Shadow priest going forward

Classes Priest
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Good day folks, making this thread mostly due to personal experience. I know that people will never agree what style of Spriest is best and should be molded after. This will be long post, sorry in advance.

Number tuning alone has the ability to make or break a spec. If a spec is broken, but not fun to play it will still get played. Meta is out there for a reason and I think it does have its place despite what we all want to think. The changes I’d like to recommend I have no hard numbers. I don’t think it’s in the hands of the player to be able to adjust the damage nob up or down.
That said I’ll add in high/medium/low damage for things that should have what I believe to be a secondary Benefit of using the spell.

So first things first.

  • Remove Shadow Crash.
    Probably my least favorite thing about the spec currently.
  1. It’s clunky.
  2. We asked for multiple charges, you broke it into two talents. (Something I’ll bring up later)
  3. It still gets stuck on random terrain.
  4. We’re still allowed to throw it onto some random tree by mistake. (While this maybe user error, I do think it should have a reduced CD if the spell doesn’t do any damage.)

In its place I’d like to introduce two spells that we have but forget about. Divine star and Halo. The following would replace the shadow crash talent.

  • Void star: throw a Void Star forward 30 yards dealing a low amount of damage. Coming in contact with an enemy inflicted with Vampiric Touch causes an explosion, that deals low damage and spreads Vampiric touch to enemies within 5-10 yards. 15 second CD. (Works with Misery)

  • insert cool name here: Expel a ring of void energy around the caster dealing medium damage and applying Vampiric Touch to all targets hit. 30 Yard range, 40 second CD. (Works with Misery)

Both these giving more control to the player and better management of the most important part of our kit, Our Dots.

  • Make silence baseline.

Having to chose survivability vs interrupt is horrid game design. Or lost damage somewhere else on the tree.

  • Un-Do the mass dispel change.

This one is 100% your fault for the amount of dispel-able debuffs in a dungeon pool. You’ve killed its PvP utility and 90% of the value it brought otherwise.

  • Mind spike / Mind Flay shared talent node.

Let the player pick their flavor. I for one like MindSpike because it gives another school of magic while in PvP, but I understand many people don’t. Move the talent to the top of the tree and any talent that effects one should also effect the other.

  • Mental decay should apply to all targets within 5yards of the target for DoT extension.

This is mostly if we’re stuck with shadow crash. Otherwise it maybe not be necessary.

  • Vampiric Touch dispel protection.

It’s old and Dated. Whenever I heal PvP I just spam dispel all game because I know I’m seriously limiting the Priests ability to do damage. Rework it into a 12-15 second Healing Absorption debuff put on the Dispelled.

  • Power infusion is priest only

Un-purgable and the recent nerfs reverted. I’m done paying the PI tax, I’m done listening to people argue who’s it’s better for. It’s my button let it just be mine.

  • Priest mobility
  1. New ability Mind Swap: Change locations with your shadow fiend or Mind bender.
  2. Reverse life grip
  3. Door of shadows
  4. Fade with buffs: give it 3 seconds of freedom with protection from displacement. (similar to deaths advance)

I’ve said it before but evidentially is just doesn’t sink in. Blizzard has made fights that with perfect play by the player it’s impossible. Raszageth You’ve made it so every melee has multiple gap closers. And you’ve made us punching bags / dead weight that needs to be carried. (Literally, by the dragons) give us some impactful movement ability.
We don’t need two different sprint buttons we need real displacement.

  • Casting our burst cooldown.

Omega lame. I believe we’re the only class that does this. Void form damage is negligible and shouldn’t be what’s holding us back.

  • MS:I / MF:I

Spike should be instant cast. Flay should be castable while moving. Remove the timer for us to use them, now with them proc’ing less I’ve on occasion had to just lose my procs. Just feels bad.
Also after this tier bonus goes away I fully expect it to return to every cast of DP gives us a stack.

  • talents

While it the tree has its ups and downs it just feels like you ran out of ideas. Shadow crash split into 2 talents. Maddening Touch and Dark Evangelism. Are the worst offenders.

There is probably many other things but these are just where I’d like to start. I don’t foresee any these things happening this expansion sadly. But I hope going forward we can iron out this spec that many of us call home.

Editing things I forgot annoyed me somehow. Dec/20/2023

  • Shadow Crash able to be spell reflected.
  • Shadow Crash hitting stealth’s targets not applying DoT’s.
  • Allow us to again PW:S Psyfiend.
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First we need a dev, then we need a dev that cares.

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I’m sure you meant Reverse Life Grip here. Wanted to add that clarification.

I thoroughly enjoyed the effort on your post. Thank you for the write up. It’s funny to me that the player-base can point out the same problems with Shadow Priest over and over and over and over again, and EVEN suggest fixes to these problems, yet we are constantly ignored, and given no feedback from the devs.

It really seems like they are just leaving Shadow on the backburner— and I honestly would not be surprised if they were going to release yet another full rework to the Shadow talent tree. Blizz was extremely silent on Mages before the Rune of Power removal rework, then bam, one day they finally announced the giant Mage rework. So I can only hope that’s what’s happening with Shadow behind the scenes, though I am a hopeful person to a fault.

