Shadow Priest Design Feedback
TL;DR
- Certain talents feel underwhelming and lackluster
- Major cooldowns lack definitions
- Spec tree is filled with passive choices that hardly change gameplay
- DoT Management is more punishing than it is satisfying
- Mobility and Movement feels punishing and restrictive
Core Gameplay
The core gameplay of Shadow is largely simplified from what it has been previously. This has made the playstyle feel somewhat lackluster and very standard compared to other specs, especially when playing Dark Ascension. The Void Eruption playstyle has a better flow with the added spell of Void Bolt, but even this is a shell of what it has been in the past. Both of these cooldowns feel underdeveloped from a gameplay loop and just make the spec feel “normal” to play without the flavor the spec had previously.
Part of this problem feels related to the Dragonflight talent trees and the mantra of “Build Your Own Shadow Priest”. This ambitious goal is a lofty one and has left us with several combinations of choosing your filler and your cooldown but ultimately these decisions have a quite minimal impact on gameplay feel. When the spec was centered around a single cooldown it felt like there were more opportunities to let the cooldown thrive and build on top of what would be a single baseline cooldown instead of trying to make things work for both. On top of this the choices in the talent tree that we do make hardly have any synergy with each other, making the tree feel disjointed.
Shadow Priest Design
Lack of Playstyle Choice
- Lack of distinctive playstyle choice in the talent tree. Noteworthy Shadow Archetypes feel underdeveloped or missing entirely
- DoT Spreading
- Shadowy Apparitions
- Funnel Damage while Cleaving
- Void Summoner
- DoTless Heavy Burst/Single Target
- Ramping Damage
Unsatisfying DoT Management Options
The current design makes DoT Management feel more frustrating than it does satisfying compared to previous iterations. Your ability to deal AoE damage with Psychic Link is directly tied to how fast and efficient you can apply DoTs to targets quickly. Right now the only way we have to do that is with the Shadow Crash and Whispering Shadows talents paired with Misery as a required choice.
With the spec’s reliance on Shadow Crash, all the issues with this spell bleed into issues with our AoE as a whole since it is the catalyst for that Psychic Link damage. Relying on a projectile spell to hit targets means any issues with Z-Axis in the game or just targeting a ground spell in general make Shadow Crash extremely frustrating at times. Furthermore when fighting more than the 8-target DoT cap of Whispering Shadows it means you are at a significant disadvantage. If you pull several small/insignificant enemies your Shadow Crash might miss several of the elites meaning you are forced to manually DoT the remaining priority targets. This is particularly punishing based on the current dungeon pool which makes this problem heavily varied from season to season.
While a projectile instant DoT applicator does have some benefits, making Shadow Crash a choice node with a version that is targeted at an enemy that still applies Vampiric Touch with Whispering Shadows would go a long way to make things feel better. This alternative version would eliminate issues with Z-axis on a projectile spell. Giving the player the choice between a targeted ground spell or a spell that travels specifically to a target would go a long way to making the spec feel less punishing.
To address the issue of facing many targets and needing to DoT them I think the answer lies in specifically giving the player more options for DoT management. Several talents in our kit could be altered to make Shadow Crash less required to maintain DoTs while leaning on more classic parts of the kit for spreading DoTs. Here are some ways this could work:
- Mental Decay working in AoE could mean you are less required to press Shadow Crash on cooldown, and only need it to apply DoTs to new targets.
- Giving Shadow Crash multiple charges would allow you more flexibility with the spell. This not only would help cover up issues with the spell but it would also extend the specs ability to handle various scenarios, especially lower keys where things die faster.
- Uncapping Shadow Crash but then limiting Psychic Link in some way to make sure things don’t get out of control.
- Give Unfurling Darkness a better use case in PvE specifically. Instead of being a hybrid on-hit damage instant cast Vampiric Touch every 15 seconds change it to be purely a DoT management talent that interacts with Vampiric Touch to make it an instant cast spell for a short period of time, allowing you to spread the DoT more easily.
