They do less damage over 20 seconds than other classes do with a single ability.
The class identity has been ruined, but the single target is trash in comparison to other competitive classes.
Shadow priest should have strong dot damage and decent single target, since it has no repeatable CC. Not sure why this was ruined. The DoT damage is literally a serious joke
The price we pay for Psychic Link.
The entire reason I just wish they removed it. Still hoping they’re doing that in Midnight.
Yeah the dots aren’t really meant to do massive damage though. They are for proccing things like shadowy apparitions, insanity generation, mastery bonuses and psychic link damage. It’s now also a lot easier to apply them with two charges of shadow crash on a reduced cooldown, so you really shouldn’t have to worry about using more than a global here and their to apply / reapply them. My only issue with shadow is that there are sometimes some gaps in your rotation on longer fights where things are on cooldown and you don’t have enough insanity to cast Devouring Plague and subsequently Mind Flay: Insanity. Pressing regular MF feels kinda sad.
It’s not though. Bliz made a conscious decision to nuke DoTs on all classes at the end of legion, and throughout BFA they constantly nerfed any and all dots from the big 3 casters and tried to find new ways to give dots value that was tied to direct damage abilities.
DoTs create a problem for WoW’s more modern encounter designers because they are extremely efficient in multi target encounters. For 1 global they did enormous amounts of damage and continue to do a large portion of your damage even when you’re moving.
Shadows dots have sucked since the start of BFA. We got a workaround in BFA with the apparition azerite trait being ludicrously overtuned and going untouched, but in SL they stamped that out hard.
Yeah I’m not sure where people get this narrative that DoTs were good till we were given X or Y ability. I’ve kind of seen people saying this since DF.
All DoTs game-wide besides maybe Feral’s rip (which is a spender - and has all the downsides of a DoT spender) suck for damage. It’s a deliberate way they pushed design. They don’t want DoTs making up the main source of damage anymore. Every DoT class moved towards DoTs acting as an activator for some other ability spender.
Priest’s been a little back and forth through the expansions after, with different ways to activate damage on those DoTs (or the DF S1 Mind Sear that acted more like Shammy Earthquake and DoTs were more mastery). But the entire time the DoTs have been very low damage with the only exception being plague patch to patch.
I didnt actually know that. I remeber that that it did more damage before the PL rework in DF. Might’ve been the Azerite Traits tho tbh.
Kinda sad that they only work as a PL/Mastery enabler these days.
A brief timeline
Legion: primarily dots buffed by the mass hysteria artifact trait
BFA: primarily ghosts, spawned on SWP crits and dealing additional damage to targets with vampiric touch on them through the spiteful apparitions azerite trait and crit scaling with chrous of insanity to increase their frequency.
SL: Apparitions change from being spawned by SWP crits to being spawned by VB, MB, and DP casts. Mastery changed to the current mastery. Shadow’s AoE damage primarily comes from searing nightmare with some soulbind traits that add a bit of Apparition damage. Shadow’s single target is now primarily direct damage abilities and it’s new spender DoT devouring Plague.
I see.
What version of those 3 that you just wrote and the current one would you prefer?
My favourite version of shadow in recent memory would be Eternal Palace, but I recognise for what I enjoyed it also had a lot of faults.
Second would be Aberrus.
I still remember when they added haste scaling to DoTs back in Wrath and I could throw DoTs on someone AFK on a flying mount and they’d just die.
I miss that.
I definitely miss that too. Now the dots don’t even outdamage the passive HP regen…
This is basically true for all dots and hots now. They’re just there to amplify other abilities.
It’s annoying, but I don’t think they can balance around having really strong dots and hots on their own.
You don’t want to be balanced around dots anyways, unless you are sure you will only do 12+ keys and raids with plenty of long lived cleave, which most encounters are not anymore.
Look at balance druids. Wonderful spec on really high keys, absolutely awful experience for the vast majority of players who don’t do really high keys as your damage is tied to long lived large groups of mobs. Affliction is similarly a dead spec compared to destruction and demonology.
AoE burst isn’t going anywhere and exchanging a burst profile for dot damage is only gonna hobble the spec with modern encounter and content design.
As much as I would love to see DoTs being strong again, I unfortunately have to agree with you.
If targets don’t live long and / or the target count is not high enough for your dots to do their full potential, you are miserable.
I, however, would see potential in talents like Screams of the Void. You use your spender and it makes your DoTs flare up. They could dive deeper into that idea. Similar to UH DK’s Epidemic as well.
Shadow could have a really flavourful DoT talent build that also utilizes our ghosts. With a shorter travel time though.
It’s the worst. At least in pvp I can dispel, heal, or reposition most times and make better use of a gcd.
skill issues shadow priest its much fun bro and do good damage
So here’s the thing - shadow’s DoTs aren’t just DP, VT, and SWP. From a functional standpoint, Shadowy Apparitions, Yogg-Saron, C’thun, and Psychic Link are also part of shadow’s collection of DoTs because they’re all dependent on Vampiric Touch to work at all except for C’thun, which is just an independent DoT all its own.
Those abilities all together are around half of shadow’s damage.
My spriest seems to be doing pretty bad dps. I just really started playing the spec last season, got pretty good at, now i’m pretty bad again. Took me a while to even play it right. Now progress gone. Using Voidweaver talents.
If you tell me you are doing decent damage I’m copying your loadout lol.
I’ve found the 2 and 4piece for voidweaver add a good chunk of dps. With the rift acting as solid aoe dps, the increase in the amount of void blasts you can get off, and the extra damage for the following void torrent, I’d say my dps has been pretty good.
Thank you, I went into my talents and untalented some things on the left of the shadow tree that I suspected were not working for me, and retalented into the far right of the talent tree. (I’m such a casual spriest i don’t know what they are called.) Also switched a couple voidwalker talents.
My dps immediately went up, so I guess that helped? Lol
When I have that alt open I will put the talent changes here.