Hear me out.
I’ve played shadow priest for almost a decade. Literally my first character when i joined wow. The current state is down right sad. The empty promise of " You’ll do better damage in higher keys" is infuriating. Why should things have to live longer in order for the class to be good when almost every other class has upfront damage and is actively getting buffed. My suggested reworks.
-Shadow Crash needs a proc chance or the target cap needs to be removed. In low keys things die too quick for shadow to even be enjoyable unless you know the dungeons and how tanks pull. Most new players give up before they can even understand the class due to very low DPS and get little to no invites in M+. Also, If a big mob is pulled Shadow crash Sometimes does not even dot the main target. Good luck with that hard cast while everything is now 30% health and you’re at the bottom of the DPS meter playing catch up.
In addition if the target dies before shadow crash hits… No dots are applied. If the tank moves mobs and you just targeted a location… DPS loss… straight to jail… now Enjoy that 20 second CD while the tank is pulling four more mobs that will be half-dead by the time Shadow crash is back off cool down.
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Cast or die. Mobility issues. If you keep moving… your dps is trash but hey at least your alive. Dropping a feather is time consuming while other classes can just hit a button and cheese the mechanic or move quickly with minimal DPS loss. As a shadow priest you’re screwed. Like a mouse getting chased by a cat. The speaker fight on SV for example feels like constantly running for your life until you can set up. if you can get to a portal fast enough to drop the debuff. That’s if no one gets there first… you gotta be quicker than that. Disperse or die.
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Psychic Link: Ability was nerfed and then buffed single target??? We don’t have overwhelming issues with single target. Setting up AOE is our down fall. Other classes do not have to work this hard to set up AOE. See shadow crash problems.
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Power word Shield: Why even press this button?? It literally does nothing but lets you die a half second later. O a speed boost…
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Phantasm talent does not remove all “snare” effects. Please update this to roots as well. For the love of god we’re already slow… like let us be a vampire and turn into a bat or something just let me break out of roots.
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The trade off for sustained potency or energy compression on AOE damage feels like losing a left or right arm.
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Shadow word: Tickle… I mean death… needs to be buffed.
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Mind Flay insanity: Very strong, very fast, good job.
Okay that’s my vent for the day… There’s other stuff but i’m tired of typing. Please do something about this.
5 Likes
Said it before and I’ll say it again…
Remove Shadowcrash in its entirety or a choice talent that applies Vampiric Touch just like Shadow Crash but the spell that delivers that mechanic is a completely different spell. Not this target vs area choice BS.
Any of these are far better than Shadow Crash… and they already exist in the game files.
- Halo
- Cascade
- Unholy Nova
- Dark Void
Then for quick fights (low keys / insignificant enemies) have a talent that modifies your AOE dot spread spell mechanic to reduce its cooldown by 1 second each time an enemy dies while afflicted with your Vampiric Touch.
3 Likes
If only the damage of the abilities did enough damage to justify hardcasting VT to apply them when needed.
1 Like
Other than shadow crash it feels fine. Archon. gg even has shadow S tier in m+.
Also enchant and gem move speed, you can get 20% speed just by that. And if moving while casting really gets to you try voidweaver.
The psychic link nerf hurts, but we catch up on single target in the overall.
Every dps has trouble getting invites, and warlock has it so much worse on movement.
The enchants might help. There’s a bunch of classes in S tier. Warlock does not have it worse. I have have a lock and usually get invited fairly quickly. My parses are worse on my lock. Still top dps. My priest parses are high 80’s mid 90s but always bottom DPS. ALWAYS. Perfectly managed rotation. still bottom DPS. Voidweaver is a nice concept but i want a dps increase not decrease.
Numerically shadow seems fine, but the dungeon encounters needing constant movement feel awful
1 Like
Shadow does good damage when everything goes right. The problem is that it’s clunky and when even a little movement is required, everything falls apart :*)
You can’t (reasonably) build a class to be a stationary turret when your encounter design leans heavily on coordinated movements to make it challenging.
1 Like
Can’t forget how horrible Shadow Crash feels.
Miss a Shadow Crash? Terrible DPS on a pack.
Hit a Shadow Crash? Decent DPS on a pack— terrible DPS on the next pack.
2 Likes
It sucks, because I think shadow crash is thematically cool (even if it’s visually a bit bland), but it’s just sooooo frustrating to have to wait so long before your class can function again even when things go right.
Honestly if they don’t want to address priest mobility, and them stacking more and more encounters needing a lot of movement, give us a stagger mechanic and let us eat a few AOEs
I wish the spell- instead of flying into the air in an arc and landing on targets would instead create like a shadowy ring on the ground, and on the ring, shadow magic would shoot up and splay out and look cool. And there would be no travel time. The spell should immediately appear at the location it’s cast.
Then, the issue of the cooldown. Maybe make haste lower the CD? 20 seconds feels so annoyingly long. Maybe keep it 20 seconds, but give it two charges?
Spriest mobility is fine though?
Archon can struggle a little during halo cause you have to dump a lot of surges but otherwise. Holding some insanity or procs for known movement and void torrent on weaver makes our movement pretty good.
Feather is on par with shaman/druid mobility. Spend 1 GCD for 40% move speed briefly. We get to keep dpsing during our speed boost too lol
You realize Druid has stampeding roar, dash, wild charge. Shaman has spiritwalker’s grace and gust of wind, on top of ghost wolf.
Priest gets feather.
1 Like
Only significant thing there is spiritwalkers.
The rest doesn’t matter lol.
Yes, it does because it highlights a disparity. Priest is even worse than DK and Paladin now in the movement department.
For what.
Sprinting across a long distance in a short amount of time? Yeah for sure.
For needing to occasionally move out of mechanics while dps’ing? Not at all. There’s a huge difference.
Not just that. Priest has no way to break roots (unless you want to waste Dispersion). Our snare talent Phantasm is very hard to spend a point on and requires us to use Fade. Any arguments about “class homogenization” are out the window now, since they gave DKs and Paladins so much mobility or knockback protection.
Consistent 40% movement speed doesn’t matter that much when you’re snared. You can still get trapped in a deadly mechanic. A class with actual displacement can warp out of it.
I mean sure. But that’s a completely different point too.
I don’t like that they removed snare removal from fade, also from vengeful retreat. Idk if it was for pvp reasons or to avoid cheesing mechanics in raid/cot.
There’s not that many roots and it’s not really relevant to the mobility discussion lol
Dispersion removes roots btw