Alternatively, instead of making our DoTs easier to spread in Mass AoE (12+ targets) the spec could instead have other spells that are meant to fill the identity of higher target count damage. This was done in the past with an AoE spender like Mind Sear or alternative spells like Shadowy Apparitions fueling more of our AoE potential. The AoE section below goes over the flaws with some of those existing spells today.
Cooldown Identity Crisis
Shadow Priest currently gets to choose between two different cooldowns, Dark Ascension and Void Eruption. This was part of the build your own Shadow Priest experiment and has ultimately left both cooldowns feeling like they are lacking definition. Having both of these offer their own unique gameplay loop and core playstyle would be fun to play with, but currently that is not how things have worked out.
Dark Ascension is a simple damage mod to our kit that lacks synergy with the rest of the kit. Having a flexible 1 minute cooldown certainly can be convenient but when selecting a cooldown I wish it had more definition behind it. The gameplay loop is the same inside of cooldowns as it is outside of cooldowns, making it feel more like a maintenance buff compared to what we have with Void Eruption. On top of that the specific nature of only buffing direct damage skills is underdeveloped in the talent tree. Mind Spike as a choice should be the default pick with these sorts of builds, but it’s typically not even strong enough to always be default. In order for Dark Ascension to thrive it needs further iteration.
- Instead of expanding on Dark Ascension, talenting into this could just change Void Eruption to a 1m cooldown instead with different visuals.
- Cast time on the cooldown feels restrictive and too similar to Void Eruption
- Further develop Dark Ascension by building in synergy to Mind Spike
- Mind Spike and Mind Melt could be removed as talents and instead baked into Dark Ascension. During the cooldown Mind Flay is automatically transformed into Mind Spike with Mind Melt baseline
- Give Mind Spike that similar proc-based instant cast gameplay we had from Surge of Darkness
- Alternatively removing this spell to fully focus on Void Eruption would be helpful as well.
Void Eruption remains an iconic cooldown in the game but recently is lacking some of the magic that made many priests fall in love with the cooldown. In Dragonflight Void Eruption feels less like a cooldown and more like a stance activation spell that gives us access to Void Bolt. It needs something to make it have satisfying gameplay again. Voidform should have a clear reason why you would want to pick this over Dark Ascension (i.e. Sustain vs. Burst damage). The other big thing is bringing back a more interactive cooldown than we had previously. The removal of the Insanity drain mechanic makes this harder to harken back to, but some type of ramping haste or damage amplification would go a long way to making this feel fun again and reward the player from getting longer Voidforms.
- From a numbers perspective alone it feels like it is being pulled back in power just so that Dark Ascension has room to breathe, making the choice between the two often unimportant both from a gameplay and a numbers perspective.
- Specifically on single target fights the Mastery activation does not really come into play leaving the only effect gained getting access to Void Bolt.
- Since it replaces Shadowform, the 10% damage gain is completely nullified making this one of the few cooldowns in the game that doesn’t directly buff your damage while active. Having the buff put back to 20% would help make the cooldown feel more satisfying as a 2 minute cooldown.
- Would like to see pause interactions come back for spells like Void Torrent and especially Dispersion where when using these spells it pauses the Voidform buff duration.
The other big thing to bring up with our cooldowns is the one talent that interacts with them, Ancient Madness. Currently this talent works exactly the same, regardless of your choice of cooldown. This is inherently punishing for Void Eruption since it has twice the cooldown of Dark Ascension but still only the same benefit for Void Eruption. On top of this it was changed recently to not give character stat sheet critical strike which makes it confusing for players if it’s even working as expected.
AoE as a Shadow Priest
With the current design, our AoE damage lives and dies based on our Single Target being tuned well and our ability to spread DoTs. This has left us in a fairly tumultuous state with small tuning changes having a massive ripple effect impact on AoE.
