Shadow Priest Bug List Compendium
Now that we are a week into live servers I wanted to make a thread in the class forums talking about the current bugs (devouring) plaguing Shadow Priest. Some of these are generic Priest bugs but for the most part these are Shadow specific. All of these have been reported in game on live and beta servers but wanted to make this thread to give more visibility to the community on why certain things are not working as expected. Hopefully there is time to address some of these more build-altering bugs in the coming weeks.
Before I go into the list you can find the status of these posted to the bug repo on GitHub.
Several of these have been fixed recently which is greatly appreciated <3:
Screams of the Void now works properly(broke again see below)- Mind Spike animation added back
- Mental Decay works if the target has an absorb shield
Gameplay Altering
Screams of the Void
This bug has returned. It has been fixed a few times throughout the beta cycle and has now come back on live servers. This bug specifically involves the interaction with the Mental Decay talent and Shadow Word: Pain.
With this bug while channeling Mind Flay (not Mind Sear) with Mental Decay talented Shadow Word: Pain will not get the increased tick rate. Vampiric Touch is unaffected.
This is most noticeable on single target.
Shadowy Insight sometimes breaks Mind Blast
Sometimes when casting Mind Blast and getting a Shadowy Insight mid-cast you will consume a charge of Mind Blast, but not consume the buff of Shadowy Insight. Doing so can put you at 0 charges but still with the buff active, but Mind Blast is not castable.
Mind Sear consumes Insanity without ticking if cancelled early
If you start a Mind Sear channel and then cancel it right away you will get “charged” Insanity before a tick actually occurs. It appears to cost half of the tick cost when doing this (14 insanity?). This leads to a weird experience where if you happen to start a cast and then get something that forces you to move right away you will lose Insanity without getting the damage.
Ancient Madness consumes twice as much crit per second with Voidform compared to Dark Ascension
When using Ancient Madness the current values are as follows:
- Dark Ascension (1 minute cooldown): 20% crit on application, lose 1% per second (lasts the full 20s of Dark Ascension)
- Void Eruption (Voidform/2 minute cooldown): 20% crit on application lose 2% per second (only lasts 10 seconds
This feels like a bug considering Voidform is a 2 minute cooldown, but gets half as much value out of Ancient Madness compared to Dark Ascension. In addition, the tooltip says nothing about the talent changing its values based on the cooldown selected.
The following table represents the behavior. Every second 1 stack is consumed and the crit value is the percent per stack * current stack. This means that the crit is only lasting 5 seconds per rank of Ancient Madness when talented in Voidform. For Dark Ascension it always lasts 20 seconds.
| Cooldown | AM Rank | Stacks | Percent per stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Void Eruption | 1 | 5 | 2% |
| Void Eruption | 2 | 10 | 2% |
| Dark Ascension | 1 | 20 | 0.5% |
| Dark Ascension | 2 | 20 | 1% |
Gathering Shadows (Tier 29 2pc) is not buffing the last tick of Mind Sear
Gathering Shadows (Shadow 2pc) is only buffing 3 out of 4 ticks of Mind Sear because the buff is dropping at the same timestamp as the last tick is happening.
Queued instant cast Mind Spike’s will not give a Mind Melt Stack
If you queue up a Mind Spike cast while casting a Mind Blast with Surge of Darkness active that instant cast Mind Spike will not give you a stack of Mind Melt.
Idol of N’Zoth debuff is exclusive to 1 Priest at a time
While using Idol of N’Zoth if you have more than 1 shadow priest hitting the same target you both cannot apply Echoing Void. The debuff is capped at 1 per target, regardless if you have more than 1 priest. We expect that having multiple priests would not change a target’s eligibility for the debuff. This also seems to “count” for both priests 4 target cap, even though only one of them actually gets the debuff active.
Behavior Miss-Match
Idol of Yogg-Saron does not scale with Shadow Priest Mastery
All other spells work besides this, including other Pet spells so this feels unintended.
Mind Sear is not buffed by Coalescing Shadows periodic damage increase
After consuming Coalescing Shadows you get a buff that increases the damage of your Periodic Spells. This buff does not buff Mind Sear damage whatsoever. While the difference to what “counts” as periodic or not in-game is not clear for other spells like Dark Ascension or others we can extrapolate that this buff should be buffing Mind Sear. This spell does not get buffed by Dark Ascension, so you can assume based on that and how it works it should count as periodic for other effects.
