i’m legitimately wondering how this even went live. does anyone actually enjoy the shadow crash aoe playstyle? if it even lands on your targets before tank moves them, it has a freaking target cap (like… why blizz? WHY? shadow crash and the god awful reticle is already so awkward and cumbersome, perish the thought your camera’s at a certain angle at the last second and shadow crash hits the wall instead of the floor) everything will be dead before you get in a few casts. heaven forbid it’s a big pull (or chain pull with shadow crash’s 20 second cooldown, again… WHY??? how was this not foreseen by professional developers!!!) with non-elite adds ala black rook hold and throne of the tides. and all of this hassle to pull aoe numbers that keep up with the tank.
absolutely MISERABLE to play shadow right now. as i said, mind-blowing they observed/monitored this in testing and said, “uh-yep! this is good!”
I tolerated shadow crash because I could mostly rely on a free mind sear back when we still had it. I agree it’s clunky and not fun. If you miss it your sol .
Other classes are always handed tools as soon as the spec is broken. It’s baffling because if they played their own game they would realize how much harder priest dps players have to work to keep up with other dps.
They took our choices out of the spec tree after saying that player choice was a good thing. That should not be tolerated and if anything a dev needs to pipe up and be honest why we are being neglected or at least acknowledge there is a problem and a fix is in the works. Shame on you blizzard.
Edit forgot to answer the post. I don’t think they are planning to fix us at all unless it’s at the beginning of next expansion. After that expect multiple heavy handed nerfs and the cycle comes back to where we are. So if you like spriest play it at the beginning of an expansion I guess.
Shadow Crash was alot of fun when it was a pure dmg ability, but now I totally hate it aswell. Shadow priest just doesn’t fit into modern wow with every class having aoe splash damage like how Legion class balance was with the DHs/Monks just aoe cleaving everything in m+ Blizzards solution has been to literally shape the entire game around aoeing mobs in m+, it’s a tragedy.
Yeah it’s honestly baffling. I played a bit on my demon hunter and hunter and was astounded by how much easy uncapped aoe they have. Hunters press multishot and bam everything is getting cleaved. DH press basically any button and everything is burning or bleeding or just getting hit.
Meanwhile my priest throws a shadow crash into a group and the enemy i was targetting isn’t even dotted because its randomly capped at 8. Wtf? WHY? Why is it capped ffs.
These devs don’t have a clue apparently.
You forgot to mention our idiotic 4set…which buffs the crash damage. So basicaly some 5head at blizzard thought that we want our aoe rely on our only dot spread ability…so they invented a tier set which have stacks that are trying to force you to sit the cd of your dot spread ability and also force you to cast dots manualy so your dot spreading ability will hit harder with stacks and bonus from mastery on already dotted targets…
Which is why our dots should just be an aoe insta cast like sunfire and shadow crash should be a burst spender on a choice node with psychic link. They can nerf or buff the numbers in testing but we need reliable aoe for God sake.
Expansion coming soon, they on cruise control from here on out. Outside of EZ +/- number changes don’t see any talent reworks etc. if a talent continues to suck will probably stay like that.
Seems like they’re pretty happy with what they’ve done to the spec - if they weren’t, they’d have come back to it like they did with discipline last winter and then again in the summer - so it seems unlikely. Blizzard tried to strike a middle ground between WoD shadow and SL shadow and they succeeded using only the bad parts of both styles.
well then shadow is in big big trouble, because it’s quite frustrating (which is one thing, but it isn’t worth the effort, either) when shadow crash is down for another 10 seconds so you have to hard cast your dots on every non-elite mob (and it isn’t much better with elite mobs, tbh) just to get no other casts in to use this total abomination that psychic link is before the pull is over, due to those who hit one button to get huge frontloaded aoe numbers (and your numbers are either on par, or worse than the tanks, and this is not hyperbole.) and also, just to point out, psychic link’s damage isn’t all that great even when it’s up for the beginning of a pull.
i’m really starting to believe those that say dot/ramp-up specs no longer have a place in the game. truly blows my mind blizzard actually dedicated the time to ‘reworking’ this spec, only to have it end up much much worse than before the rework. like, what in the freaking world are they doing? i guess i’ll just switch over to hunter/dh like everyone else, because shadow’s aoe playstyle right now is 100% objectively bad design.
Blizzard likes Shadow Crash even though it gets only negative feedback. It’s a unique damage ability so it’s understandable why they like it and there’s nothing objectively wrong with it, but it’s unique in how easy it is to fail with and how harmful a failure is. Missing Shadow Crash has always been more problematic than missing other AoE, but this season it’s dramatically worse due to the tier bonus, our other AoE being nerfed into being non-competitive, and Psychic Link being so weak that it’s often a genuine question whether it’s valuable to manually spread dots.
Blizzard has a long history of holding shadow (and priest in general) to a very different standard than other specs as evidenced just about everything about the class, so if I were to guess at their logic for this season it’s that they didn’t like how passive shadow’s AoE damage was in season 2 (even though they designed it to be that way last season and many other times in the past), so they set out to make it more of an active event so they nerfed everything that contributed to passive AoE. The problem they run into is that the only active AoE shadow has is Shadow Crash, which means they needed to put all of shadow’s AoE potential into that ability.
It’s not soon for us, definitely, but it’s soon / already upon the developers. Class attention has likely been shifting, if not already completely shifted months ago and the priority is solving problems more concretely with new resources and tools instead of trying to plaster over things one hotfix at a time.
I have a bad feeling they are going to stretch themselves so thin that the new hero skills/paths will get one iteration tune and it’s a shot in the dark if it will be anything decent. As far as priest is concerned I won’t hold my breath.
This is something about shadow that drives me mad. Whether it’s m+ or arena, you have to play out of your mind to get similar results as other classes that have half or none of the ramp up time that we have and then once we finally get going, it’s still not amazing damage.
Couple that with we’re amongst the (if not the) least mobile classes in the game, yet we are far from the tankiest
Not just about fun. I think the spec is fun and has a nice flow to most of the rotation, but it certainly is lacking hugely when it comes to continuous pulls and large scale aoe.
up even if you tried.