The spell visual and sound is so outdated and old is awful to cast and to see those ravens above your head that doesn’t go with the actual theme of shadow priest (like voidweaver).
Please fix it!
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The Ravens are an effect of the talent Insidious Ire.
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Personally I love the ravens visuals. They look awesome in my undead shadow priest
And DP VFX on the targets looks cool compared to other dots in the game (Actually to me the coolest VFX for a dot)
I don’t mind tho if they want to add a glyph for some of these changes, but I wouldn’t like the visuals to change permanently
I don’t have that talent and I didn’t asked for that effect
I agree it needs to be updated, but not because of the Insidious Ire ravens. It’s just a puff of smoke and an Absolution shoulder piece with a translucent purple filter placed on it rotating upward. The quality of that animation is extremely low, but that’s par for shadow given Mind Spike, Dark Ascension, MFI, Yogg-Saron, and Shadow Crash. Also priest generally, with spells like Flash Heal, PWS, and PWR all using vanilla effects, and spells like Penance using 2007 particles. At least Penance’s ancient particles do mostly hold up, and are often masked by PotDS and Dark Reprimand.
As an aside, Devouring Plague should also be renamed to something more thematically aligned with shadow (Shadow Word: X or Mind X).
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Actually true, the updated Halo visuales it could have been great they could actually update SC,DV and more… Dark Ascension is just horrible to look at.
I prefer keeping Devouring Plague primarily because my main Priest is Undead but also because Priests used to have the best Disease dispel in the game with Abolish Disease which attempted to remove a disease effect every 5 seconds, lasting 20 seconds.
Because of this, I see the removal of Disease as a major focus for Healing Priests and since Shadow is basically the inverse of Healing Priests then applying disease effects instead of removing them fits with that inverse logic.
However, regarding the name change to something more fitting, you remind me of Legion when they had the talent Shadow Word: Void which upgraded Mind Blast.
Our talents were pathetic back then as well. So sad lol.
Edit:
Now that I think about it, I think Priests should get Cure Disease as default and then replace Curse Disease talent with Abolish Disease which would upgrade Cure Disease to become Abolish Disease.
That at least would be a slight QOL upgrade that could be quite useful in PvP at least when up against Unholy Death Knights but also against other Shadow Priests.
Oh man… I love this vfx lol, it feels so dark. I compare it to things like Corruption/UA from Warlocks and I feel like Spriest has way better VFX for that.
Looks cooler on big targets where you see it more clear.
I think shadow priest in terms of visual this expansion is the best so far. Specially Voidweaver Hero Talent.
I think all that could be adressed with glyphs. Specially for Shadowform which I think deserves some cosmetic glyphs
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They can’t even make it possible to disable the shadow form 
I recently created a thread about class design where I said about it
The appropriate comparison would be to Malefic Rapture and I don’t think that ability looks particularly good either, but at least it’s not using some Frankensteined combination of vanilla and TBC assets.
Shadow priest is often considered one of the best specs in terms of visuals, but it’s hard carried by its theme. The quality of so many of its animations is extremely poor and the ones that are very nice, like Vampiric Touch and Mind Blast, are so small that nobody really ever sees them. For what it’s worth, we can also be grateful that many of our terrible assets like Mind Spike and Dark Ascension are also so small that people usually don’t see those, either.
actually a lot of shadow priest effects are old and ugly af
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In short, Priest is one of the most visually outdated classes. 
If you don’t opt for Voidweaver, you basically get nothing exciting going on.
Focusing just on the Shadow spec (the one I play), the worst offenders are:
- Power Word: Shield visual is so bad that looks like a graphic setting put on ‘lowest’ due to how blurry and faded it is;
- Mind Flay became worse than the OG version when it was remade, and yet ever since we didn’t see an attempt to make it look more pleasant - Insanity procs need to look more impactful because in fact it is one of the strongest things in the kit;
- Shadowy Apparitions, although they were reworked a couple of times, I don’t think they ever hit a good visual spot with them just yet;
- Shadow Crash’s projectile looks like a low polygon relic from BC era. For how often we use this, I wish it had a complete makeover to look like an actual energy crashing effect instead of a ‘boulder’. And on a technical side, making it 2-3x faster.
- Dark Ascension… I feel the angelic wings is completely fanasy-breaking for this. I suppose DA is a way to beckon at how the Shadow Priest of old was, referencing the Shadow Ascendants in lore, who resemble more of a wraith-like figure
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_ascendantit would be cool if it looked a little more like that.
Honorable mention to also update Levitate to use the “Combat-levitate” animations when you’re engaged in combat, and please remove the baseline sparkles and add glyphs for both holy and shadowy effects.
Spriests levitate with actual shadow particles in the character selection screen. Why can’t we have in in the actual game?
2 Likes
In what way?
Dark Ascension is just a renamed Dark Archangel that was accessible in the early part of the Discipline talent tree back in Cataclysm.
You could build up a stacking buff of Evangelism or Dark Evangelism using Smite or Mind Flay respectively and then consuming your buff and entering your Angelic state and receiving a buff accordingly based on if you activated Archangel or Dark Archangel.
The theme is Angelic in nature and is essentially the primary priest archetype that we see with many feather and wing references in our spell names, spell visuals and tier set pieces.
To go in any other direction aside from Angelic is what should be considered fantasy breaking.
The problem is they just didn’t delve deeper down to flush out the angelic experience.
Take Paladin for example, they represent a warrior of light and that extends throughout all 3 specializations using similar or the exact same abilities across all specs to create a solid and cohesive bridge and identity for each spec.
They have the opportunity to do the same with Priest in using the Angelic theme to bridge the gap between all priest specs and simply have the dark/light slant when moving from Holy to Shadow.
The issue however is that actually requires preplanned thought and execution which as we all know, priests are just an afterthought and are only given just enough work to make it seem like they didn’t absolutely forget the class exists, if just barely.
I like Dark Ascension tbh. More than Void Eruption.
The Dark Archangel theme is peak shadow priest design for me
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Personally, I feel like they’ve moved away from the angel aesthetic with discipline and shadow over the last decade and would greatly prefer that Dark Ascension get new particles that don’t involve angel wings, and then add a glyph allowing people to use the Cataclysm effect instead if they like.
It made sense with Disc, but not with Shadow, as I kind of feel that the specs already create that collective cohesion. Shadow in an exteme of a spectrum while Holy is in the other, and Disc serving as the in between.
I guess if the actual wings were more “edgy” or “wraith-y”, wouldn’t bother me as much. They look too cute.
So Malthael from Diablo 3 then?
Imo that is the ideal vision for Shadow Priest theme and his aesthetic is on point.
Dark Angel of Death.