What is Shadows Niche supposed to be?

Classes Priest
1

If you compare Shadow Priest to other Ranged DPS classes I am struggling to understand what is the niche for this class. Lets compare:

Devastation Evoker/Arcane Mage

A shadow priest has objectively MUCH worse mobility…

Small scale/Large scale AOE…

Single Target DMG…

Survivability…

Furthermore both of these classes bring Lust (as well as Shaman and Hunter), Warlocks bring Brez are tankier and higher dmg profile ST, AOE small and AOE big.

So if you compare mobility, survivability, burst DPS, sustained DPS, ST, AOE 2-8 mobs, AOE 8+… Shadow Priest isnt shining in ANY area, theres NO reason to bring a Priest thats going to do less damage to trash, mid dmg to bosses and be a world harder to heal because their defensives are Dispersion which makes u unable to act, or a 1.5m cd 30% health increase which mitigates less damage than a basic 20% dr.

There have been times where Shadow Priests could look forward to a type of fight be it ST, 2T or AOE and know that at least they were useful in one area. Now you are likely to just lag the Fury/Ret or whatever other class is using a 90iq dps rotation with limited combat keybinds and WA tracking, vs a Shadow Priest where you need to 200iq a 90 parse only to be 9th dmg in the raid behind the tanks wife who rolled a Havoc DH.

edit
Crazy ideas (perma DR, perma cast while moving, perma psychic link in combat)

Inner Will should be a perma % DR on Shadow Priests like an active D-Stance…

Levitate allows you to cast while moving and doesnt drop in combat.

Psychic Link doesnt need DoT’s its just on whatever is red/in-combat. I just wanna dps not worry about dotting adds over here and there.

Maybe a talent that gets rid of the dots and transfers the DPS power to your spells. One thing I noticed about Evoker is dragonrage is so bad the power budget tied up in their 2min CD is like nothing whereas in Priest Void Form is our life.

Small tunings aint gonna do much for this class. @me if you’ve had the absolute mistery of Queen Ansurek heroic. When am I supposed to stop and cast during P1? During P2? Youre either positioning poison spawns, moving out of them, moving into exploding green glob, moving the webs together or moving away from grips… Shadow Priest cannot handle this like classes with a modern game design.

2 Likes
2

Spriest feels like the best all around caster outside of Mage, which is retardedly OP.

Your damage is good, but not great.
Your survivability is good, bordering on great.
Your utility is solid with Fort and PI.
Your ability to handle AOE pull to pull is very strong (though at times clunky for aiming)
You have the ability to do any type of AOE without having a particular weak spot.

Your mobility is basically your one major issue, and you have talents to help with it, even if they aren’t spectacular.

I’d wager the only reason M+ isn’t Aug/Mage/Spriest for dps is because Frost DK is so grossly strong right now. When they eventually get neutered, I’d 100% expect Shadow to be the go to.

Bear/Aug/Mage/Spriest/Resto Sh sounds like such a strong team it is sorta nutty.

3

Maybe you just don’t like dot classes anymore.

4

Shadow Priest hasn’t been a DoT class since before Legion.

The spec is already too far into the direct damage niche, DoTs being a supplementary feature of the spec to boost your other spell’s damage.

To make DoTs feel like they do impactful damage again, they would need to rework the spec tree and offer talents that enhance your DoTs (DoT build), then on the other side of the tree, offer talents that continue to strengthen the direct damage playstyle.

This would require them actually reworking our class in the first place though.

3 Likes
5

Shadow priest has often felt like a hybrid of direct and dot spells. Personally I prefer a dot centric style, but shadow atm is very direct damage now. Its dots are little more than window dressing. (Load bearing window dressing apparently) Since our damage is heavily affected by their presence.

I like the idea of a hybrid damage profile, but it’s not where it’s at for now.

1 Like
6

Shadow doesn’t need more innate tankiness, it needs some way to make space and it needs a serious rework to allow it to stand on its own. Things that fit into the hybrid nature of a class with two healing specs and one DPS spec, but not too the degree that augevoker is.

There’s a million ways to change it that would make it more useful overall, but I don’t really think Blizzard wants to spend the resources on another Legion level rework even though we’ve seen that done for other specs.

I’m happy to see the damage buffs because of we’re going to be clunky with very little of it’s own identity, at least we can provide adequate DPS.

1 Like
7

I hope this is a troll post. Do you regularly play spriest? Playing any other ranged dps is much much easier without having to sacrifice defensive vs an interrupt. Being so slow and trying to get mechanics in makes dps suffer horribly.

Utility outside fort is nearly zero

6 Likes
8

Do you? You look like you just hit 80.

Seen plenty of amazing spriests dpsing dungeons and raids. They are NOT mage level, but few people are. They are way more useful than most other ranged dps.

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9

My literal only input here is that I just, don’t enjoy the play-style of Shadow as much as I used to. Not at all qualified to talk about the balance or tuning part, but I’d love to see Shadow resemble its legion play-style more.

That is all.

1 Like
10

Shadow’s problem is that while it’s decent to good at the things it does well, there’s a disturbing list of common situations that it straight up cannot handle with any degree of effectiveness.

All specs are good at some things, bad at others, but everyone else is at least capable of everything to some degree.

Shadow is not good enough at the things it’s good at to be this bad at the things it is bad at. BM hunter is currently in a similar position.

8 Likes
11

I think the niche is aimed at intentionally bad/underperforming.

I haven’t tried any druid this expansion but Spriest is definitely the clunkiest and most chaotic rotation between all the other DPS specs.

All of the complaints are valid, but a few minor things, you should be spamming fade everytime damage is coming 10% reduction is still 10%.

I do think internally at blizzard they are also calling all the Healing output as a counter to it being a stronger dps output. Because Spriest is dropping 200k-300k HPS with vamp and nova its not as important to drop big damage. I don’t agree with them on this but I do feel its written on a white board at Blizz HQ for what the Spriest is bringing to a group.

They have to do something about mobility and its impact on casting though. Either they tone the fights way down so there isn’t a requirement for the 60-90% movement uptime in every single boss or they give some reliable movement options.

The 11.0.5 fixes aren’t going to win anyone over sadly, and that’s probably the worst of it. Were going into a 4th (or 5th) round of useless teeny %dmg increase that we can already see are not fixing anything and Blizz is staying 100% committed to radio silence. It hurts that they won’t even say what they are thinking about the class in general.

Rework on the way? They actually think its something to be proud of and they just want damage tuning? They are still internally considering what they want to do with the class and its just going to take awhile?

We may never know!

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