Shadowlands: Consolidated Priest Feedback (What does and doesn't work)

There have been cases where they’ve said something isn’t ready but given it us anyway. The phoenix flames change currently removes a talent, shadow went live in BFA beta with 3 missing talent slots, and we’re repeatedly told changes are one part of an iterative process. Shadow is still on iteration 1.

I don’t think people even want a detailed list of changes, they want anything that provides some indication that what’s been said isn’t falling on deaf ears as it has before.

It’s not like the feedback, even from those who want to keep voidform, has undergone any change. We’re all just saying what we have since BFA Alpha. And when zero changes aimed at rectifying any of the things outlined in that feedback were in SL Alpha, even seeing things that double down on making shadows problems even worse, you can understand why people are worried.

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Do you mean designed? Because it’s just not true that classes are balanced around mythic 0 and normal raid difficulty. Balance adjustments are usually made based mainly on mythic raiders, which is a tiny part of the player database as whole. That it doesn’t appear to happen around higher end m+ is a sore point in the community right now because you dont need a mythic guild to do 20+keys.

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not necessarily the changes but more the direction they are taking. the problem is we know for a fact that more changes are coming because its alpha but what we want Blizz to address even in a small post is whether said changes are gonna address the core issues with the spec or are they simply borrowed powers that will band-aid the spec.

EDIT: Anyways is there a new build this week?

‘Designed’ is probably a better word.

Correct. Obviously, it’s above both of those difficulties, since you could be reductive and just say “Heroic Dungeons” then “Normal Dungeons”, etc. But, I can’t tell you where that fine line exists unless I had access to Blizzard’s internal data.

Secondly, I can’t agree with the notion that balance changes are made around mythic raiders. I absolutely know that there are changes that are made because of Mythic raiders or top-end Arena, etc, but I feel they comprise a small minority of the total balance changes, regardless of which expansion you choose to look at.

Case in point: The current Alpha changes. Anyone would be hard-pressed to say that the current changes, including talents, unpruning, etc, has been made in the interest of or intent for top-end players.

Given that it is well known that stats scale wildly differently between specs, why would they balance around gear that is 15 ilvls or more lower than mythic raids?

Why would they balance around people with non optimized talents/essences/azerite?

Why balance around non optimal rotations?

Here I go again with a response that was small at first and then grew:


I think my answer to the last two questions can also answer the first question:

Because the goal of balancing isn’t to have perfect optimization. The goal of balancing (for WoW) is to ensure that the numerically sub-optimal choices can complete the content. That’s why balance is done in favor of the majority and not the minority.


WoW is purposefully designed such that you can be sub-optimal and still do the content, which I think is a sticking point for a lot of people. As you point out, to most people, if you’re not optimal, there’s no point, so why wouldn’t you balance around top-end? But the misconception comes from the fact that the benchmark isn’t made with ‘optimal’, it’s made with ‘sub-optimal’.

If Blizzard only intended for the most optimal play, and only balanced around optimal players, there would be one race, one class, and one talent per row. Why even bother designing or enabling a choice that could make you sub-optimal for their content?


Take the highest forms of PvE content that can award gear: Mythic raids and +15 keys.

If I had a full guild of people that were sufficiently geared for that content, whatever the ilvl is, and told them, “You’re going to run Mythic raids/M+, but I want you to choose the most sub-optimal talents and classes you can”, I 100% guarantee you that the guild would be able to complete that content. It may be more difficult, but that’s not the point.

The task isn’t to clear the content in the most efficient manner possible. It’s to clear the content. You don’t need to clear it most efficiently.


I can take your argument to an extreme and it would still be valid:

Right now, you’re not playing optimally, both in class and in race. But you still play them anyways. You still can do all of the content that awards gear as them. You can still push to bleeding-edge content as them. Change your class to the most optimal class for PvE content. You’re still sub-optimal, because Human isn’t an optimal choice.

“But the difference in races is small!”

It doesn’t matter, it’s still sub-optimal. You can’t cherry-pick which aspects of the game you can be sub-optimal in and which ones you can. You could clear content faster as X race and Y class. It applies to PvP too.

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That’s a design goal. If that was the goal for BALANCE, they met it at every in beta and it’s good at launch. Yet there are weeks and weeks of balancing adjustments after every expansion and content patch.

The rest of your post is full of assumptions about what you believe their balance goal is. Your assumptions seem to be based on your game design experience, and that’s fine. The people you are arguing with are making assumptions about balance goals based on actual changes made to their class (and others) and how they play in high end content. Neither assumptions are fact.

It is for alliance.

Human is the optimal dps race for shadow, followed closely by dwarf and tauren, then the usual suspects.

