Shadow needs a rework, not tuning

Classes Priest
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I find his diatribes entertaining and they fill me with nostalgia. The repeated descriptions of how shadow functioned before legion are likely to have some utility should a dev happen upon one of them. Given the turnover and layoffs at blizzard, it’s likely that whichever dev has been cursed with the wondrous opportunity to repair our class has no idea how shadow functioned in the past.

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Shadow priest had amazing identity and I loved old “shadow” theme more than void. You was master of mind torture/control, vampiric theme, SHADOWS, you could have dark ravens flying around. Now you’re void and tentacles which is entirely different from what we had all expansions prior to legion. Current identity is more clear but old one was still coherent and unique. I would be so happy if it wasn’t changed or we had option to play old theme shadow priest. 4th spec would work good for it. It also had much more non-dot damage. Mind blast, initial plague hit, SW:D, mind spike procs, CASCADE (one of the best abilities priest ever had) - they were big hitters. SW:D is a joke now with its damage. It’s not even generating source. I could top dps meters on bg with just swd. Mind blast was a threat. Now it hits like rogue fillers but with cd and cast time. I wish I could have those abilities back with old theme.

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One thing leads into another. Original shadow has a very vamperic identity between Embrace and Touch allowing you to effectively drain health and mana from enemies to give to yourself and your party.

Legion identity was that of someone peering to much into the void and being driven to the brink and beyond in order to gain power.

In both cases the abilities of the class and their mechanics functioned around this identity. Right now Shadow doesn’t have an identity, or it may be better to say we are having an identity crisis, and our abilities are just there so we can technically do our job but they don’t really work together or build into a cohesive playstyle. It’s a bland “build resource dump resource” with random procs an no cohesion. It’s trying to keep what people liked from old shadow and legion shadow instead of committing to either and none of it is working.

This would also apply to your Shadow Orbs then…and old Vampiric Shadow as well. No the reality is the only reason those things are not around is because Blizzard didn’t like them, or didn’t know what to do with them, or some other random fancy of the designers who don’t give a damn about the class. Many of the things the community has loved about the spec have been removed simply because Blizzard didn’t like it, which I think we can both agree is stupid.

People still call out the failures of old shadow and shadow orbs. You are not unique, and neither is Legion shadow. All builds have their advocates and detractors.

If this is your standard then Enhance Shaman who has been perpetual garbage in pvp fails this as well. Being bad at one, or multiple, points in the game doesn’t mean the design itself is bad, especially if it’s showing potential else where. It means it needs number tuning to make sure it can be effective in both.

I’ll have to take your word for it(concerning Shadow orbs), but based on how you described it, to me is sounds like another identity crisis between was the spec a DoT spec or a direct damage spec. I can believe you had fun with it as both elements sound like they could be, I just kinda question if it was really a cohesive design.

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Shadow all the way up to the ending of WoD was essentially the same when it came to the spells you use and how they work.

The only thing that really changed was the ease at which you can do what you already did.

The identity you speak of has no bearing on how the spec played.

You can easily swap out Vampiric for Drain. Warlocks have Drain Life, doesn’t make them a vampiric theme but it essentially does the same thing, you deal damage and heal from it.

The idea of restoring heath and mana to your group was cool but the thing to keep in focus here is that it did not dictate how you played. You still used the same spells you have been for years.

Nothing gameplay wise has any relation to this “identity”.
You simply have a bar that goes up when you use spells and goes down passively which causes you to want to use spells as fast and as often as you can. But this type of gameplay loop punishes you really hard when you can’t keep this whack a mole gameplay going. Things like latency or micro cc or movement etc. negatively impacts your gameplay. Meaning outside forces can dictate how well you play instead of the choices you decide to make.

The only thing that’s insane here is the part about the lack of control you have when it comes to playing your spec as you are at the mercy of others and even the terrain as if you have to move from one BG node to the other or one pack of mobs to the other, you can just fizzle out right when you were about to get going. This was especially bad when you couldn’t even control when you were going to start popping off as you automatically just went into your powered up form without you choosing to be which often happened as soon as you killed the last pack of mobs or a player and then you go into Voidform with nothingness to attack and you rush frantically to get to another target to attack before it runs out and low and behold it did runout as soon as you got to your next target and so you have to start playing the game feeling like your short of breath as you were extremely weak outside of Voidform and took forever to actually get back into it just for you to once again waste it… over and over this happened throughout the game. Total lack of control of how you play. That is insanely awful gameplay design.

