TL;DR = This is not the first time I say this in here: our damage-over-time spells are a joke, and our dmg is way too spread out in way too many mechanics, making this class a rather poor hybrid one. The spec tree feels thematically disconnected because of this, especially towards the end, and many talents should be merged, freeing up space and possibly giving more space to DoT oriented talents, which is, at the end of the day, this spec core.
Right now, there are way too many problems with shadow priest that, unsurprisingly, weren’t addressed yet. Which makes me extremely sad because shadow priest is my main since forever. You guys keep trying to make spriest a hybrid class which only hurts the spec and despite all the reworks you still can’t get it right.
I’ll start with the core spec:
Silence is on the spec tree, why is it there? No other dps spec has their silence tied to the spec tree.
Shadow Word: Pain (sw:p) dmg is way too low. I know sw:p is free cast, but the dmg is just negative.
Vampiric Touch (vt) is doing all the work of our other dots, especially true about sw:p. HOWEVER, vt is easily dispelled and not punishable enough. 2s fear in pvp is not a big deal for most healers. See affliction warlocks and the huge chunk of dmg a healer takes if they dare to dispel those dots, besides being SILENCED.
Devouring Plague (DP), our spender, isn’t simply a threat. It only starts doing noticeable dmg when you triple cast it on the same target, increasing its dmg. HOWEVER, our insanity generation is extremely low to consider accumulating it in order to increase DP dmg.
Shadowy Apparitions (SA) makes no sense nowadays that the spec is no longer tied to critical dmg. And the dmg is also very much low. The only way to make it viable is to spec into those talents that honestly nobody is interested outside a tierset busting it even further. Isn’t it time to rethink SA?
Or even better, isn’t it time to get rid of Psychic Link? Isn’t it time to give its dmg to SA and revert it to Legion/BfA?
Void Eruption (VE) mechanic is anathema to Ancient Madness (AM) talent. If you go into VE, you wanna stay as long as you can in it, but then AM loses its value quickly, making it a frustrating/wasteful talent. What’s even worse is linking Mind Devourer (MD) to AM. Players are already reluctant to take AM in PvP since the bonus is simply not worthy. MD being RNG is also quite frustrating and unreliable.
Is it really necessary for Voidtouched to exist? Shouldn’t it be merged into another talent, like Mind’s Eye? The same is true about Phantasmal Pathogen and Auspicious Spirits. Why have 2 separate talents when they could very well be JUST ONE?
Why should Dark Evangelism exist? 2 points disputed between the other better talents for just 10% increase in our dots? Doesn’t it feel weak?
Screams of the Void (SotV) is the ONLY talent that makes justice to our DoTs, but it’s locked past two talents that barely has anything to do with dots. SotV and Idol of N’Zoth should be switched places with Insidious Ire. I say you should buff SotV, make it last longer. If you’re not increasing our dots dmg, then at least buff SotV.
Idol of N’Zoth is extremely weak in pvp. Very useless. There are only two talents worth taking that positively interact with our dots and it’s Maddening Touch and SotV.
Torment Spirits shouldn’t exist the way it does. Our spec no longer relies on critical dmg, making it a rather unsatisfying talent to use. The only reason we’re specing into it is due to our tierset. Outside of that, it won’t see play.
Now a couple of considerations regarding the Voidweaver:
Entropic Rift is the main appeal of this hero talent, but it’s hitting less than Yogg-Saron or C’Thun. Why is that? Is it because of Collapsing Void? That dmg is split though, and many mobile players won’t dare stand next to it.
Our dots need more damage, so buff Inner Quietus and add to it a function similar to Sotv.
If you’re going to nerf Void Blast to oblivion (heh), then at least you should be giving its dps to other parts of the spec.
That’s it. I have nothing to add about Archon. I hope you devs take these points into consideration, please!
I’ve always thought vampiric touch being dispelled should instead place a heal absorb onto the victim and dispeller equal to 100%-300% of the damage the dot had remaining when dispelled. Something like that. It would play into the vampire theme of stealing life from those it touches.
More generally, I think you’re right, shadow suffers from too many things buffing other things. How many talents do we have buffing our dots? Providing short damage increases, all stacking together to make our damage somewhat decent intermittently?
Then our mastery providing 20-30% (depending on how much you have) extra damage PER DOT. It makes the spec at its core feel really weak. Like it’s got all these different boosters and bandaids holding it up.
Personally I really dislike shadows mastery. I know it’s supposed to be the whole “spreading plague” theme so the dots all boost our damage, but really all it does is make you feel like you’re underperforming whenever you don’t have all 3 dots up. Plus it’s irritating that any healer can gut your damage by 60% with 1 dispel. It’s a MAJOR flaw and weakness of the spec. If our damage is going to be so tightly linked to dots, then strong dispel protection is necessary.
