Shadow Priest suggestions

Classes Priest
1

Hello, I’ve read multiple posts of people complaining about SP so I thought it would be a good idea to address and discuss in an organized way every part of the spec that needs an improvement.

In my opinion Shadow has MAJOR 3 problems.

1. Shadow Crash. I think everyone agrees that this ability is the worst, I haven’t met a single person who enjoys it nor somebody capable of justifying why it works the way it works.

Many fights revolve around adds spawning erratically or chainpulls and those fights are unplayable as SP, so without making an entire revamp of the spec (again) I think the best solution is to change Shadow Crash into something like this:

  • Cost 1 point in the talent tree.
  • Has 2 charges.
  • Make the animation instantaneous.
  • Applies VP and SW:P baseline.
  • AoE uncapped.

This basically solves all the current issues, it will be just an AoE dot applicator that does 0 damage but will give enough versatility to the spec to deal with add spawn and chainpulling if you manage the charges appropiately.

2. Capstones

I think capstones have two issues, first one is they straight up suck numerically, and second they cost too many points. I don’t think there isn’t a single spec in the game other than SP with so many capstones tied behind 2 point talent nodes (More into this later).

Most of those should be 1 point only, (Mastermind, Screams of the Void, Tormented Spirits and Insidious Ire).

Idol of N’Zoth and Idol of Y’Shaarj need a rework, they way the function doesn’t really work with today’s startands.

3. Too many 2-point talent nodes.

Besides the already mentioned, having a 45 second interrupt is awful. I understand the strenght of this in PvP but from a PvE perspective a 45sec interrupt is unacceptable and forcing you to use a talent point, of which you already lack enough, to basically reduce it from 45 to 30 (which is still 6 second more than average ranged DPS kick) is just too much.

My suggestion is to add Silence to the Priest tree rather than Shadow and make it 30 second baseline without an option to reduce it further. This might be a hot topic but IMO this is also necessary for Disc and Holy, not having an interrupt in today’s meta is a kick in the nuts and needs to be adressed.

Stuff like Malediction (Void Torrent cd reduced from 45 to 30 sec) are redundant and a waste of points IMO, just make Void Torrent 30 sec baseline and let us put the point somewhere else.

There are more things that could get a tweak here and there but I think those are the most important design flaws that should get attention as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading.

6 Likes
2

These Shadow Crash suggestions would certainly be welcomed by most. I would rather they ditch it altogether though. If they want us to be a cleave spec they should just let Mind Blast spread our DoTs to other targets, not unlike a Fire Mage with Fire Blast/Ignite.

The bigger problem with AoE really needs to be addressed. The soft and hard target caps need to be removed or evened out. Then they could just retune the damage, mob heath, etc. They should give all classes a reliable way to AoE with just 1 or 2 global setups. Instead of punishing caster or melee players on a per dungeon basis, give melee stronger cleave with a smaller radius and give ranged specs slightly bigger/better mass AoE. That would encourage a better mix of melee/ranged as long as the differences are reasonable.

2 Likes
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RNG capstones are horrible in general. Blizzard’s idea behind these are that a big burst of random damage feels good. The problem is that they tend to pop up at the wrong time and end up being wasted. That’s why they generally perform so poorly.

You’re 100% right about the shadow tree. Honestly, it feels like they came up with all kinds of unique ideas that just didn’t end up working out that well. Very few of our talents feel fun or interesting. I also hate that so many of them are conditional and require Devouring Plague to be on your target. Those talents should feel fun when they are active but end up feeling bad when they are not.

I love the core shadow gameplay of DoTs, Mind Blast and Mind Spike/Mind Flay. Even if Shadow Crash was instant and worked properly it just doesn’t feel fun. I hate to copy previous iterations of Affliction but I kind of like the idea of easily spreading our DoTs then using something like Mind Sear to amplify them.

1 Like
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And the proc/charge rate is also unreliable, just take a look at Unholy DK right now for example, their main AoE burst (The blood is life) is also a random pet proc but even if it procs at the wrong time it, does SO MUCH MORE DAMAGE than anything SP has that even with bad luck it still performs better than Shadow’s best case scenario throughout a keystone.

I also enjoy the current playstyle of mixing DoTs with MB and I think Psychic Link it’s good right now, but again if you can’t even apply your DoTs properly then what’s the point?

I personally didn’t like the Mind Sear playstyle, neither the filler insanity generator nor the finisher insanity spender variants, IMO channeled abilities are bad, a lot of times you have to move, interrupt, fear or do whatever you’re supposed to do and those channels are always a DPS loss or get you killed if you’re greedy.

I’ve played Affliction Warlock for some time as well and I think it suffers from the same issue, they have the seed to spread Corruption but it requires 1 Shard and to apply Agony they’re capped at 8 targets and are dependant on a 20-30 second cooldown for AoE just like SP so I don’t think we should head towards that either…

5

I remember we used to have dark void, that allowed us to aoe spread SW:P. It was a 1.5 second cast if I recall It was never taken, I think because a better node was always taken but I don’t know why they can’t add something like that back.