So if the identity is going insane because you are prevented from playing your spec then yea sure… it has an identity, an identity of atrocious gameplay design that simply did not work in the games fast paced content that is felt widely everywhere bar for single target long form combat that only raids provided.

Then if you want to talk about the insanity of the absolute gutting of abilities then you can say good bye to Cascade which was amazing in MoP and WoD and say good bye to burst nuke spells that Mind Spike offered and cool utility spells like Spectral Guise that allowed you to bypass areas in stealth and escape from incoming attacks and enemies.

Then you can look at the talent tree and see all those cool talents you had in WoD to be replaced by boring passive talents that gave insanity which only mattered to get in and maintain Voidform which as I already explained that it was nigh impossible to do in the vast majority of the games content which essentially made all these talents absolutely worthless.

We lost…

  • Instant cast Mind Spikes
  • Instant cast Mind Blasts
  • Hard hitting Shadow Word: Deaths
  • Hard hitting Mind Flay
  • Massive AOE damage button in Cascade and Halo
  • Chuck resource gain in Shadow Orbs is yea did slow trickle resource gain that became meaningless.

Then with Void Torrent coming into being, which seems the only reason was because it was tied to the artifact. It was and still is just essentially Mind Flay but with a cooldown. So now you can be interrupted and pay a cooldown penalty which just makes you a lot more susceptible to movement be it forced with grips or knock backs etc. or if you need to move during the channel.

I just spent a number of hours trying to find a post made by the wow devs way back in WoD where they explain the reasoning of why they actually made the changes they did to priest going into legion. They detailed out a lot of stuff that essentially is summed up as simply… they wanted to. No reason other than someone that had control over the Priest class design chose to go that route and then shortly after the initial work was made, that person left the company for whatever reason.

Unfortunately I was unable to find that exact post.

So if anyone knows the post I am taking about, please share the link. I recall someone on these priest forums sharing that link some time ago (its been years by now I think) but try as I may, I could not track that down.

I think it would provide a great deal of insight to read that blue post as when I read it, I recall just laughing at the absurdness of it as it didn’t go into anything that was “wrong” with the WoD Shadow Priest spec design and because of that, I see it as a needless endeavor that just caused unnecessary issues years after years following that mess of changes.

However I did not come empty handed, I did find some blue posts that could prove entertaining or insightful to a degree and so ill share them here and comment on some parts of them…

So now some parts I want to comment on…

Finally, I’d like to talk a bit more about Shadow in general; the big picture, not so much about these specific concerns. We’ve been retrospective lately about where Shadow has come, and how much it truly fulfills its intended fantasy, gameplay style, role, etc. Shadow Priests should be the masters of the shadows cast by the light from the Holy Priests. In terms of lore and fantasy, they should focus on the powers of the Void. However, they’re still Priests; they know that what they’re dabbling with is dangerous, and have to try to go as far as they can without going too far. Pain, Insanity, Darkness… These are the tools they use on their enemies, and even a bit on themselves. For the future, we’re looking at ways that we can adjust their gameplay to feel more viscerally “Shadow Priest”. We think some things have worked well (like their DoTs), and other things have worked not so well (like Shadow Orbs). It’s too early to announce anything specific at this point, but we can tell you that there are very significant changes coming to Shadow in a future patch, that we hope will better capture the fantasy, while providing unique gameplay. We’re reading all of your feedback, and taking it into account when making these changes.

The bolded part…

That is your intended fantasy it seems. Even in that sentence they have misgivings and conflicts as they want to go this nebulas “Void” route while also remaining a Priest. But when you try this out in practice, you have mechanical failures one after the other. This is when the entire Mana and Insanity resource issues start to show as you need to use utility but they also cost mana but at the time you had no mana and only insanity and so they cost insanity which caused you to loose more DPS than just GCD cost which then incentivizes you to not use utility which then later they made them grant insanity which that problem bleed into the entire spec so that you have to use your GCD’s optimally every second possible to maintain voidform or else you suffer massively which again when you introduce CC and latency or travel time you are at the mercy of everything but your ability to choose what button to push when in helping someone out or having no target to attack at all etc.

