Again why would people who don’t play the spec complain about it.
If we don’t play shadow why are we wasting our time complaining about.
I think you should just go gear up your freshly leveled priest.
Except the same exact thing is happening on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and every other medium that Shadow Priest is discussed. Either every single poster against Voidform is possessed of the powers of the Flash, and thus able to post the same points that are being outlined here… Much like say a dutiful parrot on Fox News; or you might be wrong about what the consensus of players want out of their class.
Personally, I think you are wrong. But I will at least accord you a basic respect. Disagreements aside, it’s been a pleasure debating with you. I think that saying "just reroll" isn’t a fair argument though mind you. My frustration, like so many others is founded on the fact that I (again like so many other posters) have devoted years into our Priests.
It’s wrong for Blizzard to marginalize all of that time investment, with a redesign at this stage of the game unless they offered a free reroll of class. Some reputations cannot be restored or rebuilt now, such as Zandalar Tribe.
Ultimately there’s only one final truth here. One of us will emerge as the victor in this back and forth. So I say to you Amideus, all the best. ‘Devil take the hindmost’ my friend, but all the best to you in your adventures in Warcraft.
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The talents are just symptoms of the over arching fundamental issue of Void Form.
As you can tell just by reading them, they are boring and uninspiring. Because you cant do much to this restrictive spec / play style without it snowballing out of control. It barely plays, its unrewarding, its frustrating and it didn’t have to be this way. It just didn’t.
But here we are going on 4 years into a broken spec. Yet we had 10+ years of a fun spec that at times had issues regarding AOE or ST yes ill grant you that. But you know what? I DON’T CARE.
Most priests didn’t care about numbers because the spec was still a joy to play. That has been lost for too long now. Lets see what we can do to bring it back in SL.
5 Likes
This a million times over. Back in WoD, I knew I’d never kill things as fast as Arcane, but I didn’t care because I was having fun. That’s really all I want back ultimately. The fun of playing a Shadow caster that is not bound up into fel magic or demons.
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This is subjective though. Again it goes back to, what makes your opinion that it’s not fun and rewarding worth more than the opinion of those that do think it is and current play? Should the people that currently play have to have their class changed AGAIN just because you’re not happy? How many people have you not accounted for with your confirmation bias?
No one is more right than anyone else here. But whatever. None of this matters. Enjoy screaming at the wall that is the Blizzard forums in a cesspool of nonsense.
As I stated previously.
I quit and played a different class as a main in Legion. The Demon Hunter.
Then I stopped playing altogether in BFA.
Now I am liking how Shadowland’s looks. I am interested in seeing how Torghast will play out. But I do not want to play a broken spec like Void Form in that place.
I was going to just keep with the DH but I miss my priest and ever since the SL alpha been showing the changes to the Shadow Priest spec and its even worse then in BFA, its time now to let our frustrations known as you can clearly see all the flaws now that they are no longer masked behind Artifact or Azerite/essences etc.
Your still shrouded in those buffs. I guarantee you would not enjoy shadow on Alpha and that’s a huge issue because many classes/specs do feel good to play when usually that doesn’t start until they get gear. So the class at a base plays well.
Why cant we ask the same for shadow?
That’s why we are here now.
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here you go again trying to silence people who don’t agree with you. how about you leave, try another post. (just like we should try another class)
If the thread is locked on such a flimsy reasoning, then we can only assume what I cited earlier. You came here to play damage control. Nothing about this thread is breaking the rules and it’s very relevant to player frustrations on Shadow.
If your only winning move is to silence all views you disagree with, then you won nothing.
Edit:
Heck, even Bellular is now calling out Blizzard’s lack of direction with Shadow Priests.
#deletevoidform
6 Likes
I haven’t been playing retail much but IIRC, there is a shadow spike type ability that is only available in Void Form… this spell feels terrible to cast and should be like fireblast for mages where you can cast it even while casting another spell, so as to not interrupt the rotation so much. It really feels awful and all the new shadow sound effects along with the goofy new race animations really turns me off to playing my old main right now.
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This video is very…cringy to watch, and the content is extremely shallow. I applaud his effort but he clearly doesn’t play shadow(at least in this expansion).
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Which character are you “playing the class” on, because it definitely isn’t that one 
5 Likes
Maybe make void form a damage CD instead? Instead of the cobbled and hobbled form it is?
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The funny part of that video is that he was actually wrong on the positives, StM and VBr2. Both sound good but are actually bad. The rest is accurate.
Face tanking everything in Torghast with slow dps and little self healing is going to suck.
3 Likes
Yeah the video is pretty trash. Its obvious he doesnt play it. The first positive he states is that we have choices in our Talents. The only choice is if we want AoE or Single target.
