez I find maximizing shadowend cds keep me up. Shadowmend with macho passive is really strong. From there I dilute with renew,pws, and desperate prayer.

But they can easily be cancled with dispell /purge spells .

Flash heal is last resort and not worth it even then.

In dragonflight, this spell with is macho passive will be keeping you alive. Without it you’ll melt.
At least from my exp in ptr.
10 percent dmg reduction and strong overtime heal

Shadow covenant would never work because we don’t have enough shadow spells - it had little to do with how good they were to cast. Dark Reprimand and the halo/dstar change made sense in that regard because it meant we could fully utilize the window.

Smend change kinda broke that. But we can’t really just say that Scov would have ever been good without a redesign.

Big disagree on this. Flash Heal was going to be a useless spell for us (and still is going to feel like trash with Smend gone), but PW:S and Renew change were and still are really, really great for Disc.

Everything else, I agree. Their reasoning didn’t make any sense because they caused the problem they’re trying to fix specifically with priest for some reason. ‘We’ve given everyone an interrupt - so healer priests shouldn’t have one, because there’s too many interrupts out there!’ Meanwhile, Paladin, the spec that just got a battle rez, also got an interrupt?

If their idea is that there needs to be less control going into DF - then the other classes should also have less control/utility. It doesn’t make sense to just add a BUNCH of utility, interrupts and CC then go on to priest and say ‘Well you know guys, we just added a bunch of stuff, so we can’t give any to you.’

This would be yikes. I wouldn’t want to play a Disc where I had to play something like lightweaver for my healing to not suck in extended damage windows. Smend + Scov was the only answer Disc had to stuff like medivh birds. Extended windows of damage that continued past your atonement bursts.

Saying ‘well we’re going to add a talent that makes you weave hardcast heals more!’ is not an answer. Disc already has several aura nerfs to reduce its overall damage because they don’t hardcast heals as much. Giving them more to weave into a healing rotation both A.) Pulls back on the entire spec’s current identity which they seem to be trying to keep in every other way. And B.) Lowers their potential damage for no reason.

If I’m expected to cast mostly defensive penance, I should have something that gives me real damage in exchange. Instead, we’re looking at removing mindgames too, I guess.

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If they get rid of Shadow Mend than they may actually give us a -20% damage reduction from Translucent Image because they’re trying to balance people using Masochism + Translucent Image at the same time.

If they buff flash heal for us losing shadowmend and the extra healing from maso…
And if they give us that 20 percent dmg reduction. From fade. The. I won’t complain.

But if they don’t, I won’t be happy. Flash heal too weak

Blizzard must address kick/silence/interrupt immunity for Discipline if this happens. Every other healer has some PvP talent to give at least a small window of immunity via a talent choice. Discipline does not. This is going to consume a PvP talent and for Disc there’s already almost no flexibility. Bottom line this really blows.

They can’t buff flash heal as it stands because holy has access to it and benefits from echo as well as other talents that buff it/encourage its use. They’d probably have to pull back on those talents for holy in order for it to work.

It seems they’re thinking of Shadowmend as near-flash heal’s level of healing. But That’s only the case when the DoT ticks people back down. The vast majority of Smend use in current WoW the DoT doesn’t matter (atonement immediately healed it) or got canceled by followup damage (PvP, used on tanks/high damage windows).

Completely agree and is mostly what I was trying to get at. They added Dark Reprimand and shadow Halo/DS. They were going in the right direction with a dedicated “shadow build” and then they threw it all away and forced themselves to rework Shadow Covenant.

Renew instead of PW:S as an atonement applicator has the same issue that Plea did - it forces you to do a bunch of overheal in order to do your main class mechanic. It’s not as bad as Plea due to being a HoT, but spammable PW:S resolved the issue completely.

All changing PW:S did was give us yet another maintenance spell to cast every 8s and add more button bloat with Renew. Rapture works the same regardless.

I posted my thoughts about that on the beta section as well.

I’d personally rather they just NOT give every other healer a 15-45s interrupt. It’s an unnecessary arms race, especially in PvP where now 2v2 healer+dps comps are even more powerful because they now have 2 interrupts instead of 1.

Holy is also super popular in PvP so they’re balancing things in the moment instead of the FOTM change.

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Omg
Shadow selfs sustain hitting a huge blunder then. Rip this sucks too much.