You don’t use insanity on your character, you the PERSON behind the keyboard goes insane with the absurdity of the mechanical nature of everything revolving around Voidform issue.

  • Oblivion
    • Instant, 2 min cooldown
    • Let the power of the void flow through you, instantly generating 100 Insanity.

This I don’t even recall if it ever made it into the game. But you can see they knew that you needed to start out pumping or else you are behind the curve in short burst/timed fights. This is the major issue of the draining mechanic Voidform version as you were always and easily prevented from going into Voidform or just silence or stun or grip to run out the clock so it basically seemed like that spell never existed which meant all the spells contingent on getting into Voidform didn’t exist either. Which resulted in you feeling like your exhausted and out of breath trying to get anything done as every other class can just pop everything and destroy you while you barely tickle them.

Being “unique” doesn’t mean its “good” when you are always playing catchup and flat out dead visiting the graveyard in-between. You are just simply uniquely terribly bad.

Re: Ramp Up Time
For the cyclical rotation to work, it’s important that there is significant time on both sides of the Voidform line. And the Lingering Insanity letting you speed the cycle up as you maintain it creates some really fun gameplay. But that first ramp up of the fight can feel like it drags on to some, and so we want to make sure that there are talent choices that let you kickstart your rotation. Currently, Shadow Word: Void, and to a lesser extent Power Infusion, do that, but we think they’re not quite strong enough to live up to that goal. We’re planning to tweak Shadow Word: Void to help it really deliver on getting you into Voidform quickly.

Re: Mobility
Every spec needs to have some weaknesses, but Shadow’s current immobility is fairly stark in that regard. It’s especially painful that their cycle slows to a crawl when they can’t get cast time spells off. The aforementioned change to Shadow Word: Pain generating Insanity on cast should help significantly with that. That said, we are concerned about the risk of Shadow Priests running around spamming SW:P constantly in PvP, and will be keeping an eye on that.

Re: Utility
Shadow is in a very odd situation when it comes to utility, especially in PvP. The amount of potential utility they offer is astronomical. It’s a staggeringly long list: Body and Soul, Dispel Magic, Dominate Mind, Mass Dispel, Mind Bomb, Power Word: Shield, Psychic Horror, Psychic Scream, Purify Disease, Shackle Undead, Shadow Mend, Silence, Vampiric Embrace… probably something else I’ve forgotten offhand. But at the same time, despite the crazy number of utility spells at their fingertips, it’s actually quite hard for them to actually use many of them. Since their rotation is based on continuously generating Insanity as fast as possible, any time lost to utility is punishing, especially in Voidform, where you’re actually losing Insanity while casting other things. And then on top of that, many of the spells cost huge chunks of Insanity as well. We’re not happy with that situation, and are considering other potential options. They could probably stand to lose at least a couple spells off that list, but we’re also considering bringing back Mana as an additional resource that would just be used for limiting your usage of the many utility spells, with costs proportional to their impact.

Re: Survivability
We see a fair number of complaints that Shadow is squishy. That’s true, and intended. The offsetting factor should be their shields, and their self-healing. Vampiric Touch provides very strong constant self-healing (so strong that we had to nerf it recently, as it alone outhealed the damage of outdoor quest mobs). Shadow Mend is an extremely strong spammable heal. And Vampiric Embrace (the new version) is great group and self-healing. The one thing that we think isn’t living up to its goals is Dispersion. It’s extremely strong, but the DPS cost on you rotation is also quite strong. We’re going to try pausing your Insanity decay when you use it during Voidform.

Re: Surrender to Madness
Talents as mind-blowing as this are a ton of fun. The fantasy here is extremely strong, and the gameplay concept as well. We don’t agree at all that it needs a redesign, and are totally fine with many people considering it ‘too niche’ or ‘too extreme’. We may tweak the exact implementation (increased Insanity generation vs decreased Voidform Insanity decay, for example), but are very happy with the overall design.

They list out the weaknesses but also list out the offensive utility that “can” be very good in PvP and Surrender to Madness which doesn’t even exist anymore so we are left with all the crap as all the good aspects have been removed or made null.