Nelf is great for M+ skips with meld, but that’s hard to quantify.

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So far removed from reality, I have to ask, are we even playing the same game? Classes get nerfed or buffed by the experience of the top raiding and PvP players ALL THE TIME. What you are describing is Encounter difficulty adjustment, not class adjustments. It is rare for an encounter to be adjusted to accommodate a specific class, at least after testing is done/pushed to live. Adjusting the Visions so that Tanks and Healers had less mob health than normal (which is I think the only existing example of what you state above that I’ve seen in the past 12 years) is something that you should remember, because the odds of something like that happening again are very slim based on past performance.
Edit: Of course, I don’t see any of the work that went in before the encounter went live… but encounter design really isn’t directly why the priest forums are on fire right now.

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@odinreborn
I’m not going to address everything you’ve said because I don’t want to have to spend four hours typing something up that you’ll try to nitpick while avoiding the overarching message.

However, here is the problem: you think you’re smarter than everyone else. You can argue it all you want, but it’s incredibly obvious to everyone. Newsflash: you’re not. And even if you were, it literally doesn’t matter. You don’t play Shadow. You don’t play high keys. You don’t push content to the point that balance actually matters. Hell, you don’t even do baseline content like +15s. Other people do. They still matter.

At the end of the day, even having a harder time pushing the highest content isn’t the issue that Shadow (and Disc and Holy, but I’m mostly speaking from a Shadow perspective) Priests are complaining about right now. The problem is that, once again, we are getting zero feedback from Blizzard about our class.

Legion: Shadow Priests were crazy strong because of S2M. The spec was high risk, high reward. But because the people who push content can play well, the reward was nerfed. It was then high risk, meh reward. People were frustrated with Voidform, the playstyle, the ramp, etc. But Blizzard made it work with Legendaries, Artifact Weapons, etc.

BFA Alpha: Shadow Priests asked what was happening to Shadow now that they’re losing everything propping them up to make them a decent class. Blizzard says “No updates as of yet!”. Priests kept asking. Blizzard gave no feedback. Priests kept asking. Finally, Blizzard responds, “Oh man, we wish we knew earlier! We hear your concerns but now it’s the end of the Alpha and too late for anything but tuning. Check back for exciting updates in 8.1!”

8.1: Shadow Priests get literally nothing except some more borrowed power to prop them up. Sure, they become a pretty decent class damage wise. But it’s all borrowed power. They haven’t addressed a single thing. No actual class changes. Shadow Priests ask Blizzard what happened to their class updates and Blizzard responds “Well, we don’t do class changes in the middle of an expansion, but check back for exciting updates in the next expansion!”

The rest of BFA: Shadow Priests continue to get propped up because they’re underperforming. Then the tuning of the borrowed power was off, so they nerf us. Unfortunately, they keep nerfing the class abilities, talents, etc, while only propping us up with more borrowed power. Everything that makes Shadow playable is borrowed power. Seriously. Go boost a Mage and do world content, some dungeons, etc. It feels slow, but it’s playable and makes sense. You contribute. Go boost a Shadow Priest and do the same thing. It feels absolutely awful. Everything takes forever to kill and you’re likely to die much more often. It’s literally faster to do content as Holy or Disc than as Shadow on a boosted character lacking the BFA borrowed power.

Shadowlands Alpha: Shadow Priests ask where the changes are. Blizzard responds, “well we made it so you’re less mobile and uh… well we changed S2M again but it’s still unplayably bad.” Priests give a ton of feedback. Blizzard says nothing. Priests give more feedback. Blizzard says nothing. Priests continue to give feedback. Blizzard answers a question or two during some long interviews. The response: “We have no updates at this time, but we hear you.” The problem with that is this is exactly what happened in the BFA Alpha. The next thing we expect to hear is “Sorry, it’s too late in Alpha for any meaningful changes. Check back for exciting updates in 9.1!”

We’ve heard it all before. Unless they actually do something, Shadow is going to be nearly unplayable in 9.0. 9.1 they’ll give us some borrowed power and we’ll be okay damage-wise. 9.2 they’ll give us more borrowed power and we’ll be very, very strong halfway through the patch because of gear scaling. 9.3 they’ll nerf some of the core Shadow abilities to tone us down. The next expansion Alpha we’ll ask what they’re going to do to ensure we’re not awful from losing all the borrowed power. And the cycle will repeat. Again.

That is why Shadow Priest are so upset right now.

Everyone is calling you a troll because you don’t play Shadow, you don’t push content, you don’t work for Blizzard and yet you tell everyone that they’re overreacting, Shadow is fine in most content, and that Blizzard has a plan.

