Shadow Nerfs

[Coronach]

Really bummed about the dispersion and void torrent changes. Anecdotal for sure, but on Tuesday my parses were pretty bad so I tried to figure out how I could improve them. The only skill mistakes I could find were in my usage of Void Torrent and Dispersion as S2M DPS increases. Armed with that information, I was able to parse substantially better on our Thursday raids and felt a great deal of satisfaction having improved.

DPS tuning happens - not unexpected even if unnecessary before 7.1 buffs. Mechanic changes that reduce skill and fun on the class...well those really suck. Having ways to manipulate insanity generation made the class more fun by making the S2M gameplay deeper. I'm naively hoping they'll revert those changes and just see how the MH change impacts damage for a week.

[Cheze]

This, I mean I never disliked the talent.. It's just that it's too good to pass up, much like Twist of Fate. No talent should be so good that it's considered mandatory.

imo they should either make it baseline, or remove it. I feel the same way about twist of fate tbh; they're just never gonna get mechanics that strong balanced against other talents.

it's frustrating because they actually have some good concepts in the pvp talent tree; mind trauma, psychic link and shadow mania would all be pretty interesting pve options, but they're stuck in the pvp tree and we get lackluster shit like LotV for some reason

[Dawnrage]

Most people on these forums have severe levels of autism. I had relatively no difficulty clearing mythic+ 10's while not lagging behind the other dps in the group (comprised of demon hunters and rogues). Honestly can't even fathom how people don't think the mass hysteria nerf is justified. If you want proof, i'm not allowed to post links on new accounts so you'll have to deal with copy paste. puu(dot)sh/rm5kU/a6b206b181(dot)jpg

Infracted - Djriff

I don't think anyone thinks that MH + S2M didn't deserve to get nerfed, but both those nerfs are pretty devastating. The VoiT nerf makes 0 sense since it's not that huge a boost anyway and removes one of the interaction our artifact weapon has on our resource, which is kind of shitty. The MH nerf is a lazy nerf that also far lowers the skill cap of spriest.

If you are a shadow priest, and you are fine with nerfs because of numbers, that's cool. You can't sit here and be happy though that they essentially just reduced the skill cap by a huge amount, especially if you are a spriest that has done mythic +10 (which btw has no bearing on the nerfs so not sure why you bring that up, not a huge population is going to do mythic +10, especially when it's a week that favors spriest with bolstering, skittish, and fortified) and should want the class to not be brain dead to play since if you're good, you can definitely out perform a shitty spriest who uses S2M poorly, which won't be the case after the nerf.

[Kilee25]

The issue to me is that a large portion of that "skill cap" was jus internet location and geographic location in relation to the server. There are lots of equally skilled players who would have never been able to reliably match the best parses. And people with good connections will lump everyone below them into the "lacks skill" category, regardless of the reason.

[snaxattax]

it'll be just like in WoD when what shadow needed to have meaningful aoe was an unconditional tripling of mind sear damage, but what they'll give us instead is some retarded conditional way to double mindsear damage which also is a significant single target nerf. I'm thinking maybe something along the lines of a large % increase in mind sear damage and completely removing all insanity generation from the spell completely.

I mean you just need to learn all the tricks to outplay firemages. ignite spreading is an extremely high skill cap mechanic. especially since, just like the people that are capable of basic arithmetic said, ignite spreading and cleave mechanics are so strong that raids will do everything they can to maximize cleave.

also love the discussion of xavius logs because god knows every fight you can get double lust double s2m. totally representative of how future spriest performance will be.

shadow is on par to actually be worse than mop for first tier, which is impressive.

[Spirthealer]

Dying a lot during a fight is purely an l2p issue, DPS nerf/low DPS has nothing to do with it. You always prio boss mechanics and work your DPS around it.

I never said them dieing was because of low dps... I'm so happy you read what I posted... that was a joke I'm not, because u did not read, and losing dps because a class can't move other wise it loses all its dps while others can, that's bad design... but I'm happy 75% of the wow community does not understand that...

We now have a problem were people use tank and spank sims to say SPriests numbers are great, then when they get pulled into raids they are pulling far lower then the rest. on top of that level 100 talents that give no choice or game play use other then last 20% of a fight and still have people dieing is a bad design...

[Djriff]

The issue to me is that a large portion of that "skill cap" was jus internet location and geographic location in relation to the server. There are lots of equally skilled players who would have never been able to reliably match the best parses. And people with good connections will lump everyone below them into the "lacks skill" category, regardless of the reason.

No.

You could do the rotation at 200ms and still get 100 stacks of Voidform easily, where it came in was around the 130+ when you're literally dead if you make a mistake.

This nerf not only severely reduces the potential length of StM, but gimps shadow as a whole.

[Deleted]

Whep, I guess my shadow artifact will have a special place in the bank now. But I'm glad that now my AoE trash dps will be 110k, instead of 75k.

I stole it too, love it

[KaPe]

On a plus side - with increased Mind Sear insanity gain, now you only need 33 targets to have permament Voidform, instead of 50. The later number was way too high and this one is a much more realistic one. Also, low damage is a good thing, since you don't want to kill anything and lose that sweet 100 insanity per second. You don't even need Surrender to Madness now.

