Right off the bat at level 10, I see Invisibility (Defensive CD comparable to Dispersion) and Counterspell (Interupt compareable to Silence) baseline.
I don’t see a great option to see what else they could learn to level 20, but this is another argument to have Silence and Dispersion baseline.
Maybe I’ll write a dedicated feedback post when the thread comes up, I don’t know.
I’m just fed up at this point. Shadow is once again not being treated with the same design philosophy as every other talent redesign made since Retribution Paladin in 10.1.
Not only was the single largest pain point of having to sacrifice survivability for utility ignored, we only got a reduction of one 2 point talent node from eight. Some specs in the game have zero.
Some feedback on the recent changes
Shadow Crash
I feel like 2 charges of shadow crash still misses the issue. The charges regen 1 at a time still and shadow crash CD is too close to the duration of the dots they are applying to realistically pool a charge in consistent AOE.
Could we maybe circumvent the issue entirely by possibly uncapping shadow crash and putting the effective aoe cap on psychic link instead or have an aoe spender as a choice node with psychic link that is for more mass aoe situations to make mass applying dots without a cap not problematic.
It feels so bad in some of these dungeons that I have to hit vampiric touch for the first ten seconds of a pull to set up to do damage when everyone else just starts taking off at the start. I have to plan around everyone elses damage more so than my own because of the opportunity cost of shadow unlocking their aoe damage.
Idol of Y’shaarj
The amount of times Priest has gotten an ability thats just similar to a previous class ability but worse in every way is wild. This is just Time Anomaly from the Mage class tree but worse. Time anomaly was also removed cause having large variable haste increases feels awful because you notice more when you dont have it than when you do.
Void Volley
the coolest new addition to the spec in a long time. I personally wish it was an AOE spender without a cooldown to have something for Mass aoe but as it is this is a cool ability. I hope the tuning of this ability makes this a worthwhile talent point in the future.
Some feedback on problems that still exist with the class
Utility
You have to give the class a baseline interrupt somewhere. Priest not having an interrupt in the class tree is an artifact of a design philosophy that no longer exists or makes sense. The opportunity cost of picking up silence in the spec tree just puts anyone who does take it at a disadvantage from anyone who doesn’t take it.
The only crowd control you have is an uncapped fear.
No single target CC without losing damage to take it.
One of the few classes in the game that cant root break themselves.
Leap of faith loses its value every patch we buff rescue. We’ve seen multiple raid and dungeon encounters where a friend NPC would be amazing to be able to reposition with leap of faith only to have them be immune to it.
Vampiric embrace does very little outside of cooldowns making it effectively a 2 min cooldown that has to be used every 2 minutes on the mark.
What does that leave us with relevant utility?
Twins of the sun priest. I can not describe how much people don’t want this. Tired of people arguing over it. Tired of having to figure out who I should cast it on. Tired of explaining to the DK that im not going to hold my own usage of power infusion so they can get better timings with their stuff. But thats our utility as this class. Damage that isnt ours.
Movement
with very little utility on the class it begs the question whats the point of also being one of if not the slowest class in the game. What is the gameplay reason for this? I can understand Death knights being slow with abilities that make up for this such as death grip as well as the ability to ignore forced movement effects but there is no such trade off for priest.
What is the purpose of having the ability to move an ally to my location if im always going to be the last person to arrive at the location anyways. Why is my movement speed ability so weak that even the legion order hall gives you a faster version cause its cruel to think 40% over 5 seconds is noticeable for a gcd cost. Why is priest the anomaly class where some of our most popular racials have nothing to do with throughput and everything to do with getting from point A to B.
Some feedback on Theme
Since voidweaver has brought about this more cosmic and space theme to shadow could we see more things in that nature. Every shadow ability feels like im an Anti-psychiatrist who brings up my targets repressed memories to do mental damage to them.
Things like Entropic Rift, void torrent and void blast feel more like what the modern version of shadow should lean on aesthetically that it would be cool to see another visual updates to abilities like halo and divine star to reflect this more outer space theme than just purple stuff thrower.
Overall I appreciate the effort being laid out by the people involved with these changes and hope to see further iterations or discussion.
I’m with you 100% here.
Here are some things I still would like to see in Shadows Tree…
Instead use something like…
Bring back Mind Sear and have it be a choice talent with Psychic Link. Players can choose either passive AOE via Psychic Link or Focused Targeted AOE with Mind Sear.
Make Shadow Apparitions explode on impact (Think SC2 Banelings) but have reduced effectiveness similar to Deaths Torment as a talent.
Change Mental Decay so Shadowy Apparitions extend dot duration. This makes maintaining dots on multiple targets passive through well executed gameplay.
