Is Shadow Priest supposed to be this miserable?

[Baelic]

A few expansions? Mind Seer has never been good or on par with other classes AoE. Dont you remember when it didn't even damage the mob it was casted on? You had to cast it on a party member or dot your target otherwise you're only hitting 2/3 of your target. Tank gets knocked back outta the mob pack? Oh well no damage for the next 3-5 seconds, but thats ok.

Mind Seer is and always has been absolute garbage.

Except those are functionality problems and they have been fixed, allowing it to function pretty well right now. It's the damage of Mind Seer that has been seriously lacking for the past few expansions, including this one.

[l33t]

Sidenote, Warlocks getting 3 Shards baseline for a smaller ramp up time, when do we start with 60 Insanity?

Sidenote, as you have seen, nobody even mentioned us, other than saying infamous line about how useful multidotting is when their precious melees can't cleave. Therefore, I believe it is safe to say that in the eyes of developers we're OK.

[KaPe]

Sidenote, as you have seen, nobody even mentioned us, other than saying infamous line about how useful multidotting is when their precious melees can't cleave. Therefore, I believe it is safe to say that in the eyes of developers we're OK.

Don't forget about all those boss fights when there are three spread out mobs, who all start in execute range *and* live for at least two minutes for full Surrender to Madness usage. Shadow would be absurdly overpowered there, so they cannot be buffed at all. Sure such fight doesn't exist, but hey, better safe than sorry.

[Rakannishu]

The max level talents are just poorly designed. You should not be forced into one talent just to be remotely on par with the other classes.
Doesn't this go against their design philosophy in the first place?
I actually like the idea of STM but you have to give up way too much to get it and that makes it a poor talent. Blizzard either needs to change STM or make the other talents competitive so we have a choice again.

[l33t]

Don't forget about all those boss fights when there are three spread out mobs, who all start in execute range *and* live for at least two minutes for full Surrender to Madness usage. Shadow would be absurdly overpowered there, so they cannot be buffed at all. Sure such fight doesn't exist, but hey, better safe than sorry.

Three, heh. I suck at only one which is Eye of Azshara last boss. Somehow the boss which starts at execution range is absolutely terrible. Maybe its because I have to constantly dodge 34765785678724986987 shit mechanics thrown at me? Or maybe, and this is the cornerstone of all current problems IMO, fucking melees just stand there and roll on their keyboards because they are not involved by any of the boss' mechanics?

Oh, but as you've read in the Q&A, its "good" that people are taking melees. As I said earlier, ranged casters being shit are the design goal, and now it is proven. So, you should be glad that people kick you from their groups or simply do not take you. Its good for the game, do you hear!

[Woop Woop]

Time to reroll to melee boys!

[Rife]

Given that the Dev feedback is tantamount to "melee is fine" I'd say strap in for World of Meleecraft: Legion.

Melee:
- Ignore mechanics by being able to move without being punished.
- 100% uptime
- top tier single target DPS
- aoe stuns
- highest aoe damage in the game
- interrupts every 12-18 seconds
- easy to heal with CH/WG/LoD/EF & GTAoE

Ranged:
- less than ideal uptime due to movement
- have to do mechanics
- mostly 2nd rate single target DPS
- pleb tier AoE compared to melee
- interrupts on ~1 minute CD's
- no stuns or limited stuns compared to melee
- harder to heal as usually spread out

So ranged have "multidotting" and melee have "cleave". That would be fine for balance if melee didn't also have 100% uptime, more stuns, more interrupts and are easier to heal while doing top tier DPS. There is literally no downside to melee at the moment and plenty of limitations to being ranged. Also worth noting that multidotting is garbage in a competitive raid environment because in every case where multidotting is possible there is a priority target that needs to be burned down fast. Multidotting has become nothing more than meter whoring whereas cleave is generally useful to kill adds quickly etc.

[Dawnrage]

Just play fire mage, they have just as insane cleave as any melee and great single target DPS as well.

[Gorsameth]

Given that the Dev feedback is tantamount to "melee is fine" I'd say strap in for World of Meleecraft: Legion.

As opposed to World of Rangecraft: Every other time?

[PHILtheTANK]

Sadly I don't even see how our AOE can be fixed without a complete rework of mind flay/sear. Even if they tripled the damage of mind sear we still wouldn't compete with real cleave classes, and then they'd have to buff mind flay to keep it the prefered single target spell, and then everything else would have to be adjusted. Mind sear is just a badly designed ability right now.

[l33t]

Sadly I don't even see how our AOE can be fixed without a complete rework of mind flay/sear. Even if they tripled the damage of mind sear we still wouldn't compete with real cleave classes, and then they'd have to buff mind flay to keep it the prefered single target spell, and then everything else would have to be adjusted. Mind sear is just a badly designed ability right now.

Mind sear was a badly designed ability from the moment it appeared in the game. IMO, they'd better just removing it from the game and replacing it with shadowcrash-like ability with lowered CD. Or maybe just give mind flay a 10% chance per tick to spawn Shadow crash in its target, that's even better.