The core of this problem is that Psychic Link is either too weak or too powerful, and feels like it is often left in poor states for too long. From season to season the strength of this talent is relative to the strength of the base spec, but the tuning of this spell has been a roller coaster to say the least. At 30% this feels like it has weight to it in the current design, but every time it gets knocked down the spec starts to suffer again. Spells like Void Torrent and Mindgames still don’t have the same AoE Burst potential that they had when the coefficient was higher, making these spells feel pretty lackluster still.
Other AoE spells in the kit and their flaws:
- Shadowy Apparitions
- Travel time can feel like a big detriment to playing around Apparitions without sitting in melee.
- “AoE” damage is locked behind having every target DoTted which has its own challenges (see above)
- Lack of interactive talents with this spell that make you feel more like a Shadowy Apparition build.
- Shadow Crash
- Tuned down enough to be irrelevant from a damage perspective and just there to apply DoTs with Whispering Shadows. Takes two talent points to get anything worth selecting.
- The Season 3 set bonus attempted to fix this but to make that “balanced” the base spell was nerfed.
- Spreading DoTs
- See section above
- Inescapable Torment
- Overall playstyle is fine, although many players are a bit exhausted having run this for so many tiers consistently.
- Even though this is target capped at 5 its damage output at 5 and below targets is extremely lackluster
- Idol of N’Zoth
- See section below on Old God Idol Capstones
If you package this kit together it currently feels like we have a bunch of small AoE spells to try and copy them all together to deal passable AoE. This makes the gameplay feel unfocused in AoE and mostly passive gameplay rather than feeling involved or satisfying.
Filler Spell: Insanity
Currently Shadow Priest gets to choose to use Mind Flay by default or talent into Mind Spike as our core filler spell. While the intent here is surely to let players choose the playstyle they want, the exact reasons for when you want Mind Spike or Mind Flay often come down to numbers rather than a gameplay choice. Both spells lack synergies with the rest of our kit, making it unclear when you want to play one versus another. This is particularly problematic for Mind Spike because the choice is not directly Mind Flay vs. Mind Spike, its Mind Spike and Mind Melt vs. whatever other two points on the talent tree you would take otherwise. This makes the choice somewhat confusing and chaotic knowing which one you want to play with.
Currently the community is split on how this feels. Overall Mind Flay baseline is a less punishing spell compared to Mind Spike, but Mind Flay: Insanity is more punishing to play with compared to Mind Spike: Insanity. The empowered fillers seem to have caused more problems than they have solved. On top of this from a feel perspective Mind Spike: Insanity feels exactly like Mind Spike, lacking any distinct flavor. In addition, this proc being attached to every other Devouring Plague makes these procs feel “easy” to play correctly, whereas when you got it every cast you had to think more about your rotation. With this talent you play normally and sometimes your fillers do more damage.
Button Bloat
Shadow Priest has too many abilities that do not have significant gameplay impact. This leads to confusion to new players and old trying to figure out when to use these buttons that are hardly impactful.
- Mindgames
- Halo / Divine Star
- Holy Nova
- Power Infusion
- Currently just synced with Dark Ascension or Void Eruption.
- Probably a stand alone button only for theme and Twins but from a gameplay perspective as Shadow would rather this just be baked into our cooldowns.
- Balance seems to be taking this into account in our overall budget which makes it harder to gauge the overall power level of the spec
- Shadow Word: Pain
- T31 tier set aside, this is basically just a movement ability with Misery being a required talent. Having a DoT spell like this that we basically never press is a weird spot in our kit for such an iconic spell.
- Shadowfiend/Mindbender
- Without Inescapable Torment these feel extremely lackluster as a spell and feel like they contribute to button bloat.
- Utility Spells are nice to have, but if they are not significant or useful they feel bloated. Would rather have a selection of utility that is best in class rather than having a bunch of options that are mediocre
- Void Tendrils
- Shackle Undead
- Outside of Incorporeal this has such niche uses in PvE
- Psychic Horror
- Actually great spell but too big of a DPS loss to take currently
Specific Talent Feedback
- Mastermind
- Connection to Idol of N’Zoth has no synergy
- Tormented Spirits
- Tormented Spirits scales quadratically as both the chance for a proc and the number of targets that are dealt damage both depend directly on target count.
