Aggrend posted on Twitter yesterday mentioning potential buffs to shadow priests. However, even with Shadow’s current low damage, it earns its raid spot by contributing significant amounts of healing. Since their healing is directly converted as a percentage of their damage, any buffs to their DPS will have direct impacts on this HPS and could make them too strong in PvE. I will go in to detail with the numbers below.
The short version, using my own logs as an example (sod.warcraftlogs. com/reports/dcPfZvYtBmHahTXz#type=healing&boss=-2&difficulty=0&wipes=2&options=8), is that the class currently does raw HPS of roughly 1000-1200, and on a healing intensive fight like Hakkar or Festering Rotslime shadow does around 60-65% of the healing output of dedicated healers. (sod.warcraftlogs. com/zone/statistics/2009#boss=2956&metric=hps&class=Any&dataset=90 or sod.warcraftlogs. com/zone/statistics/2009#boss=2956&metric=hps&class=Any&dataset=90)
When paired with a warlock tank, shadow does roughly 100 effective tank HPS, which often makes them the top tank healer (e.g. sod.warcraftlogs. com/reports/qpT6ACwzVxfQ1J7H#fight=4&type=healing&target=17)
In AOE healing situations spriest is at its most powerful – I have an example here on Hakkar where I did 4x as much healing to my party as both the dedicated healers put together. (sod.warcraftlogs. com/reports/q3t2AFaLjgfhZXnR#fight=39&type=healing&pins=2%24Off%24%23244F4B%24expression%24target.name%20in%20(%22Gatherdude%22,%20%22Vashezza%22,%20%22Adiabetic%22,%20%22Zoomkins%22,%20%22Elebrutus%22))
and another example of a different spriest doing the same (sod.warcraftlogs. com/reports/j9ADapmYWgkPtNwQ#fight=5&type=healing&pins=2%24Off%24%23244F4B%24expression%24target.name%20in%20(%22Krueg%22,%20%22Hollow%22,%20%22Bananawhip%22,%20%22Vonny%22,%20%22Spaniard%22))
This healing allows the dedicated healers to effectively ignore the shadow priest’s party, reducing the healing requirement in the raid by 1/4.
Given the strength of spriest healing, I propose that any buff to their damage should also be paired with a reduction to VE healing. Something like a rune that effectively says “You deal 20% more damage to targets that have your vampiric embrace on them, but healing from VE is reduced by 75-80%.”
Given the raw spriest healing of 1000-1200 from above, the damage boost would bring raw healing up to about 1200-1400, and the reduction would then limit their max HPS to around 250-350, which is still useful but not “I solo heal my party” useful. Making it a rune option would also give spriest the ability to swap between prioritizing healing on fights where it’s useful and damage on fights where it isn’t. Tying any damage boost to VE would also encourage players to spend the global on it and provide their healing utility, which not everyone currently does, and would not affect shadow’s already competitive AoE dps.
Thanks for reading!
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Been saying this for months. Make a rune that makes VE apply 30% increased damage done by the priest instead of heal party for 30%. You can’t have spriest doing the same damage as everyone else well also out healing more than dedicated healers. This will just become stack shadow priests to cheese content. It will be game breaking overpowered. Maybe post it on agrends twitter. Hope they see this.
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LOL @ “You cant have shadow priests doing the same damage as everyone else”. Obviously you don’t play one.
So you want shadow to do the same damage as everyone else well healing the entire group more than healers?
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I just want SP to do similar damage than everyone else, not half. As far as healing, there is only 1 in the top 5000 in the rankings for healing priests so lets not pretend that they are the best healers in the game.
I’m starting to think I’m the only one playing shadow priest who doesn’t think they’re actually fine? Their healing is so strong that I don’t see how you can buff their damage without making them completely broken? A lot depends how healing intensive fights become with later content
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So you just feel worse because you don’t deal equal damage yet heal 5 people for 30% of the damage you deal plus bring a curse and 15% increased shadow damage to the raid? Sounds right to me 
It’s literally just a bunch of 40 year olds screaming at a dev that a graph on warcraft logs is saying that class sucks on a 20 year old seasonal game. So they want it changed at the detriment of everyone else so they can speedrun the raid into oblivion every 2 hours on the weekly cycle so they can show off those l33t 99s to the other 40 year olds in discord.
im not joking btw.
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Personally even as a sp, rather we stay near lower avg damage. Unless there’s a way to reduce our utility for damage then maybe. You still will get invited to a raid pretty darn fast.
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simple fix, Make shadow word death kill the priest if it doesnt kill the target.
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give us a rune to buff our damage by 30% but we take damage equal to 15% of all damage we deal.
I also play spriest and think they’re fine as-is. I’m worried about them becoming too strong if their damage is buffed. If you look at full-raid damage (including trash) spriests are already in the top 200 rankings, and that’s while healing nearly as much as a healer in the run.
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Spriest needs significant damage buff. No one cares about the various perks they bring when things die so fast.
telling you void plague damage cut in half. mind flay damage + 300%
If void plague damage cut like that no one would ever play it over +50% mind blast
Any increase in shadow priest damage has to be paired with a massive decrease in their survivability for PvP purposes. Currently shadow priests are one of the most difficult classes to kill, combined with their two dots doing enough damage to kill almost anyone.
Seems they doubled down on raid utility for spriest with the cos/coe thing. Understandable spriest want to top the meets but not sure what they would give up, as again seems like their getting pegged into that utility/offhealing/mana battery role.
I doubt there’s much if any concern about PvP but yea more damage is the last thing they need there.
I’d give up eye of the void immediately. Low dps, curse resist makes it useless with a cooldown on the curses.
VE should be changed to the tbc version where it is a shadow priest buff and the healing is the same for the priest but cut down for the rest of the group. It was done bc it affected the whole raid but i think that would be a good adjustment for limiting the group healing while still keeping the SWD self damage in check.
Next let’s move some damage to mind spike and/or figure out a way to make flay better (+range for sure, maybe the old no more snare bandaid?). If we tone down passive dot damage can we then make flay/sear increase damage and crit chance/damage so it’s still something that isn’t passive?
You just got a 10% buff, stop crying.
Not just you. I agree completely and was flamed and spam clown reacted in the class discord for daring to suggest VE be nerfed alongside a bigger dps buff than the one we got today, to keep overall healing at ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM the same as it is now, hut ideally reduce it significantly.
At present spriest is stepping on the toes of healers and is making arcane mage feel pointless - I understand that arcane can do more healing across more players/groups but has slower casts and way more restrictive mana economy, all to only do 20-40% more healing than a dps class passively doing high hps while doing full dps (granted its bottom of the barrel dps but its still much higher than arcane healer’s dps)
Frankly anyone who thinks the devs don’t “see” VE healing as part of spriest’s full package that it’s balanced around, is incredibly shortsighted and should probably just be ignored/disregarded.
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