[Legion] Shadow Priest Discussion

[Kaesebrezen]

Adversely if you do, you're pulling to much.

No. I just want to kill as fast as other damage specs, not as slow as any healing spec.

[Kretan]

Yeah.. If you don't play the other specs, you won't see the problem.

Shadow kills as "fast" as a discipline Priest while questing, and has to spend a lot more time bubbling/healing to keep his HP up.

Yeah I don't have a basis of comparison other than leveling shadow in the past. I feel like shadow in Legion has felt really no different than the past. I've always known it was a slower spec, but nothing to me screams that it's too slow.

[Kaesebrezen]

I feel like shadow in Legion has felt really no different than the past. I've always known it was a slower spec, but nothing to me screams that it's too slow.

The gap to other DD specs is just too huge.

If you are balance for raids around having a 70% Voidform uptime and the vast majority of your damage is during Voidform - but in dungeons and while questing your Voidform ranged from 30-50%, then you will automatically deal comparatively low damage to any other damage spec. It's just that sample.

[Kilee25]

I levelled in vanilla and bc as holy, so my "bar" for levelling is quite low.

My worry is that if this is an inherent and obvious weakness when levelling, there's no way the same weakness doesn't appear in raids at some point. Someone mentioned that it's fine as long as we stick on a few big targets, but that puts us in the same spot we are in right now with CoP, where we are pretty crap if we keep swapping to small adds. But that's a big fundamental of raids, and not having the ability to do that well is a major weakness that might pin shadowpriests to a very small niche, which might actually limit the number you can take in raids, and also limit their value in high end progression as well.

Food for thought.

[Kretan]

The gap to other DD specs is just too huge.

If you are balance for raids around having a 70% Voidform uptime and the vast majority of your damage is during Voidform - but in dungeons and while questing your Voidform ranged from 30-50%, then you will automatically deal comparatively low damage to any other damage spec. It's just that sample.

I think in questing it can be frustrating if you don't pull at the correct speed, but I don't think dungeons are a huge issue TBH.

[Relan]

New build today, look alive people ;D .

[Kretan]

I levelled in vanilla and bc as holy, so my "bar" for levelling is quite low.

My worry is that if this is an inherent and obvious weakness when levelling, there's no way the same weakness doesn't appear in raids at some point. Someone mentioned that it's fine as long as we stick on a few big targets, but that puts us in the same spot we are in right now with CoP, where we are pretty crap if we keep swapping to small adds. But that's a big fundamental of raids, and not having the ability to do that well is a major weakness that might pin shadowpriests to a very small niche, which might actually limit the number you can take in raids, and also limit their value in high end progression as well.

Food for thought.

I don't share that concern because of the fundamental difference between raids and leveling. Unless the fight has 50% downtime of zero dps where the downtime can run your voidform dry over and over, I don't think that comparison is warranted at all. Also, target swapping isn't a big deal unless void ray somehow becomes a thing or it lives for a very short time (under 10 seconds).

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New build today, look alive people ;D .

I'm guessing we get slight tuning and some bug fixes we have to discover slowly. I doubt much big will change for us haha.

[davesignal]

Or just a passive : when not in a group, you deal XX% more damage outside of voidform.

I'd like to see a talent, maybe in place of Mind Spike (maybe move Mind Spike to Shadow Crash's place and make Shadow Crash baseline) that gave you an always-on Voidform. Like maybe a flat 10% haste buff, a 10% Shadow damage buff, Void Bolt no longer has a CD but costs Insanity to cast.. something I could use when I don't feel like absolutely destroying my wrists playing with 70% haste, or want to do solo content without having to rush between pulls to get the most out of Voidform.

