I don’t think its as simple as favoritism (even though this plays a part)
this is MY personal opinion…
i think that a core aspect of Blizz marketing this expan is the whole idea of “we learned form BFA to listen to the community” and the whole players have the power to change the game or whatever…
I think shadow suffers on a fundamental core mechanic level which would require so much more work and Blizz doesn’t want to spend resources on that. They rather create more content in the expand and polish it.
Blizz only worked on 2 fan-favorite classes (shammys and Druids) to pretend that they actually looked into the classes and them not changing anything is a conscious choice. when in reality I think its a matter of managing resources.
I mean if you look at Torghast the highlight of the Expansion you can see how disappointing it actually is.
they didn’t even put effort into making each class anima power unique.
These interviews are to sell snake oil and keep the hype going. Mark my words the hype will die fast and this expansion won’t be as good as people think it will.
“Favoritism” might sound like a hyperbole but IMHO, as a bias priest who loves the class hence why I am still here talking about it, that is how I feel since I switched to a balance/ resto druid main. It hasn’t been worth. it has felt like playing a handicap.
There are so many problems in terms of ramp up/ burst / single player scenarios/ mythic+ses that can be solved through talents but I haven’t seen that at all. Shadow seems mostly unchanged, still suffers from the longest ramp up time, VERY limited mobility compared to other classes, VERY niche utility.
It seems like only die hard priests can play this spec at a HIGH level, otherwise it suffers so much. That, to me is a spec that needs to be looked at, more than balance druids, more than ele shamans.
Just very dissapointed that shadow looks like more of the same, with nothing that helps it’s multitude of weakness, and it’s just not fun to play. I feel like most of the shadow priest players are the few that enjoys voidform, or the diehard priests’ that refuse to play other classes that are designed better.
An honest, SUBJECTIVE opinion, I am mad at how ele shaman got a resource but significant change, balance druid has had a significant rework, and shadow has remained relatively unchanged. I’ve always found the first 2 specs very fun even at the bfa level and shadow has just been a mess with no alternatives except being good at long drawn at fights with no intermission ( this is a BAD niche to have especially because of mythic+ and most of the last tier bosses have a form of intermission).
Stay off the SL Moonkin discussion thread on the druid forum, you might die of shock. From what I gather in that thread, the devs are directly interfacing with certain prominent community members there to incorporate their feedback. i.e. having resolved the issue of RNG/ wasting proc time when eclipse procs mid cast by doing the 3 cast to cause eclipse change.
Not so concerned with numbers as of yet. However like we’ve all been saying, the complete lack of any mechanical updates as of yet is extremely troubling. Covenants suck, and there is no way that they will make up for anything unless they are wildly overpowered.
The bias they show some classes is unreal. It must be nice to main a druid and be favored by Blizzard, in which you can get dev responses catered to your concerns in an alpha thread, whereas priests can literally ask devs in interviews about our only DPS spec and still we get nothing.
the part that stings is actually the first part of his answer( this is the second part) when he was asked about shadow priest specifically.
he said (something in the lines of) “I have nothing for them right now but soontm”
which to me meant that they aren’t even looking into the spec because if they were they could’ve said something like: “yes we read the concerns and we are looking into it” or “we are aware of the concerns and have nothing at the moment but we are looking into them” but no we get this…
which basically means that the devs are not even bothering with looking into the core spec but just want to slap some borrowed power bandaids on it to shut them up.
I bet they will tune our damage to be a bit high so when the community complains about the spec they can turn around and say but your are performing good dps. its been Blizz secret method of sweeping specs under the rug.
all in all this interview just exposed the level of effort that is put in this expansion and killed my hype and that is not simply because of how they treated shadow but also:
Torgahst anima powers are class generic powers that has nothing to do with specs ( you would think they would make them unique but no both priest and mage have a rat explosion build)
the unpruning is total bs. all they did is make spells accessible to other specs.
In the interview Morgan mentions that they might make Torghast anima powers into the effects you get form the legendary. Like really they don’t even want to put the effort to make legendary unique and interesting.
you can see there is an obvious lack of effort and motivation…but hey it’s alpha you never know.
They did this in 8.1. Ion promised reworks for the spec and what we got was number tuning, because “we don’t do reworks in the middle of an expansion.”
