Here are my concerns for shadow priest, having played Shadow in Vanilla, TBC, and Wrath. I know it’s early and there will be more balance changes and new runes in the 40, 50, and 60 brackets so I’m not dooming too hard about it. Maybe some of these points are wrong or I’m missing something so feel free to correct me.
- Spriest’s 3 main vanilla spells still won’t scale well if they’re still in their patch 1.12 balance state, the number I’ve seen online is that Shadow Word: Pain, Mindflay, and Mind Blast scale with spell power a little over 40% as effectively as a Mage’s Fireball does w/spell power (just spell power scaling, not even getting into crit yet.)
- MF and SW:P can never crit, making crit a wasted stat, and MB can crit but has a relatively long cooldown compared to fireball/frostbolt/shadow bolt/starfire/wrath/lightning bolt.
- Spriest lacks a 100% crit bonus damage talent, and their one spell that can crit will always crit for 66% the damage of every other caster’s crits.
- All this means is that spriest will scale well under half as much as mages do with spell power and crit, and their crits will always hit for 66% of the damage of every other caster’s crits on only 1 single spell that has a long CD.
- Also spriests have no crit in their talents and hover at around 7% crit at level 60, maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get slightly more with gear, but that would really be a waste of crit gear since every other caster in the game would benefit from it way more and would likely be prio’d the gear in most guilds.
- Also we oom in less than half a minute at 60 and there are no apparent mana changes yet, just new spells to oom us faster.
Mind Sear and 3 target SW:P is cool though, and if homunculi’s armor debuff stacks with other armor debuffs, that’s a cool execute range CD for us. Also Twisted Faith is cool, though it would be cooler if MB and MF scaled better to begin with.