Who knows, maybe there's a point where this actually matches newly nerfed Holy Nova?

E: Wait, that's incorrect. Voidform is capped, so it probably won't match Holy Nova even at 100 stacks. Maybe with artifact trait and Void Ray.

[barrsftw]

Hopefully they'll just remove S2M and stop balancing the entire class around a mechanic that is only really usable in a raiding/end game PvE environment.

[marathal]

This is why we can't have nice things.

Top players in the world destroying heroic raid content using a specific combination making it too OP.

LOL

[Deleted]

Hopefully they'll just remove S2M and stop balancing the entire class around a mechanic that is only really usable in a raiding/end game PvE environment.

Nothing would satisfy me more than them entirely removing StM but have they ever taken out a talent which is obviously (and wrongfully) one of the main pillars of the entire specialization?

When you look at Artifact tree, when you look at other choices in our PvE talent tree it's so obvious that they intended LotV to be Normal-HC-Mythic talent which by the simple game design would be transitionary while basically demanding anyone who ventures in to raids to go for StM, no exceptions.

I will not comment on the Mind Spike talent, might as well have left a hole in there.

[Aoewy]

how bout ursoc
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

or Nethendra
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done
(please note no legendary at all on the priest)

Its a big nerf to what was an abusive playstyle for top tier players. should have never went live most guilds that were doing any type of top 100 world progression were ready to stack 3 Priests... Overall was stronger than even arms in execute fights (which is most of the raid) Ursoc 30% enrage, cenarious burn phase, xavious burn phase, Eye boss Twist of fate 60-70% uptime if your good. Bigger nerf than was needed But STM should have just been deleted as a talent in beta and replaced with something balanceable.... Giving the already best execute class STM was the dumbest thing I think ive ever seen.




100% wrong actually Demo was not in as bad of place as everyone said because demo locks scale retardly with gear... in 880+testing on ptr demo locks seemed like they could compete for top 3 caster. as of today the new simcraft has Demo locks at 865 BIS gear #1. One of our priests is already 100% swapping to lock with a 2nd of our 3 priests possibly swapping too if needed. Honestly I think Demo will get nerfed in a month or so it just scales so hard.....

Also as to mages the reason mages were not touched was a little change at the end of 7.0 with critical mass and base crit. Mages scale badly.. like Mages maybe the #1 ranged at 850/860 ilvl but give it 2 weeks. at 880 ilvl mages don't really gain as much as other classes. Boomkins and demo locks on the other hand scale very well with gear.

Anecdotal evidence. You take the #1 parse of the shadow priest and show it in comparaison to its own raid team. You need to check the statistic overall of each boss, all class included. For Nethendra, we are 14th : https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10/#boss=1853 For Ursoc, we are 14 again https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10/#boss=1841. This is 75 percentile, it represent the average/know how to play but isnt world 1st material guy.

[Ashbeck]

Surrender to Madness was a mistake.

Now literally every aspect of the specialization is tuned around one broken talent.
I'm a semi-casual scrub who sets his foot in to raiding now and then but if I was a full blown casual OR hardcore Mythic raider, I would be mad as hell.
Talent which was obviously made for one niche only has become the Holy Cow which musn't be touched or compromised in any way.

I wish that S2M had never been invented for SP, it's skewed everything for us and Blizzard keeps hiding behind it to justify our DPS numbers when in truth many of us don't even use it. What use is a 'suicide' spell to me when questing or clearing trash on 5 mans and now that it's been nerfed it may even be relegated to little more than a gimmick even in raids.

I just don't understand what Blizzard are doing at the moment, maybe the whole dev team just play Fire mages but you only have to do a few 5 man dungeons on a Shadow Priest to see how embarrassingly low our AOE damage is and whilst I welcome the buff to Mind Sear it just isn't anywhere near sufficient.

[Rumstein]

No, it wasn't.
The hysteria stacks keep going after you reach 100 Insanity stacks (at least they did).

Never did in live.

[tiptopmemer]

Shadow priests have ALWAYS been forgotten,
We've ALWAYS been the afterthought,
Whenever we've been strong,
Its because blizzard underestimated us.

Thats just pathetic.

[Khorneflake]

Wrong choice blizzard? Of course it was, looking at data for a single weeks raiding when you've had MONTHS of alpha and beta testing, then giving one spec a 100% nerf HALF A WEEK before mythics open? Are you serious? This nuclear nerf was not nessacary until later in the expansion when our haste scales higher, why not just a faster degeneration? No, please the noobs who can't or won't learn how to play and just cap our MH at 50 stacks so they feel as though they've achieved greatness when they get to 50, because anything beyond that is a waste of time. Take away our interesting play on dispersion and VT to increase our stacks and line up with PI during vf, I've wasted no time in rerolling, blizzard, but thanks for 3 weeks of needless grinding when you've had all the time in the world to balance this.

[CrippleshoT]

https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs?lang=en-gb

Changes are not final.

[beefeetr]

It really bothers me how bad of a talent mind spike is. Why couldn't they just tune it to make mind spike a decent mythic dungeon talent and S2M the raid talent. Buffing mindsear seems really hammy, you already have mind spike why not just tune that?

[britishbubba]

https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs?lang=en-gb

Changes are not final.

Why do game companies insist on announcing things in an official capacity and then say this?