Shadow spec changes

Classes Priest
1

I just recently came back to the game and holy moly. I can deal with loosing a little damage but shadow core rotation changed multiple times.

Mind sear was a fun spell and the excuse of button bloat is a slap to the face of the priests that love the spec. What gives blizzard you give us Christmas toys and then take them away?

Damnation , why is this gone? Fine you’re going to force me to use shadow crash. Oh darn tank keeps moving and now I only hit 1 mob … as a mage if I miss flamestrike I can cast another or fire blast or Phoenix flames. Why do we loose our tools to dps

Insanity proc and generation - I’ve never seen insanity regen so slowly and the rotation is now weird because I am stuck waiting on something to cast. The change to every other dp was awful.

I’ve mostly rolled with all the nerfs but this time I’m out. Play another ranged caster and the difference is night and day.

4 Likes
2

Button bloat was a thing back then in my eyes, but that was a twofold issue that was entirely the fault of mind spike being a seperate button from flay, which was the only one that triggered insanity at the time, and mind games. They fixed one of those, and decided the other was fine to stay for some reason, but then removed our aoe insanity spender (Likely due to being to turret-y? having to sit there and hard channel it) but they could have reworked it into something else if that was the issue.

3

I don’t get where the button bloat? You hit insta cast mind spike when you had to move and no other time really. It’s so silly people complain about button bloat then when they take your mobility procs away you complain about being a turret. Not saying you in particular, more referring to the idea the buttons were bloated. I’d give halo/ds/mg away just to be mobile. That’s three buttons that are hardly used and now your bloat is gone and you have mobility. Now you have to choose between casted mind spike or channeled flay and your either going to be OP or below average

Edit: I would even throw void torrent away too!!!

4

Pve players ruined another spec because things too hard.

1 Like
5

at least back when i was looking at it, you spiked until you had insanity, then you used flay, unless you needed to hold spike for mobility, it led to having 2 fillers that honestly didnt need to coexist

6

It wasn’t to much mental gymnastics for me. Just the least important filler you had. Pretty simple for anyone who played spriest before legion. It was actually a lot more forgiving.

7

Yeah the thing is, nobody was asking for the mobility to go away. Just the spike/flay dynamic. It could have been a choice node - we could have made Surge make flay able to be channeled while moving.

Because really, spike/flay was bloat. They were functionally the same button only spike blocked a talent node that allowed mobility so it became a mobility option.

But also yes, many people did want halo/ds gone because it felt bad to press. Blizz took that feedback and gave it insanity gen instead.

8

So halo/ds are filler spells with a longer cd ? Kinda seems they coulda done a lot of things better……I’m really not happy with the direction of shadow….on the other hand fire mage is pretty fun

The issue with people not liking insta proc mind spike must be a pve thing

9

I think you, along with Blizz, missed the conversation around button bloat completely.

All PvE Shadow Priests that agreed there was button bloat identified that Halo/DS, MG, and the filler overlap of Mind Flay and Mind Spike were the cause.

Instead of increasing the utility of Halo/DS and nerfing damage, they added Insanity generation.

Instead of doing anything with MG such as removing it from the class tree and adding it to Disc, or increasing the utility effectiveness and removing damage so that it is not just a larger Mind Blast that you hit on cd, they did nothing.

Instead of heeding the calls to make our mobility better, they removed instant proc Mind Spike, reduced Mind Blast and DP procs, and reduced overall Insanity generation, making us literal turrets repeatedly casting our filler.

They did not find a place for Mind Flay and Mind Spike to coexist without competing as fillers, so they made one replace the other.

They removed Mind Sear, our only AoE spender, because they interpret 1 button = bloat?? Then added DP and Void Torrent to Psychic Link to make up for the loss of Mind Sear, which of course, had to be nerfed into the ground.

The problem isn’t PvE players thinking things are “too hard,” the problem is incompetent devs trying to fix the problem Blizz created by not having adequate staffing leading up to Dragonflight and releasing an incomplete spec.

PvE players understood where the issues were and pointed the devs directly to them. The devs cherry picked a couple of key words and did what they wanted with little understanding of how the spec works.

This PvE player got his KSM three weeks into the patch and unsubbed because of the incompetent devs.

1 Like