Oh cool I can take Intangibility and San’layn! So much survivability!
Or I could take neither, and pull more stuff from the bottom for more damage but constantly need my health babied.
I think some more abilities should be required to go down a tree branch than what is being considered now.
Really hope spear is gone in PvP. Most hated ability for me
Also… the more I see these new trees… the more I don’t want to order DF.
The priest class tree was doomed from the start. Legion branched the 3 specs too far apart and there’s nothing leftover to unite them besides utility spells.
I expected a sort of base class rework to better fit the new philosophy behind this new talent system. The amount of throughput for both healing and damage in the base tree is concerning. You could have united the specs with a theme of rites and Word-spells, making Shadowy Apparitions work for the 3 specs and adding new Word talents and spells. The Priest fantasy was already pretty weak to begin with and it died with Legion artifacts.
It’s horrible that it’s staying as it is and worse that it’s allocated in the Priest class tree. First, all parts of Shadow’s current kit that make the gameplay not fluid at all are staying. Second, this left so many defensive and utility points in the Shadow tree. No one will ever trade damage for utility and it was something you guys promised wouldn’t happen in this system.
I was baffled to see the order of the first four talents. Mind Flay as the spec defining spell instead of Devouring Plague. Mind Sear gating the pure single-target talent. AOE, spread cleave and ST talents aren’t positioned very well. Surrender to Madness will never happen again. All talents, conduits and legendary I wish were scrapped forever got in. The new toys are all lost in that abusively expensive final tier of talents. Why do we have so many multi-rank talents there? Shadow has historically always gotten the shortest end of the stick in terms of new stuff. We barely had any interesting tier set bonuses to become Shadowlands legendaries and yet again we gain almost nothing completely new. I don’t borrowed stuff from Affliction and Unholy.
The spell was added as a band-aid for Shadow’s aoe during the beta and is still here today. This is completely unacceptable. We desperately need a new AOE mechanic that synergizes well with our single-target. Either make it entirely based on applying DOTs in an area or make it Blizzard-like, just don’t keep SN here. It’s heartbreaking how little the dev team cared about carrying on the rework the spec received. It clearly was rushed and needed more fleshing out and new ideas, but it didn’t happen during the course of the expansion and we still don’t see any improvement on it in this new tree.
I think for the Shadow tree, there are just too many options with too many multi-tiered talents.
Some suggestions:
Remove:
Adjust/Change position:
This might allow for some diversity of choice in the Shadow Tree, as it currently feels bloated with random bonuses. While I LIKE these bonuses, it causes problems with the tree’s customization.
I LOVE the Holy tree! Please be careful making changes to it. There’s so many different builds in this iteration that I can’t wait to try
Since you all are keeping Mythic+, Searing Nightmare spam is the only way for a shadow priest to ALMOST keep up with the other DPS specs. It is an absolutely nightmare (and boring combination) to use. As the above priest said, please buff Mind Sear for AOE and give us back the GCDs to occasionally interrupt, cc, etc.
No other spec has to channel a spell for 3 GCDs and simultaneously cast another spell for 2 GCDs on top of it to do AOE damage. And it’s stupid how immobile we are. Please, please, please, just rework it.
I think you forgot just how many of these ‘baseline’ abilities were actually a part of those old talent trees (not to mention all of the abilities that actually aren’t as old as the game itself and came in later expansions). Vampiric Touch, Dispersion, Psychic Horror, Mind Flay, and Silence to name a few. Psychic Horror’s the only one that remained a talent even after the switch to the ‘modern’ talent system.
I’m not as confident as you seem to be about an intent to use Idol of N’zoth as an AOE rotation. The spell descriptions are terse as if intended for a tooltip and I’d appreciate a fuller explanation from our blue friends. If this is intended as an AOE rotation, why does Searing Nightmare still exist?
-targets cat form druid-
-uses reflecting prism-
You were saying? 
