Shadow needs a rework, not tuning

Classes Priest
21

They need to simply eliminate shadow crash, and replace it with a talent that causes VT/swp to spread on tick to the nearest 2 enemies. The chance needs to either be very high, like 50% or the talent needs to just spread to 5 enemies on first tick and then have a chance after that.

Additionally, psychic link should trigger apparitions. with talent that offers bonus damage when only 1 enemy has your dots.

Void eruption itself is cancer. At the very least, it shouldnt need to be cast and something else should be replaced by void bolt, maybe mind flay or swD. Mind spike needs to do much better non insanity damage to make up for the poor insanity damage, or it could become a pure single target hammer.

1 Like
22

i actually really like Void Bolt tbh, it gives a class desperate for casts they can move a significant amount of them during our burst window, and Void eruption is a far more interesting, both visually and mechanically, ability than DA which feels straight out of cata both design wise and visually.

Make VE instant cast, make void bolt able to store 2 charges so you can hold it for a few seconds (less messy rotation during heavy proc windows) and it’s perfect afaic

23

I’m hoping that before the end of this expac Xal’atath gives Shadow Priests an offer of power and at that point everyone on this forum is so frustrated we switch sides for glorious, smooth mechanics, buffs and damage and go into Midnight having joined the dark side.

10 Likes
24

Oh wow…all of this. Of course, tweak here and there, but all of this makes sense and have often hoped for many of these changes to occur. If this is supposedly what makes a “Legion” priest, then even more sad for having not played that expansion when it was current.

25

That would make our ramp up time even worse in AoE situations.

26

I miss mind sear. Specifically the one that mass spread SWP. It was very satisfying to pop it out and blast in mass AoE pulls.

It wasn’t perfect. There was an odd dead zone of aoe with too many mobs to solo dot and not enough to make sear feel strong.

For me the most missed thing is a sense of control. A sense of control over aoe, burst, whatever. It feels like so much of our damage is through passives and secondary effects there’s an isn’t a sense of power behind each button press.

3 Likes
27

Honestly, DF Mind sear reworked to be channelable while moving and automatically apply a searing Nightmare style pulse on top of the baseline pulse could be very fun imo

2 Likes
28

I wish the spec was less clunky. Void eruption needs to go . Event though it’s my big damage button I hate pressing it because it doesn’t not flow at all

2 Likes
29

I like the cast dot/hit target with somgle target spell/spread dot to nearby mobs approach. Incorporate the current vt/sw:p combo with something like: add a charge to sw:d, make a talent if you sw:d a target with vt on it, it spread vt (along with sw:p) to nearby targets. Using sw:d to spread dots does not cause back lash.

30

At least it looks good :slight_smile:

31

make it instant and it’ll flow better, I’d really rather we get rid of the boring flat % damage boost instead of the actually interesting DoT extender Burst button

32

I’m tired of feeling this way.

5 Likes
33

I ended up rerolling off my spriest for the time being. It’s flat out terrible to play and does next to no damage

1 Like
34

I suggest making an elemental shaman if you want a fun range caster. They have so much more utility, AoE is always available and lightning is cool as hell.

35

Pretty much this right here. I just started playing Shadow, and I’m happy whenever I get to cast either of these two spells, and unhappy whenever I have to press virtually any other button.

1 Like
36

Been maining SP for years. I’ve never felt this weak since Uldir :frowning:

3 Likes
37

I’m dancing across my keyboard as if I’m playing Flight of the Bumblebee, only to end up bottom of the meters.

4 Likes
38

I think the rework is going to disappoint when it eventually happens, and it is years away.

Timeframe wise: I don’t think were going to see any Priest rework this expansion, it will all be tuning until next expansion and there may be a rework at that time, though I would still call it doubtful for one main reason. Priest is bleeding its player count, and its only speeding up despite having two of the healing classes, which usually meant it had a very respectable % of total population.

When the re-work comes its likely it wont be great news and the reason for that is purely based on Augment Evoker being a thing. The Augment evoker fills a DPS slot, is accepted by the player base and has mod representation to account for its low personal DPS output while being a semi-support or Soft Support.

A priest rework is going to hit the same way; when wow first launched priests were pure support. Shadow was basically useless for DPS, holy and disc were both meh with some minor niche moments they could really shine. WOTLK was the first time Shadow was truly a DPS and really it was only by the end of the expansion that it could do this. It languished after WotLK until Legion, after that its been all over the place in all three specs and as we all know its basically been abandoned by Blizz since, and when they do speak on it, they always point to the other aspects it provides being the things that should have value.

So a priest to Blizzard is: Stam Buff, Power Infusion, heals from shadow or DPS from disc. Its design has been to be the bottom performer in its designated role while also being a bottom performer in the other roles.

Shadow is low DPS but it brings a Stam buff, power infusion, Vamp Embrace, Leap of Faith, Halo group heals, the worst interrupt in the game and lots of personal sustain.

Disc is the opposite with the low healing but tons of other things that make up for it, but it took many expansions and updates to the mods people rely on to account for the utility it brings outside of healing throughput.

The rework is going to make either Disc or Shadow the next Augment evoker and the changes to shadow in TWW are indicating that they have chosen Shadow for that rework. The DPS will remain lowest possible and the rework will focus on buffing the utility aspects.

Disc and Holy will likely just be reworked to reduce button and Talent tree bloat but largely be unchanged on the basic designs.

39

Are you talking about just Shadow here or Priest in General?

I would argue that Cata, MoP and WoD were some of the best and possibly Pinnacle moments for Shadow.

Spells like Spectral Guise and Feather having 80% or even 60% speed bonus and the simplicity of Shadows damage profile while in WoD having 2 solid choices to change up your damage profile to be extremely Dot/Rot centric or you can go the proc city amplified damage buffs with your nuke spells in Mind Spike, Mind Blast, Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Death.

Shadow as least was very fun in that era.

It was the shadow redesign to fit an old god void theme with the artifact weapon in Legion that began this entire mess we have been experiencing for the last 8+ years.

With the degenerate draining mechanic that made anything beyond a long raid fight with low to none intermission and movement debacle.

With the complete stripping of utility and rotational spells like Spectral Guise being removed and Shadow Word: Death removed or made pitiful or Mind Blast losing its oomph power in liu of it just becoming a source to generate insanity or getting a highly suspectable to being wasted spell like Void Torrent which only now with Voidweaver after 8 years can you mitigate its potential wastefulness and who can forget about loosing Cascade going into Legion… Sad moments.

Then because of the Legion redesigns, this caused the split in Priest where very little crossover was used from one spec to the other which caused massive ramafications in PvP as a core example being that our duel use of Shadow and Holy spell schools were no longer really accessible which caused you to be more suspectable to being locked out as an example being Shadow Mend for Shadow was bad because you can interrupt shadows damage or healing and you are locked out of the other as well which made you completely useless and at the mercy of the enemy.

Legion kicked off the dark times for Shadow and dark in this context is bad.

6 Likes
40

Aye, cata and mop shadow priest was peak

2 Likes