I think the mastery should be changed to something else. Something that isn’t so fragile and easily disrupted. Make it affect apparition damage or something. That would give us both single target and multi target damage but it wouldn’t have such a weakness to dispels. Just tossing out ideas
I’m not the PvPer I used to be and I tend to stay away from commenting on PvP in the stuff I do because of it, but I can see it looks absolutely dire.
Spec’s built for a game that’s long gone, and every nerf it got for PvE hit it twice as hard in PvP.
This is also a delayed and therefore feels bad type of mastery.
You can often find yourself killing a target or it running away or you die yourself long before your spirits actually reach the target.
This is why I think we should go back to Mental Anguish that we had in WoD where it enhanced a select number of your Mind Spells.
But instead of just enhancing some of your Mind Spells, it should enhance all your Mind Spells.
Doing this will make any gameplay build value Mastery as no matter what, you will be using a fair amount of Mind Spells in your damage rotation.
Then bring back Mind Sear and it would also buff Mindgames in PvP and then suddenly, your damage can be felt in a pretty impacting way regardless if you have dots on the target or not.
Then just take our current mastery Shadow Weaving and make it a bottom talent option in our talent tree for a static increase to your damage (something like 5-10% increase damage) with each dot applied on target. That way it can be opted out of if you didn’t want to deal with that issue but for more PvE situations you can still have that type of gameplay enhancement included as your personal preference.
If this Shadow Weaving talent proves too strong, then it can be moved to perhaps the middle section but only enhance periodic damage and as such is more aligned to a dot/rot build with Mind Flay, Mind Sear and Void Torrent being enhanced alongside your dot damage spells. Then Idol of N’Zoth and C’Thun would benefit from this as well.
Leaving Idol of Y’Shaarj and Yogg-Saron leaning more non-periodic damage based.
I don’t have access to the beta, so I can’t comment on the hero talents. But I do agree with most of your points, op.
I also wanna add that I wish the spec wasn’t so heavily reliant on Void torrent for any decent damage, especially when it leaves you vulnerable to cc as you’re standing there channelling it. No other caster has this problem.
The spec definitely needs buffs to its damage and survivability to make it stand out as a true dps spec, and not just a support spec for the team like it is right now with its barely average damage.
You kinda answered this. We have way too many damage sources, and they are adding even more. In that case nothing can realy do big dam on its own. And i think that is a big issue for sp, especialy in pvp where you cannot stand and funnel your damage and consistently keep those billion “piss” spurces up to make some noticeable boom from all of them combine.
Instead you spend 80% of the game recasting dots, that doesnt do any damage, just for them to get dispelled, but without them on target nothing else does any damage either, so xou HAVE to cast them. Its absolutely idiotic design and im saying that even without mentiong the kicks, micro ccs and lack of mobility compared to every single other spec except another priests.
This class needs a completely separate pvp desing from pve. It just doesnt work.
The class needs to be modernized, we can all see it’s a Frankenstein of mismatched talents that make no sense and have little to no synergy with eachother.
-Shadow Apparition needs to go away, Psychic Link alreadly does it’s job 100 times better.
-VT and Shadow Word Pain should just be one spell at this point.
-We need a reliable way of doing AoE that isn’t tied to a clunky 20sec cooldown.
-Give us basic some mobility for god sake.
-Need some insta-casts for pvp, getting perma interrupted is no way to play a modern caster.
I’m so tired of The Devs just tweaking our numbers as if that fixes the problem.
I picked up my spriest a week ago and I can confirm it’s a hot mess of boiled garbage.
You really feel like you have negative impact. Like I would be better off with my (insert spec), why am I holding these people back. The playstyle is clunky and feels like it has no identity. At this point why do we have to choose void torrent as a talent? It’s the only spell that hits hard why wouldn’t it be baseline.? This is almost as bad as legion shadow. That’s when I quit wow for the first time. Blizz needs to separate the void and shadow playstyles and focus on a spec that’s fun and works not one or the other. Super unhappy about priest as a whole.
True. With Psychic Link so dominant right now, SA has no reason to exist. And most SA talents we have can very well be merged into a single talent. I miss Damnation skill, it used to make multidotting easier and alleviate insanity consumption in our opener. Now we barely have a decent opener.
Now that we’re very reliant on mastery, it gets really worse. The lack of mobility also makes everything harder for us, even when playing as a void elf. Many things have to change with this spec, but they’re just interested in buffing surge of insanity procs.
True. With Psychic Link so dominant right now, SA has no reason to exist. And most SA talents we have can very well be merged into a single talent. I miss Damnation skill, it used to make multidotting easier and alleviate insanity consumption in our opener. Now we barely have a decent opener.
They’re going to do exactly what they did throughout DF. 5% buff here, 3% buff there. Finally after a year, we’ll feel somewhat balanced and start hitting goals easier.
It’s kind of crazy how careful they are with SP’s, but so careless with dh, ret, rogue etc