And the most important question about these changes is whether they will rebalance Mage Tower challenges around this. The priest ones are already extremely hard compared to some other challenges and with missing utility spells it might be next to impossible doing these challenges.
can not agree more , was fun and visually stunning, like wtf Blizzard
Please please please, make shadowy apparitions also apply to targets with shadow word pain. The AoE rotation is already annoying to determine how many targets to change the rotation.
Icy veins summarizes it quite nicely, but when there is a different rotation for 1 target, 2-3 targets, 4-5 targets, and 6+ targets, it is nearly impossible to realistically keep up with in m+ environments.
Changing apparitions would likely simplify aoe slightly when using the searing dialogue talent, but still keep it complex for those who instead choose Misery.
Another wish (though i doubt it will ever happen is give an easier way to apply VT in aoe situations. It is one of our main damaging dots that is effectively useless in high target scenarios.
I will say I like that feeling of not being able to have everything I want to have and needing to make choices. I’ll probably be drowned out by folks who theorycraft and/or min/max, but I think a lot of that stuff at the bottom is pretty interesting and I spent a while deciding on what I wanted to pick!
Overall, I’m not very excited or very disappointed for Shadow. It looks like the play style is going to be similar to how it is today. It looks like there will be more options for doing AoE damage, but I wish one of those would include Shadowy Apparitions in some way.
Things I hate about the priest and shadow trees:
Things about the priest and shadow trees that look interesting:
The change to Twist of Fate might not be that bad considering that we might be doing more damage based on new talents and having the potential for more damaging abilities at our disposal.
One idea that i’ve seen bits of, in order to simplify the aoe rotation while still keeping priority dot damage would be to change searing dialogue as follows:
Each tick of mind sear propagates all active dots to another target if possible.
Edit: this propagate would be tuned to either be from primary target, or all targets depending on how the damage scaling goes, you could even max it at 5 targets if you want to pigeonhole priests into that niche dmg group.
This would allow us to keep priority damage and dots on 1-3 targets (totally doable and interesting), and only change our filler from mind flay to mind sear. It would propagate damage exponentially which will still retain the benefits and drawbacks of dot classes not being instant burst, but also doing respectable damage. AND it would free up GCDs to use for procs of mind spike or mind blast/interrupts/CC.
Could we have a bit more information on these two abilities so we can provide feedback?
Is Echoing Void a debuff or dot? What is the range of dealing Shadow damage? Does the chance for this effect occur based on a single instance of SW:P, VT, or DP on a single mob or does it occur when all three dots are on a mob?
Would you give an example of a benefit gained for Idol of Y’Shaarj?
Check the Community Council forum for more deets, they just posted about it.
I feel like the Shadow tree has exposed a very, very glaring fundamental problem with how these Talent Trees work in their current state, as I’ll showcase with the following example:
You can make a build as Shadow that doesn’t spec into Power Infusion, Void Eruption/Void Bolt, VAMPIRIC TOUCH, AND DEVOURING PLAGUE, and not only are you capable of doing this, but you are capable of taking Talent choices that depend on Vampiric Touch being cast or applied to a target. You can take Psychic Link, Shadowy Apparitions, and Misery without speccing into Vampiric Touch, which is the DoT that specifically allows these abilities to function.
Now, I know the design intention behind these new Talent Trees specifically discusses that there can exist unviable builds, but there in absolutely no world in which a build like this should even remotely exist, even as an option, and a big part of this stems from the fact that the only truly “baseline” ability Shadow gets is Shadowform and nothing else. This build isn’t even unviable; it’s outright unplayable, period. It’s a DoT spec with one DoT, no resource spender, two resource generators, a whole bunch of useless healing spells, and nothing more.
This right here has singlehandedly convinced me that these Talent Trees in their current state need a huge amount of work if Dragonflight is coming out even remotely close to December 2022. The fact that a player can be even remotely capable of creating a build this useless leaves me speechless.
This used to be a corruption ability back in patch 8.3 (kinda fitting that N’Zoth is linked to this one, for that reason). I think back then it was a buff stacked on your own character, and when it collapsed your character was used as the source of the AoE effect. If it remains like that, then it’s going to be viewed as pretty weak simply because it’ll require being in melee range of your target(s) in order to damage them with it.