Not even on about whether or not you can melt mobs with high dps (you can!), but the fact that Dominate Mind literally creates a threat mule when you fade every 20 seconds makes for a really safe journey even when you try tier8 with subpar gear.
I just set a Weak Aura to track the Dominate Mind timer and I’m having a blast. The controlled enemies seem to last way longer than even Hunter/Warlock pets and some of them have abilities that hit like a truck (you can even PI them).
It’s pretty fun to get to know what each enemy does, like those sharks from the underwater delve. I usually maintain them until the end of the run. I wish Blizz would amp up the timer to 1 minute instead, just as a QoL.
Who needs dominate mind Ted and tentacles are more than enough with fade. But yes Delves are built with spriests in mind we walk through them like untouchable gods pulling multiple packs at a time.
While I agree fullly that Spriest rip Delves apart there are two issues that feel like they are truly bugs, but they exist because we have dominate.
When the caster mobs are not targeting the player, they still cast at the player like 80% of the time. This likely didn’t see enough traction because Brann isn’t a tank, but since we have fade and Dominate we see it way more than other classes.
The other one we were privy to suffer that others may not have suffered is, Brann healing the previously dominated target. It happens inconsistently but sometimes after they drop being dominated Brann will continue healing them rather than helping you dps them. You have to basically mind control them again, let them get to full hp then drop the control and damage them fresh. It seems to revolve around if they were low hp when the MC ended then Brann doesn’t properly update to stop seeing them as an ally target.
Im not saying these in any way stop us from dominating delves just I think both would account to being true bugs from a developer standpoint, and Spriest being the only class/spec combo that really got to experience them was just because were the only ones with mind control.
This though is interesting, are you doing tier 11? Because the few and far between pulls where there are 3 casters are the only threat in any delve. Even with 7M hp if 3 casts get off I die if one crits or im not using some DR, nothing else comes close to killing me, especially any combo of melee.
Well, there’s a couple things that inspired that commentary.
First, that conversation was happening at the start of the season. Shadow scales hard with stats, and we had very little. On top of that, shadow was bottom 2 dps in the game and needed two months of buffs to still be middling.
Second, delves are built around a lot of tools that shadow either doesn’t have, or if it does their version is very weak. Casts are everywhere, and shadow has the the worst kick in the game. CC is extremely useful, and all shadow has is Psychic Scream. Displacement makes dealing with all the area damage far easier, and shadow has none.
Third, a lot of what you’re mentioning requires really fiddly, annoying gameplay that people don’t want to engage in. Dominate Mind is good in delves, but almost nobody is going to set a WA to tracking Dominate Mind to make constant use of the ability tolerable. I can’t say I ever tried to PI a dominated mob, but they removed the ability to cast PI on non-player targets in TWW to stop people from casting it on their shadowfiends. It’s certainly a bug if PI can be cast on dominated mobs.
tl;dr: People said that priest is bad at delves because its tools are greatly inferior to most other classes, the tools it does have are okay but annoying to use, and the problems caused by that were exacerbated by the conversation happening early in the season when people had low stats and balancing was terrible, which caused shadow to do incredibly poor damage.
Not really, I personally don’t see a point in doing over 8’s. Those are already good enough for me, but in Season 2 we apparently get more rewards for higher tiers (if I read that correctly), so might as well do it.
However by then we’ll have Brann tank, so I’m hopeful that Disc will actually become really good in Delves.
This is probably the most important thing to call out. The other side of it, the big issues in delves also go fixed. I remember the Waterworks boss basically one shot casters, there were other similar nerfs on the delves themselves that meant Spriest could survive, ramp and do their thing.
The tools were also updated, mobs had larger cd’s placed on more lethal abilities, Brann cd’s on interrupts and supportive abilities were shortened so he could contribute more solutions.
The narrative was definitely true at the beginning… I remember having 4 delves I just wouldn’t touch at T8+ until some changes were made.