What they don’t seem to understand is that our utility doesn’t mean jack if you cant follow up with the DPS behind it. Doesn’t matter if you can “leech” health with Vampiric Embrace if you are never allowed to deal any significant damage because you can just get locked down the entire time. Same thing goes for Psychic Scream as so many classes can just be immune or get out of it quickly with so many passive damage effects littering the field that our Fear just seems like a quick disorient but nothing useful enough to create space and even if you do, that space is removed as soon as they are out of fear.

Then most of our scary stuff can be dispelled without a second thought be it our buffs or the debuffs we send out which ultimately neuters our offensive and defensive pressure/protection to the point of seemingly being non existent.

The above list also forgot to include Fade w/ Artifact, and the 3rd and 6th rows of PvP talents. As an update on this, we’ve decided to buff Mind Control baseline (effectively re-adding it to PvP on top of Mind Bomb / Psychic Voice), and remove Psychic Horror instead. That still leaves them with way more utility than anyone else, of course.

Then this here basically alludes to our defensives that were ripped away like Spectral Guise from WoD were given back in the form of PvP talents that then most of which no longer exist while other classes got many if not all their old defensives back while we still lack anything useful.

To Conclude:

Seems ever Since Legion redesign of Shadow and Priest in general, they have taken many things away and never added them back in and they justify it by saying that we should be weak in those categories anyway and so here we are suffering in a growing list of ways.

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That’s a really long post to point out all the pain points I had conceded earlier when I stated it would of been better for them to fix the pain points instead of gutting the concept as a whole and leaving us with the scraps.

Correct that’s the whole “gutting of the concept and leaving us with the scraps” I had mentioned before.

You spent a lot of times and typed a whole lot of words to effectively say what I had already said, that legion design has flaws that needed to be addressed but instead of doing so they gutted it, and to say how much you disliked it.

This is flat out false. Shadow in Vanilla depends more on Mind Blast and Mind Flay for much of it’s damage with a single dot, being SW:P, which is where the entire “face melter” moniker came from. In TBC they got Vampiric Touch to go with Vampiric Embrace and the health/mana battery, and dot playstyle, was born. In WoTLK they where actually given the damage of other DPS, especially near the end of the expac, with much of their single target damage actually being in Vampiric Embrace, they also got Plague on a long CD and Mind Sear for AoE.

So far they had still been on Mind Melting rotting playstyle with Mind Blast doing ok damage but the whole reason they would be given Mind Spike was because so much of their damage was over time and on shorter fights it made them weak compared to other DPS. According to you these two styles got split with Shadow Orbs maintaining the old rot style shadow with a new almost run and gun playstyle depending on Blast/Spike as primary damage sources.

Legion gave us Insanity and actually focused on the dot playstyle with the stacking of haste making dots do insane damage in addition to Mind/Void Blast/Death.

That is a fair bit of transition in playstyle from focusing more on Blast/Flay to being a dot based mana battery, to a true rot spec, to a mix of both and then to build up and race against time/death spec from insanity. Acting like nothing changes because ability names remained the same is disingenuous.

No, no you really can’t. Especially the warlock design of “draining life” is purely a selfish “my own power” type of drain compared to Shadow’s original concept of draining for their party giving it a far more cult leader type of feel, which makes sense considering one is a warlock seeking person gain and the other is a priest who tend to be a figure head of some type of religion.

Just because they both had some method of draining health from enemies doesn’t make them the same, once again this is disingenuous.

It absolutely did. In TBC during the heyday of the mana/health battery playstyle Shadow didn’t focus on topping meters, and it couldn’t, because if it did along with all the health and mana drain it did no tank could keep aggro off them. The higher priority was maintaining VT/VE uptime and hell the very first guild to ever down M’uru did so because they put their Shadow Priests in their DPS groups instead of their healer groups. Acting like that had not impact on their playstyle is not even disingenuous, it’s just straight up nonsense.

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You quoted me and then you talk a lot about something that my very quote already explained.

What this implies is that your spells and how you used them did not change much over the years.

But legion made drastic changes.

  • Mind flay was always Mind flay… a filler.
  • Mind Blast was always Mind Blast… a chunky nuke.
  • Mind Spike was always Mind Spike… an upfront damage spell without cooldown.
  • Mind Sear was always Mind Sear… your AOE damage spell.
  • Devouring Plague was always devouring Plague… a chunky damage over time spell that healed you.
  • Shadow Word: Death was always Shadow Word: Death… an instant cast with cooldown chunky execute.
  • Shadow Word: Pain was always Shadow Word: Pain… a decent damage over time spell.
  • Vampiric Touch was always Vampiric Touch… a decent damage over time spell.

