OK so im one of those that plays all classes at least superficially to better understand what they do when facing them.
Now that having been said i finally circled back to my priest, who ive never really enjoyed all that much largely due to the forced shadow appearance. AND IM HAVING A FREAKING BALL WITH IT.
Im loving the toolkit, the available options, and im having no problem with large groups or difficult mobs. And love the option to go holy or disc for group play. Although im still not fond of the shadow appearance, at all, even with glyph, im trying to see passed that.
And yet all im reading is how bad it is. I realize it isnt going to top the dps meters but the utility and flexibility makes that much easier to stomach for me.
Granted im only 114 at this point so im guessing its a scalability issue or something? Someone fill me in here what am i missing, what is all the hate about?
Umm…at least get to 120 first. Leveling does not show the problems. You’re in the very early stages of a ‘puppy love’ and/or ‘honeymoon period’ of the spec.
It’s like a teen girl finding their first love and the very first question is, “I don’t understand why people get divorced. Can someone explain this to me?”
Yikes.
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Of course, but other classes that people rave about i had far more trouble leveling with so the issues were much more apparent.
For example, Ele Sham, or Bal Druid … they were terrible to level IMO, the issues were clear very early on.
I guess what im looking for is what are the reasons for the hate at 120?
The way the spec works, everything you do gets filtered through this lens of voidform. Nothing is powerful on its own, and it leads to a situation where you’ve designed a spec to work around them only reaching their potential in very specific situations like 4+ minute raid encounters and very high m+ keys where mobs take a long time to die.
Essentially it works like this. At the start of an expansion you can get maybe 20 voidform stacks. You are balanced around this, you reach your peak damage after 20~ seconds and any content that lasts about that long or longer feels good. I want to stress also that peak =/= average. Shadow takes even longer than that to reach its average or overall DPS, while most specs start well above their average with a frontloaded burst, and then gradually come down, shadow has to do the reverse and build up towards it over an extended period of time. As the peak gets further back, naturally so does the average.
Then as the expansion goes on, you get more stacks in raid combat, 30, then 40 etc. Except you still have to be tuned compared to other DPS specs. Now it takes you 30-40 or more seconds to reach that peak, in the meantime at that 20 second mark (Where you had been at full power earl on in the expansion) you’re relatively worse off. It creates this feeling of power progression being detrimental anywhere except raid encounters where the long ramp ups isn’t as much of a downside. Meanwhile every other spec just gets stronger, more frontloaded, and burstier as things progress.
Shadow is wired backwards compared to every other DPS spec, and while it’s got an enjoyable rotational flow, the feel of power it should provide just lacks. Right now I don’t really reach my potential in voidform until a solid minute after the fight starts… This also ignores shadows near complete inability to burst something or provide priority damage on the fly, something we used to be very very good at it, and has only become more important in modern wow as expansions progress.
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It has been detailed out by the Priest community here and elsewhere.
If that’s not enough or doesn’t connect / make sense to you compared to what you see during your play then why worry about it? If you like it then continue liking it.
I would say however that if you do start becoming disillusioned with it as many of us have then it would be quite useful to relay your fresh observations here.
From what I am deducing however, you haven’t had any experience on Priest until now? Else you wouldn’t come off as so fresh to it and inexperienced with what / why the issues are what they are.
If that’s the case, then I would also assume you never played Shadow before the Legion revamp and thus you don’t have prior experience / knowledge on how the class played / felt meaning you only have a portion of the puzzle so you don’t see the entire picture of what was and what is.
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Excellent, yeah this is about what i expected.
I dont have alpha access and from what ive heard many arent to happy as yet still expecting more to come.
Many classes have a build up problem ive noticed, its always seem to be those with a secondary resource pool that has to build up to use, such as maelstrom or rage, or Astral power, of these Druid i think its the only one that actually can choose a skill to reset the pool to half out of combat over starting from scratch.
Others such as Hunters start with full and deplete.
I think the problem really is the build and spend model as opposed to simply having it at the beginning of the fight. Perhaps im over simplifying it.
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Shadows problem isn’t that building insanity is slow. It’s that building insanity is only the start of what will then be a much much longer process of getting reasonable voidform stacks. Taking a couple seconds to build a resource is not a problem to me, it’s that shadow can’t spend it itself, and instead has to wait 50-60 seconds for any real damage to materialise.
Again I stress, this is not about having our resource available on pull. Starting at 100 insanity would have absolutely zero impact on fixing the issue.
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Your assumptions are not entirely true but i have not played it very much aside from getting to max level and some minimal understanding for the last couple expansions.
Thus the question.
Yeah, there are a few classes/specs that functionally also start low and ramp up - I found Ele Sham similar to Shadow Priest in open-world content for that reason. One part of it is that Shadow’s ramp-up takes even longer than those other specs do to get to full power (the building resource here is Voidform stacks, not just insanity - it’s basically a build/spend resource based off another build/spend resource). Another part is that Shadow didn’t use to be this way. It used to have a playstyle that was not heavily based on build/spend, and people who enjoyed that previous version are very upset it got changed into this style they dislike and didn’t sign up for. Having something taken away makes people feel much worse than never having that thing to begin with.
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I agree ive never liked the voidform situation, its one of the reason most of my priest time in recent xpacs was in disc or holy. Then again ive never been fond of even shadowform to be honest, you put together a nice transmog and basically look like a dark fart cloud, but i digress.
I misc disc as a viable dps option from long ago, there really should be a holy ranged dps spec, but thats another discussion.
They seem intent on keeping these various build spend style things but thats what puts those classes at disadvantage clearly.
Regardless im having a lot of fun right now, more than i have with a lot of others… and as said im not expecting to top meters just be viable and competitive. I like the ranged hybrid play style and none of them are without issues.
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I don’t think builder spender design is an inherent problem. It’s more that the way blizzard has done it for most specs has been to build them around interactions with their spender, which leads to a disproportionately powerful spender and then disproportionately weak builders to balance it out.
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Fair point. Ultimately it comes down to haw fast you get into it, and whether or not it balances out the weaker phase enough.
I think it should start full and available then go into the build spend phase, would make a world of difference perhaps?
For shadow, that would make no difference at all. As I’ve said the majority of concerns players have about the playstyle or damage pattern has nothing to do with the insanity bar starting at 0.
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I don’t know, it seems like it’d be a large QoL life improvement to simply have insanity generation out of combat. Starting almost every encounter with a full bar sure would be nice. It wouldn’t solve all the scaling issues but it’d feel better in dungeons and out in the world.
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As said, Voidform stacks is the underlying build/spend resource here, not insanity. If fights started with full Voidform stacks, heck yes it would make a world of difference.
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It would also, conversely, make very little sense from a gameplay or thematic perspective. Which is where shadow comes unstuck with this problem whilst conventional specs don’t.
what do you mean with Big? You mean it takes a long time to ramp up? because I don’t think ramp damage is big it’s just that you’re able to cast your spells faster and sooner but only if you can ramp up. Also…
#removevoidform
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yes, I mean outside voidform your damage is like a disc priest
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so you might wanna worded like “ramp up is long and outside VF dps is low”
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Were also ignoring in Shadowlands that VF rewards absolutely nothing as baseline and only does a stacking haste buff with talents thats in the mid teens. Hardly felt.
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