[snaxattax]

I think in questing it can be frustrating if you don't pull at the correct speed, but I don't think dungeons are a huge issue TBH.

it absolutely is an issue when most dps specs have their damage based on how a tank holds mobs during combat, whereas ours is impacted on top of this by the rate at which they pull. it's not a significant negative when you're in an 'organized' and competent group, but pub/shitter groups will absolutely be nightmares if shadow goes live with current beta mechanics. the problem is for more of the shitters, that this definitely trickles down and stigmatizes the spec.

and then for people on the higher end of the performance curve, the mechanical limitations of shadow become problems. maybe if sphere gets retuned to like 80%, so we actually have the absolutely best 3 target dps mechanics in the game I'd accept things the way they are, but right now shadow is looking to be worse than it was in mop. and it was actually bad in mop - in the sense that you could replace a shadowpriest in a raid with a warlock/mage/etc and see an improvement in overall raid performance - except for two fights (raden, and then pre-nerf norushen where you abused shadow offhealing and mindbender damage).

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something I could use when I don't feel like absolutely destroying my wrists playing with 70% haste, or want to do solo content without having to .

the spec will need a mechanical overhaul for it to be playable if you're worried about repetitive strain. we're going to have sub 1 second gcds for the majority of raid combat, and we are practically gcd locked even in single target.

before we stacked haste, but most of our in-combat time came from chaining mind flays. changing haste mb cooldown and insanity duration scaling really made this problematic in wod. I'm also not convinced of the paste argument that insanity duration not scaling with haste would have made us overpowered, but again we're talking about post mortem discounting of bad feedback so whatever.

[l33t]

I'd like to see a talent, maybe in place of Mind Spike (maybe move Mind Spike to Shadow Crash's place and make Shadow Crash baseline) that gave you an always-on Voidform. Like maybe a flat 10% haste buff, a 10% Shadow damage buff, Void Bolt no longer has a CD but costs Insanity to cast.. something I could use when I don't feel like absolutely destroying my wrists playing with 70% haste, or want to do solo content without having to rush between pulls to get the most out of Voidform.

That's nice, but wasn't that a shadowform's role since start?

Overall I think Blizzard just took wrong direction in their shadow design. Instead of making us cool in vf/absolute shit out of vf, they could make void form changing our spells, and adding more effects to them. Like, for example: mind blast becomes instant, cleaves up to three targets and has reduced cd; mind sear spreads dots, but with reduced duration; mind flay fears target, like death coil; and dots tick once per 0.5 sec instead of usual 1.5 minus haste.
Currently, instead of feeling like old demo lock with Meta, I feel more like a boomkin who plays in a wrong eclipse. Which sucks whole bag of dicks.

Anyways, hope for character copy to arrive at beta, finally.

[snaxattax]

or how about this: you enter voidform allowing you to cast an empowered void shift, which shifts all your gear onto your warlock alt.

and, yes, literally all they had to do was make some sort of evangelism/AA type buff to consume overflow shadow orbs and/or make some sort of 'empowered' level 90 tier where we can consume orbs for tuned-to-relevance aoe damage, and the spec would have actually been a spec.

maybe they'll pull their heads out of their asses and give us some sort of coherent aoe mechanics, but considering we went live for WoD with shit-tier aoe with the idea being we'd make up for it with first tier setbonuses (even though they were completely gutted)... I'm not holding my breath.

I'm just glad that the numerical gutting came early enough for the positive thinking train to turn into a diarrhea tsunami before testing finished, unlike in wod and mop when they came in less than a month before live... maybe the devs will finally change the problematic base mechanics now that the innumerate masses can't ignore them behind artificially inflated numbers.

[l33t]

or how about this: you enter voidform allowing you to cast an empowered void shift, which shifts all your gear onto your warlock alt.

and, yes, literally all they had to do was make some sort of evangelism/AA type buff to consume overflow shadow orbs and/or make some sort of 'empowered' level 90 tier where we can consume orbs for tuned-to-relevance aoe damage, and the spec would have actually been a spec.

maybe they'll pull their heads out of their asses and give us some sort of coherent aoe mechanics, but considering we went live for WoD with shit-tier aoe with the idea being we'd make up for it with first tier setbonuses (even though they were completely gutted)... I'm not holding my breath.

No, I seriously fear MoP 2.0 lies ahead once again. So much for "rework", fucking Blizzard scrubs.