- This makes these talents lackluster for Single Target Damage while incredibly powerful as targets scale up.
- Suggestions:
- Give it similar target scaling to Maddening Touch/Auspicious Spirits, or make it RPPM while buffing the base chance to increase the talents floor while lowering the ceiling.
- Just replace it with the T30 4pc from Aberrus
- Damage output of this talent is directly related to Auspicious Spirits, which makes it live in a relatively unhealthy spot.
- Tormented Spirits scales quadratically as both the chance for a proc and the number of targets that are dealt damage both depend directly on target count.
Old God Idol Capstones
- Anyone that plays Shadow instantly falls in love with the idea of Idol capstone spells. Would love to see potentially more of these in the future, or even future visual Glyphs added to really lean into the theme of these abilities.
- Potentially more Idols? G’huun, Xal’atath, Bwonsamdi, etc
- A Glyph that lets you put down pillars to the old gods you are talented into
- Thematically interesting, but lacking in playstyle definition. All of them have some component of cleave damage, which hurts the overall identity of why you would want to take each one. Would rather each Idol spell have a clear niche or playstyle
- Idol of Y’Shaarj
- All of the effects are just kind of “nice to have” or passive. None of them really change what we do in PvE or are played around much.
- While the other Idols have some sort of visual, this one feels lacking.
- Idol of N’Zoth
- Having an effective double cap its AoE (limited to 4 debuffs at a time and the damage is soft capped at 5) makes it less than ideal. Not being able to spread this to all targets AND that damage being capped feels too restrictive, would rather have one or the other.
- In large AoE pulls you actually want to explode the stacks via the on-death trigger so you actually get the damage out before other targets die, which would reduce the overall damage dealt. This means we want it to be on the enemies that will die first since we have no controlled way to explode the stacks outside of that.
- Removing the cap on debuffs would go a long way to making this feel better.
- Giving the player an option to be able to detonate all active stacks would also help give more control back to the player when they want the damage to happen in addition to the passive detonation.
- Idol of N’Zoth feels like the damage over time Idol, but in general there seems to be a lack of synergizing talents both leading into N’Zoth and elsewhere in the kit, which makes this talent underwhelming. Screams of the Void is almost single handedly giving this talent life
- Having an effective double cap its AoE (limited to 4 debuffs at a time and the damage is soft capped at 5) makes it less than ideal. Not being able to spread this to all targets AND that damage being capped feels too restrictive, would rather have one or the other.
- Idol of Yogg-Saron
- Visually exciting when it procs.
- Direct tuning of this talent is directly tied to the tuning of Shadowy Apparitions, Auspicious Spirits, and Tormented Spirits, even if these do not directly buff the damage of Yogg-Saron. These points being required to get to Yogg-Saron have a knock on effect any time the tuning of these spells are changed.
- When it procs it is mostly out of our control, making it awkward to plan around. You can cancel stacks and somewhat game this, but that does not feel great.
- Idol of C’Thun
- Visually exciting when it procs.
- Nothing clearly wrong with the talent in its current implementation but lacks any sort of defining playstyle.
- Hard to find a clear reason why you want to specifically take this talent, aside from the raw numbers. You always want more Insanity generation so this is almost always relevant.
Top Section Utility Choice
- There is at least one too many utility points in the top section
- Without losing damage we can only select 2 out of the available 4 options without losing damage. Dispersion and Silence being the core 2 here means selecting anything else is almost impossible in most PvE content
- Intangibility, Last Word, and Psychic Horror were seldom ever taken in PvE for these reasons
- Last Word
- Would rather this be a full reduction to a 24 second kick with the Silence component removed.
