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This is such a weak move.
It is basically trolling to come here on a mage of all classes and be like “idk what you’re talking about spriest is great it has so much utility and has procs like fire mage 
” when none of those things are even objectively true. I mean, calling us tanky? Saying that our rotation is smooth? Seriously??
It’s not a matter of opinion, but none of what he said is even true period. So I can see why some would see it as trolling, especially when for example our lack of utility is why we aren’t desired in group content.
23 Likes
I don’t see it as trolling on the basis that you can be objectively wrong on all points, but not be trolling.
Nothing that what the OP said can be construed as flamebaiting or trolling. He can be 100%, completely wrong, but that doesn’t make him a troll.
7 Likes
Everyone is complaining about voidform…my complaint is how insanely weak dots are!!!
VT and swp friggen tickle!
6 Likes
There’s two reasons for this.
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It’s partly intentional, bliz outlined their intentions at the start of BFA to reduce the % of overall damage dots did for classes that had them. Fights were going to lean much more on heavy target encounters, and multi dotting was starting to become too valuable to just be something some specs had in spades, and others had none of.
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They didn’t account for azerite. All the work they did in early BFA to weaken dots was basically undone completely by SA + COI azerite. As a result, these traits forced more nerfs to the baseline spec to compensate for them (Despite the traits themselves being the problem). Those traits were then hit hard in 8.3 on top of that.
Bottom line, bliz wants to move away from multi dotting being a distinct niche, and more just a valuable thing some specs can do “a bit” whilst instead focusing on levelling out single target.
Problem is they missed the mark with Shadow. Hard.
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-I completely understand that I’m the new guy just returning to this spec, I’m just trying to make sense of things, don’t mean to ruffle feathers or say I don’t think other’s opinions are invalid. By all means, I have not done the most challenging forms of PVE or rated PVP yet, and am just enjoying the play style in bg’s, world content, and dungeons so far.
-The complaint over DOT’s weaknesses make sense to me, I’m sure I’ll notice it at some point, but this falls under the category of things to be expected to be tuned, so not a big concern for me.
-The complaint over a lack of complexity seems to me (at the moment) that it can be remedied by taking talents which are not considered in the “meta”, but I think different kinds of complexity are of personal taste. The type of complexity I experience is (so far) more enjoyable to me than when I play the “complex” spec of arcane mage.
-The thing I still understand the least is the claim that there’s a lack of utility. Shadow has two off-heal abilities, a bubble, 1.5 fears, a silence, leap of faith, dispersion, a dispel, and a stun you can talent into. I even feel like I’m forgetting something.
I just really enjoy the play style (especially since I’ve been using Shadowy Insight). If the dps gets tuned up (which it definitely will at some point), even better!
1 Like
None of shadows talents add complexity. They add buttons, those buttons are still just “press on cooldown” abilities with little to no interaction with any other aspect of the spec. Also these extra buttons are currently next to things that feel so necessary to keeping the spec functioning that even if they weren’t optimal, people would still take them. Don’t think that’s true? Dark Ascension is barely behind legacy, and fortress of the mind actually sims higher than shadow word void, but nobody plays it because in reality the spec just doesnt work without the other.
From the perspective of those doing mythic plus, the aspect of the game where utility tends to be at its most contentious and important. The only one of these worth mentioning in the last two expansions has been vampiric embrace. The others are either so small as to have no realistic value, or a situation has never arisen for them to be considered something to “want” a shadow priest for.
Nobody’s assuming shadow will do poor damage because of how it is in SL alpha, they’re annoyed it’s making it harder to do quests and actually test other alpha features because the spec is so bad compared to anything else.
Shadow’s damage is not an issue of tuning. It’s an issue of mechanics. Every spec is tuned within some margin of eachother when played properly.
But you can’t play the spec in the way it’s been tuned around unless you’re hitting a raid boss for multiple minutes. You’re instead going to be doing drastically less, because you’re tuned around reaching those “high stacks” that you won’t hit. Every other spec in this game actually ends up doing MORE damage the shorter the encounter, not less.
Shadow’s tuning on live right now is absolutely fine, for what blizzard balance spec dps around. If you find that your damage is significantly lower than your peers, even at the same ilvl, in the same content, and you don’t feel you are completely butchering the spec at the same time, then the lack of damage is a mechanical issue, because the content you are doing was not balanced around, in favour of something else less relevant to you.
That’s really the crux of the issue for me personally. Bliz designed however many dps specs, and then a world for them to exist in and challenges for them to overcome, then they designed a spec to work the complete reverse to those other specs, and its expected somehow be good at the things they’re good at to be valuable.
