Shadow Overhaul

Classes Priest
1

I said I wouldn’t make another one of these at the end of the Dragonflight Beta, but I feel that the current design of shadow is so close to being good that it’s worth my time to scream into the void once more.

This is an overhauled talent tree that I worked up to resolve most of the priest community complaints. Issues addressed include lack of mobility, excessive utility on the spec tree, lacking impact of staple spells, awkwardness of the mastery, poor DoT damage, clunky AoE, slowness of shadow crash, old shadowform visuals, annoying initial insanity ramp, lacklustre capstone idols, and a lack of interesting utility options on the class tree.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Priestsofwow/comments/1flf7k8/shadow_priest_rework/

Mastery Changes
Mastery changed from Shadow Weaving to a chance for Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch to tick twice.

Row 1
Devouring Plague

Row 2
Surge of Insanity - Shadowy Apparitions - Dispersion

  1. Surge of Insanity: Now triggered after spending 90 insanity instead of after 2 Devouring Plague casts.
  2. Shadowy Apparitions: Now affect targets afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain instead of Vampiric Touch.

Row 3
Psychic Horror - Shadowy Insight - Intangibility/Mental Fortitude

Row 4
Voidtouched - Thought Harvester - Misery

Row 5
Void Eruption -Mental Decay - Voidbolt - Unfurling Darkness - Whispers of the Damned

  1. Void Eruption: AoE insanity spender which costs 15 insanity, hits all targets within 20 yds of the primary target and applies Shadow Word: Pain to 8 targets. Vampiric Touch is no longer free or intended for AoE use.
  2. Voidbolt: The same spell we currently have access to only in vodiform as a standalone talent.
  3. Whispers of the Damned: Replacement for Dark Ascension and Voidform which have been moved to the hero trees. Instant cast ability with 1 minute cooldown that simply generates 30 Insanity.

Row 6
Psychic Link - Tormented Spirits - Mind Melt - Maddening Touch - Ancient Madness

  1. Psychic Link: Now applies a portion of Mind Flay damage to targets affected by Shadow Word: Pain instead of all single target spell damage.
  2. Mind Melt - Now procs from Void Bolt casts. Still stack to 3, but lasts only until a Mind Blast crit.
  3. Ancient Madness: Whispers of the Damned now increases crit by 10% fading over 20 seconds.

Row 7
Mastermind - Mind’s Eye/Distorted Reality - Dark Evangelism

Row 8
Mindbender - Deathspeaker - Mind Devourer - Auspicious Spirits - Void Torrent

Row 9
Inescapable Torment - Phantasmal Pathogen - Screams of the Void - Insidious Ire - Malediction

Row 10
Idol of Yshaarj - Idol of Yogg Saron - Idol of Nzoth - Idol of the Knaifu - Idol of Cthun

  1. Idol of Yogg Saron: No longer summons a derpy Faceless One. Instead increases the speed of all shadowy apparitions by 300% and causes Shadow Word: Death to summon 13 shadowy apparitions to assault the primary target when cast on a target under 20% hp.
  2. Idol of Nzoth: No longer a terrible RNG cleave DoT. Instead causes Vampiric Touch to also apply Echoing Void to the target. Echoing Void increases all damage dealt to the target by Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch by 300%. If the Target is dispelled, instead remove Echoing Void and burn 20% of the dispellers mana. Echoing Void can only be applied to 3 targets.
  3. Idol of the Knaifu: Increases Mind Blast damage by 300% and causes Mind Blast crits to generate 4 additional insanity.
  4. Idol of Cthun: Now also makes you immune to interrupt effects while channeling Void Torrent.

Class Tree Changes

  1. Phantasm: Now removes all roots and snares and makes the priest immune to them for the duration of Fade. Visually upgrades Fade to the old Shadowform appearance from before Legion.
  2. Angelic Feather: Speed boost increased to 60%. Now a choice node against Door of Shadows. Door of Shadows is an instant ability with a 30 second cd that allows the priest to teleport to target location within 40 yds.
  3. Rhapsody: This talent is terrible. It now causes Holy Nova to shield you for 1% of your max health for 1 second before detonating in a holy nova empowered by 20%. Still has the stacking mechanic but now stacks to 100.
  4. Void Tendrils/Sheer Terror: Sheer Terror removed and replaced with Spectral Guise as the choice against Void Tendrils. Spectral Guise is just as it was in MoP but with a 1 minute cooldown.
  5. Words of the Pious: Now a choice node against a new talent Spiritual Empowerment. Spiritual Empowerment causes Power Word: Shield that you cast on yourself to apply the weakened soul effect for 15 seconds but empowers the shield by 500%. Now Shadow has a reason to be this deep on the left side of the tree.
  6. Twins of the Sun Priestess: Removed from the game for the trash that it is. Replaced with Fear Ward.
  7. Halo/Divine Star: Halo moved to Archon tree and replaced with Cascade.
  8. Cauterizing Shadows: Replaced with Phantom Reach.
  9. Phantom Reach: Capstone changed to a choice node between Silence and Power Word: Quell. Power Word: Quell is an interrupt on a 20 second cd.