You used them the same regardless if you are max mana or low mana or max health or low health. Your levels of health did not dictate if you would use the spell or not, you always used the spell and don’t really consider not using it because you would never not use it.

Every spell has its defined purpose and you found a reason to use each and every one of them.

Over the years, you can use them more efficiently like Instant cast Mind Spikes and Mind Blasts pending talents or super charge your Mind Flay and Mind Sear so they do more damage.

But what legion did was make you use some spells some times and other spells other times.

The ebb and flow of pre Legion Shadow was now a sloooooow and then a faaaaaast back and forth that was uncontrollable by you as the player.

Meaning you would go fast when you wanted to go slow and you would go slow when you wanted to go fast.

With Voidform you no longer needed to keep reapplying all your dots as Void Bolt is now accessible which is a different button to press that you didn’t have access to prior and now your button to refresh dots goes asleep for a bit.

So your priority of finger movements change from being used often to not be touched at all or rarely. Now instead of dancing with the muscle memory of pre legion gameplay, you now dance with your fingers in this awkward high priority to low priority buttons swapping back and forth all over the place.

So in terms of gameplay, your buttons were always the same buttons and once you got used to them you develop and lock in that muscle memory in pre legion design.

Post legion design, you have to constantly retrain what button to press when based on if you have access to a spell or not that changes to a different spell in of itself constantly which changes the priority of when you press it.

You may like that gameplay, but that is not at all what and how shadow played for a decade prior.

Or minor differences and making them into a mountain like in the case of the draining theme. Drain Life only heals the warlock… sure okay. And Vampiric Embrace heals you and your party… so what? You don’t do anything different, you do the same thing be it solo or group. You play the same regardless. So call it whatever you want, when it comes from a mechanical standpoint, there is no difference.

You seem to keep coming from the standpoint of identity in relation to theme or just because something is named Vampiric or Void that somehow it behaves completely differently than something that has the same mechanism but goes by a different name.

But I am referring to the identity of gameplay mechanics. Knowing that when you press a button, it will always do the thing you meant it to do and you know when a button is priority from a proc because it lights up or you have that visual indication on the screen that many class and specs have that telegraphs the meaning and intention of what that visual indicator means for you to do.

Think of spells as having a number because in the background, they all have a number associated with them. The names are meaningless when it comes to how they mechanically function.

The naming seems to keep throwing you off somehow.

Edit:

If that didn’t explain my point on how similar Shadow played for a decade then here is a different way to look at it…

Imagine if Vampiric Embrace caused your Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague to incur a 10 second cooldown while active.

That would drastically change up your gameplay and you would have to be a bit more careful who you apply Vampiric Touch to as you will have to wait 10 seconds each time.

Sounds silly right? Sounds a bit intrusive to your gameplay and something that is completely out of place.

That is the entirety of Voidform for me. It’s completely foreign to my gameplay experience that was the same for 10 years. It didn’t have any aspect that caused some buttons to not be used some times and to be used rapidly at other times.

Hopefully that helps convey the degree of change between pre and post Voidform design.

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Yep. In DF they took away all the instants. They nerfed angels mercy so that we couldn’t reset desperate prayer while getting wailed on. They nerfed the duration of the pvp talent where you fear people after hitting burst. All this because shadow pumped in S1. We never got anything back from that.

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I agree that mindspike procs were broken is S1 of DF. And honestly I didn’t like it even though it was beneficial to my spec.

I don’t like being OP compared to other classes, I was happy to see Frost DK nerfed a bit recently even if there are still some flaws to polish out like 2h vs dual-wield. I simply want to play on an even field with a spec that actually makes sense. It’s probably very difficult for devs to sift through the feedback between legitimate grievances and people who just want to roll over others.

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All I’m asking is if we’re going to have to be the casting punching bag, gimme old angels mercy back.

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Correct.

Correct

False Mind spike wasn’t even added till WoTLK, I believe although it might of been Cata. It was added because Shadow had trouble helping deal with smaller adds and other raid mechanics that required bursting enemies down quickly. It fundamentally changed how the spec could play when added.

