It’s worth noting that shadow’s version of karam is SIGNIFICANTLTY SLOWER than frost and MM’s and even balance’s version. He gains stacks at a much reduced rate and it’s possible to out manoeuvre him for a good minute and a half without even pressing power word shield.
I feel like the fact we have to have slow karam says a lot in itself 
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Sure but it also says the challenge is at least in some ways tuned around the capabilities of the specs doing it.
I do think it asks Shadow to do something that the players who play it won’t have necessarily practiced in their day to day gameplay, namely kiting, but it does make that kiting something within they can do.
I didn’t really have too much issue with Karam ever reaching me but that could have had more to do with the Worgen Racial being very useful when things got spicy. I also did a completion using Fried Bonefish with searing and the movement speed you get from staggering kills on the little mobs has a very high uptime later in the fight when movement is important.
Yeah those tools do certainly help, I set myself a challenge (As Oniun mentioned) of doing it in my regular gear with the worst talent build I could imagine for it, which involved not having any movement speed except for the odd dispersion during a hand cast.
You should take a look at these numbers I found while examining videos of the shadow priest challenge when it was released in 7.2. I’m sorry I do not have links to actual videos. I just watched whatever I could find on YouTube. The conclusion is that Raest’s health was severely inflated in the Shadowlands release even though shadow priests are weaker at handling this encounter than they were in Legion.
If you reduced raests HP to 1.2x karam’s you would kill him 100-0 zero in phase 2, or at most leave him at 10%. To do that in legion required us to be doing THREE TO FOUR TIMES the dps of any other dps spec during their cooldowns. I can go into the mage tower in SL gear, get to phase 2, pop an SL pot, drums, and all my cds, and do 55-60k damage in the first burn. With original Legion values, the fight would be over.
The fact is that every single number, be it health, damage, relative hp, ilvl, haste, crit, mastery, vers, whatever, has changed. On both the player and the encounter. The fights aren’t comparable.
Now I’m not saying the fight couldn’t stand a nerf. Absolutely for those who aren’t as good at optimising damage knocking 5-8% off Raest’s hp would make burning phase 5 feel significantly more achievable, but everything is so different that pulling up old numbers feels like it misses the point.
Not to mention the fact that in the original tower we only had one cooldown that could survive a hand, now we have 2, and in Legion we did not have the damage to ever kill a hand before its cast went off in any circumstance, something that is no longer true.
I’d say shadow is better at the SL Tower than it was at the Legion one, once you discount the ability to skip every single mechanic by burning it 100-0 in phase 2.
The fight then and the fight now is definitely comparable. The rate at which the NPCs go down can definitely be compared. The fact is, Raest would indeed go down much faster (ignoring the StM strategy in Legion 7.3) than he does in today’s release. The biggest complaint today is that Raest goes down too slow from his massive health pool.
I’ve watched your videos. You’re very good, but you just barely complete the encounter even while using all the consumables you can. Even other pros today post videos of themselves completing the challenge while just barely making it to a rune or getting lucky and not dying from a Hand from Beyond cast (all defensive cooldowns not ready). This was rarely the case in old 7.2 videos of the encounter from other players. They were not relying on drums, flasks, potions, to have a mere chance to completing the challenge. They were providing an edge to the player.
I would say the shadow priest challenge in Shadowlands is worse and you are not making anything better by ignoring the past.
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I didn’t say the fight was easier. I said shadows kit lines up better against it.
And yes, I also said that Raest could do with a hp nerf. But to reduce it to the original ratio would put his hp around what? 40k?
I am not advocating for the ratios to be exactly the same. I’m advocating that Raest’s health be reduced to a point where the amount of time it takes to down him is comparable to that in Legion.
I find it hard to believe that you are sincere when you say that shadow is better at handling the challenge than in Legion. A major mechanic is kiting and shadow priests have lost abilities to make that happen without anything to compensate. Shadow priests still had silence and dispersion in legion for dealing with Hands from Beyond. The best ability to burst them down, Void Torrent, was baseline in Legion. You now have to sacrifice a talent for it.
I mean as far as I’m concerned weve swapped a slowroll ramping sustained damage profile for actual cooldowns we can line up with the two raest burns, and gained desperate prayer as an extra way to survive a hand explosion.
Also void torrent is on half the cooldown and does comparatively much more direct damage since its primary use in legion was extending voidform.
Shadows challenge is tuned significantly tighter than it was in legion, but if you gave legion shadow this challenge (Without surrender) it’d be harder than doing it with SL shadow
Is it possible to complete this challenge without consumables (killing Raest only) on shadow priest? If not, is shadow priest really in a better place? I have not been able to find anyone capable of doing this.
Idk. Ied say legions was much easier. And I was still using primarily pvp gear then and had no actual leggo. Not as easy as dk Agatha. That’s a joke of a joke. But still easy compared to now. Even doing it now in pvp gear sucks. Doable but sucks
Whether or not it is or isn’t only speaks to the tuning of the encounter, not how well shadow’s kit lines up with its mechanics.
Well, I guess I can agree with you there. Why am I getting so defensive? It seems we agree the encounter has some tuning issues.
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I don’t think the tuning for this particular challenge is that far off, like I honestly don’t think using drums or a pot is particularly excessive, but I do understand the perspective of those that do. Also I think killing Karam is a legitimate strategy, blizzard even compensated their recent change by reducing the damage increase he gets from his enrage, which I’d say shows blizzard thinks it is too.
Knocking off 5-8% hp from Raest would have a big impact on how much of phase 5 you’d have to play to kill it.
Shadows challenge was designed around old school surrender to madness which had us casting while moving for well over a minute while also dealing crazy damage
After this comment I went back in to have a crack at this, just managed it. It’s not a defence of the tower’s difficulty because it was incredibly tight and far beyond the capabilities of the average player, but it was just about doable. SL gear, no consumables. Had Raest at about 40% when the final phase started, so 12% above where I’d normally have him.
Dang, that takes some serious skill in my opinion! What talents did you use? I’ve tried the StM burn strategy and after the first burst on Raest I can get him down to only 75%-80%. After the second burst I can only get him to about 50%. After that I end up getting overwhelmed by Karam or Hands from Beyond at about 25%.
Fortress, Body, Twist, Horror, Spirits, Torrent, Hungering
Went back in with my camera on and did it again.
Once again I must stress none of this is meant as a defence of the current tuning, I think this fight is too hard, but not by a massive amount. I just like hard solo content, and I like challenging myself to play better in that content.
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