Add a choice talent with Mental Decay to reduce multi dot application spell cool down by 1 second for each target afflicted with your Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch on them upon death. This makes it a good talent for quick content where the enemies die faster than the normal time it takes for your dots to deal their full damage.
Bring back Unfurling Darkness. Good to help get dots out and mini burst damage.
Bring back Deathspeaker or roll it’s effects into Dark Ascension.
Example:
This will limit the strength of the live Deathspeaker effect with its resetting and full damage nature regardless of targets health to only occurred while Dark Ascension is active without removing it completely so that it can benefit from the redesigned Deathspeaker 35% health threshold and the new Deaths Torment talent without being abused outside Dark Ascension window.
Make Dark Ascension damage no longer limited to Non-Periodic since you removed Mind Spike.
Either remove the cast time and make instant cast for Dark Ascension and Voidform or while those are active, you can float around like Xal’atath and are able to cast while moving similar to a past iteration of Surrender to Madness granted.
Add more transformational spell options into the tree.
Examples:
Implementing changes like these can really make for some interesting builds that make the Idols stand out as real game changing options as well as making the overall gameplay smooth imo.
Now for some more bigger changes to consider going into a new Expansion…
Current mastery feel punishing when you need to swap to a target to burn quickly or use Shadow Word: Death snipes on and you don’t have all your DoTs on it.
Instead, mastery should enhance damage to all Mind Spells.
This would give you more power into the spells you actually have to physically cast and because of this, they won’t scale out of control like dots do with many targets as well as not make the execute damage of Shadow Word: Death feel suppressed when used on a target without dots on it.
Basically just take WoD’s mastery but apply to all Mind Spells.
You can easily just move how current Shadow Mastery works into its own talent since you already have 2 versions of this already in the tree with Insidious Ire and Madness Weaving.
Just dump it already.
WoD Shadow Orb resource system was way better to control Devouring Plague and easily readable with its cost of 3 and max of 5 orbs.
With insanity, you get a lot of trickle resources that is not well visually telegraphed through the User Interface.
Also, you gave both Xal’atath and the Voidweaver visual Icon multiple void aesthetic sphere orbs. Those orbs can easily represent the resource system much like warlock souls shards and mages ice fragments or Sun fury fire orbs.
You already have a better visual model to use, just incorporate that and then the UI can be updated to show Shadow or void orbs once again and allow major spells like Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death during execute HP range to generate Resources and then maybe Shadowy Apparitions.
I’ll chime in, I have been maining shadow since Vanilla and currently hover over top-100 shadow in m+ (not because I’m any good but rather because shadow is so bad nobody actually good is playing it)
Philosophy and direction:
I really like most of the changes and the spirit of the changes, they do hit on some of the major pain points for Shadow
Questionable changes
Big unaddressed problems
Dispersion and silence should be made baseline. Our first two rows of talents are utility talents and they belong in the class tree.
Just delete PI please. Or Twins. Maybe I’m living in a bubble but ever since it was made into this version (after being switched to a personal cooldown like it was in Legion) there’s been such a massive amount of feedback on how toxic PI is. In any group content PI is unfun for everyone but 1 player. It breeds bad social interactions, harassment in whispers, cringe gameplay of adjusting your cooldowns to another person’s.
No movement is not a class identity I don’t want to jump through both gaols like fire mage but not to beat the dead horse but any actual displacement like reverse Life Grip or Door of Shadows isn’t just a QoL with the way encounters are designed currently
Shadow doesn’t bring any unique utility over other priest specializations In other words if Disc is the best heal (like it was in S1/S2) there is no reason to invite Shadow unless it does giga damage. Easiest way to solve it is to make VE into actual group healing cooldown instead of a meme but I doubt it will change anything because it’s not enough.
Judging by how the physical dps comp is an actual alternative to the meta comp this season, I would maybe look into more damage type buffs for more comp variety - like Shadow brings shadow weaving buff and it’s a 3% more shadow damage for the group allowing you to play some shadowcleave-type comp with B/UDK and Warlock or new void demon hunter but I digress
TLDR
Overall I’m (cautiously) very excited about the changes. I think there are a lot of new exciting options and changes that will depend heavily on the tuning. Shadow has been objectively the worst m+ dps spec in m+ this season, but the gameplay feel is awesome.
I really like that we have two distinct playstyles of Archon and Voidweaver and I enjoy playing both of them. Choosing between the two even in the high keys is sometimes a player preference and both can provide the same throughput. This is however a luxury of higher keys and mythic raid because Archon is a poor choice in content where stuff just doesn’t live long enough (1-13 keys before turbo boost). As much as I love the higher key gameplay of both Archon and Voidweaver playing anything below 13s is misery as a shadow.
