It feels like our damage over time does no damage.
Been playing the BETA a decent bit, Solo Shuffle, PVE, etc. Right now it feels like our dots aren’t even meant for damage but just to either give us slow resources, spread Psychic Link, or to stack our Mastery so we can spam Mind Flay.
While Mind Flay and Insanity versions both feel decent to hit on occassion, it feels extremely bad for our filler/builder to be doing 20-35% of our damage. Since Shadowlands this is probably the worst our dots have felt, wondering if you guys feel the same
Shadow priests seem less than happy at the moment?
Of course it’s not core to the healing specs, but getting Shadow Word: Pain back was really flavorful after BFA pruned everything… and then they proceeded to dump all of our damage into holy fire.
They keep coming up with impractical ways to use it for mana return or off-healing or damage reduction but without an AoE applicator it still feels awful…
Why can’t they just put an appropriate amount of damage in the spell and call it a win? Even when I fool around on my affliction warlock it feels like Blizz has completely lost the plot on how to balance DoTs.
Our Hero talents feel less than impactful, or you have to change your entire build just to get value out of what you spec into. The SP tree in general feels weird with the layout now that they seem to want us to spec fulling into our filler damage (?). Stacking DP used to feel really good when it actually did damage lmao. I don’t have a problem if they round it out, but when our filler does more than all our dots combined when you factor in the insanity version… feels terrible man
I know this is going to sound insane, pun not intended, but Shadow is not DoT spec.
The total damage contribution of all Shadows combined DoTs, including Devouring Plague, does about the same amount of damage as an Arms Warriors DoTs. And no one in their right mind would call Arms a DoT spec.
The two specs even have similar masteries. Doing more damage to target with DoTs.
Shadows DoTs are just there to round out there damage and allow for some procs. Not so different from, say, an Ele shamans Flame shock.
Edit: for reference, an Affliction Warlocks DoTs does about 4-6 times more damage than a Shadow Priests DoTs. Even their channeled DoTs (Night Fall: Drain Soul, Oblivion) does more damage than Shadow Priests equivalent (Mind Flay: Insanity, Void Torrent)
I get what you’re saying but I am going to have to disagree. Or at least in a sense of why shadow priest feels bad to play
Warriors mastery I’m pretty sure also recently got changed. Dots on Warrior are an addition to hitting your abilities. Shadow priest dots are REQUIRED to even start thinking about doing damage (1x multiplier for damage per dot). In Dragonflight, almost all our damage was dots. Devouring plague could start hitting like a truck as you spent more and more
The theme of doing damage has literally always “supposed” to be a dot spec, granted Blizzard has screwed that up a couple times, this being included…
Having our damage being a proc based or even CD channel (Void torrent, which also does terrible damage), means that if we start casting and have to move instantly, or get interrupted in PvP, we lose out on all that CD or proc potential. I literally can’t think of another spec that suffers from this like Shadow does
Don’t get me wrong. I agree that Shadow is supposed to be a DoT spec, and plays like one. But in practise it is a direct damage burst spec. As weird as that sounds.
Shadow Word: Pain, on the beta at max level, is one of the weakest DoTs in the game. And Vampiric Touch is not far ahead of it. To use Arms as an example again. Rend does only a little less damage than SW:P and VP combined. They also spread their Rends with an AoE ability just like Shadow with Shadow Crash.
Even Voidweaver, which is clearly meant to be the DoT focused hero spec. Only does about ~30% of its damage through DoTs (this includes DP and VT). Hell, Voidweaver doesn’t even want to use Void Form. That’s how you know things have gone awry.
For better or worse, Shadow is going to be a direct damage burst spec for the remainder of TWW. Unless they get another rework mid expansion.
I’ve been thinking more lately that they should just abandon dots for sp and make us full on wizards. When we get casts off, health bars should drop significantly. Or our dots all proc at 35% health remaining and do big damage. Idk, but shadow just hasn’t felt right in years
What gets me is shadow is the only true caster left in the game and we do doodoo damage. Shouldn’t hard casting feel impactful? Shouldn’t there be a high reward for high risk situations? It just feels backwards of what it should be. Either give us instant casts and procs or make hard casting do significant damage.
Edit: void torrent should hit harder than chaos bolt or ray it’s a longer cast.
If they want to abandon dots all together with a rework, then let it be so. Problem is right now, our whole tree is designed around our dots, and building up for DP aka our spender dot, but in general most of our DPS comes from OUTSIDE of our DOTs.
Its just an eternal discussion with shadow priests in later designs. It realy feels like an 100 pll have 100 different tastes. I do agree that atleast for pvp sw:p and vt should get like 200% buff to feel like youre doing something while getting massaged by 2 melees. But then it would get insanely broken if left to free cast …so how do you balance it?
I think our mastery became a big issue for dots. All of their damage is baked into it, its invisible at first but overall it seems like if we count mastery our dots do by FAR the most damage in our kit. Currently on retail after 2 weeks of gearing im sitting on 520ilvl and 25% mastery, so not a bis gear but a decent and even with that its 75% damage difference. Thats like playing one major patch behind if you dont have target dotted.
But as i said…this is just …many ppl many opinions.
