Its a shame nothing will change.
cynical, sure… but they seem to enjoy making priests and DKs suffer.
Raid balance also makes this impossible. They have continuously nerfed specs that were performing well in only their niche while also having mediocre performance in the rest of the raid.
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Agree with most of your overarching points, that the spec has become a hodgepodge and there’s a bloat problem, but have to disagree with some of your specific suggestions.
Firstly a defence of Mindgames: Mindgames is a GOOD spell and should stay. Shouldn’t be asking to remove unique and interesting abilities like what we get with the inverse effect from Mindgames - probably the only good thing to come from Shadowlands. The problem isn’t that it’s a bad spell, it’s that it’s severely undertuned, especially given its hefty 4 talent point requirement. It needs a very considerable buff to become a proper cooldown again, to the initial hit and/or the inversing portion. If we’re looking at pruning bloat, imagine if I advocated for the removal of Mind Blast – yeah that other spell that hits for absolutely nothing and isn’t worth pressing at. I’d be burned at the stake because it’s an iconic spell but really it isn’t inherently interesting at all; it’s flat damage except it doesn’t even do what it’s billed to do. Hence, more reason to remove Mind Blast than Mindgames. Mind Blast needs to become notable again or reworked e.g. throwaway suggestion: as the new radius dot spreader and consolidate shadow crash.
Also, Psychic Link is the future, credit to the devs this was a good directional change. Mind Sear should stay gone, we need to commit to a future here and stop harking to the past, it’s how we got into this current mess by cramming all this old styles and spells into the modern spec.
Twins of the Priestess should be a PVP talent. Early days WoW PI could buff others, then that function was removed because it was deemed problematic, then it was reinstated with Twins, and now we’re going full circle again it seems as devs are realising it’s problematic (again). Works well in PVP though, fully purgeable but a team-focussed ability. PI nerf ought to be reverted if Twins does get relegated to PVP.
Also, something I don’t see written enough about, I would very much like to see shadowfiend become optional or kill it off completely please, so tired of this warlock-lite crap. We don’t want pets and we aren’t warlocks. And to have the Y’sharaj idol, the most powerful old god, centred about that gremlin is downright sacrilegious. We’re entering void-focused xpacs here lets make the eponymous abilities something to behold. Noone likes shadowfiend/mindbender gameplay. Just make shadowfiend a completely optional and simple insanity generator cooldown talent. Removing and reworking that whole Yar’shaarj capstone path should give the devs some room for creativity.
There’s an identity crisis with Shadow, the devs need to commit to a playstyle e.g. Legion, so we can move forward I think… or just split the tree down the middle like they do elemental shaman. And they need to clearly define what a Shadow Priest is. Is it a 50/50 blend of direct and dot damage, is there instant casts? Is it about prolonging the crazy Voidform minigame with surrender to madness? We’re the only healing hybrid that’s expected to hardcast AND has no mobility –what’s the tradeoff? For starters, give us mobility and hardcasts OR no-mobility and instant casts.
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From a pvp standpoint I could see it was hot garbage from the start, now that it’s not over tuned it’s crappola. I don’t pve because it’s scripted and that’s not fun for me personally so I can’t speak from any recent experience there. I quit the spec altogether and picked up mage. So much fun and at least one spec is always viable. Good luck but blizz poops on shadow every expansion so I wouldn’t hold my breath on them being very good for long ……….ever
Good god , I loved it, it was super easy and mobile. Now it’s a turret turd. I would play my priest again if it was like 10.0
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I completely agree, it’s because it’s so undertuned that I consider it button bloat. They could give it increased scaling in PVE (for obvious pvp reasons) and it could be a great staple of the class/spec.
I’d prefer to have the option between Psychic Link and Mind Sear (on a choice node). Unless they rework our dot spreading we are kind of locked into 8-10 targets which severely limits us when mass aoe is required. Psychic Link in of itself isn’t the problem with our aoe, it’s dot spread and tuning.
Well said. Twins has to go from pve.
Anything that removes Inescapable Torment I’m all for, and the Y’Shaarj talent is by far the worst design out of the 4 idols. I wouldn’t remove Mindbender completely though, just rework the 3 talents to fit more with a Y’Shaarj theme.
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The only good thing that came from Shadowlands is memories of leveling in an 80s heavy metal album cover for an hour.
Mindgames has never been an interesting ability. It was fun when it was strong and hilarious on Hungering Devourer, but it was only fun because it was strong. It’s just Mind Blast that costs mana and generates a little more insanity.
Blizzard’s tuning of the ability indicates they don’t want it to be as strong as it was in Shadowlands, especially for discipline. Given that intent, they should simply remove Mindgames as it’s too weak to take for discipline and holy and only worth taking for shadow because it provides a small amount of damage when the other options don’t (currently seems to be around a 2% dps increase to take it).
If I put together a wishlist for 11.0 shadow - Mindgames being removed would be #1 on that list.