Wasn’t added until WoTLK, until then Shadow had to multi-dot for AoE which was an issue when you needed to burn down multiple adds and shadow really couldn’t contribute in a timely manor. It also changed how Shadow played when introducted.

Devouring Plague was originally an undead racial that the class and spec wasn’t balanced around at all. We went through two expansions without it was a part of the kit before it was finally given to everyone in WoTLK and it was a long CD dot that you actually combined with a death knights ability to spread dots enabling you to get far more damage out of it as well as permanent uptime. Like the others this was a change to how Shadow had played up to this point.

Added in TBC which meant it had zero impact on vanilla playstyle, but beyond that, and ignoring it’s pvp implications, correct.

Correct

False. Vampiric Touch was added in TBC and it’s prime purpose was to enable mana returns, so Spriest would oom during encounters and be stuck wanding. It did ok damage for Shadow but was subpar compared to everything else, especially something like an affliction lock, because the purpose of Shadow at the time wasn’t to be a traditional DPS spec but to be a support and utility spec that provided mana and health returns to it’s party. WoTLK still let it retain these elements by adding replenishment but it wouldn’t be until near the end of WoTLK that Shadow got to do competitive damage and become a true damage spec.

Aside for the handful of abilities that have been with the class since vanilla all the spells you mentioned in some way changed how the spec played and functioned and have had multiple reworks and adjustments that has effected both their place in the spec and at times even changed the playstyle of the spec via how they interacted with various talents, such as how you pointed out with Shadow Orbs and how I pointed out during Legion.

All you are really doing is dismissing anything you don’t like while ignoring the history of these abilities, as well as their place and function in the spec. I get it you don’t like Legion shadow that is fine, but at this point it feels like you have become so emotional in this topic that you don’t even realize that you are just saying nonsense because you are so desperate to get me to hate it to.

Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean someone else can’t, or didn’t, enjoy it and it doesn’t mean that it was bad or good. I’ll also point out, I never once said if I felt Legion shadow was a good or bad design, I said it was at least a cohesive design. It felt like someone actually sat down, came up with an idea for shadow with unique mechanics and did their best to see it represented in game. What we have now is the result of the people since then taking that idea, ripping it to shreds, failing to replace it with anything new, and leaving us with the scraps.

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Dude, now you are just intentionally misunderstanding this entire idea of what gameplay means.

The gameplay just gets enhanced/expanded from classic to WoD. But it RADICALLY changed going into Legion.

If you really want to break it down, you had 3 types of spells.

  • Channeling
  • Direct damage
  • Damage over time

Each expansion just expanded upon those with the spell list we have seen over the years.

But when you used each spell, it ALWAYS did why it does. It does not CHANGE.

A Dot Debuff does its damage over time passively without you needing to cast additional times for each and every tick of damage.
Your Channeling spells still required you to channel.
Your Direct Damage spells did their damage each time you completed the cast.

But in Legion, your AOE in Void Eruption became Void Bolt which are 2 entirely different spells which prevents you from using one if you have access to the other. One requires resources to use (triggered automatically when you got enough insanity), the other generates them. Meanwhile you have to deal with the draining mechanic where most of your damage didn’t come from the spells themselves but from the stacking haste and dot damage every second you remain in Voidform. This caused all your spells to be default weak until you can last a long enough time in Voidform to out scale the default weakness and then eventually scale to insane levels that were beyond brokenly overpowered which caused nearly every patch a nerf to the base damage which made anyone under geared or doing trivial content to feel less and less powerful while the rest of the classes gained more power as the expansion progressed. Then as I mentioned you are now at the mercy of other players and latency and mechanics (due to the draining mechanic) to which if you are interrupted slightly at any moment in time, your entire damage craters and you get tossed out of Voidform. To top all that, you were disincentivized to use your utility to assist others the longer you were in Voidform because of the stacking haste making it so your primary damage rotation abilities were increasingly made more available which narrows any spare time to do anything but tunnel into doing damage which makes the entire “support” aspect of our toolkit nearly null and void because you simply were no longer balanced around fitting those into your gameplay experience as you were severally punished if you did. Just failure after failure with that entire Legion gameplay model.

That is a complete 180 to how shadow played for 10 years prior.