15 Likes
I actually wanna pick up on this, because maybe it’s an example of poor design that you actually can see at your level of play / gear.
Without Shadow Word: Void, Void Bolt and Mind Blast will always come off cooldown at the same time in voidform. The goal of shadow is to keep your highest priority spells on cooldown all the time, but how is that possible when one just has to sit there available while you use the other?
Your two highest priority spells clashing repeatedly is just one of the many mechanical problems shadow has that either has no solution, or requires a talent to be fixed (The two other specs that had this exact same issue, BM Hunter and Fury Warrior, had it fixed baseline).
I’m glad you’re enjoying the spec, but please understand people read things like this and they’re scared that of all the things in this forum developers take on board it’ll be the thing telling them to keep doing a good job. We tried blind optimism once, it didn’t work.
14 Likes
I want to take issue with topic 1, more at the devs ideology than at your post Ellipsis.
Shadow’s DOT damage is poor even by comparison to other classes. Using single target examples as % of their overall DPS:
- Arms Warriors - Rend + Deep Wounds = 35%
- Fire Mage - Ignite = 25%
- Affliction - Unstable + Corruption + Agony + Siphon = 35%
- Fury - Gushing Wound = 9%
- Frost DK - Frost Fever = 7%
- Assassination - Rupture + Deadly + Garrote = 20%
- Boomkin - Sunfire + Moonfire = 10%
- Shadow - Vampiric Touch + SW: Pain = 12%
When we think of DOT classes, Shadow and Boomkin both usually get classified as that: because we always used to be. But when we look at damage meters in BFA, the real DOT classes are Arms, Fire, Affliction, etc.
They overdid it. The other thing that drives me nuts, is just how weak our DOTs tick for. That’s particularly annoying when off the pull, your DOTs are ticking for like 5k per tick. By comparison, average top end ignite tick might be 32k, Deep Wounds ticks for like 34k.
Because Voidform, Insanity, long ramps, void bolt, and all our borrowed power (azerite, corruption, etc) sucks up all the power budget in our spec - our core spells feel incredibly weak.
It doesn’t matter to players that technically we’re still dealing similar overall DPS. The tangible feeling is that SW: Pain hardly feels worth casting because it’s ticking for 5k, or that Mind Flay feels weak because it’s ticking for 13k.
We’re throwing Mind Blasts for 50k, the mages are throwing Glacial Spikes for 800k. We feel like we’re playing a different game. This ideology of theirs has sucked all the class fantasy out of what Shadow was for ~80% of the Shadow playerbase who played Shadow before Legion.
Even in Legion it didn’t feel this bad because our ramps weren’t this long, and this reliant on borrowed power.
What they should do, is recognize that sometimes you need to design fights that aren’t council fights. Throw some Patchwerk fights into raids so that single target specialist specs can blow them up. Throw some burst AOE fights in so Warriors can bladestorm. Throw some 2-3 minute burst phase fights so burst classes can feel big. And yes, throw some council fights in so DOT classes can multidot.
They need to stop trying to make us all feel decent at everything (obviously that’s not working), and go back to giving everyone time to shine, and times to get carried.
16 Likes
In reference to your last paragraph, that’s not how game design works. No developer, regardless of whether it’s Blizzard or otherwise, just takes only the good feedback into consideration. At no point has Blizzard ever done that to begin with in the past, much less now.
That’s not even how feedback in general is supposed to function. You extrapolate the common threads among all feedback, positive and negative. Your last paragraph just seems like typical doomsday-speak, as if Blizzard is out to sabotage your class by way of (somehow) only looking at good feedback (Just on the Priest subforum??) and disregard everything else.
No. I’m well aware of that. I am, however, rationalising the feelings many do have. Regardless of if they are logical, sensible things to think, they are thinking them. Even I am at times but then I snap back to reality (ope, there goes gravity) and try to do something constructive.
6 Likes
I don’t understand how voidform is so different from a fire mage going in and out of hot streaks, or something comparable. If you were topping dps charts in raids, would you still not enjoy how the mechanics “feel”? And if so, I’m curious why!
I did notice this, but it to me has read as “proc-y” like a fire mage, or some ret paladin builds I’ve played in the past. A reasonable take though for sure, I get that it could be annoying at times to some.
I get that. I think on my end, I’m posting this for a similar reason, I’m becoming attached to mechanics, and have become defensive seeing criticisms of the spec’s core. “Our dots are weak, our heals are weak”- these statements make sense to me, these types of complaints come up often with many specs, and they’re often legitimate. Just the idea of gutting the whole spec’s mechanics seems like a waste (and possibly a trade for something worse) when there are probably clever, small changes like tweaking the timing & dps numbers, that could make it more enjoyable for those that have complaints, while still keeping it intact. People loved the spec when the voidform stuff was first introduced, right? I do trust the collective voice saying “Hi, there is room for improvement here, Blizzard!”- I’m essentially just hoping that the baby won’t be thrown out with the bathwater on this one.