In-game this has not been implemented as a periodic effect, we can see that via spell data. This makes it awkward for spells that should easily buff it, but because of this oddity do not.
Idol of C’thun damage is scaling as if it were an NPC
Right now Idol of C’thun’s Void Tendril (procced from Mind Flay) is getting scaled as if it was an NPC. This means every single tick gets 1667.5 damage applied as a base and then adds damage on top of that for the spell power scaling. This is an insane buff to the tendril that is likely unintentional. The bigger issue with this is that the Void Lasher procced from Mind Sear does NOT have this bug, and is doing significantly less damage because of it. Right now it takes 5 targets for the Void Lasher proc to do more damage than the Void Tendril proc per tick, this is clearly not intended. The issue linked above goes through the math and raw data for how we found this.
Idol of Yogg-Saron’s Void Spike damage is not cleaving correctly
Idol of Yogg-Saron does cleave damage to targets around the main target for 30% of the damage.
From the blue post:
Idol of Yogg-Saron has been redesigned: Each time you spawn a set of Shadowy Apparitions, gain a stack of Idol of Yogg-Saron. At 25 stacks, you summon a Thing from Beyond that serves you for 20 seconds. The Thing from Beyond blasts enemies for Shadow damage and deals 30% of that damage to all enemies within 10 yards. Damage reduced beyond 5 targets.
In reality this is actually set to do 30% spell power to other targets, not 30% of the main bolt’s damage. This works it out to scale much much worse than likely intended. In practice what this means is that each hit has independent crit rolls and any target modifiers on the main target are not shared to the cleave targets like it is with things like Psychic Link or Pain of Death.
Void Eruption is hitting 4 times on a single target, up from 2 thats expected
When casting Void Eruption it is hitting 2 extra times on your main target.
| target count | expected hits | actual hits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 4 |
| 2 | 4 | 6 |
| 3 | 6 | 8 |
Minor Bugs
You cannot apply Glyphs to Mindbender without first untalenting it
With a recent patch they have made the Shadowfiend glyphs work with Mindbender, however you can only apply the glyphs while not currently talented into Mindbender. If you want to apply any of the glyphs first untalent Mindbender and then talent back into it to keep the glyph appearance.
Mind Flay cannot be press and hold casted
While holding down Mind Flay the Press and Hold casting setting does not work.
Idol of C’thun tooltip says it gives 3 insanity per tick but it is actually 2
The tooltip value for Idol of C’Thun says it gives 3 insanity per tick, this is misleading since it only gives 2 insanity per tick from a recent change documented. AFAIK this is not bugged behavior in game, just a bugged tooltip that should say 2 instead.
Power Infusion cannot be cast on Players on a Dragonriding Mount if they have the 2-person accessibility option available
If a player has enabled the item to enable Dragonriding follow-along with another player you cannot cast Power Infusion on them while they are on a Dragonriding mount.
Maybe not a bug?
The following entries are still listed as bugs because they were changed/removed in Dragonflight but no official blue post was made about it so we do not know if its intentional or not.
Vampiric Embrace (Rank 2) was never added to Dragonflight
Going into Dragonflight several rank 2 spells have been placed into the talent tree. Others are just not in the game baseline or otherwise that we have access to. These all provided much needed baseline changes to these spells and I’d expect this is a bug and not intended. These spells are found in the game files, just not associated to the Priest.
Vampiric Embrace (Rank 2) - Vampiric Embrace heals for an additional 35% of your single-target Shadow spell damage.
Shadowy Insight Proc data is Missing
The new Shadowy Insight talent does not display the proc rate in-game or in spelldata. Importantly we don’t know for sure if its a flat chance or RPPM, although based on the lack of target scaling it seems to have been changed to RPPM. In Legion this talent was a flat 10% but that appears to have been changed.
Lack of transparency in the proc rate/if its hasted seems like a bug 
Shadow Word: Death cooldown is no longer hasted
Shadow Word: Death’s cooldown is now no longer affected by Haste and is a flat 20 second cooldown.