Why does Shadow Word: Death do more damage to me, than to an enemy? My SW:D (even when it procs, or is below 20%) does 256k damage. It does 280k damage to me with 6603k health in PvP gear.
I wish this was a joke
Tell me how it makes sense Blizzard.
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256k is just a bit lower than what I’d expect it to do against a full health target.
Yeah, I don’t know - 10.2 removed (most of) the ridiculous potential for self-deletion from the spell, but why it can’t work like Hammer of Wrath for paladin at this point is beyond me.
It’s more antiquated flavor hanging around from Classic, which is kind of a running theme with the class as a whole.
I wish we had the machine gun death proc. Then it mught actually move health bars (mostly ours of course)
Shadow Word: Death deals damage based on several factors all added together resulting in its output number.
Shadow Word: Deaths backlash damage to yourself is simply based on your max health.
So the more health you have, the more damage you will do to yourself.
That means at the beginning of an expansion now going forward (unless they change it again) that you will do a greater amount of damage to yourself relative to the target until you get a lot more gear and the expansion goes on.
I would suspect that near the end of the expansion that you would gain a lot less health compared to the amount of intellect and other stats that enhance your overall damage dealt. So you should see SW:D doing more to the target vs the backlash amount done to you.
What should happen imo is that you get the backlash damage done to you based on a percentage of the damage done to the target, but the percentage damage done to the target needs to be extremely low because it used to nearly kill you if it didn’t straight up kill you outright when you were fighting an encounter where either the target takes more damage or you get an empowered encounter buff that makes you do more damage or you have some combination of both.
With the devs changing Shadow Word: Deaths backlash damage to be a percentage of your health then you were no longer negatively impacted by those enhanced damage done/taken fights that make you just not want to use the spell else risk killing yourself.
That is why the backlash damage needs to be set at like only 1% of the damage done hits back at you so you don’t risk dying in those enhanced damage encounters yet you still have a way to break Crowd Control effects on demand.
Perhaps changes can be done to Tithe Evasion to change the backlash damage to be based on damage dealt instead of the max health of the priest.
So something like this…
- Tithe Evasion
Shadow Word: Death deals 20% more damage to targets below 20% health and deals 10% of its damage back at you instead of 5% of your maximum health.
OR remove the additional damage component.
- Tithe Evasion
Shadow Word: Death deals 10% of its damage back at you instead of 5% of your maximum health.
But it seems like a wasted talent point if you don’t actually gain anything aside from a different way the backlash damage is calculated which is the justification I used to include more power in your Shadow Word: Death.
The backlash damage is not the problem here. Shadow word: death does not move healthbars.
Shadows damage is so bad that I’ve landed fully dotted void torrent into mind devourer juiced DP into double void blast all empowered by insidious ire and still not put someone into execute range at full honour gear.
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I do remember when they finally nerfed SW: Death backlash people complaining about crit backlash globalling their toons!
In regards to the question of WHY the backlash damage of Shadow Word: Death is dealing more damage to the Priest vs the target is 100% based on your maximum health which incentives you to NOT use it if your just helping the enemy kill you faster than you kill him lol.
Let’s say you have 10 million heath.
5% of 10 million heath is 500,000.
So that means if you do not at least do 500,000 damage to the target with Shadow Word: Death then on a 1v1 fight simulation, you are assisting the target in killing you faster than you can kill them.
So let’s say instead of the backlash damage doing 5% of your maximum health, it instead deals 10% of the damage done by Shadow Word: Death. That would result in the 500,000 damage example to only be 50,000 instead which is significantly lower.
Then let’s take for example you dealing 100% more damage to the target based on some raid encounter buff. Now you would do 1 million damage and backlash damage would still be 500,000 based on 5% of your maximum health or 100,000 based on the amount of Shadow Word: Deaths damage dealt.
So that means the more damage you do, the more in favor the based amount of backlash damage done to you is calculated on your maximum health. The less damage you do favors the percentage of damage done calculation instead.
So no matter what, if we can’t choose what calculation we are dealing with in terms of backlash damage then you will suffer more/less pending the situation accordingly.
In terms of Shadow Word: Death just not doing enough damage then sure, that is exactly why the backlash damage is noticeably more than the damage dealt. But as the expansion goes on and you get more gear, that gap will go lower… if the maximum health doesn’t increase the same relative to the damage being done.
At the end of the day, the backlash damage calculation just needs to have a choice built into a talent option imo then you can change based on your preference.
If we are going to choose how we want Shadow Crash to behave then I don’t see why this is an issue.
Otherwise just make the backlash damage be determined on the amount of damage SW:D deals and limit it to a low 1% and call it good.
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If I understand this correctly, I am going to have to sit through several patches of terrible gameplay to finally feel like my spells deal damage. That’s not going to fly for me. I’ll be unsubbed in a month until they fix the game.
Lots of issues surrounds Priest.
I am just casually taking a break right now and only playing to get trading post crap done.
Also, with the class changes coming in 11.0.5, I just feel like I have better things to do with my time than to play something that is going to change so soon anyway. Why would I want to struggle and suffer playing the game with low stats due to being the new expansion and all secondary stat percentages are low while also knowing major class changes are coming?
Nah I have learned long ago that expansion launches are just too much work to be worth it as the next major content patch will come with catch up gear and I can knock out many things that took other people’s months of work to slowly grind at lol.
I have to admit though… since I see so many things in the trading post that I want and upcoming months of it… it does require me to remain subbed if I want that stuff so I think that is a great business decision on blizzards part even if I personally would rather not have these time limited items be restricted as much as they are. It is what it is I suppose.
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I’ll be sure not to look at the trading post so in not tempted to do the same thing. My sub is already cancelled.
Im still working on unlocking the Warden ensemble… still got multiple months left.
Also the Sylvanas ensemble transmog has been leaked/announced? To be coming soon and I really want that for my hunter lol.
But yea, I admit, they got my sub till I finish those and maybe more based on the trading post… clever sobs lol
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