I am Sinsofmany from Ragnaros EU, a Void Weaver Shadow Priest player who is mostly focusing on Mythic+ and does casual AOTC raiding.
I’m currently at 2550 score in the second week of S2. My highest score was 3500 in DF S3. Just for context, no bragging.
There have been countless suggestions across multiple expansions and patches at this point, about what to improve in Shadow Priest’s gameplay, fantasy, core mechanics, etc.
In this post, however, I’m trying to focus on 3+1 simple things that would improve SP QoL massively, in my opinion. These suggestions are not aiming towards making SP overpowered, they are slight improvements that would definitely make the gameplay smoother, not only for mythic+ players, but for world content and raiding.
1. Shadow Crash #1:
In DF (I think) we got the CD reduced on the spell itself which helped to maintain VT and SWP in AoE. The TWW S2 2-piece is helping even more until Shadow Crash is up again. Normally, you’d have 2-3 seconds left on your dots in AoE when SC is back up. The 2-set is helping to have like 4-6 seconds left when SC is up, so you don’t have to be extremely precise on your GCDs for Shadow Crash. This is really nice! The issue is something else.
SCENERIO: We are struggling in M+ environments if a pack has been pulled, we were using Shadow Crash, and more mobs were being pulled shortly afterwards.
Even worse, when there are packs that consist of 1-2 big adds + many small adds. Oftentimes the small adds are dotted up and the big ones are not. You use your CDs and by the time you finish casting Dark Ascension + Void Torrent (as a Void Weaver), the small adds are already dead and you have to start manually dotting up the big ones. Then, the Tank pulls the next pack and of course your Shadow Crash is on CD. If you didn’t use it on the previous pack, you have 0 damage.
SUGGESTION: Bake the DOT application talent (Whispering Shadows) into the base Shadow Crash and replace Whispering Shadows with the following: If a target suffering from Vampiric Touch dies, the cooldown of Shadow Crash is reduced by 0.5/1 second. - It would not cause the issues that a 2-charge-SC would cause (dotting up 12-16 targets at the same time), because your SC would be on cooldown once you engage with a pack. But with the cooldown reduction, you’d have a chance to react much faster to a rapidly changing environment with multiple trashpacks engaging.
2. Shadow Crash #2:
The travel time of Shadow Crash is insanely long, considering how fast-paced current instanced environments are. Most classes can simply jump into a pack and start blasting right away. Our Shadow Crash takes a loooong time to arrive at the targeted area and that is only the very beginning of our rotation.
SUGGESTION: Really just halve the travel time of SC. It is frustratingly slow right now. You could even make it work like our old talent worked, which applied Shadow Word: Pain to all targets in a targeted area. I have forgotten how it was called back in Shadowlands. Shadow Crash could be a ground-targeted spell that is an instant cast and applies VT + SW:P to all targets in the area. Since our DoTs are only there to allow us to do damage, the instant cast to apply them is not really out of touch in my opinion. Huge QoL improvement!
3. Idle Insanity
This is mainly from a raiding point of view. - Basically every builder-spender caster has some juice to start with when entering combat. Balance druid has Astral Power, Warlocks have Shards / Burning Embers.
SCENERIO : A Shadow Priest can practically start doing damage once Vampiric Touch + Shadow Word: Pain + Devouring Plague are all on the target. But since we start with 0 Insanity, we are spending a decent amount of time to prepare to do our burst rotation. - Mine is: Vampiric Touch, Shadowfiend, Shadow Word: Death, PI + DA and then Devouring Plague. These are 4 globals, just to prepare doing any kind of damage on pull. And you even took away the out-of-combat Insanity generation of Divine Start, so we have to start with 0 Insanity.
SUGGESTION: Give us the option to have a talent to gain at least 25 Insanity in an idle state. That would help making our opener rotation pretty smooth and enjoyable.
+1 SUGGESTION: Dark Ascension
Could you please make it an instant cast? The spell itself does absolutely nothing on its own, but still has a 1.5 second cast time. Imagine Avatar or Combustion to have a 1.5 second cast time. It’s just absurd.
How is it a dps loss? Ik it might result in more ticks but I feel like there could be a balance struck so u don’t have to plant in a raid tier that has a lot of movement during fights
Void torrent has a hasted tick rate, so haste increases the amount of damage it does in the fixed 3 second window. So it already scales with haste.
Reducing the duration of torrent reduces the amount of time you spend casting torrent, which increases the amount of time you spend casting filler spells which are worse.
The reason it’s done like this is because Void Torrent is a channel with a cooldown. You don’t get to cast more of them by reducing the channel time.
