not a hate post on s priest but an actual question.
i do run as disc for castle Narnia ( yes i said narnia)
we have a newly levled priest and he asked me if he should stay shadow.
Dont get me wrong I love shadow in solo content.
But what does a spriest bring that a disc priest cant OTHER than damage?
the reason of this post - is in terms of clothies
u have locks with soul stones and portals and summons.
mages with food at least.
i remember back in the day ( i left for 4 yrs) that spriests used to be able to help generate raid wide mana but i think thats gone.
so in theory if you were given a raid cloth class why would someone choose spriest over lock or mage?
what utulity does one bring to the raid?
The answer from a world rank raiding perspective: Power infusion and Vampiric embrace. Shadows gotta be one of, if not the strongest DPS to bring as a 1 of to a lot of fights purely because of the extra PI with the twins legendary.
Shadow also has 90 second CDs, something that’s almost entirely unique to shadow and has a lot of value on fights like darkvein, the spec is also “reasonably” sustain based and capable of burning priority targets without major CDs. The other two major cloth DPS are significantly less capable of that.
Shadows self healing / ability to live through raid damage is very strong. You’ve got PWS, devouring plague healing, and dispersion is a very short cd for the amount of mitigation it provides. There’s also shadow mend which is fantastic at surviving against the very hard hitting dots that exist in Nathria (Notably on artificer) when out of range of your healers.
Shadows not great at the last 2 bosses, which is one of the reasons we didn’t really see it in the WF race, because of their focus on mobility and burst cleave DPS but it could still be a safe 1 of for all the reasons mentioned above.
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Shadow has been getting worse and worse as the weeks go on. The sim as one of the highest dps but as people have been gearing and how raid dmg truly is they are falling behind and are now the worst ranged class. Not the worst range spec but class overall as all others have atleast one spec that is out performing them across the board.
They do very well on single target with little to no movement but that doesn’t really exist. They also have all real AOE tied to talents so unless you take them you contribute very little to burst AOE, sustained over a few mins they do decent.
They could use a bit of tuning to their kit to help with these things but since the huge rework I doubt we will see anything until some later large patches
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Shadow still has vampiric embrace for some off-healing and their own strong self-heals plus dispersion, which puts them in the much more durable category than mages.
But, you know, your question is odd to me: they are a priest, already. Unless they’re willing to re-roll, you can either have them DPS or heal. That’s the choice you have: do you need a healer, or not? Disc is still a healer, of course, so that’s not the relevant comparison.
I wish shadow was still more focused on support than pure damage, like its previous iterations. Blizzard’s design keeps pushing the “glass cannon” idea, which just doesn’t work for a hybrid spec. The concept of very high damage and squishiness should be exclusive to some pure DPS classes.
But to answer your question, I don’t see why anyone would play shadow anywhere outside of PvP.
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What is “glass cannon” about shadow? They have very good defensive tools.
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