Didn’t play WOD till the very end due to life stuff, but I’ve heard how it went. I really don’t think this is a different scenario - DF shadow is the result of a dev that doesn’t understand or care about priest and is implementing the most common surface-level requests - bring back Mind Spike, bring back Dark Archangel, bring back Shadow Orbs, get rid of Voidform, etc. - in a transparent appeal to nostalgia without any consideration for the implications of simply adding those to the spec or any effort to make talents affecting those inclusions attractive without taking them, such as all talents affecting both Mind Blast and Mind Spike either losing all their interesting considerations, like Coalescing Shadows, or being diluted to meaninglessness without Mind Spike, like Manipulation and Whispers of the Damned, and they didn’t give them separate scaling to account for Mind Blast’s cooldown because doing so would reveal that Mind Spike serves no purpose in the spec.
DF shadow won’t be remembered fondly by anyone that really knows the spec outside of PVP because it’s a flavorless, bloated blob of gray sludge right now with clumsy gameplay and offers no value to any group outside of damage, which will always be available by other specs that bring more to the table.
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I just finished leveling a shadow priest after being away for about 12 years. It sucked.
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I’m very new to the priest class and planning to level up to 60 this weekend, but I haven’t had any complaints about our talent setup and playstyle. I was able to kill a couple rares solo while questing. It seems fun, especially not having Voidform as our cooldown.
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Ive been having fun with Spriest so far. So i wouldnt be making blanket statements like this. Also, we bring PI as a dps spec, and good off healing, which isnt “nothing”. Overall there are things that could be done, like any other class, but im enjoying my shadowpriest and know others that are as well. shrug
I’m comfortable with my comment about nobody that really knows shadow will remember DF shadow fondly. Other classes either stayed more or less in their SL state, others were improved dramatically - shadow gameplay was made worse than it was in SL by increasing unreliability (exporting damage from VF/DA to Twins, the Idol talents, the overload of procs) and muddying gameplay.
PI isn’t utility, it’s throughput, and damage got stripped out of Voidform (and consequently Dark Ascension) to baseline Twins. PI isn’t a selling point for shadow unless shadow is already doing more damage than almost every other class.
As for offhealing, shadow is pretty bad - outside of arena, warlocks are stronger offhealers than shadow with healthstones in Shadowlands…and Flash Heal is 2/3 as powerful as Shadow Mend and Vampiric Embrace was nerfed by 40% for no apparent reason, so we’re worse at offhealing now than we were before. We do have good self-healing, but that’s not unique or even meaningful when our ability to avoid damage is the lowest of all classes.
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I wish they’d address the shadow concerns as fast as they did with discipline.
Having to wait for shadow crash or mind bender to come off cd whilst everyone else is pumping in aoe is really terrible gameplay. And who thought it’d be a good idea to turn Mind Sear into an insanity spender with pitiful damage? It really needs some tuning to make it worth using.
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Interesting, this was my initial impression too. First I thought, what did they do to mind sear and why? The spec has no consistent aoe now right?
Then I saw mind spike and was like, hey I remember that spell, but I don’t know how it fits into the rotation, last I played I just applied dots, mind flayed until instant MB proc (which would not interrupt mind flay), then go void form at full insanity.
Now I am not sure what the idea is.
It feels utterly bad, Mind Sear that is. All other aoe options are lengthy cooldowns. If we compare to affi, they do the same DoT spread, but their dots give them spenders far more frequently, and seed spam is and feels great. With how costly sear is, it feels like i’m waiting ages doing ever so slightly more than single target damage, to get enough for mind sear, only to do well OKish aoe.
I like the single-target, quite a bit and PvP. AoE though, I have never had a worse experience on a class ever. Idk what this garbage fire is.
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i hope we can spec around mind sear and just not use it. we have more then enuff buttons to push other then that.
that wasnt shadow priest. that was void priest.
Shadow magic comes from the void just as holy magic comes from the light.
Shadow and Light are the primary forces along side Order and Disorder, Life and Death.
Void is a derivative of Shadow. Shadow takes precedence over Void.
WoW Cosmology chart
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I stand corrected. However, according to that chart, there is nothing to indicate if Shadow Priests are named by a reverence for the primal force called Shadow or the manifestation of Shadow called Shadow or Void. It’s ambiguous, but I would think it is the latter since Holy Priests are named after the manifestation of Light. In that case, there is no basis to complain about a difference between a Shadow Priest or a Void Priest. They’re the same thing.
That the Shadow priest needs some tweaks, yes that’s correct and I agree, but I don’t feel like the spec is as bad as some say, I really like it and I’m trying to enjoy it. The problem is where we are with the Shadow Priest right now, even though the spec feels fun, for the vast majority it will just be garbage just because it doesn’t have the Legion/BfA design , they’re clearly obsessed with it…
I don’t think this ever was a point of conversation. Most if not all concerns are derived from a mechanical issue, not theme regarding shadow.
What I will draw attention to however is that you have things like Dark N’arru that the normal light N’arru beings become when there energy drains away. It basically is a cycle of life for them. You see this in The Burning Crusade, Warlords of Dreanor and Legion at least. So it’s common enough in lore in and outside the game to not ignore.
Also you have cult of the forgotten shadow that doesn’t really involve void type talk when describing its way of dealing with shadow.
Then with the concept of Void Itself, it doesn’t have to be connected to Old’Gods as they just tap into that power but that power is not defined by them. I say this as that is also a talking point when talking about Void Magic and tying it directly with Old’Gods.
So that’s just some quick brief points to keep in mind when discussing power origins and the like.
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My original statement was in response to Buttayobread complaining that the theme in Legion was Void Priest rather than Shadow Priest. It seems to me that Shadow barely had much of an identity in the game before Legion other than just being the opposite of Light. I guess some are just bitter about the direction that identity went. Anyways, I’ve already commented about mechanical issues that need to be fixed earlier in this thread.
That’s just a language game on their part.
I don’t disagree with you here. However, Shadow (Void) magic has a deep connection with the Old Gods since they were created by the Void Lords. The Old Gods also have had a lot of influence on the history of Azeroth.