I appreciate the small boost in overall damage which was awarded just recently.
While it is not top tier, parts of this spec feel good. The mind flay insanity proc after each Halo burst is amazing. Increasing their charges to 4 and giving ample time to cast them is also great.
The problem with this spec is in situations where multiple new ads are spawning (such as during Broodtwister and faster paced dungeon pulls).
Dotting up consistently is a nightmare. Shadow Crash helps but it’s under-tuned. The target application limit and 20 second CD are inefficient, especially when considering that it’s taking up TWO talent points.
If that spell is on CD and there are 5-10 new ads spawning, then congratulations, priesty buddy is now useless. By the time you cast vampiric touch on a couple ads, other classes have already dished out millions of damage. In some cases the ads are already goners or in others they wipe the group because the priest couldn’t contribute quickly enough. Not sure why it was necessary to nerf psychic link by 17% when AOE is already underwhelming.
Some other problems to consider:
Why should a basic interrupt spell require a talent point? Let alone one with a 45 second cooldown (referring to Silence).
Power Word Shield absorption feels weak. With close to 5,600,000 HP it only absorbs 260,000 damage. That’s less than 5% of the HP bar. People are using it more for the movement speed increase than for its damage absorption. Yeah it has a short CD but if you have to keep using it then you’re not dotting up or dealing damage.
Mind blast also feels weak. Isn’t that supposed to be the main spell for shadow priests?
People who have played this spec for longer, let me know what you think!
Long ago, we used to cast mind sear so that other players in the group wouldn’t realize we were afk during AoE content.
The AoE might be bad now, but it has been much worse in the past. We also had insane council cleave damage to make up for the lack of AoE and m+ didn’t exist so there wasn’t a lot of mass AoE content to expose our weakness.
Hard to believe that Power Word: Shield used to last 30 seconds and absorb around 30% of your life with the example of 5k HP in classic with PW:S absorbing around 1500 damage.
So from around 30% to 5% lol it’s just pathetic lol.
That level of shielding is far too strong for the priest. It is best if effective shielding is left to warlocks and mages. In fact, a strong power word: shield kind of encroaches on the unique niche that mages and warlocks occupy… PW:GFY!
I should not have to chew through an undispellable shield for 1/3 of the locks life before I can hurt him. He gets to rot me down during all this. At least the mage can be purged.
I think a great place to start would be to give Shadow Crash a second charge with the second talent point. Baseline it applies the DoTs and second point it gains another charge. I don’t even know how my damage stands in a group because, as was said earlier, if the pull is staggered or adds arrive then I’m literally standing around waiting for Shadow Crash to reset. And it feels like that happens far too often.
I don’t think this will fix the problems but I think it’s a good stopgap solution.
Could also make shadow apparitions reduce the cooldown of shadow crash. It’s RNG enough to make it come back fairly quickly or not at all. There’s also no downside to this as it’s passive and wouldn’t add much besides being able to target multiple mobs outside of 8, but by the time it would come off cooldown, the mobs would be close to death.
What would make our burst worth while, and would make void weaver more desirable is to make void torrent work like the old drain soul mechanic from warlocks. Allow the dots to tick faster and more frequently during that cast time. This would cover 2 issues that we have, 1 is burst and the other is a meaningful and powerful CD.
In all honesty, there isn’t a lot that the devs could do to make shadow priest feel a LOT better.
Honestly, they should make shadow crash and its modifier baseline and replace those two talent points with a dot spreading Mind Sear that costs insanity. EASY EASY ASL
Shadow is a Frankenstein of outdated talents and abilities that don’t fit in modern wow.
-Our talents have no synergy, Shadowy Apparition needs to go away forever.
-Our only source of AoE is locked outside a 20 second cd, just merge VT into SW:P and make it AoE baseline for shadow. There’s no reason for it to be 2 diferent spells anymore, it’s a relic from a time when dots were powerful and VT needed a cast time, now they exist only as a debuff to trigger procs, gain mastery and use psychic link. No other class with AoE dots has such restrictions and yet we are the only ones who require our enemies to have dots on them for our class to simply “function” at all…
-Turn Shadow Crash into an AoE spender that deals full mastery damage and can proc a free cast like mind sear used to but in this case it’s instant so no chance of getting interrupted. Put Shadow Crash on a choice node with Psychic Link.
-Void Weaver needs to be redesigned for Shadow so we get consistent damage, we don’t need another cooldown window that competes with Void Eruption.
-We have no mobility, pvp is a hellish turret punching bag, perma interrupted and locked out of shadow spells.
The Devs don’t understand that buffing our damage doesn’t fix our disastrous class mechanics, especially in short aoe fights and pvp. I’m tired of raid damage charts being used as a metric to argue that Shadow Priest is doing fine.
I’ve given up on my priest after 3 expansions, back to Frost DK for me.
Why? I was under the impression most Spriests liked rolling out the ghost squad.
I thought the modern WoW audience loved stacking cds for that spikey damage profile. I personally hate it but I’m never gonna play competitive content.
My personal take is that the animation is nice to look at. But the mechanics involved are severally lacking.
I recall back in Cataclysm when Shadowy Apparitions were first introduced and because they were passively summoned/proced, they were also given that chance to summon/proc more often while you were moving. So you could essentially get some damage done by running around.
Now the Shadowy Apparitions back then slowly WALKED to the target instead of float and as such it was pretty pathetic to use and even more so in PvP and they were even targetable so warriors could use them to charge at and whack and gain rage from lol.
But back to the proc while moving mechanic, I would like to see how it would play out if we had a PvP talent that made your Shadowy Apparitions proc based on Shadow Word: Pain damage just like Tormented Spirits but the chance is increased to maybe 20-50% while moving and then with other Shadowy Apparition damage enhancing talents, you can actually have scary damage coming out often and passively while you struggle to slowly walk since you will most likely always be slowed to some degree lol.
Also I really would like to have a method to turn Shadowy Apparitions into baneling type bombs that deal a portion of their damage to up to 5 targets. With this type of function, you can actually deal passive AOE cleave damage to targets even if they are not dotted up and getting Psychic Link damage spread. But it would still have the issue of our mastery suppressing your damage which should get addressed/changed still imo.
Tl:dr
Shadowy Apparitions look cool and have a lot of room to grow and become interesting, but currently lack anything mechanically within the choices provided that could become entire builds centered around them.
Yeah, I don’t understand why Shadow Apparitions need to go away - it’s a single point talent that passively causes damage and enhances shadow’s overall class fantasy. They’re cool as hell looking. What a strange take.
Esthetically, alot of priest like it. Functionally however, it’s just a weaker version of psychic link that only triggers off certain spells, it doesn’t do much of anything.
These don’t stack well, they actually contradict each other when it comes to priority casting, and no, most players prefer having power evened out over time than all of it in one small window of time.
A perfect example is Pillar of Frost for Frost DK, the class feels weak when it’s on cc and most players want them to remove most of the talents that apply to pillar in favour of baseline abilities.
If you weren’t required to take apparitions, the tree design would be a lot worse. It’s in that spot for good reason right now. I’m a fan of the ghost Bois but I’d like some graphical updates and speed boosts to them.