Is Shadow Priest supposed to be this miserable?

[Deleted]

Ah, i see. So we simply accept that? I was under the impression that if there was something broken about a class (OP, UP etc) its a good thing to bring attention to it on various forums.

Except it's not broken, priests just don't shine in that regard. We excel at 1 to 3 targets, I'd put ourselves in the top 10 much easilly, perhaps top 5 even and so does Noxxic. As for bringing attention, I'd try official boards. The OP was asking if we are miserable, I don't think we are.

[Woop Woop]

Except it's not broken, priests just don't shine in that regard. We excel at 1 to 3 targets, I'd put ourselves in the top 10 much easilly, perhaps top 5 even and so does Noxxic. As for bringing attention, I'd try official boards. The OP was asking if we are miserable, I don't think we are.

1-3 targets is what we are good at, yes. We dont really excel when other classes can do more or less the same damage we can do but with a shitload more in aoe. I rarely find encounters with 2-3 strong adds, so it matters little, the majority is 1 boss with weak adds that needs to die fast.
Shadow feels quite stupid and useless on those, which is what Mind Spike was supposed to fix. And now its a talent and worse than the spell has ever been.

[Toroto]

Can anyone enlighten me about whatever rotations you guys are using? Did some mythic dungeons today and still ended up pretty darn low compared to Monks, Rogues and Demon Hunters. The whole "We'll do better in mythicals because the mobs have more health" is a lie. Trash packs still dropped faster than I could do anything useful in Voidform. Almost every boss has some shitty mechanic that fucks up our Voidform, it's really retarded.

[CydeTV]

I love my priest. So fun to play. Leveling it was so fun and easy, I could pull mob after mob after mob kill packs of 3/4 and move on with no downtime. After hitting 110 it was a bit of a struggle but not bad at all. StM is fun when you can use it and I like this style over those god awful orbs although I do wish we had devouring plague back. Our AoE is a complete joke and needs help bad. But any fight I can dot 3/4+ adds plus a boss makes for some insane dmg numbers. Just have to constantly work at it. And in pvp we're really good. The only problem I have with the Spriest is the shitty AoE. Other than that, solo questing/killing elite is easy and dmg in Mythic is high other than super big AoE pulls. People must be playing it wrong. They will however in their current state, suck in Mythic plus.

[Waytomoo]

We are doing more than fine in all other aspects than bursty aoe in my experience. Sustained cleaving with 3-5 mobs is really great if they last long which they will in mythic+ (already do in mythics). So I dont really think we will suck in mythic+. Perhaps we are not the best class out there but completely viable. Only thing we can't do is handle 10+ mobs that die in less than 20 seconds.

So all in all, no, I don't think we are miserable.

[Deleted]

1-3 targets is what we are good at, yes. We dont really excel when other classes can do more or less the same damage we can do but with a shitload more in aoe. I rarely find encounters with 2-3 strong adds, so it matters little, the majority is 1 boss with weak adds that needs to die fast.
Shadow feels quite stupid and useless on those, which is what Mind Spike was supposed to fix. And now its a talent and worse than the spell has ever been.

Fact of the matter is, we're currently 4th on single target, first on 3 targets.
We cannot expect to also be top 5 in 4+ targets.
We are ahead of all mages specs, considering where mages have been the last 12 years, I find that to be a good compromise.
As you said yourself, raid encounters are a majority of single target fights, where we do shine.

We're in a good spot from my experience, and from the rankings.

[Deleted]

From the dev interview the other day, don't expect us to get good AoE. The philosophy is very much double down on strengths, and don't shore up weaknesses. We are good where we can multi-dot, and we are good on single target. We just have to accept that we will not be a burst AoE class.

Dungeon AoE will never be our strong point, and I don't really want it to be, as much as it sucks that we can't burst down AoE packs. There are plenty of other classes/specs capable of doing that. A DH might excel at that, a mage might excel at that, but they can't and won't be allowed to excel at multi-DoT style encounters.

What worries me more, is the Mind Spike talent, and whether it will get changed. If we're not meant to be good at AoE (our weakness) don't try and shore it up with an awful talent. I'd rather see something there that improves our multi-dot capability, or our single target capability.

[KaPe]

Fact of the matter is, we're currently 4th on single target, first on 3 targets.
We cannot expect to also be top 5 in 4+ targets.
We are ahead of all mages specs, considering where mages have been the last 12 years, I find that to be a good compromise.
As you said yourself, raid encounters are a majority of single target fights, where we do shine.

We're in a good spot from my experience, and from the rankings.

Two things:

1. This is all with Surrender to Madness. I don't know about you, but I find it really awkward to be balanced around a talent that kills me in the end and completely dominates anything else at the same level. Not only is this 'unique' in a bad way, it also means everything must be balanced around this thing. When you cannot use it, your performance suffers greatly. And once again, dungeons are supposed to matter in this expansion - not just raid bosses where S2M is available for every pull.

2. There was a point where Shadow was top damage due to multidoting. It quickly got nerfed. Raid boss balance is treated much more seriously than AOE balance. No one is going to care if this requires the priest to kill themselves and keep up dots on 3 different targets. Any meter dominance won't last for long - and it will come at a price of horrible AOE. Better to make the spec less reliant on S2M and avoid future nerfs, while also improving their weak points.

[Deleted]

KaPe, I don't see them doing much about AoE. See my previous comment. It doesn't fit their philosophy currently.

[Gorsameth]

Can anyone enlighten me about whatever rotations you guys are using? Did some mythic dungeons today and still ended up pretty darn low compared to Monks, Rogues and Demon Hunters. The whole "We'll do better in mythicals because the mobs have more health" is a lie. Trash packs still dropped faster than I could do anything useful in Voidform. Almost every boss has some shitty mechanic that fucks up our Voidform, it's really retarded.