[snaxattax]

there was a large contingent of posters who thought the pre-TOES buff to mindsear was 'overpowered'. nevar 5get.

[Kretan]

it absolutely is an issue when most dps specs have their damage based on how a tank holds mobs during combat, whereas ours is impacted on top of this by the rate at which they pull. it's not a significant negative when you're in an 'organized' and competent group, but pub/shitter groups will absolutely be nightmares if shadow goes live with current beta mechanics. the problem is for more of the shitters, that this definitely trickles down and stigmatizes the spec.

and then for people on the higher end of the performance curve, the mechanical limitations of shadow become problems. maybe if sphere gets retuned to like 80%, so we actually have the absolutely best 3 target dps mechanics in the game I'd accept things the way they are, but right now shadow is looking to be worse than it was in mop. and it was actually bad in mop - in the sense that you could replace a shadowpriest in a raid with a warlock/mage/etc and see an improvement in overall raid performance - except for two fights (raden, and then pre-nerf norushen where you abused shadow offhealing and mindbender damage).

I really don't think shadow priest has issues in dungeons if you look at it from a voidform mechanics point of view only. The only real issue I can see is that lack of trash dps because mythic + will be the one place where cleave aoe is potentially really damn important. I hope mind spike can fix this to an acceptable degree but we will see. Voidform is so easy to get in to and trash packs in mythic + should last long enough where the in and out problem of voidform shouldn't be an issue....the aoe thing in mythic+ is real but other than that shadow is fine for dungeons.

Shadows mechanics are fine for raiding though as long as single target is tuned high enough. If it isn't then I think shadow will be a middle of the pack spec. On the dungeon side I think it entirely depends on how good mind spike is and how prevalent AOE is for mythic+.

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That's nice, but wasn't that a shadowform's role since start?

Overall I think Blizzard just took wrong direction in their shadow design. Instead of making us cool in vf/absolute shit out of vf, they could make void form changing our spells, and adding more effects to them. Like, for example: mind blast becomes instant, cleaves up to three targets and has reduced cd; mind sear spreads dots, but with reduced duration; mind flay fears target, like death coil; and dots tick once per 0.5 sec instead of usual 1.5 minus haste.
Currently, instead of feeling like old demo lock with Meta, I feel more like a boomkin who plays in a wrong eclipse. Which sucks whole bag of dicks.

Anyways, hope for character copy to arrive at beta, finally.

I really wanted this to happen in terms of just buffing our current spells to feel awesome. I wish they would have taken that route.

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Holy hell eye beam got gutted in this build 0.0

[Djriff]

Great, a nerf to mass dispel, exactly what we need.

[Kretan]

Man bladestorm got castrated too holy crap. 50% nerf to bladestorm and eye beam.

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Great, a nerf to mass dispel, exactly what we need.

I'm not exactly sure why that was needed lol

[snaxattax]

Great, a nerf to flavor mass dispel, exactly what we need.

thanks for noticing. also, note that it only impacts shadow in raids and rbgs, not arena. clearly we need to be brought in line with our current beta arena performance.

also they nerfed bladestorm but buffed ravager. changed whirlwind for arms into a dot spread (wew lads arms needed help on uncapped aoe). also rampage got the raging blow cleave treatment.

also buffed flamestrike. buffed flamestrike but no change to mindsear. clearly it takes way to much effort to ctrl+f 'sear'. they're doing all they can guys.

[Djriff]

BG's I'm guessing.

[l33t]

Weeeeeeeeeeell maybe that's the answer lol? Nerf other classes aoe abilities to the level of our mind sear? Let's all roam the world of castrated aoe

I also have to mention that Blizzard is destroying almost all numbers in tooltips. For example, I was looking at assa rogue today in beta, and he had "deals moderate nature damage" tooltip on his lethal poison, instead of usual "2200-4000something" like on live.

[Djriff]

Well I don't actually see leveling everyone out to be a bad thing. If blizzard wants solo combat to last 10-12 seconds, I imagine they would want dungeon trash to last from 20-24 seconds. This is just bringing everything in line.

So technically our AoE got a buff?