He doesnt have any idea what hes talking about.
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I have 8 lvl 120s and it never made sense to me that Shadow had far and away the worst self healing of any of the specs in that I played.
7 Likes
He doesn’t get all his points across, and I’m in agreement with Motrin on the StM and VBr2; but he is at least right in other things. Such as the fact that Voidform and Insanity need to go in general and the Developers need to stop and actually pay Priest some attention.
That being that Blizzard’s casual neglect for Priests and inherent bias and preference to design for other Classes is finally showing, simply by virtue of how badly off Shadow Priests are. Which… we’ve all been trying to signal boost for 4 years on deaf ears. I’m glad that he’s covering it also since it says a lot more than any single poster’s words, and it reaches a much larger audience as a result.
Hell if they absolutely need inspiration and tentacles, I would be ammenable to them making Shadow Priest play identical to the Warshade from City of Heroes, complete with it’s massive tank form and floating blaster form. That was a load of fun back in the day and since CoH isn’t on the market now, it certainly wouldn’t be IP theft.
…Man a Sunless Mire spell where I boost my damage based on the kill total I have. That’d be so rad for soloing to be honest. So would tanking as a Giant C’thraxxi (Lobster Form), or shooting eye beams of shadow magic. xD
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The big issue is how they shifted our healing around.
They pulled out our Void Shield from Xalatath in Legion, which was very nice, and we used to heal from DOT damage, but that was significant when Mass Hysteria meant our DOTs started ticking super super hard.
In BFA and Shadowlands, our DOTs are the ~weakest DOTs in the game, so 50% of a VT tick is nothing.
With nearly the entirety of our power budget invested into Voidform/Insanity/ramps mechanics, our DOTs do nothing anymore - so scaling our self-healing off our nothing DOTs doesn’t work.
Another way to frame it is like, 8% of our damage is VT in a single target fight. 50% of 8% is 4%. So effectively, Shadow has the equivalent of passive 4% Leech.
Compare to other classes with like 10-20% Leech + self-shields and such, and it’s really quite bad.
8 Likes
Bring back OG Spriest… get rid of this voidform crap.
They completely killed my favorite class / spec in the game.
As an idea on paper it sounds nice… but the gameplay is garbage.
I’ve been a spriest since 2009 - till the end of WoD.
Legion killed my love for it. I still play it from time to time, but I don’t enjoy it all or as much as I once did.
I’ve have always played caster specs in wow and have main’d locks/mages/Spriest/hunters/paladins throughout my time playing wow for raiding / pvp
I’ll probably never get to main a spriest again unless they make some changes to voidform or at least bring back devouring plague and renew to the spec to add mobility options. Hell with it I’ll even take back the shadow orb concept if it means I don’t gotta play voidform anymore.
7 Likes
Because atm Spriest has the longest ramp up time of any class, bar none. It takes between 45-60 secs to reach a rolling damage spike based on our mechanics. I start off doing about 32k dps and about a minute later my minimum on single target is about 48k dps. That’s ridiculous.
You’re outright rejecting everyone’s assertion that it is impossible to balance. The only reason that we are saying this is because they have yet to succeed doing it after four years. You may be right and someone could figure out how to do this, and implement it, but that someone apparently isn’t working at Blizzard. How long do you want the class to be in the state its in? People here are annoyed (and basically demanding a refund by asking for them to just revert it back to pre-Legion) because there was NO reveal on what they were doing differently that was going to actually fix the class so that it was balanced (yes, PvP and 5-mans is included in this), yet still worth playing.
It isn’t like its impossible for them to rework it an make it better. They did it for Holy priest back in Legion. But they needed to finally let go of the Lightwell concept (which was dysfunctional outside of guild raids [and rated PvP, but I won’t go there, since the class was just too squishy even if Lightwell was good there], kind of like the insanity mechanic is for shadow), and retool the spell kit, to do it. NOBODY IS COMPLAINING ABOUT HOLY’S PERFORMANCE IN RAIDS ANY MORE, and it isn’t even considered overpowered.
STM: Nobody is going to use the talent if it can kill you, unless it allows you to do better DPS than the other DPS. Simple risk-versus-rewards here.
Class balance dictates that you CANNOT do more dps than the other class (yes, there is variation, but they usually adjust the numbers).
These concepts are mutually exclusive. Hence, it is a complete dead end. I’d be interested in hearing your reasoning if you think that either of my base assumptions on this are wrong.
The ramp mechanics makes the class outright noncompetitive in 5-mans. They gave no indication that the stupid Dragonball-Z-esque rampup times were going away.
5 Likes