Don’t bother nitpicking this, I’m not going to read your asinine responses. Just read it, take it in, and either accept it or disregard it. I honestly believe that you think you’re not trolling. But you are. You are bringing nothing useful to the discussion and nitpicking people’s posts for a reaction. That’s trolling.

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And yet I’m still perfectly at liberty to. And I will, regardless of whether you read my response or outright ignore me.

Not even close with regards to me thinking I’m smarter than everyone else. I’m not sure whether you think it’s because I’ve been replying a lot in this thread, or because my responses tend to be long-winded to elaborate my point.

Right now. Already has been stated that they’re aware. Not having a response now doesn’t equate to you never getting a response in the future.

And this was only an issue when the reason wasn’t known why. But Blizzard already came out and stated why, because they were behind.

Like, you can not believe or take that reasoning at their word, but it’s still the truth.

…Are they, though? Because last I checked, Shadow Priests right now can do all but the bleeding-edge M+. Is there any gear in the game right now that you’re being denied because Shadow Priests literally cannot do the content for that gear?

I mean, you haven’t exactly made a case that Shadow can’t do most content.

As I’ve stated before, I don’t care about whether or not you can do the top 1% of content. It doesn’t affect overall viability.

Have I flamed anyone? Insulted them? False-flagged their content? Have I broken a single rule in the Code of Conduct? No? Then I’m not a troll. I can disagree with you all day on every post you make, and it still won’t make me a troll.


By all means, hold my feet to the fire if Shadowlands is released and Shadow Priests still have received no Blue post in the same vein as other posts in the Alpha thus far.

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And that’s the issue. I look at balance on the whole, and [at least] this subforum looks at balance only in high-end content, regardless of the participation of that content.

I’ve stated before that we (General ‘we’) are going to be fundamentally opposed on this, and that’s fine. My goal isn’t to persuade, it’s to discuss.

Wait, really? I swapped this character from Human to Undead in Cataclysm, so that was the last time I played on Alliance.

What makes it the best race?

Edit: Looked it up, it’s probably this (?), which didn’t exist back when I was still a Human.

The Human Spirit: You gain 2% more of all secondary stats (Haste, Critical Strike, Mastery, Versatility) from all sources.

Yeah, in 8.3 humans became the best race in a lot of situations purely because of this racial and how good % corruptions are. Humans are the best race for Alliance PvP now as well.

Human spirit was changed from a base 5% spirit increase to 2% increase to the value gained from your secondary stats.

It’s like having an extra 10 corruption of severe / expedient.

Conversely, dwarf and tauren both give 2% crit damage. And shadow crits a lot now.

It’s like having an extra strikethrough 1

Corruption made actual numbers a LOT better than percentage. Panda is good for double food buff, and the belf goblin gnome night elf 1% stat racials are comparatively much worse.

But these things, despite being comparatively large, are hilariously small next to class performance, especially in more nuanced scenarios than patchwerk Sims.

Thank you for nitpicking pieces of my post and completely disregarding the actual message. You proved my point.

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You’re welcome!

This would be super infeasible, but I’d love to see data on the total amount of extra damage/damage avoided, etc. across a character’s lifetime from these passives.

Human generally just becomes better and better as expansions go on and stat budgets rise. The exact same thing happened in WoD and Legion.

Nailed it. The conceit is strong.

You are probably the only one here that says “balance” and doesn’t mean either raw number output or some type of representation in high end content. Raw damage is easy; if the difference between 1st and 10th DPS output was 60% it is out of balance. If there were zero shadow priests in the first 100 horde / alliance mythic nzoth kills, to most people that is also out of balance. Under your version, neither of those things is relevant to balance if shadow can do some level of content that isn’t mythic raids.

As a matter of fact, here is blizzard using the term “class balance”:

CLASS BALANCE CHANGES – FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Blizzard

We’re working on a series of hotfixes to adjust class balance. We currently plan to implement the following changes with weekly maintenance (the morning of February 25 in this region)

  • Druid

  • Restoration

  • Rejuvenation now costs 10% base mana (from 10.5%).

  • Efflorescence now costs 17% base mana (from 21.6%).

  • Tranquility direct healing increased 11%.
    **Developers’ notes: These changes should improve Restoration Druid’s raid healing output, without much impact to their already strong capabilities in dungeons and Arenas.

    Marksmanship

    • Damage of all abilities increased by 5%.

It’s a long post so I only included part. They specifically address druid raid performance, and are you going to try to tell us they were made so druids were capable healing heroic nyalotha 6 weeks after 8.3 release? They were underperforming in mythic raids. Class balance is NOT about content completion.

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