You are just being willfully ignorant if you actually think shadow played differently each expansion just because we got a new spell to use in our rotation. The same applied… you dot up targets, you use your nuke spells when you could and you fill in with a channel. Repeat every single expansion.

You cannot be this dense.

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Someone is being dense in their ever more frustrated attempt to make everyone thing exactly like them but it isn’t me. Your entire diatribe about Legion effectively boils down to getting a new spell, just like all the other new spells we got, and having to fit it into your rotation, just like all the other spells we got. Your idea that Shadow made some great use of it’s utility before M+ is laughable considering it was locked out of everything but shadow spells unless it shifted forms which used to tank it’s mana making it significantly prohibitive to do so and it took forever for them to be even given PW:S while in Shadowform.

Actually if I recall correctly it was Legion that allowed them to cast disc spells in Shadowform like PW:S, Dispel, Mass Dispel etc. Most mobs tended to be immune to both silence and stun back in the day so Horror and Silence where not getting used, and hell back with the original talent trees you didn’t even take silence in pve. Shackle would again require shifting out of Shadowform and was highly limited at who you could target. This simply mean Legion, the expansion you hate, is actually when Shadow got access to much of it’s utility without being significantly punished for it.

Simply put your rose tented glasses are just that. You think Shadow was some consistent pillar of WoW with no change in gameplay until Legion and that is complete and total nonsense. Every single spec in the game experienced significant gameplay changes, especially priest, literally every expansion.

You have said nothing but nonsense since the start and while you are free to continue to do so, nonsense doesn’t change opinions and only exposes bias.

EDIT

I mean ffs you literally went on an entire story time telling us about Shadow Orbs and how suddenly Shadow had two playstyles of either the rot style, or the run and gun mobile mind spike style and then you want to actually say with a straight face that type of gameplay is the same as Vanilla, or TBC. It’s just laughable.

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While I agree that aneurysm is hyper focused on WoD shadow being the entire history of the spec, he does have a pretty good point. Every X-Pac from vanilla until WoD saw shadow improving. Legion broke that trend and shadow has been clambering out of the whole that the legion redesign put the spec into.

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I don’t disagree it in general got better, but that isn’t what I’m discussing. I’m talking about the design of the spec and how it changed over time. The idea that Shadow was always the same since vanilla, which is his point, is laughable.

The issue that had dragged on from Legion wasn’t the design itself, it was how the design was abandoned instead of addressing it’s problems, like how they did with old shadow, which in turn leads us to here.

I would be more inclined to agree that Legion shadow was the issue with modern Shadow if it still operated anything close to resembling Legion shadow but it doesn’t. Hence my point being the issue isn’t Legion shadow but the gutting of Legion shadow without actually replacing it with something else. All we have is gutted scraps of a concept and nothing else, not Legion Shadow or any of the old Shadow versions.

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The did keep a few aspects of legion shadow. They kept the damage nerfs to our entire kit from DoTs to mind blasts.

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as a DoT lover, i miss Mass Hysteria, and our stacking haste :frowning:

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I appreciate how accurately and concisely you are pointing a mirror to his unhinged contradictory rants. But trust me, many priest players have wasted our time trying to have a rational discussion with him. None of this is getting through, the dude is either delusional or is purposely trolling but I think it’s most likely the former. Do yourself a favour and just put his profile on ignore like many of us have.

Even after almost a year I can still see snippets of his arrogant nonsense because every priest thread is littered with the arguments of people unfortunate enough to engage with him.

Don’t get an aneurysm over it.

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Your trolling now if you think the gameplay stayed the same between WoD shadow and a legion Shadow. WoD shadow being classic shadow.

The entire resource system changed to drain and automatically shift you in and out of a form that you had no control over and shifting your power to the end instead of consistently the same.

That’s just me scratching the surface. They didn’t simply just add Void Bolt and call it done. You are delusional.

Now you are just saying crap that never happened.

You were able to always use spells like Levitate, Shackle Undead, Power Word: Shield while in and maintaining Shadowform.

Later when Leap of Faith was added, for a short time it took you out of Shadowform but they changed that as well so you could. It essentially only made it so you got tossed out of Shadowform when you used a Holy healing spell which that only changed so it never happened at the start of Dragonflight.