So going into 11.2 I really hope that these changes can help smooth out the damage profile so shadow isn’t such a stinker in shorter-lived content (especially since we are losing the AoE capstone talent). I hope both hero talent trees will remain competitive and interchangeable depending on the niche you are trying to fill, routing, etc. I think it’s a step into the right direction but it doesn’t seem like it will meaningfully change anything about our niche so if Disc (or Holy lol) good then Shadow is irrelevant unless it tuned like UDK this season.
Adding another voice to the chorus, please give us Silence and Dispersion as baseline abilities for Shadow, there’s no reason to force us to use 2 vital talent points for utility that nearly every other class gets either baseline or in their CLASS tree.
Who is benefiting from this decision? It’s not casual players, it’s not key players, it’s definitely not raiders.
The current design of the upper part of the shadow tree is just so bad. Just pull the trigger, replace the two nodes with some ultra-generic bonus, it’s fine, we won’t really care, just let us have those two talents as a baseline for choosing shadow.
Bring back old Shadowform & Mindflay !
or just get rid of the whole Void fantasy garbage
I’m overall happy with their intent to change, but like many said here, there are some points the need to be seen. Hopefully we can count on adjustments across the builds.
My thoughts:
Honestly, activating Voidweaver should also (at least, visually) change those spells. Void Word: Pain / Void Word: Death, etc.
according to a random cow?
I think enough people would agree that if Power Infusion is what’s holding back more utility for priests, just…give PI to Augmentation (they need love anyway) and comp priests (all specs) with silence and a combat rez. And bake some of the lost throughput into Shadow’s major damage CDs.
PI has just progressively become ill-fitted for Shadow. PI lasts 15 seconds, Dark Ascension lasts 20, Voidforms last ~40 seconds! PI is gone well before your cooldowns end, so your cooldowns don’t feel as powerful and you feel like you’re running out of steam while your major CDs are still active.
As Shadow in M+, you will virtually never top the damage meters in a decent group because your allies are getting your PIs. One of the core fun things to try to achieve as a DPS - being the highest DPS - is just not possible.
Of course, Shadow feels great with extra haste. But you should be aiming for high haste anyway.
For Void Volley’s SFX, it would be nice if it had the heavy thump that Xal’s had when she attacked Khadgar.
For that matter, maybe make the VFX match her attack as well!
Overall concerns
Mastery - Should be looked at - it works more like a penalty for not having dots up when needing to do things like help burst down priority adds / switch targets - Also it feels like doubling down on this with with insidious ire already
DA vs Void Eruption - If we ignore the damage output (assume they are identical in all scenarios) why does this choice exist? Is it there for visual differences? Is it there for people that don’t like pressing void bolt? I don’t get this still
Utility in the Tree - At the top of the tree were still making this choice - i know in the recent morgan day interview he said it was something that would be looked it. So I am guessing that is WIP
Movement - Shadow needs some way to either move while casting / impactful instant casts or some kind of displacement and is currently too punished for needing to move out of things
Shadow Apps vs Psychic Link - Both of these have the same requirement (having VT on the off targets) - What is the point of having both? Why not just combine their damage into a single thing? It seems that both of these will live in competition with each other, if Apps get to powerful, then links % will have to come down, If link is powerful then Apps can do to much damage.
Idols - I am not picking one over the other for any reason other than what the numbers tell me to do, they do nothing to change my game play, they all just are providing passive benefits that are questionably just clutter on my screen if i am tracking them.
Ideas/Suggestions
Mastery - Make applying SW:P to your most recent target put a debuff on them that greatly increases the damage they take from VT/Plague/Pain - this will give the “dot” class fantasy with out having to worry about multidotting scaling out of control - mastery in general could additionally increase shadowy app(or psychic link) damage to prevent it from only being only useful in single target - rework misery to pressing pain will also apply VT
Remove DA - I think if we want visual differences, just make it a glyph
Utility in the Tree - Take shadowy apps out of the top, frankenstein it with psychic link. replace that node with some new utility, ex. something that makes VT gives healers mana, or a blink ability - then allow dispersion / silence to path to misery
Shadow Crash - I think the talent change is better, but I think it would be better if crash just did big damage and cost insanity. there should be a talent where casting VT applied it to the target and 5 near by targets and we limited the AoE damage with scaling
Devouring Plague - The duration should be longer and should not be the sole insanity spender, should work like rogues slice and dice, where you want to keep it up on your primary target, but you would spend insanity on things like void torrent or shadow crash. if those are on cd, then you could stack plagues or make void volley a spender and usable while torrent is on CD. (there should be more in that gameplay loop)
Idols - I don’t get the y’shaarj change, I get the old one was kind of a weird, but now it doesn’t have anything to do with your fiend/bender but the path goes through it - I think something better would be stacks build up to make the bender CD more impactful - turn the bender into an echo of one of the seven prime Sha of y’shaarj
N’zoth is in a better place than before, but feels like it doesnt match the text, i watch the target get random stacks but I am not seeing anything happen when it hits particular stacks
Yogg -
c’thun - if you wanted to do anything to refresh i think it would be cool if any tentacles you have do more damage while you are channeling void torrent
A few points:
For all the good stuff this soft rework accomplishes, why on earth are you continuing to double down on Dispersion and Silence being talents and having us keep the literal worst interrupt in the game as a talent point? These abilities and Last Word should both be baseline, and MFort honestly should too.