I’ve effectively retired trying to make Shadow spec work for now. Really only interested in Disc/Holy. I’ve geared up my Balance Druid for hybrid magic caster shenanigans. Just got full honor gear and it already feels miles ahead better than Shadow Priest in PvP. I’ll return to Shadow if they end up making some significant changes like the ones you outlined in your post. I am a clothie player at heart.

/sigh.

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Good catch will edit

And sadly I think your on point. I think 10.1 was recent enough changes and that they will just aura buff / nerf us to get us by. I seriously hope they look into the issues I’ve listed here. My two biggest things I want to see changes would be the removal of Shadow crash and Priest mobility addressed. Sadly we will probably have to wait till 11.0 to see if that happens.

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I completely agree.

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Yeah +1 to all of this, well written. Couple of addons I’ve thought of in the past.

  • Silence should be in the main priest tree. Can keep short silence/psychic horror as a choice node in the shadow tree

  • Remove Mind games, put door of shadows in it’s place. Subsequent talents can lower it’s cool down, and make it instant cast.

  • For PI, twins of sun priest can be reworked to make PI into a heroism/blood lust. Regular PI is castable only on yourself and undispellable like you said.

What i really want is for blizz to split up shadow and void into 2 specs. Shadow priest can be an amalgamation of cata/mop/Wod, and void priest can be legion/bfa.

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I remember on the ptr, Shadow Crash shared a node with Dark Void, I kept arguing how to remove Shadow Crash and let Dark Void spread our DoTs…

Essentially the trade off was having a 2 second cast time on Dark Void that would reliably do what’s its intended to do…Everytime. No whiffs, no movement issues and definitely no terrain issues.

Yet people wanted Shadow Crash, I thought it was crazy how’d they kept saying how awesome it looked and it’s great and iconic…

Now look where we are.

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100 percent.

When need a Dev that plays this spec consistently in both PVP AND PVE Content.

A dev who would also test out Past iterations of SP, from vanilla to now to understand its history and development for proper changes.

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Yes yes 1000 times yes.

Edit: although I’d say door of shadows would have to be elsewhere in the tree to make it a bit more accessible

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There are no debs that work on a specific class. They have devs that is assign to work on several class at the same time.

Also why should priest be the only class with their on dev. Is only fair to have every single class to have their own dev.

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thats how it should be. They have the money to hire talent for this. Anything less is disrespectful to the consumer with the amount of green they charge for minimal outcome.

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I don’t really remember much discourse about wanting one specifically over the other were the functionality of both to change, it was moreso that bliz made the choice for us and people were complaining dark void without VT application was just inefficient bad shadow crash.

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A big priest Amen to this here. why is it any other caster has a shorter time on their cooldown. silence has to be one of the longest CD in the game.

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We have no information about the internal working of Blizzard’s class development team at this point. However, we do have information that in the past the structure has been that an individual might take the lead on a specific class development project but that most of them will be involved in each. Shadow has, however, been the spec with the highest turnover of class leads over the past 6 years, with almost everyone who is assigned to fix whatever mess things are in leaving the company shortly after their first or second iteration goes live.

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these words hit so hard…

im just hopping the new expac will finally break the cycle.

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I’m pretty sure every Shadow Priest wants our VT/SWP dots to just be one baseline AoE casts spell, all our procs and AoE relies on it. Make shadow crash an AoE spender faster missile fired at a target (not an arrea) and put it on a choice node with psychic link. This will make shadow crash a choice for hard aoe burst while keeping psychic link as a prefered option for single target. They can remove the fear dispell effects from Vampiric Touch in pvp and just buff our baseline utility and mobility. We don’t need number tuning yet, give diverse talents and the ability to choose, rather than being forced into the same build, then you can nerf or buff damage as needed.

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I want dots to do more damage however that goes directly against blizzards design philosophy thats been in place since bfa…

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This is pretty important to the discussion. The numbers isn’t as what’s important as the gameplay loop. If we got buffed by 15% we’d be the go-to no matter what. What’s the issue is that there’s generally only one way of playing right now. Also there’s a core ability to our AoE damage, and large population don’t like it. (it would seem)

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This is just my tinfoil hat theory, but I think you guys need to accept that Blizzard has no interest in balancing dps classes (and only a marginal one in balancing tanks and healers). The game has been out for ~20 years. I am hard pressed to believe they don’t have the data to tune everything within a relatively tight band (~5-10% of each other or something). They want things to change season to season so that the game feels “fresh” and people keep paying for subs as they level the new meta specs.

Shadow isn’t going to be adjusted anytime soon, unfortunately, because we were just fotm. Please don’t confuse this with me endorsing or enjoying this design philosophy (I don’t). It just seems like what the facts bear out when I look at their decisions.

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I think they’re listening, WoW is a cash cow and they can’t afford to alienate players, plus Metzen is back and this is his baby. I canceled my subscription in early summer and left comments about the class including buffing glyph of shadows so we ca actually see our transmogs. They added the change Glyph of Shadows change in patch 10.1.5. I expect they’re working on fixing our core issues based on player feedback while tuning out the noise of those who just want to be OP, which is why it’s important to explain our problems and offer solutions because in the end, we know our class.

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