People are talking about high level Mythic+ where mobs are alive longer. (like 8+). Normal mythics still die to fast for us.

[KaPe]

KaPe, I don't see them doing much about AoE. See my previous comment. It doesn't fit their philosophy currently.

The problem is that this expansion is making drastic changes to dungeon system, so their old "philosophy" should be changed to reflect that. If their approach is still the same, there's bound to be problems, until *maybe* it magically fixes itself on some mythic+10.

[zenkai]

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.

Yeah I hear it gets better with more artifact points but it shouldn't be pure crap until then especially for us healer who play it off spec. When I do world questing I just stay in Holy, I do more DPS and I survive way better, despite dumping some points into my weapon.

[GT4]

Fact of the matter is, we're currently 4th on single target, first on 3 targets.
We cannot expect to also be top 5 in 4+ targets.
We are ahead of all mages specs, considering where mages have been the last 12 years, I find that to be a good compromise.
As you said yourself, raid encounters are a majority of single target fights, where we do shine.

We're in a good spot from my experience, and from the rankings.

Let's ignore that even with S2M, fire mage is basically even while having better mobility, better survivability, better AoE and better add damage (auto-spreading ignite). Let's also ignore that SP without S2M is at the very bottom of all DPS specs (including 2nd and 3rd specs for other classes) and S2M is way too situational to be used effectively in almost all dungeons (even higher Mythic+3) while not even being usable for all raid fights either (CC/boss transitions during the last 35% = no S2M).

SP is probably fine for raids (potentially really good for some fights, below average for others). So are many other specs though and they aren't punished for that by sucking in dungeons and outdoor content - both now having the potential to provide similar loot to mythic raids.

In addition to that, the numbers are just way off at the moment. When it comes to AoE, this is almost a SP exclusive issue (although frost has similar problems, they have 2 other DPS specs which have insane AoE). Other DoT casters still do decent to good AoE damage for longer duration AoE (talented seed of corruption / sunfire + starfall) but SP can't even do shit then because the spammable AoE is a joke and there's no way to efficiently apply DoTs in an AoE. At the same time, even in 1-3 target scenarios, melees are strictly better for "short" fights and can still keep up with SPs that don't have S2M up.

It's honestly trivial to buff SPs in ways that don't affect their S2M DPS at all. First off, the obvious thing to do is to buff other options at 110. Other than that, however, there's still lots of possibilities to buff SPs while mainly if not exclusively affecting non-S2M, e.g. by buffing mind flay/mind sear, changing some of the other talent options or reducing mass hysteria to 1%/stack and buffing baseline DoTs accordingly.

[Deleted]

Two things:

1. This is all with Surrender to Madness. I don't know about you, but I find it really awkward to be balanced around a talent that kills me in the end and completely dominates anything else at the same level. Not only is this 'unique' in a bad way, it also means everything must be balanced around this thing. When you cannot use it, your performance suffers greatly. And once again, dungeons are supposed to matter in this expansion - not just raid bosses where S2M is available for every pull.

2. There was a point where Shadow was top damage due to multidoting. It quickly got nerfed. Raid boss balance is treated much more seriously than AOE balance. No one is going to care if this requires the priest to kill themselves and keep up dots on 3 different targets. Any meter dominance won't last for long - and it will come at a price of horrible AOE. Better to make the spec less reliant on S2M and avoid future nerfs, while also improving their weak points.

If what you say is true, I agree, but what Noxxic has in their guide which I suppose is what they use for their rankings (otherwise, their guide is flawed at best) is LotV, not StM. I find myself (I use LotV, no point doing StM in dungeons) at the top of the meters on most bosses, save the ones with heavy (and I don't mean just avoiding an AE here and there) movement.

[GT4]

If what you say is true, I agree, but what Noxxic has in their guide which I suppose is what they use for their rankings (otherwise, their guide is flawed at best) is LotV, not StM. I find myself (I use LotV, no point doing StM in dungeons) at the top of the meters on most bosses, save the ones with heavy (and I don't mean just avoiding an AE here and there) movement.

Noxxic is no reliable source of information to say the least.

[Rumstein]

Noxxic

Ah. /10char

[justflayin]

If what you say is true, I agree, but what Noxxic has in their guide which I suppose is what they use for their rankings (otherwise, their guide is flawed at best) is LotV, not StM. I find myself (I use LotV, no point doing StM in dungeons) at the top of the meters on most bosses, save the ones with heavy (and I don't mean just avoiding an AE here and there) movement.

I wouldn't use Noxxic as a source. They're known to be extrememly unreliable with info/data.

[Linri]

began leveling SP yesterday, in legion zones, so far seems pretty cool, been a while since I played SP

[Woop Woop]

began leveling SP yesterday, in legion zones, so far seems pretty cool, been a while since I played SP

100-110 wasnt too bad (i thought all classes struggled abit lol). Wait until 110, it feels really slow and crappy although it gets a little better with 830+ gear. Trying to kill a pack of low hp enemies without shadowcrash isnt fun at all.
Id advice you to find another class unless you are attached to the character. If i had played beta or done more research on the class i wouldnt have leveled one.

Kinda offtopic, but what are we supposed to do with StM during progress bosses? Should we wait with it until we know the fight 100% or what?

[gaymer77]

Shadow priests are very well off when it comes to single target or even up to 3 targets. Where we don't shine is many targets. And that's acceptable. Noxxic has us ranked 4th on single target fights and FIRST in 3 target fights. I think that is a pretty damn good spot to be in.

Kinda offtopic, but what are we supposed to do with StM during progress bosses? Should we wait with it until we know the fight 100% or what?

Personally, I don't mess with that talent even though its sims higher. I run Legacy of the Void. I don't like talents or spells that kill you.