+1 for this. Actually I wish Void Eruption was shaken up too. Void Bolt now became just a damage filler spell (no longer extends void form), so VE just became a… harder to handle version of Dark Ascension.
I don’t know what it could be, but I know that I loved an older iteration of Void Form where you could maintain it for a really long time by properly executing a tight rotation.
I agree with 100% of what you put down but blizzard already knows all of this. Not one idea you put is new, they have been posted literally hundreds of times in the last 2+ years.
Blizzard has 0 desire to improve the way shadow priest plays or its clunky rotations.
Its possible the big rework is coming in 11.2 but based on all things PTR and all files found we should expect nothing but %dmg buffs/nerfs until Midnight expansion.
They have the power to do things like: make psychic link affect all mobs currently in combat, from a programming perspective you dont need to have dots on mobs to make link hit.
They actively choose to ignore the communities gripes. Just like they choose to not make mass dispell more reliable or choose to not give the entire class reliable and competitve interrupt. Or chose to nerf holy.
As a class our failure is interacting with blizzard like they listen to our feedback or care about the spec. You need to reconsider this attitude, align to the ideal that playing shadow priest is about playing against blizzard. Finding a way to make lemonade when the god of Azeroth isnt even willing to give you lemons
For the first suggestion I would have it be that the two current talents for Shadow Crash is baked into one. It auto applies VT to up to 8 targets. The second SC talent should be to give it a second charge. This will satisfy all instances of SC, as in SC Single Target with adds fights you won’t need the other charge. Then when you do like M+ or large AOE fights you have it ready.
I could maybe see a rebalance of how much insanity you get per spell. Though I feel like our 2x Mind Blast then VE is a good way to get the ball rolling.
As far as the +1 suggestion goes so many things in our kit should be instant cast. Halo should have the option for Instant Cast from the Archon Hero Talent tree. Once we get rolling however, we seem to be fine it’s just a clunky start up
What evidence, did something leak? (honest question) - I don’t think is without merit to think about a big rework, since MM got a huge one right now for this patch.
Also, totally unrelated for being a reason, but if 11.2 takes place where it seems to be going, it’s the perfect thematic time to make Shadow better.
Make it somewhat smarter to apply our DoTs to priority / high HP enemies. It is really sad when you pull a big pack (e.g. Darkflame Cleft first pull basically the entire Cinderbrew) with many irrelevant mobs + 4-6 high HP mobs and those don’t even get your dots. All the small ones are dotted and dead within 5 seconds so you are back to manually dotting the actually important mobs.
plus 0.5 suggestion: please make SC always apply our DoTs to our current target.
I would love to see 2 charges of Shadow Crash but that’s been a conversation for many years at this point. Blizzard very obviously don’t want to make it happen, that’s why my suggestion would be to reduce its cooldown by 0.5/1 sec per enemy killed with VT on. That sounds like a fair compromise at least.
There isn’t any that’s why I said based on all files found we should expect nothing… because there are no TWW related files indicating a priest Rework is coming.
But I agree that Thematically 11.2 does seem a good place. But, as a hear me out moment, Xal is basically the “Silver surfer”. If we defeat her and then Ally with her to fight a big planet eating evil galactus/dimensius whatever… then she would be the perfect new named Hero to also thematically become an Iconic Shadow Priest that the rework can coincide with as part of the Midnight expansion. I would get them waiting for it to be part of the next expansion
If I had to guess Xal’ isn’t going to be the expansion big bad. The Etherals have been working on something for a while now. The one that was in last raid took something the Nurbians had hidden away, and now they have the Heart of Darkness.
They will likely be making thier move in whatever we get as a following raid. My guess is Midnight is going to revolve around what we learned from the Titan Disks in our questline.
Phantasm now gives the priest immunity from movement loss effect for 2 seconds. (Like deaths advance)
Silence is baseline.
Enemies hit by Halo causes all dots on the target to have their duration paused for 3 seconds.
Enemies damaged by Divine star cause the priest damage over time effects to collapse. Dealing their full amount of damage over 1 second.
Shadowy insight now stores an extra charge of Mind blast again.
Void eruption initial damage causes a shadow crash to land at the target.
Dark Ascension is instant cast.
Dark Ascension damage modifier affects Mind flay and Mind Flay Insanity.
Then just talent clean up (why is shadow crash 2 talents.) + buffing Idols + pets/ minions gets proper buffs along with our consistent + %damage buffs.
Yes, please x1000! It is very frustrating when you have 2 charges of Void Blast, you are already casting it and Shadowy Insight procs. You could have had 3 Void Blasts but the instant proc just ruins it.