1 Like
6

Shadow’s major problems go beyond the three you mention, though the things you mention certainly are problems.

The biggest problem that shadow has is that Blizzard hasn’t put any effort into what it should be since Legion, and have spent ten minutes at the end of the beta cycle for BFA, SL, and DF removing power from Voidform and putting it somewhere else in the kit without any real consideration for how it should play. They took a spec with a very narrow focus on executing an increasingly frantic 3-button rotation, turned it into a 2-button rotation and removed the mechanism that made that gameplay fun, then flattened every other contextual or nuanced ability shadow had to a boring button on a moderate cooldown to be pressed on cooldown to fill out the rotation.

You can see this lack of intentionality in play very clearly with Void Torrent, which was a very cool, strategic ability when it was introduced in Legion, then lost its purpose entirely and turned into a boring big damage turret button you must press on cooldown once it no longer had to compete with Mindbender. You can also see it in Blizzard returning Dark Ascension and Mind Spike for no reason other than to quiet forum complainers, admitting that their inclusion was nothing short of ham-fisted, promising to revisit them, and then never revisiting them.

Rather than spending any amount of time thinking about what shadow should be, how it should play, and which cooldown it should have, Blizzard just took a hammer to Legion shadow and has spent about an hour over the last decade rearranging those pieces to make a new picture without moving the Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, Vampiric Touch, and Shadow Word: Pain pieces, and the result is a talent tree that can’t incentivize certain abilities or playstyles and needs to rely on random procs because the foundation of the spec is still a 3, now 2, button rotation that used to get faster and faster and now doesn’t, and there’s not enough room to build options into that spec.

2 Likes
7

I disagree with most of what you said, I’m really enjoying Mind Spike, Dark Ascension and Void Torrent (I play VW only), but I agree with you that they are not giving enough love to SP.

I think the biggest mistake Blizzard is doing is changing things numerically rather than design wise, even during DF when SP was meta, we had the exact same problems we have now.

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You can enjoy that those abilities exist. A lot of people do. I do, at least for Void Torrent. That doesn’t change the fact (yes, fact) that the abilities were returned for the sole purpose of stopping people from asking for them back and without consideration for how they function in the spec, and you know that it was done impulsively because they returned a month before Dragonflight launch with their 2009 particles and a blue post saying they knew they didn’t fit or hit the right marks and would be revisited . They were not revisited and did not get new particles, either.

Mind Spike and Dark Ascension serve no purpose other than to allow players to remove distinctiveness from shadow and make it feel, not play, more like other casters. The cost of allowing that choice is that Blizzard needs to design around and balance two fillers and two cooldowns against each other, which they’ve failed to do. Not only does Dark Ascension receive far more talent support than Void Eruption, its weakness as a cooldown required that Void Eruption be pruned back even further than it already was in Shadowlands. To make matters worse, our alpha build hero trees incentivize the use of the “wrong” cooldowns.

I’m not opposed to Dark Ascension even if I strongly dislike it, but Blizzard needed to choose one cooldown and run with it. Their experiment of letting people have it either way is a failure - Voidform fans do not get what they want, but Dark Ascension fans largely do.

Void Torrent used to be my favorite ability in the game in Legion, back when it was used as a stall on insanity drain. In BFA it had the misfortune of competing with Mindbender, which is historically Blizzard’s favorite ability to support for shadow, so it never got used. It completely lost its role in Shadowlands and had it replaced with the job of “does big damage on moderate cooldown” and joined the very large club of shadow abilities that do big damage on moderate cooldowns.

I love Void Torrent, I want it to be cool, and I agree that it feels better on voidweaver, but shadow is already the slowest spec in the game, has among the highest hard-cast burden of all casters, and Void Torrent does not feel distinct in the spec to merit it commanding 10% of your time channeling it every combat. Mages complain about hard-casting Pyroblast, but at least hard-casting Pyroblast is a deviation from what fire usually does. Void Torrent is not a deviation - it’s just more of the same.

All this said, I think shadow plays alright right now. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either. What I do hate is that shadow’s current design does not allow the talent tree to provide any choices that impact how the spec is played or which abilities are prioritized. You can’t go into a Mind Blast build because Mind Blast already needs to be cast on cooldown. You can’t go into a Devouring Plague build because you literally can’t spend resources on anything else, so you’re going to do it anyway. You can’t go into a Void Bolt build because it’s locked behind a 120s cooldown that has no talent support because the talents need to assume you don’t have access to Void Bolt.

1 Like
9

The Thing from Beyond is really awful for that. It auto pops afrer 50 apparitions… but since those are random, you have zero agency to when they appear.

What should be done: Have the idol be an active ability that becomes available at 50 apparition spawns, and let the count stack go up to 100 while adding a 20s cooldown to the idol.