Shadowy Apparitions can no longer be seen by allies
I have no words to describe how disheartening it was to read this outrageous news. With so many problems that require attention, why did you do this? what was the reason? the class itself has almost no animation compared to the other magic classes, and now you remove the coolest fantasy and identity the class has ever seen? I’m already seeing the jokes, “Hey shadow priest are you casting spells or crafting?” . Mindspike has no animation, mindblast and SW:P shows a brief purple fart on the target, SW:D is acceptable for being something sudden, DP appears a screaming head for a tenth of a second that no one notices, Shadow Crash is a purple polygon that falls to the ground and turns to dust, and now we players will see less apparitions since crits don’t produce two more apparitions, but now our friends won’t be able to see the coolest part of being a shadow priest, you guys blew the whole fantasy, that was the last straw.
On beta now I can’t even see the Apparitions myself. Dunno if this is a bug, but either way, it’s awful if we lose our audio/visual feedback, and it feels terrible that others won’t be able to see it.
Why are they creating a problem and then acting like they are providing an effect.
I can’t find any complaints across the forums about Apparitions being a problem. Aesthetically or graphically.
Are we getting trolled? Like how did the aparation changes gets even considered is beyond me…its the sort of change like “DV and SC are no longer afected by haste”…like wtf? In all the issues this spec have i just dont understand how these even come to the mind…let alone go trough.
Whoever is making the Shadow Priest changes seems out of touch with the class fantasy. First you remove Shadowmend and give us multiple Holy spells? Now remove double apparitions on crit and turn them off in dungeons?
I can’t tell you how many times people have complimented me on how cool Shadow looks and it’s always 100% due to me levitating in the air sending out a flood of apparitions at my enemies. It was the one flashy thing we had since most of our other spells have virtually no effect on the enemy.
Now peple will look at the parser wondering if you are doing anything at all…because outside 2-3 spells you are just there moving your hands. That’s it, now I’m not a shadow priest anymore, I’m Mr. Mime from Pokemon. For the love of god we are in 2022, we urgently deserve better animations.
Because having 3 spriests in a dungeon group (which is a possible scenario - even if bad) would be spawning so many projectiles on top of summoning yog idol pets in mob packs that it would seriously impact performance for their recommended specs now that shadow crash is applying VT to 8 mobs at a time.
Isn’t it still possible to have 3 demo locks in a dungeon, each having 12 imps shooting 12 projectiles, a demon, and a felguard? For a total of 42 pets and 36 additional projectiles?
Ghosts are particularly slow (so more of them on the screen at once), and seem to have emissives - which can be very costly.
It’s hard to say without being on the WoW dev team specifically but this was almost certainly the concern. Spriest ghosts were already turned off in raid, after all.
Then just give something back to compensate. It’s hard to choose shadow right now over other casters. Ppl can only see us as a piece of black thing dance some vodoo style and dps meter goes up and down.
The easiest performance saver here to tie in with class fantasy is to continue the insanity route - to the priest these things look as they do because we are insane, to everyone else they look like orbs. Only priests can see them as apparitions.
Though I never knew this was an issue before with priests. You can already turn down spell effects for everyone but you in system settings.
Limit the maximum amount of apparitions rendered at one time, or add it to the existing spell density control. Not sure why getting rid of them altogether is a good option.
There should be no hidden spell animations unless specifically turned down by the player in the settings. I wanna do cool-looking sh#t and I want to be able to see when by friends/teammates are doing cool looking sh#t.
Just more proof of the technological limitations of the game engine. Most of the “lag” experienced by players is probably just the software struggling to perform. This whole game is running like Windows Vista. Blizzard spews some BS about the technology not existing to support smoother gameplay but they about to get shown up by a new studio with no other games in their history.
I speak of Ashes of Creation and while they have yet to actually put out a game, the performance they showed in their server stress tests make Blizzard look like a bad joke. The truth is that Actiblizz just doesn’t want to invest in the future of this title and continue to take the consumers for granted. I can only hope that the people running Microsoft might recognize the value of the IPs that Blizzard has and are willing to invest in expanding them rather than letting them die slow, painful deaths as Blizzard has done with all their once-famed-now-infamous IPs.
Maybe this is also why Lightwell hasn’t been balanced at all and does zero healing because if it healed enough to warrant clicking, the visual effect would crash the servers?!
I’m sorry brother, despite respecting your perspective I can’t agree with that, there should be an option to disable effects in the settings for those who have a weak setup, this is an MMORPG, being a fantasy game the visual appeal is of utmost importance. Isn’t it possible that we’ve reached a point where only numbers and performance matter, what’s the fun on a screen where everyone is just waving their hand and seeing numbers on the screen?? I don’t know about you, but that’s not why I started playing WoW or any title that is considered a Role Playing Game.
Agree 100%
I don’t understand why WE PRIESTS have to be the ones that loose things because others CAN, its just not fair.
This is an incredible amount of work, FWIW. I wouldn’t expect any dev to have something like this ready quickly.
They only intend to turn it off for party members - not for the priest itself. So you get to see the cool stuff happening, just your group won’t have that performance burden.
I get wanting to see other people do cool stuff. But as a dev when your recommended specs have performance concerns, you sort of have to address them, else just shut out a huge portion of the audience.
I wish there was a middle ground too, but knowing how systems like this work, it’s quite possible they didn’t have a middle ground option without significant drawback in the time they have before the expansion ships.
I’m not sure how this is really a negative though. If I’m doing M+ or raids I’m only paying attention to what I’m doing. I’ve never sat there and looked at other specs around me to see the visuals they’re shooting off.
That’s a pretty poor oversight then, isnt it? We’ve had them for years. It isnt as though they are a new thing. Not really a good excuse.
Also, I don’t really think it has been confirmed that the apparitions are actually causing performance issues…
As stated in other posts, if I am playing with friends, I wanna see their abilities and know they are seeing what I am doing too, especially if I have managed to make an army of apparitions. It makes the game feel more fun and alive.
It obviously has no impact if the person only cares about numbers or mechanics, or plays solo, but plenty of us enjoy the thematic elements and effects of the classes.
We haven’t always been able to generate quite as many as we currently can, is more the thing.
Again, they’d already turned them off in raid a while back for presumably the same reason. Now with Shadowcrash applying VT, you can quite easily get up to 10 targets for your apparitions in realistic scenarios.