Im currently 577 on my shadow priest, currently running heroics with guildies to pass the time, and a lot of my guildies i run with are CONSISTENTLY beating me by a large margin being only 560-570 ilevel. There are times when the tank beats me, but only if i dont pop all cooldowns.
Shadow priest just feels rough as hell to play and i dont see a point in playing it if there isnt a buff soon. Ive tried all the specs, varations and trinket variations. Archon and Voidweaver both seem to do the same amount of damage when i tried them for a few dungeons.
Whats everyone elses experience currently with shadow? Is everyone liking it? Are any of you wanting to switch?
I’m enjoying myself in terms of playstyle and feel, tuning feels a bit iffy but i’m chalking that up to our usual early expansion woes as a spec, by far not enough haste and as a consequence our dots don’t tick as much, procs are less frequent and voidweaver especially is suffering from not having enough haste to get 3 guaranteed blasts per void torrent
I’ve been surprisingly fine. I was expecting extremely poor early dungeon damage but halo triple mfi pulls I’m topping and boss damage is acceptable if they start to run long. I’m also surprisingly already back around 25% haste which feels amazing compared to the 10% I had levelling.
I’ve had no issues. some packs I’m killing the meters othersI’m not. I think a lot of it has to do with my timing of cooldowns. Single Target is about the same.
Open world? Yeah Shadow sucks. No kiting, no real CC, essentially just face tank everything. It’s not awful but it is stale in my opinion.
Our damage profile just feels really bad alongside us being undertuned. Damage is coming from places it normally doesn’t. On big pulls, almost 85% of my damage is coming from MF:Insanity, Halo, and Psychic link combo. Dots do no damage (but you need them for mastery) by the time you get ramped up, everything is dead anyways.
Blizz has received numerous feedback on the forums, if they actually do anything with this information other than continue buffing our channeled filler spells, I’d be suprised. Don’t even get me started on PvP and how easy it is to effectively stop almost all of our damage (since everything is a cast)
Shadow Priest is fine. It’s the nature of heroics hurting us, not the spec.
In heroics, these tanks are pulling HUGE rooms, like 20-30 mobs. We’re essentially target capped to 8 due to Shadow Crash. We can hard cast some extra Vamp Touches out, but things are dead by the time we do.
Which brings me to the second point. Things are dying SUPER fast. We need to ramp up a bit. We need to Shadow Crash, Mind Blast x2, Void Star (if you’re running it), Dev Plague, full channel a Void Torrent and NOW we can blast some damage. But by then, the Ret, Fury, Frost DK, Windwalker or Havoc has already pressed their 3 instant AoE buttons for 80 million damage. If the packs lived long enough, we’d catch up. But we can’t catch up on dead mobs.
We’re a scaling spec. We need Haste. Right now, at i577, I have 17% haste. That’s abysmal. Ret, Havoc, Fury? They need stats too, but they can get their damage out without tons of stats. It’s instant cast AoE buttons. Odin’s Fury will go off with 1% haste or 40% haste.
Given these realities, it’s not surprising we’re getting stomped on the meters. I ran a heroic with an i580 Fury Warrior earlier doing 2-3mil DPS with Odin’s Fury on most pulls. Havoc DH doing 2mil DPS with 3 buttons. I’ve seen a Ret Paladin do it too. We cannot currently compete with that. Doesn’t mean we’re bad, it means we’re bad for 10min heroic dungeons with 30 mob pulls that die in 20sec. Afflic, Balance, Fire mage etc are all having the same issue.
In fact, in PvP it’s the same story. It’s all Fury, Windwalker, Frost DK right now, mostly. Casters don’t have the stats, or the time, to get going in a lot of these 1vs1s.
Overall, I think Spriest needs a damage buff, yes. But comparing us to derpy melee in 30-mob, 20sec pulls isn’t the argument for it. We’ll never be good at that.
Edit: A few additional thoughts. I’m finding Voidweaver more flexible and consistent than Archon in dungeons currently. Halo does great damage on huge pulls, true. But Voidweaver can compete. It feels like it has better insanity generation and isn’t as reliant on Mind Flay: Insanity to do 100% of our damage for us. Archon sims better, and will likely be better in higher keys with the omega MDI pulls, but for now I’m really enjoying Voidweaver. I’m averaging about 630,000 overall damage as Voidweaver and around 610,000 overall damage as Archon in my dungeons.
I would also like to see VT and SW:P doing WAY more damage. Other commentators have stated that the damage of our DoTs is too low. Man, what an understatement. They’re ticking for like 45,000 damage. One Mind Flay: Insanity is doing about 1.1mil damage. What the frick? Also, I feel like we should be getting more self healing from both Vamp Touch and Dev Plague. Solo play feels bad right now. Shadowform no longer reduces damage taken by 20% (or whatever it was) and we have cloth armor. Just getting trucked by mobs in Delves.
While I didn’t expect it I actually find that I do much better with archon in heroics vs voideaver.
I take DA and the improved halo damage and you’ve got sold damage for 20seconds/ 1min.
Spending the 40 seconds preping yourself for that damage window also while carrying over MF:I charges will help.
Don’t dump your MF:I unless you’ve got nothing else / about to run out.
I find stuff just dies way to quickly and this is the best way to keep up with instant style damage. (not dots)
I get what you’re saying, but you’re assuming everyone here is unable to grasp foresight into how the spec is going to feel, or don’t realize that 90% of the feedback posts in here are people who played the beta who got to freely buy minmaxxed gear and run PvP and M+.