[Kilee25]

Not that I care but didn't the original mind sear not hit your main target? I thought the whole point of its initial design kept it from colliding with mind flay. What mean is that I thought it was a good spell "originally".

[moremana]

Disk ftw and you never die. I stopped at 101 with Shadow, chunked that pos build to the curb, havent looked back, I heal in holy cause I just love holy, I dps as disc if I get the dps role in a dungeon and help out the heals for fun.

[Syenite]

Going holy between bosses in dungeons to do 300k+ aoe dps with holy nova instead of working my arse off for a mere ~200k as shadow is depressing at best. Starting to question myself why i even play this garbage...

[Woop Woop]

Not that I care but didn't the original mind sear not hit your main target? I thought the whole point of its initial design kept it from colliding with mind flay. What mean is that I thought it was a good spell "originally".

Thats right, people would dot up main target and mind sear off it so they did damage on all mobs. Im not sure it that has changed but damn did mind sear become weaker, lol.

[Toroto]

OP here. After getting some more gear and haste and crit in general, the class doesn't feel completely trash anymore. We scale incredibly well with gear, but Blizzard keeps shoving this Mastery/Versatility gear down my throat. We're still God awful at trash and our playstyle is clunky as hell, but I'm starting to see the light in the end of the tunnel. Just pray to the Old Gods that you'll get some shitty players in your pugs, because then you might have a shot at topping the list. Played some Mythics with my guildies and just wanted to go veep in a corner at the numbers they were pulling on both trash and bosses. I felt like I was doing ten times the work with little to no reward! Keeping track of multiple dots, insanity, voidform. The bosses all have so much CC, we don't really do optimal damage with all this moving around. Surrender to Madness? I haven't touched this dogshit of a talent once. I don't like it. Please give us something else to work with.

[Deleted]

So simcraft released some numbers for 840 ilevel Patchwerk-style fights. Even though numbers are somewhat inflated (since it uses suramar mythic loot, which most people do not have yet), something really disappointing attracted my attention: with StM we are merely "above average", while without it we are garbage tier. And even then, difference between us and top 3 is around 40k DPS, which is depressing. I though "but we're good at single target" was the only real saving grace, but right now it's use a gimmick talent to be viable or reroll. Legacy is below the top 3 by 100k. That's third of their total DPS. And for the other classes a mistake means a loss of DPS, not a loss of life.

A few expansions? Mind Seer has never been good or on par with other classes AoE. Dont you remember when it didn't even damage the mob it was casted on? You had to cast it on a party member or dot your target otherwise you're only hitting 2/3 of your target. Tank gets knocked back outta the mob pack? Oh well no damage for the next 3-5 seconds, but thats ok.

Mind Seer is and always has been absolute garbage.

I'm sorry, were you in coma during firelands? Slap sear on tank and go for a smoke, come back to see firemage frantically trying to keep up, but failing by good 25%.

[Dawnrage]

So simcraft released some numbers for 840 ilevel Patchwerk-style fights. Even though numbers are somewhat inflated (since it uses suramar mythic loot, which most people do not have yet), something really disappointing attracted my attention: with StM we are merely "above average", while without it we are garbage tier. And even then, difference between us and top 3 is around 40k DPS, which is depressing. I though "but we're good at single target" was the only real saving grace, but right now it's use a gimmick talent to be viable or reroll. Legacy is below the top 3 by 100k. That's third of their total DPS. And for the other classes a mistake means a loss of DPS, not a loss of life.

Yeah I really hope it's just simcraft being inaccurate as usual, since having S2M forced down our throats for raiding better mean it's an amazing ability in raiding, since we can't use it anywhere else, and all our talents are revolved around using it (or being crap because we can't).

[kaamila]

Just play fire mage, they have just as insane cleave as any melee and great single target DPS as well.

i wouldnt say great ST dps. the burst is great. after those 10-12 seconds though the dps drops alot and melee continue to pass the mages. AOE is great, still get beat by most melee though and ST is above average.

[GT4]

Yeah I really hope it's just simcraft being inaccurate as usual, since having S2M forced down our throats for raiding better mean it's an amazing ability in raiding, since we can't use it anywhere else, and all our talents are revolved around using it (or being crap because we can't).

It's not. The non-S2M profile isn't 100% optimal but neither are the other classes' and there's not terribly much DPS to gain (maybe 10k) using the given conditions. The SP engine itself is really well sustained and numbers match in-game numbers very well so I'd be very surprised if there were any significant errors (that's coming from somebody who found and reported significant errors with three other classes' modules within the span of two weeks before legion release, all being fixed by now). If I simulate my own character, numbers also match really well for different fight durations (with and without S2M) and I'm also seeing this poor performance reflected in-game when doing mythic dungeon bosses with good players. The only way I can somewhat keep up with the better specs (that means >300k DPS for ~1 minute fights) is to spec S2M and hope there's another low single target DPS spec in the group (e.g. Affliction WL) so the fight goes up to at least around 70 seconds.

Having said that, SP scales insanely well with secondary stats (for me at close to 10k haste, I'm looking at both haste and crit being way above int still) so SP will be doing a lot better with raid gear.