Fun fact, you can actually do really good healing with Prayer of Mending bounces with Shadow Word: Death prior to Legion. You set up before you engage in fights and during the fight you position yourself accordingly and use your Silence and Stun to take out the troublesome targets and sometimes fear pending the target type and how close they were to dying and if it was even requested to use while bouncing your Prayer of Mending around and shielding to absorb incoming damage on your allies. Then in a pinch you can spam Flash Heal.

You can successfully do this because you had multiple ways to generate mana to the point you can rotate through them all and keep yourself topped up with no issues while you’re damage was all passive in dots or in short bursts that didn’t require you to babysit your DPS buttons.

You simply dot the targets and use Mind Blast and between Shield and Prayer of Mending Bounce, you can keep everyone alive and just use Vampiric Embrace on typically boss fights and then if you really had to scramble in healing, you use Prayer of Healing and Divine Hymm before they were taken away and were actually really useful or you can choose to use the healing Cascade or the Damage Cascade pending the situation. Then you can use Disperse between fights to get mana back or Shadow Fiend to maintain it.

Some of that varies between Wrath and WoD but the ability to pull it off was the same even during the WoD mythic dungeons they added you could pull this off. I even did it in Timewalking just fine when it first came out.

Since Wrath and onwards, I consistently que up as a healer in 5 mans even in early no gear parts of each expansion and did both Healing and Damage as Shadow and later on I did so much damage and healing that I became a tank as well.

Now understandably they essentially removed any capability of that going into Legion. Because even if you could somehow still maintain the healing portion, you could not maintain any level of damage since you had to always be doing something to maintain insanity while in WoD your entire resource
System was limited from spells that have cooldowns on them. So you get chunks of resource instead of trickles. This allowed you to use the time between the cooldowns of Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death to choose if you want to do filler damage or utility or raw healing and you were not punished as you can weave in your damage right after or shortly and not worry about your resources just going to waste by draining away. That only happened slowly out of combat.

Yes. That’s why they were so good. They were both elegant while also completely game changing while also not changing what you do but merely shifting the focus into different spells.

With Clarity of Power, you shifted more focus to use Mind Blast on Cooldown and using Mind Spike and Shadow Word: Death more which doing the hybrid healing/damage that I explained, you just dot up a few targets and then you are free to move around and unload either healing or damage and I actually was so fast in WoD that I typically kept
Placing the feathers on the ground for everyone else and/or gripped the tank on the way to the next targets to get him into the fray quicker as it was much easier bouncing my healing to him since he took less damage overall.

Then for Auspicious Spirits, you played the same way as previous expansions except that you just have more uptime on Devouring Plague. You just spend more time casting your dot spells and less time or no time casting things like Mind Blast, Mind Spike and Mind Flay.

You see, you played the same regardless what option you chose. What changed was merely the frequency as to what spells you use more or less.

You lean for more upfront damage or more periodic damage. All your buttons did the same thing, you just got to choose which ones you want to spend more time pushing.

You have a lot of broken ideas as to how Shadow worked in both gameplay and utility and you are the one that can’t seem to recall basic things that existed in multiple expansions prior to Legion.

Your thinking that you can’t Shackle Undead without Shadowform being dropped is astonishingly shocking. You might be thinking either Cure or Abolish Disease as that did kick you out of Shadowform.

You should go back and do proper research as I’m beginning to think you never played shadow before Legion at all.

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Show me where I’m wrong.

You can make claims but do little to back them.

His remarks are loaded with a massive list of inaccuracies and illogical understandings that just because you get a new spell doesn’t necessarily mean it completely changes up how you approach a battle.

Shadow today is suffering from problems that existed back in wrath but were since rectified in each expansion moving forward only to be stripped from those fixes with the gutting that Legion did to WoD shadow.

Either many people never experienced that firsthand or they never properly used the tools it was capable of does not make my claims as invalid or incorrect.

So refute what I said with facts if you choose or snivel in the corner as it seems your only chosen course of recourse lately.

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This whole expansion is a big middle finger to SP everywhere.
Voidweaver was the spec where voidform/voideruption could have and should have been moved out of talent tree → into hero tree → reworked entirely.

Not even a rework on this fail design.

The onlything they’ve done is focus on 3 classes since alpha.
At least warlock got fixed up quick before release qq

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