Hello, I have many characters above 70 (Paladin, Enh Shaman, Feral Druid, WW Monk, and this Shadow Priest).
From a leveling point of view, the shadow priest seems super weak. I have a hard time keeping myself alive when there are 2 or more mobs. My other classes just mow down the mobs with ease and have better self-healing. Is this a melee vs. caster thing?
Pushing to get my priest geared up for S2. Been doing keys and crafting as heals, but fired up shadow tonight to go quest in Siren Isles to get ring.
So, max level and not leveling, but the questing showed me what wrecks and what doesn’t, so probably correlates to you.
Essentially it came down to having CDs such as Void Eruption, or just enough insanity stock piled to where I could Devouring Plague immediately. If either of these conditions were met everything just melted.
On the other, if no CDs and no insanity when pulling anything it felt like a massive struggle - low damage and took forever to build insanity.
So just use CDs liberally and manage insanity well and you should mow through stuff. You get Psychic Link pretty early while leveling. Multi dotting is how you deal with packs.
As far as caster vs melee, I did find I needed to use defensives and utility much more for casters, especially mage. For bigger pulls use Vampiric Embrace and if you need distance from something beating on you Psychic Scream.
Shadow doesn’t have the burst potential of some of those melee classes you mentioned, however survivability shouldn’t be that much of an issue because you have several ways to keep yourself alive.
One talent that I found useful is From Darkness Comes Light, which buffs Flash heal as you do damage and allows you to top yourself up with a few casts easily. Give that a try and see how you go.
Felt bursty to me if you have CDs and/or insanity going into pull.
You get most things to quickly get things rolling fairly early on in the leveling process too. Misery so VT also applies Pain so all dots applied in 2 GCDs (with that pooled insanity I mentioned for Devouring Plaque), Void Eruption CD has tons of burst, and Surge of Insanity for super powered Mind Flays.
It’s bursty over a timespan of 15~ seconds, but melee are often bursty literally from the word go.
There’s nothing bursty about 15 seconds and that wasn’t my experience. I feel if your “burst” is taking 15 seconds you’re doing something wrong
…that’s where the not-so-bursty part comes up lol. If you have lots of insanity, then yeah you’d be quick!
I can’t think of a resource in the game that generates slower than insanity, now that I think about it.
Yup, it’s a trickle that is very noticably slow compared to any other class/spec I played with.
Once again a highlight and contrast to Shadow Orbs as those were generated from Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death when dealing execute threshold damage.
It was easily predictable when you were able to use Devouring Plague as it was visually noticable in the display of a total of 5 Shadow Orbs and only required 3 for Devouring Plague so you know when you have 2 Orbs, it only required 1 more button press of your Shadow Orb generator ability to then follow up with Devouring Plague.
Compared to Insanity, you have a bar that is not easily visually identified when you are between the threshold of not being able to use Devouring Plague and when it becomes usable and oftentimes you find yourself spamming an ability multiple times just building enough to toss out another Devouring Plague only to realize it’s taking more casts than you were predicting at a moments notice.
Insanity is just a horrible resource system but back in Shadowlands blizzard stated they didn’t have time or the desired effort was not present to change the resource system and here we are 5 years later with the same issues and more piled on top.
It’s just absolutely unacceptable at this point along with all the other issues that continue to go noticed or on deft ears.
It’s just pathetic at this point.
I feel like people didn’t read what I write. While questing you can pool insanity after CDs to do some chain pulling and not starting from scratch every quest mob.
Yeah I loved shadow orbs so much, so I’m biased. It just made so much more common sense. Blizz must have agreed because they carried it wholesale over into Demo locks.
I get there’s ways to mitigate it, but if comparing to any other class then insanity is still slower resource generation. I mean, it’s a ramp class. So you’re saying that if you’re ramped, then it’s good. Well, yeah.
Look bro, just trying to help the OP. There’s ways to play were you can manage resources to kill things faster.
Try helping the op instead of just coming in saying it’s slow and you have to play it slow when that’s not true - I’ve mentioned ways to speed it up.
Sall good. I’m not against managing things better, I’m just against mischaracterizing spriest. You’re right there’s ways to speed it up.