Once upon a time, priests had spectral guise, which gave three seconds of stealth or until our lasting illusion was attacked three times. It was a great ability. When I saw Spectral Illusion on the talent tree for midnight, I was thrilled. That is, until I realized it doesn’t work against players. There is no stealth… they still see you. What is the damn point? Oh, PvE, of course. What was I thinking?
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We almost lost greater fade in Midnight, the reality is we have a lot of tools - shroud, fade, SOTR, SWD compared to other healers partly because we lack the mobility to dodge. We definitely don’t need a stealth affected. It doesn’t make sense for our class fantasy and it would be wildly overbalanced given the pruning to healer CC. Greater fade is definitely strong enough as is.
The way the mechanics of this game are set up, it heavily favors mobility and immunity over reduction.
Meaning if you can’t avoid or immune incoming assaults, then you can get taken out with a big hit or from from 1000 smaller strikes.
If you can’t avoid or immune slows and forced movement, then you can quite literally get your entire gaming experience shut down without having a fighting chance.
So as a priest, when you are unable to clear or immune things like slows or avoid or clear things like stuns and interrupts, then both the weaknesses of being easily slowed/rooted and unable to cast because you can’t immune or avoid the oncoming onslaught, you essentially become a target dummy for the opponent to freely lay into you without much of a fight.
Add on top the ability to easily remove most of the passive damage in dispelling magic debuffs that the Priest would inflict and now you make it hard for the Priest to cast because you are limited in avoiding being shut down and limited in avoid damage outright alongside other forms of CC and now your own damage is severely reduced because a major part of the passive damage you deal can easily be cleared with a simple dispel.
No other class has all those negatives stacked on top of one another to culminate into the perfect storm of being a liability.
Back in Mop and WoD when Spectral Guise was a thing, it provided actual breathing room to set up your attack. It lasted just long enough to get going and with Psychic Horror as a stun, Psychic Scream and Silence and the ability to use Spectral Guise in both offense and defense actually provided a well rounded toolkit to get things done.
Perhaps it’s too powerful for Holy and Discipline but that’s where they could at least have a PvP talent that enhances Spectral Illusion to be more akin to Spectral Guise specifically for Shadow.
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I feel like this is mixing many different issues together. The question is how should shadow play in PvP and what are its tradeoffs. I don’t think mobility was really a key factor for shadow in TWW given they were fairly tanky. They just need to move enough to pull people out of position, which is what fade enables.
This was over a decade ago, it’s not really relevant to discussing PvP in 2026.
The real question that should be asked is how does shadow face tank and set up gos without its strongest defensive and stun.
IMO there’s already too much stealth in arena and it’s a clunky mechanic. Gfade is really strong and I’m glad they saw sense in not removing it, but shadow needs things other than making fade stronger.
Going to actually second this. Fade already has way to many talents for it as is, and with how heavily the class as a whole, but especially holy and shadow, have been pruned they need to be looking at adding new tools instead of trying to cram more garbage into fade.
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That indeed is the question.
But my response is that being a class that is essentially a target dummy in that it can get shut down and it does not have any escapes just multiplies the incoming damage because you cannot reset the damage by going into a stealth state where you can drop your target frame from the enemy or immune the incoming damage or have access to a displacement ability to do a soft reset of the incoming damage and you are still locked down during the defensive cooldown of Disperse as it prevents you from dealing damage while still allowing the enemy to build up energy or rage or secondary resource to just dump it all on you after you exit your state or just plow through it because the effectiveness isn’t near what it used to be and instead of target switching, they can usually just tunnel you to death anyway.
Every other class has some sort of escaping the incoming damage onslaught and often multiple ways.
So what’s a priest to do?
Priests are uniquely set up to be forced to just take on the full damage bursts of everyone with no recourse to escape it and people wonder why you just get popped like a zig in an insta gib moment? It’s not that difficult to see why.
So the conclusion is be it an escape in the form of dropping target frames in a stealth format or an immunity or a displacement ability, if priest does not have access to any of these while also having poor damage reduction to compensate, priests have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to dealing with incoming damage.
Then to cap it all off, the primary way Shadow deals with incoming damage is to leech back its life by also doing damage but without a means to ensure you can get your spells off since we can’t be immune to stun or interrupt or have the ability to chase those that line of sight away the damage allowing enemies having a very simple escape route to ensure the priest can’t recover.
The problem with putting that onto the Fade skill is currently fades 10% DR coupled with 10% DR fron Flash Heal is your primary way to tank.
Adding a stealth mechanic to a damage reduction mechanic really doesn’t work, one assumes you will take damage hense it reduces it, while the other expects you to avoid the damage making the DR less valuable.
This is one of the many reasons why it needs to be a new spell or mechanic and not tied to fade simply because it used to be on fade in the past.
Just like how you can have tentacles activate on the target AFTER the fear from Psychic Scream has concluded, you can have the damage reduction of Fade only trigger AFTER the spectral Image or Spectral Guise Shadow Clone thingy fades which also means after your stealthed state ends as well.
It’s not a complicated problem to solve.
They just simply need the will to do so.
Also, to address the idea that you cast Flash Heal to trigger a temporary damage reduction buff is one of the most moronic ideas to ever be implemented. It only shows that they can’t think of something else that just naturally flows with the spec and instead make an awkward setup just because whatever it works?
So many half baked ideas in regards to priest is just pathetic.
It would make more sense that whenever you Power Word: Shield yourself, you receive a temporary damage mitigation or the damage absorbs by your shield while it’s on you is doubled so it’s always a weaker shield on others but is twice as strong on you if you cast it on yourself or just have it so if you receive a Power Word: Shield from any source, the damage absorb is twice as much. That way be it your shield or another Priests shield, you gain the benefit.
But noooo, instead, tying a damage reduction mechanic to a healing spell makes way more sense than the actual primary damage reduction spell since vanilla according to the devs working on priest every 3 expansions.
Simply unbelievable how much of a missed opportunity that is.
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I don’t disagree with this and think most priests would agree Protective Light is stupid and bad design, but sadly as bad as it is it doesn’t erase the reality that priest is about the only class, that I know of off hand, that can have 20% DR active 50% of the time. The implimentation is garbage but is effect is strong.
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