Firstly, shadow’s overall raid dps right now is not a problem. It’s a problem of the delivery, and how that causes issues in other content / specific situations in raids that every other dps excels at.
But let’s take fire. Fire starts high (Right now, very very high) with a proper combust setup and then comes down, their setup takes a couple globals but they very very quickly spike to about 2.5x their sustained dps average, and closer to 10-15x their resting dps. (After about 5-10 seconds).
Shadow is the reverse, you start very low, you stay low until about 50 seconds into the fight where your first voidform ends, then you spike a bit and reach your average, which you sustain from then on. Those first 50 seconds feel absolutely terrible, they did in legion, they do now. And any fight shorter than 50 seconds? You just suck.
Comparatively if a fire mage has a fight that lasts 50 seconds, they’re absolutely rolling because they have bust up for 20% of it, instead of a more realistic 6-8% for longer fights.
8 Likes
Blizzard has had four years to work out what these changes are and implement them. Given the choice between having Blizzard tinker with things for two more years to maybe fix things, or cutting their losses and building shadow around a concept they actually understand, many people would choose the latter.
Also worth noting the developer who created voidform, and the one who attempted to fix it throughout BFA no longer work on WoW.
16 Likes
I’ve been through this one myself a couple times, but another issue is the uptime of VF. In a raid, you’re typically in VF >80% of the time, roughly 40 seconds in to 10 seconds out.
VF doesn’t feel like a bonus at that point, that’s just your new normal. Continuing on that, being outside of VF feels like a penalty.
5 Likes
50 seconds seems like an overestimation, but you’ve definitely put more attention to this so I’ll take your word for it! So it’s more of a feeling of awkward timing and inconvenience in some situations, right? Couldn’t adjusting the timing/ insanity amounts fix this in a significant way?
This is interesting, and while I doubt it’d take years to make small enjoyable changes, I guess one never knows. I wouldn’t think that they “don’t understand” the spec just because the developer doesn’t work there anymore. People can responsibly leave behind systems/ inventions for others to use & develop after they leave a job.
I appreciate all this info, and I appreciate that people care about the spec, just trying to understand how people can care so much about a spec, but want it to basically be a different spec all together at the same time.
Many specs have a version of that though, right? It feels bad to be an arcane mage with no charges, or a frost mage with no icicles, for example, but then you get em back and spend em!
It’s not that there’s zero utility, but most of the things we bring add very little value to a group and compared head to head with almost every other class we bring far less. I’ll be talking from a PvE perspective:
From the list you give we need to remove Silence and Dispersion because every DPS bring those (in a way)… Every DPS spec has an interrupt, for PvE “Silence” is just the worst interrupt in the game. Also every spec has a defensive I think Dispersion is the only one that locks you out of casting/attacking while not being a full-immunity (heck some immunities don’t even have a drawback).
Outside of Vampiric Embrace the off-heals/bubble are too weak to make significant impact to your group, there’s little use of them outside solo questing (in PvE).
Leap of faith has been useful in a few very specific scenarios in Raids but other than that it’s packs very little value to a group (well it can be amazing in LFR with people having no clue where to go with mechanics lol).
What’s left is mostly purge, and AOE fear are “ok” pieces of utility but nothing that really makes anyone feel like they want to bring a priest. Mass Dispel has a lot of potential to be a strong one but I think it’s hurt by having so many Blood Elves, I guess it’s better in alliance but come on who plays alliance?..
2 Likes
50 was an underestimate being frank. My first voidform last 55 seconds, it takes me 5 seconds to get into them from pull, and then I’m not really at full power until I’m back into my second one. That’s like… idk, 70 seconds? 65? Not to mention if lust is on pull I’m not gonna get much value from it, because my damage hasn’t really even started by the first 30 seconds.
It’s more like at what point do you consider this to be a justifiable design, and once you find a point where that buildup is short enough to work, does the spec still “feel” like voidform.
9 Likes
To further clarify on this:
Approx 10s to get into VF. Then (with Lucid Dreams) you can get about 45 stacks (40-50) which is 45 seconds of VF. That’s 55s, and you’re not at full power until you enter the NEXT VF because of the way Lingering Insanity and Chorus of Insanity work.
It is not, at all, an exaggeration.
I think the above example of us being the opposite of a Fire Mage could not possibly be more spot on. They spike up then fall down and level out, we start in a hole in the ground and climb out.
6 Likes