Archon Changes

  1. Halo - Now an active ability which pulses out by default.
  2. Perfected Form - Halo now activates Dark Ascension on cast. Dark Ascension has been modified into a 25% flat damage buff for 20 seconds.

Voidweaver Changes

  1. Voidheart - Renamed Voidform and given its visual effect. Voidform increases spell damage by 10% and lasts for the duration of the Entropic Rift.

I fully believe these changes would modernize and improve shadow in every way the community desires.

3 Likes
2

Dislikes:

  1. The new mastery - Currently VT and SW: Pain are both abyssmal damage, having them tick 2 times would be worthless. The DPS loss from the mastery change would basically make the class entirely worthless in all content and nothing addresses this dps loss. Additionally the biggest issue with SP by most peoples statements is that were juggling 3 dots and 2 of them are worthless aside from being tied to the mastery bonus damage.
  2. Adding more button bloat and proc bloat: Now we have Dark ascension and void form separated out, adding in a new Whispers of the damned button to push and having voidbolt as an always available to push button and void eruption is another new button to push more frequently leaving us with straight out the gate 3 new abilities to push in our already bloated beyond reason rotations.
  3. Psychic link damage loss: This is so blatantly a damage loss that you come off as a person who hates SPriest with every fiber of your being you are trying to kill it outright. Why make it only work on Mind flay there is literally no reason for this other than to ensure our damage output reduces by like 10-15% in AOE scenarios. Double the impact when you’re clearly making other single target casts a huge part of the build/design.
  4. Idol of Yogg Saron: currently Shadow apparitions are useless and building around them won’t fix anything. This would outright lose us tons of dps, it takes awhile to ramp them up, they move faster but now you get a <1% damage increase in a good scenario for a Capstone talent…
  5. Idol of Nzoth is now worthless - 300% increase damage on aoe SW:P is going to equate to almost no damage increase as it is the lowest damage dealer we have, VT is not part of the rotation anymore outside of single target and is also low/useless damage so you’ve doubled down on it not being present but are now capstoning it. N’zoth in its current state is better in every way than anything presented here.
  6. Idol of the knaifu - Not worthy of capstone talent because you removed mind blast being a contributor to psychic link. This all means decent ST damage and astronomically lowest AOE damage.
  7. Door of shadows is just a no.
  8. Anything relating to Holy nova existing or being something we may have to use is just more button bloat and worthless - rhapsody is now not just terrible but clunky and terrible.
  9. Spiritual empowerment is not a reason to go this deep on the left side of the tree, ideally we don’t want to be casting it on ourself outside of solo content.
  10. Now Have halo and divine star… more button bloat.

The only thing I like is power word quell which is just Quell but with power word in front of it.

Nothing creative or unique, just bloat and stealing an ability from evokers, with some nostalgia abilities brought back. But in all it would add 7 abilities to our bars while removing 0. I think this would kill the class in M+ content and not make up for it with Single target unless you ramped all the abilities to insane degrees. There is also nothing that benefits from the new crit focus other than we now want crit instead of mastery.

1 Like
3

There is no Voidform or Dark ascension button anymore.

The psylink damage loss is replaced with VOid Eruption which replaces Shadow Crash.

Idol of Yogg addresses how terrible SWD feels.

Idol of Nzoth is there to fix the worthless DoT damage. Buff it to 1000% if you think 300% is too low.

Idolt of the Knafu addresses how terrible it feels to cast mind blast. The AoE damage has already been solved earlier in the tree with Void Eruption.

Spiritual Empowerment would be enough for me to consider taking that talent.