I take it back. Removing Mindgames would be #2 on the list. Shadowfiend should absolutely be removed from the class tree (sorry, holy) and Mindbender removed from the shadow tree. Discipline can keep Mindbender.
I am so tired of Blizzard refusing to make SF/MB good on its own and stapling every tier set and every bit of other borrowed power to the worst, most boring 3 minute cooldown in the game. Blizzard needs to kill SF/MB, burn the body, walk away, and never look back.
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This may sound good to you from a pve standpoint but from a pvp view I disagree with you almost entirely. Shadow gameplay is crapolla. It doesn’t even feel like shadow anymore it feels like an immobile mage without as many tricks. Now that it’s not over tuned everyone is seeing its flaws. I for one haven’t logged on to my priest since about 2 weeks after the rework.
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Delete Shadow crash.
Make Divine Star & Halo our source of spreading Dots.
- AoE dots in raid fixed with halo.
- AoE dots in m+ fixed with divine star
- A very annoying button removed from the game.
- Have Haste effect the cd of them and you’d probably have good uptime of Dot’s in M+
- They can just do what they want to do which is tune Psychic Link for M+
This would be worse in my opinion. Devine Star would hit even less units and is still tied to a cooldown. Halo could hit mobs you don’t want to hit and is 40sec cc, also they aren’t even in the shadow tree, I don’t even bother with that node.
Having our AoE unavailable because of cooldowns is that main problem with our spec. I still think that shadow needs AoE to be built in when we cast our dots, the 8 target limit should stay so it doesn’t force the devs to nerf Psychic Link back into oblivion.
I concur. Pvp is my main gearing method and it is hellish at the moment.
This is what I suggested in my thread not too long ago. I was summarizing what I said earlier.
In my perspective this would easily give both good usages.
Take fights in the raid, gnarlroot, Larodar, council, fyrakk would all see good usage of halo. Adds don’t spawn to frequently and are generally spread apart. Or for council good position would hit all 3.
As for divine star this would easily be much better than current shadow crash. Make sure you get a few dots out and then throw a star at them, For M+. As for raid it might not be bad on T-Swift but the adds roots still due to quick.
Why was mind sear removed? Something needs to be done with shadows crappy aoe.
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Because even with mind sear you still don’t do meaningful damage to targets you don’t have dotted. Mastery is providing a 60-70% damage boost on main targets at this point.
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My thing is why not just change the mastery to something that functions properly in all scenarios. This current mastery is awful in comparison to the old multistrike mastery that worked everywhere.
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on god, i’d honestly kill for Shadowy Recall to come back if it meant they could tune our abilities to do actually okay damage to targets that aren’t dotted for aoe purposes
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I have to admit, the idea that our mastery doesn’t kick in until we have our dots on the target and by association, our damage is heavily suppressed without said dots does get annoying at times in both gameplay and keeping that type of mastery in tact when offering suggestions and theorizing possible paths shadow can take to improve its overall effectiveness. Then toss in the dispel protection or lack there of in PvP and you have a real mess of a situation where any competent player can easily suppress shadows damage simply by removing dots.
But…. At the same time, the idea of a dot/rot spec having a mastery being tied directly with the application of dot spells just “feels” like a proper mastery and it is interesting in that it enhances the rest of the specs damage.
So the simple “multi strike” effect mastery on shadows dots with shadow recall mastery from MoP just seems like a meh solution. Like I guess it could work? But it’s just a random chance without any gameplay changing involvement.
The advantage is that you can just ignore mastery outright and not have to be forced to keep your dots on the target which if that’s the case, I would rather just prefer WoD mastery of Mental Anguish as that can ignore dot interaction outright while still giving you some level of control when its effect takes place in amplifying your Mind Spells, but I would simplify it in amplifying all “Mind Spells” and not just 3 of them. So it would affect Mind Sear (upon return) and Mind Games and heck why not Mindbender as well if talented.
For reference…
- Mastery: Mental Anguish
- Level 80 Shadow priest ability
- Passive
- Increases the damage of Mind Blast, Mind Spike, and Mind Flay by 20%.
i’d honestly make it a mix of the two, with a scaling increase in proc chance of multistrike the more dots on the target, the biggest thing is that the current iteration feels like our dots are there for direct damage increase instead of Rotting like they should be, it’s a big turn off for me atm from being the dot/rot spec we were always meant to be
As nice it would be to just apply dots and sit back and let them tick and deal damage to achieve this “Rot” aspect which would be doing the heavy lifting and by extension allow shadow more mobility to just LOS and reapply as needed just doesn’t seem like it’s something blizzard wants in current modern wow.
They want people to always be doing something. Case in point with healers doing something even when group is full health.
So with saying that, I don’t think they would allow dots on their own to deal the majority of the specs damage. It should require an active ability to either pump up the dot damage or the dots pump up its damage. But they need to work in tandem and not separately imo.
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If you haven’t noticed, this is what all dots in the game currently feel like and it’s a deliberate design decision coming from BFA. Blizz killed rot, I doubt they’re going to change their minds for one spec.