Now we’re getting Shadowlands and surprise surprise, nothing but S2M revamped and a version of SW: Death that’s useless in PvE. And when we ask them about our spec they have nothing for us.
Or they’re staying silent because they have absolutely nothing, and they’re just going to dodge all concerns until the expac drops, at which point they’ll promise some bandaid fixes in 9.1. Just like they always do.
Meanwhile the leveling experience is going to be dot and facetank, early mythics ate going to be a lesson in being turned down, and we’ll get wrecked by every melee who knows where their interrupt is.
By 9.3 we’ll be all bandaged up and content will be bearable, and we’re have enough stamina to survive crappy rogues and DKs, but not good ones.
And everyone will forget the horrible cycle and hope for a redesign, post thousands of suggestions on how to make shadow viable and be ignored. You know, like every expansion in my memory.
Unless something significant changes in beta, I’ll be on a hunter, and dust off my priest about 9m2.5.
Did i not call it on Torghast and the lack of effert put into it and the anima powers the Devs provided…
and now we have torments(which are timers whether they are soft or hard) because Blizz “thinks” that waiting for your CDs is “Degenerate gameplay” .
here is my opinion…sense Torghats going to play a major part in the expansion a lot of people will be exposed to it and because Blizz wants it to be a major replayable aspect of the expansion what they are actually trying to do is limit your exposure and experience in Torghast because players will be bored of its generic anima powers.
the whole unpruning is a complete bullsh’t most of the “unpruned” spells are spells that already exist in the game they just made them baseline to all specs and they did that just to cut corners and attach anima powers to them…
by the way another class (i believe it was monk) has a rat explosion build…so now there are 3 classes with rat explosion builds…
do you see the lack of effort? I mean for god sake they only had 12 classes to work on rather than 37 specs and they still didn’t put effort into them.
I called Torments a while back. Knew it would happen. It’s the need to artificially extend time-played, instead of offering meaningful content. But I’ve got a good back-up game now. Blizzard does reverse course, but rarely is it done out of player interest or agency. But if it’s a benefit to them, you can expect it.
Torments are a perfect example of that. When I called foul on it unfortunately, a pack of clowns on the forums went berserk about it. White Knighting for Blizzard, and the ‘glorious community’ at work again. Frankly, I don’t mind. They deserve the game they get.
Only popping in here a second to bump this (not that I expect much to happen), and give the remaining Priest community some inspirational music. It’s also a reminder for the loser who put me through hell back at the start of the month, that no. I will not ‘vanish’ like you want.
Even if you mobilize your sycophants to act on your behalf.
Voidform could work, but it would require changing the way it scales
Where most classes gain 1k dps per 5 ilvls, Shadow gains 1k for the first 5 ilvls, then 3k for the next 5, and 10k for the next 5 and so on. We don’t scale in a linear manner like other specs
We scale increasingly higher with every state we gain because each point of haste not only increases our dps on its own, but it’s increased further by each point of crit. On the flip side, crit is also affected in the same manner by our haste.
So each stat scales on its own, then they both scale off of each other, and before you know it, our dps has snowballed to the point that were 10% ahead of everyone, then we get nerfed again
For voidform to truly work, this stat interaction needs to be addressed, or we will always scale out of control, and require nerfs every patch to stay in line
We also must be balanced around our top potential ilvl dps, and not our average. Because of the way we scale, average ilvl dps is low, but max potential ilvl dps is extremely high. Nerfing max dps nerfs the already low average ilvl dps, and buffing the low ilvl causes the high ilvl to scale out of control
The issue is our scaling. It needs to change if voidform is to work and not need constant attention and nerfing
Sometimes I wish blizzard balanced with the average in mind not the extremes. I’d rather the mythic first race be dominated by a single class then have that class be poop for the other 99.99% of the time that class is played.
They can’t tho because shadows top end dps would be like it was in eternal palace. We’d be best in single target, absolutely dominate council fights, and destroy everyone in muti target cleave or aoe.
I remember ep and everyone cried about Shadow being top dps until we were nerfed. Shadow is starting to outscale those nerfs in Ny’alotha, and if we had one more raid tier, Shadow would be right back on top again
The more you give Shadow, the more it’s stats double dip and play off each other, and scale higher and higher
If they just removed the interaction between haste and crit, we could scale in a linear manner and be more in line with other classes.