4

I just have to re-iterate a point I already made, you feel like someone who just hates the priest/Spriest and it makes more sense to just not play it in that case. “How awful it feels to cast mind blast”, “how terrible SWD feels”, “the faceless one being derpy” so he has to go… You added buttons and procs and made all of the capstones boring raw Dmg % increases.

Capstone - Idol of Yogg Saron
300% move speed increase on Apparitions. Easily the worst capstone Idea ever… if the fight is long enough that apparitions matter this is useless and in any other situation the packs will blow up so fast you’ll get a single digit number of apparitions to appear. Apparition speed sucks but its generation rate is the issue compared to our need for BURST damage.

The follow up is a Raw % damage increase to SWD. It doesn’t change how it feels its just make it hit harder. Why use a capstone on that just ups it damage if that is all it would take for it to “FEEL GOOD” to use.

Idol of Nzoth - Now a raw damage increase on VT and useable only as a single target boost reliably.

Idle of Kaifu - Another boring raw % damage increase for 1 spell only.

you made up a new capstone and 3 of 5 are now just raw % damage multipliers to spells. And one of them comes with all the issues of dots being mandatory for max damage but now it is locked to only helping ST.

Your Void eruption is not a reliable burst or good replacement for Psychic link danage and would basically just be a replacement for shadow crash. Linking its damage to SW:P means pushing it too much is a wasted cd (you don’t want to refresh SW:P constantly) or You spam it cause its too op and nothing else matters.

The current uses of Void eruption and dark ascension are to time out big damage when needed; like during bloodlust or bosses summoning adds, now the big damage is locked behind uncontrollable procs making the rotation and timing windows a complete mess with no reliable burst in any end game content scenario. You replaced it with a click to give 30 insanity, which sounds so god damn boring.

At the end of everything though your Ideas are “raw % dps increase” as capstones and damage tweaking numbers… if they just need to change the numbers it would be easier to just add the % and call it done. There isn’t any reworking here, just a lot of removal of the flavor and visuals that make a SP what they are.

5

I’m an old priest who remembers how the abilities originally functioned. You seem new and you lack vision.

The AoE rotation I’ve presented would play quite well and the damage would be just fine because damage is always fine once tuning occurs.

6

I have to agree with Melophan, this rework just isn’t good. It doesn’t address the core issues of Shadow Priest and that is our abilities lack synergy. Quell isn’t bad, though I would just have it be a cd reduction of silence that puts it on a 20-25 second timer instead of it’s 45 second base.

Our Mastery isn’t fun or intresting now. I do not want to see it be turned into spinning plates. If I want to spin plates I’ll go Afliction Warlock. If the Mastery needs a rework, I would much rather it do something useful such as “your dots have X% chance to grant insanity” and help keep DP going.

Why is everything 300%? We are getting flat damage % increase now and it’s not helping. Having our abilities do 3 times the damage is not it and Blizzard will just Nerf them into the ground again.

Priests of the Twin Suns is useless?.. Since when, we get PI and our target gets PI. Do you really want to go back to the dark ages whete YOUR PI was never used on you and instead you just gave it away?

Speed incress on Yogg… yawn. I would much rather see it flood the screen with Shadow Apparations. Let them hit hard, let them generate more insanity.

If you really want to see an Idol deticated to Xal’atath then have it be something thematic and cool. Like “your abilites have a chance to summon 2 Empowrred Mind Blast that do 60% more damage and are instant cast” then for a visual give us those Void Orbs that Xal’ is seen floating with that goes away when you use them.

The biggest change though is to either give 2 charges of Shadow Crash or uncap the number of targets Shadow Crash can affect. So many classes hit within so many yards unlimited targets. Yet we are stuck to 8 so our AOE is capped out at 8.

7

I mean, the reworked void eruption is better than 2 shadow crashes. It applies pain in AoE which is what allows us to spread flay damage and send apparitions. The AoE rotation would look something like: Whispers of the Damned → Double Eruption spreading 16 pains → Void Bolt sending 16 apparitions → Mind Blast sending 16 Apparitions → Eruption for damage etc. When you hit a surge, you MFI with psylink for damage and insanity.

The mastery I chose is just the MoP mastery. I could be anything really, just not what we currently have.

The values are 300% simply because that’s what it would take to make any of these spells feel impactful and having the option to select which part of the kit to empower is good.

I like the sound of your Xal’Atath change. Those orbs look great.

The reworked Yogg does send a wave of apparitions via swd.