- Interrupt requirement in keys can be strict enough to where even a 30 second kick is not good enough, and Silence as a core mechanic is rarely valuable in PvE if ever
Movement and Mobility
The mobility of the spec is very dependent on the tuning of our instant cast spells and many of the points already mentioned, such as cooldown identity with Dark Ascension vs. Void Eruption. This, paired with the fairly turret nature of Dark Ascension builds, significantly locks down the spec and makes it very proc reliant to handle movement events.
Suggestions
- Change Surge of Insanity procs to have some baked in mobility. Making Mind Spike: Insanity instant cast would go a long way to making the spell not only feel better but also shore up movement concerns in PvE and PvP. The struggle here would be balancing this out with Mind Flay, a potential secondary change could be making Mind Flay: Insanity castable while moving. This would give the player some options on how to handle movement.
- Give some kind of displacement talent into the class tree (i.e. something like Door of Shadows or a jump type effect). We have two movement talents but nothing that helps with displacement.
Good Things about the Current Design
While the focus of this post has been mostly on the negative aspects of the spec, I think it is equally important to highlight parts of the spec that the community likes in the current design.
- Psychic Link style Priority Target damage AoE can be good if tuned well, but currently impacts raid performance too much when balancing happens.
- Void Torrent feels great with auto-proccing Idol of C’Thun
- Voidtouched leaves more room in the opener if you get procs. Also allows some sort of burst depending on the situation.
- While Shadow Crash does have its issues, having any instant-DoT applicator is crucial to this build working in the current state.
- Idol of C’Thun is visually a fun spell to see proc.
- Yogg-Saron is visually awesome to see when it procs, especially if you get lucky with multiple out at once.
- Mental Fortitude gives us much needed defensive value in our kit. Priests/Shadow Priests are one of the weakest specs in the game handling incoming damage and without this talent we would be devastated in higher end prog content.
Class Talents
- Void Tendrils
- Being a melee casted root that breaks almost immediately on damage has extremely limited use cases. If it was similar to Mass Entanglement it would see more play
- Sheer Terror
- No current use cases, does not reduce the breaking point enough to be noticeable in most scenarios.
- Healing spells like Holy Nova, Renew, Prayer of Mending and even Flash Heal and all relevant talents are much less relevant to Shadow Priest
- If these were added to Hallucinations it could open up more off-healing builds for Shadow Priest to go into without losing too much damage in the process.
- Flash Heal specifically is cast more often as Shadow due to the interaction with the talent Protective Light where Flash Heal is a part of our defensive tool kit.
- Rotational buttons like these are not meaningful off-healing in their current state to pickup or press
- The off-healing would be more useful is if it was similar to Vampiric Embrace where it could handle specific windows where you want more healing
- Ideally we could talent into some options that make sacrificing damage for a small window worth pressing the healing buttons to handle a high damage scenario.
- If these were added to Hallucinations it could open up more off-healing builds for Shadow Priest to go into without losing too much damage in the process.
- Mindgames
- Feels tacked onto the kit but doesn’t really contribute anything. It’s 4 points that you feel like you need to take for damage but they are so inconsequential it doesn’t really matter and makes the spell feel more like button bloat
- If this was changed to a pure utility spell that would be more exciting than feeling obligated from a DPS perspective in PvE
- Halo and Divine Star
- Constant tuning changes to spec talents and spells have pushed these to the point where they’re either not worth pressing for damage or are barely worth pressing for damage and effectively button bloat in terms of DPS
- They can be decent from a healing perspective but otherwise are just a different filler spell we press sometimes that can just feel like button bloat
- Angelic Bulwark
- Feels underwhelming and procs in an unreliable way that makes it much less useful.
- Does not work like Undulating Sporecloak nor does it work on lethal hits (like a sort of Cheat Death mechanic) which makes this significantly less useful and kind of a trap talent for many players.
- If this worked properly it would shore up the desperately needed passive mitigation problem the spec has, which directly contributes to the amount of deaths the spec sees inside of a raiding environment.