Person - dots dont do any damage we are dot spec.(Sw:p ticks for like 35k ± into 7m hp)
Person- torrent is a long chanell it should be buffed to do way more damage
Person- mindblast is realy realy weak for a casted ability (150k into 7m hp in pvp, while getting ferocious bites for 2.3 mil)
Person- omg our capstones are lame AF they dont do anything yet they were the main selling point of DF shadow.
Person - i feel like voidblast is the main nuke of our hero talents and should do way more damage. (same for halo and rift)
Person - devouring plague damage is laughable, its our only insanity spender it should hit like a truck.
Person -auspiciois spirits doesnt do any damage without our s2 tier set. Its by many considered the coolest part of shadow kit, yet its very meh damage without amps such as the set and the massive visual nerfs (both for others and now even for your own …theyre almost invisble) trying so hard to make them ireelevant.
And i would swear ive even seen topic where someone complained that our fillers are weak.
And then you imagine devs come to this feedback. (Edit: after re-reading this, i must admit that this sentence is a big utopia, ive had a chuckle at it, but for the sake of the argument lets asume there is a universe, where an developer that comes to priest feedback, exist)What do you do?
We have way too many tickling sources. We cannot have a nuclear button.
Split the damage profile of Periodic and Non-Periodic and put more focus on enhancing one or the other with chosen talents.
This would draw a clear separation which if done right, would provide more clarity as to which talent options you would prefer that coincide with your chosen damage profile type.
No more death by 1000 cuts. We can have up front meaty and chunky Non-Periodic damage or we can have a slower ramping up style of Periodic damage that gets scarier the longer time persists.
Our casted dot debuffs can add procs to Non-Periodic damage and our Non-Periodic damage spells can fuel dot damage by increasing resources as well as extending dot duration.
Our capstone Idol talents can and should be addressed to be more interesting and game defining.
Yogg’Saron granting more Shadowy Apparition spawning and/or make them explode on contact dealing a portion of their single target damage up to max 5 nearby targets.
Y’Shaarj enhancing each Mind Spell with an additional effect.
Example: Mind Flay would be cast while moving.
N’Zoth should come with a flat increase to Periodic damage at the very least. Basically merge Dark Evanglism talent with N’Zoth.
Change mastery to a more WoD style that enhances each action you do instead of passively that can easily be negated due to ability to cast and retain uptime on your dots that also is not limited to enemy dispels.
Mastery: Mental Anguish
Increases the damage of your Mind Spells by 20%.
This would buff either filler damage type of Mind Flay or Mind Spike while also increasing the burst damage potential of Mind Blast.
Then if Mind Sear is brought back as choice with Psychic Link, Mind Sear would be best with Periodic damage builds and Psychic Link for Non-Periodic damage builds.
Mind Spike could also deal additional damage to targets without dots on them via a talent option. Then this additional damage can be felt through Psychic Link. This would make Mind Spike become a burst damage spell on targets without our dots on them.
Obviously I got more suggestions, but the point is that these issues are all real problems that need to be addressed and I have at least imo addressed them all in my feedback with actual examples of how exactly to overcome such drawbacks.
It would be accompanied by large nerfs to psychic link and/or your direct damage.
If dots got say a 100% buff, or whatever yall feel would be suitable, the talent where they tick 80% faster following DP’s would be absolutely bananas in keys.
I get what you’re saying but you also have to factor in DF vs TWW. I played Shadow all through DF and I honestly thought the spread of our damage was great
Something happened with TWW where they compensated too hard and our scaling of DOTs went to the crapper. It feels like every patch they want to go a different way with SP but don’t revert any of the stuff that made us play a certain way before. Why have a class that’s moving into an instant damage direction with a mastery that requires you to have all your dots on the target to even benefit from it?
At this moment in time, Destro does more DOT damage than us with Wither lmao (while spamming Shadowburns, Incinerates and Conflag, most of which already instant cast or can be for PvP)
I said this so much. I would love for my shadow priest to play like Fire Mage does.
I mean you guys may not agree, I’m sure. But to me, Fire Mage playstyle is just oodles of fun. The problem with Shadow for me is that it just SUCKS for AoE. Like TERRIBLE. Fire is sooo easy to pull off AoE and Shadow is just hot garbage.
Have you seen the recent video showing Destro off in Arena with Wither?
Just jumps around and instant casts nearly the entire time and does top or near top damage.
So stupid that Shadow would have to stand still and manually cast over and over again in order to even attempt to compete on the damage front but would never happen as we would be interrupted over and over again.
As of now and for the entirety of Shadows existence, we had no way to be rewarded with the ability to counter attackers when we are attacked. We just had to figure out how to get our damage out while getting trained and pummeled.
Destro for a long while have had the ability to trigger instant cast Incinerate when being attacked.
Yet as Shadow, we are not rewarded with counter offensive capabilities when we are being trained on and we get our dots easily removed which means we spent more time setting up our damage but never seem to get a window of opportunity to capitalize on our set up to actually become a threat… not alone at least, you require your teammates to play around you in order to set up properly. Meaning you can’t just do whatever you want solo unlike what you can clearly see in that video that Destro does not have near to the level struggle that shadow would have.