If your idea of a class being “fine” is based off that we will finally feel “good” with stats in S3 of TWW, that’s only 50% of the problem.
-Shadow crash not being baseline and only hitting 8 mobs will follow us forever. I hope you know people pull alot more than 8 mobs in M+ regularly
-“Scaling spec” doesn’t make our damage profile feel any better, in fact it will most likely make it worse as you’ll see DOTs/MF just ticking faster so we can full build into Insanity procs even further
Yeah, we ramp, so does Affi warlock. That doesn’t take away that every CD we have has a cast time, and it takes sometimes FOREVER to get a first DP to go off.
-Funny enough, we’re actually most balanced with other classes the less gear we have right now, higher end sims vs other classes are showing us falling off even harder with tier and gear
If you are only focused on numbers then you are completely missing the boat on shadow’s problems.
Take a moment and think. We are supposedly built around building and spending insanity but what do we have that actually spends insanity? Devouring Plague and…nothing else.
Meanwhile take something like an Aff lock and its shards it has Malific Rapture Seed od Corruption, Vile Taint and Soulburn giving it a ton of utility options, including survivability.
Paladins spend holy points on Divine Storm, Templars Verdict, Word of Glory.
I could go on but I hope you are getting the point. Every other class and spec has multiple spenders for AoE, for single target and even utility/survivability options. Shadow has Devouring Plague and if you stop and think why its pretty obvious.
Insanity was never something that was designed to be spent. It eas designed to be built and maintained and battle and ever increasing speed at which it would fall off. That is what it was designed for, but Blizzard has tried to shoe horn it in as a resource spender and the spec has suffered for it.
Number tuning is a bandaid fix to the actual problem. Shadow needs to be redesigned with an actual resource it is meant to build and spend and given actual options of what it will spend them on.
You’re given ilvl way below what you can cap out in during the season, and usually people are going into all of these fights severely undergeared and not minmaxxed at all. The most minmaxing you get is which tier piece and trinket you equip. Even if all the feedback calling the spec great was from beta, it would not be invalid and only relevant to a later patch - because they don’t have access to anything with those stats.
You’re acting like Mythic ilvl gear is going to magically solve all of shadows deep seated problems, and what % of the player base is actually getting to Mythic ilvl gear in the first season? Maybe 10%?
Saying all of Shadows problems are going to be fixed with gear is pure copium at it’s finest
And Affi lock can get its burst off way faster from my own personal experience running both in heroics recently trying to compare the two
If they want to make the spec horridly OP in M+, content it’s already looking like it’s about to be taken for considering there’s a decent chunk of mind soothe skips, then sure.
Literally no class in the game has AoE that good.
I’m not pretending that shadow has no problems. IMO it’s back to a spot that feels like early DF to me when it comes to the amount of procs and being unable to spend them all efficiently.
But if we’re strictly talking its capabilities, it’s really not that bad right now. The FEEL of the spec I’d agree with. Just there’s multiple reasons that it’s not landing right with me.
It’s very jarring to do a heroic with a good DPS. As a spriest, I feel completely useless. I’m i582 with about 20% haste, some rings and weapon enchants - my priest is well put together. But man, I’m getting murdered by most competent people in dungeon damage.
I did a City of Threads earlier with a guild Fury, Frost DK, Prot Warrior, Hpal and myself. This Fury warrior was using Odyn’s Fury and Bladestorm and doing straight up 2mil damage. The entire pack is dead shortly after shadow crash lands and I get a mind blast out. Not even enough resource to drop my first dev plague lol. And even without cooldowns, I’m doing maybe 800-900k AoE on a pack, and this DK and Warrior are doing 1.2mil. Like a 30% gap.
Move on over to single target and I’m struggling BIG TIME. I’m doing maybe 800k on a decent boss fight, the Fury is doing 960k, the Frost DK is doing 900k. The Prot warrior is doing 700k. When I sim my Spriest on Raidbots I’m getting 656,000 DPS on the 5min Patchwerk fight. My Elemental shaman is 10 ilvls behind my priest and geared like crap and I’m sitting 789,000. Why is my way worse Ele shaman simming 29% ahead of my Spriest?
I don’t mind being 10% behind on damage, but being 30-50% behind on damage feels super, super bad.
Of course, M0 will have slightly smaller pulls (we have a soft target cap of 8) and the pulls might last a bit longer. So we might be slightly more competitive? But I’m over here thanking god for Mind Soothe and PI, because no one is taking us for damage, that’s for sure.
I think once you get to higher keys / heroic raids it will feel a lot better since packs / bosses will live longer. When I pop halo in a heroic dungeons, everything pretty much melts instantly. Mfi’s feel great. The flow of sp is kind of wonky and unresponsive after being used to having 40%+ haste for the last several months.
Edit: Although I am a bit concerned for how it’s going to feel in an arena environment, still having to cast our burst and halo
Same for voidweaver, having to cast void blasts. SP needs less casted abilities in the modern shuffle environment, not more
I hate how blizz has been fine with this for shadow priest since Legion. Great game design having a spec be almost useless for a large part of the game lol.
100% agreed. The following spells need to be instant cast:
Mind spike: insanity
Void Eruption/Dark Ascension
Halo
Void Blast
Mind Flay: Insanity (castable while moving)
The above changes would drastically improve the play experience of the spec.
Not sure how are you playing but I am 564 and literally have 0 issues. I usually top DPS AOE and ST in heroics right now AND playing as Voidweaver when I am supposed to play Archon for more dps. So I don’t really know what is your problem