I talked a LOT of smack about Unfurling Darkness over the years, and prior to Voidweaver getting gigabuffed in Nerub-ar Palace the hatred I had towards UD was extremely justified. So with that in mind, I’m actually really sad to see Unfurling Darkness go now that Blizzard finally managed to figure out a way to make it viable for once, and as it turns out, when it’s actually worth taking for numbers the way it adds a powerful movement global is really, really neat.
Idol of Y’shaarj is in a very confusing spot on the spec tree and the random nature of it will make getting a proc shortly before you’re about to press your CDs feel really, really bad because you’ll have 10% LESS Haste during part of them. And what does it have to do with pets now?
Idol of N’zoth is VERY cool, and I love it. This is one hell of a way to improve a talent.
Void Volley is an absolutely perfect button that feels very satisfying to press. I’ve always enjoyed these combo skills (Templar Paladin bonk, PWave–>PStorm, etc.) and this one fits in perfectly. Amazing ability. 10/10
Depth of Shadows+Death’s Torment+Mindbender=LMAO. Jokes aside, though, this dynamic is thematically awesome and gives Shadow an incredibly useful damage profile even on single-target fights (having strong ranged Execute damage is quite rare, outside of Arcane), but the amount of Insanity 3-5 Mindbenders and a N’zoth proc generate is absolutely bonkers.
We have an excessive number of 2-point talents, but by far the worst offender in my eyes is the new Instilled Doubt. This is the single most frustrating non-utility talent on the entire tree in my eyes; it’s an incredibly weak node for ST situations but is nearly mandatory to path through in order to get to the mandatory Void Torrent/excellent Void Volley. This should absolutely not be a 2-point talent. Most of the tree shouldn’t have these, but this particular talent is absolutely oppressive when building a new talent setup because of just how expensive it is for how mandatory the talents partially gated behind it are.
The new tier is neat. I don’t care much about the Archon stuff at the moment (although longer Voidforms and more Halos is really cool), but the Voidweaver set bonuses are incredibly fun and satisfying to play with. Void Blast hits like a nuke from orbit already, but letting us effectively weave Void Blast and any other GCD due to the cooldown reduction aspect of it feels satisfying, and the huge, hard-hitting Entropic Rifts and Void Torrents are cool on a thematic and numerical level. The set bonuses are probably a little on the strong side (that might be underselling it by a lot honestly; these set bonuses are very very very strong) but they’re actually rotation-altering in a positive way.
Dark Evangelism is in probably the single worst spot on the entire tree for a talent to be in. This talent is nigh-impossible to take where it currently is.
Overall, some cool stuff here. But please address the Dispersion/Silence/MFort issue and please take Instilled Doubt out back, because this talent feels absolutely abysmal to take currently but is very much a near-mandatory one.
Actually, no, I have more feedback to give after sitting on this for about 12 hours or so.
Why does Shadow have just shy of twice as many 2-point talents as pretty much any other spec in the game? We have seven. The other specs that have a lot have five at most. There are entire specs in this game that have zero. There are some incredibly compelling synergies we can’t explore because we have so many expensive talent nodes (with Instilled Doubt, as I mentioned in my previous post, being far and away the worst offender).
This spec has so many talent points that just feel like complete filler. That’s an issue now and it continues to be an issue on PTR, and it feels like we’re the only spec that continues to have this issue.
Indeed.
I loved priest when it dabbled in SHADOW magic. Now they have them dealing with magic much too dark. Would love for there to be options for this though.
Having the option to be a Shadow Priest or a Void Acolyte would be interesting- even if all it did was change the cosmetic appearance of spells and effects/dialogue interactions, etc.
But then we’d be talking about ‘class skins’- something Blizzard inexplicably refuses to consider.
Easy way to fix it:
When you cast Dark Ascension or Void Eruption, you get 15% Haste for 10 seconds. When Dark Ascension or Void Eruption end, you lose 10% Haste for 10 seconds.
It does hit the Shaman Ascendance issue of putting more power in the major DPS cooldown, but it does remove the “feels bad” aspect.