Shadow is in such a bad spot that I:
I want to play this class but I feel like I have to re-roll to another class because I want to push keys. I can’t because no one joins my key or invites me.
End rant.
Feel the same, my guild had me swap to holy priest because i was extremely unhappy with shadow and getting into 0 pugs.
Idk, damage in M+ at least feels like it’s kinda getting there / comparable to most specs. We still suck at situations like parasites on ovinax but I’m not sure that’ll ever not be the case.
I am doing my best to convince myself that the reason Blizzard had functionally zero changes for priest, did zero iteration on archon and voidweaver, and did the minimum amount of iteration to oracle to get it “playable” is that they didn’t want to dedicate any effort to the class because it’s getting a shaman-level redesign. This would mean that spending time iterating on Dragonflight priest would ultimately be wasted, so they simply got it playable and shipped it.
The problem they ran into was they ran out of time (again) and, rather than making some token and ill-conceived change for the sake of it, they decided to remain silent and continue working on the class until it was ready to be tested and they realized too late, perhaps because they didn’t believe the feedback they’ve gotten for years on end, that priest’s problems are too foundational to fix by giving a raid buff and reworking some passive talents to make things flow better. This would mean that dedicating to a much longer period of silence until they were ready to reveal the rework, hence priest’s unique omission from essentially all changes for 11.0 and 11.0.5.
Why do I think this? Because they “ran out of time” to rework priest three expansions in a row and most of priests’ particles are ancient. Despite priest being the only class to get get functionally zero changes for the expansion, it also has gotten its first new particles in years during TWW (Void Blast, Entropic Rift, Void Torrent, Resurrection cast animation) and some were added and removed (Void Crash). That means they’re actually doing things with priest behind the scenes.
But maybe it is just particles. That’s still more attention than Blizzard has given priest since Legion.
Bro, your supposed to puff puff pass, not inhale it all in one go and slip into a comatose state of an hopium high lol.
You must be messing with that good stuff lol.
In all seriousness though, what you say makes sense logically. But practically, with the Microsoft influence in tow, I just have little faith as a merger of that level is bound to cause a lot of friction which will either stifle any creative output that Priest desperately needs or people will just leave the company outright.
I suppose there is a slim chance for the merger to become more beneficial for the blizzard side of things in terms of creative justices firing on all cylinders but… I just don’t have any hope of that happening mainly because of my own experience working with Microsoft. It just doesn’t seem that likely. But happy to be wrong on this account.
I’m just on the regular stuff, but I’m doing way more of it.
I agree with everything you say here, except for one thing: every other class has had extensive work done on them between 10.2.5 and 11.0.5. The only change priest got was irrelevant to healers and removed a single global every ~30 seconds from the shadow rotation.
Whatever is going on behind the scenes would be affecting priest the same as it affects every other class, but priest’s treatment is an extreme outlier relative to every other class in the last six months - somehow even moreso than it has been in the last eight years.
The hopium is definitely speaking, but Blizzard repeatedly admitted they did priest dirty between PW:GFY and 10.0 and have spent all of 10.1 to 11.0.5 silently limiting the damage priest does to the game ecosystem (PI/ MD/soothe nerfs, replacing Light’s Wrath with uppies to significantly reduce disc’s ability to spike up health bars in raid, making evoker fill disc’s raid healing niche). They’ve chipped away at every aspect of priest’s identity and given everything priest does to one or more other classes, all of which do it better now. There has to be a point where they stop containing the problem and address the problem instead.
I just think that the work they did for the other classes was already in the works before big daddy Microsoft got fully invested and prior before those roots have taken hold.
But the further time passes by, the more of a stranglehold the MS boys will have on the blizz boys and with each passing day grows the concern of upper MS management making calls that could very well see any idea of effort put into Priest just put on the back burner or dropped completely because MS have other priorities that they want to shift the focus on.
I hope this is true! i Hope with all my soul!
Probably not, they may buff the dr fade gives, or reduce silences CD. Damage is actually really good.
Every class has a hard time getting to m+ as DPS.
Your score is fine but if you wanna get into 10s seeing as you push and not farm, you are actually far behind in ilvl. When I post a 10 key for completion, 630 ilvl DPS sign up. It’s not the class, it’s you’re 619. It takes me like a minute to get into a pug 8 or 9. 10, could be an hour, and only completion runs. And that’s because the player base as a whole sucks at 10s, not shadow.