New 7.1 Shadow notes.

[Djriff]

can you put Shadowform in there as well.

[Peroxidex]

Well even if it just procced off of sear and still cast flay would be an improvement. It would be great in mythic +7 and higher when we have more time to do a full rotation and 1-2 voidforms.

Why would you post a claim that the changes aren't real without linking a source? If they had not heard of it, which is likely the case as they're still stating it, then a source would be extremely beneficial. Is it the fact there is no real source and it's simply your own speculation? Datamining is wrong when they discover something new and misconstrue what they're looking at. We've had basic class and talent changes countless times yet you think they're somehow mistaken?

I'm sure many people appreciate your guide here on MMO, but let's face it, it's mostly sourced from other people and guides. You are not an authority on priest anywhere, but in your own mind (and here). I realize Twintop is gone and you seemed to have worked with them, but sadly, you are not them.

(lol at PTR tests showing the changes are true)

[Hendo741]

can you put Shadowform in there as well.

Changed Non VF to SF. If someone is DPSing out of shadow form they deserve the decrease....

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Why would you post a claim that the changes aren't real without linking a source? If they had not heard of it, which is likely the case as they're still stating it, then a source would be extremely beneficial.

Someone else did post it. it was a twitter post by celestion. It was ambiguous, although i read through the lines as well.

[Djriff]

Why would you post a claim that the changes aren't real without linking a source? If they had not heard of it, which is likely the case as they're still stating it, then a source would be extremely beneficial. Is it the fact there is no real source and it's simply your own speculation? Datamining is wrong when they discover something new and misconstrue what they're looking at. We've had basic class and talent changes countless times yet you think they're somehow mistaken?

Did you read the thread?
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post42873516

Datamining has been way off before, for example look up almost any damage trinket on wowhead or wowdb and it'll be wrong. It's datamined data that fills those spots. Datamining is an excellent tool but until blizzard posts official patch notes nothing is set in stone. I was mainly saying the numbers are off, which GT4 provided numbers from PTR.

I'm sure many people appreciate your guide here on MMO, but let's face it, it's mostly sourced from other people and guides. You are not an authority on priest anywhere, but in your own mind (and here). I realize Twintop is gone and you seemed to have worked with them, but sadly, you are not them.

(lol at PTR tests showing the changes are true)

Actually I did a lot of my own testing and talked to several people about it via PM's. Not sure what your beef is with me tbh.

[Dorothyjean]

Even if it misleading datamining, although I have no clue how showing "this number now becomes that number" is misleading -- All PTR notes would be misleading then, it still means even with Shadowform that you are forced to use S2M. I've met Shadow Priests out there who have a lot of troubles doing S2M but Blizzard doesn't care about the high end ability to play a Shadow priest ... if you can't cut it, oh well no one wants your class now for Mythics. Also, that Twitter that was linked was dumb ... Celestalon said that the notes were "misleading datamining" but still had no answer for the guy being declined 55 times in a row.

On top of it, our artifact is getting nerfed and I'm sure you did a lot of testing Djriff as well as others did but you guys are like the 1% and now casual shadow priests who possibly can't handle S2M or are clickers etc. who get totally screwed over by our slow ramp up damage, our shit AoE and having to be able to be high skill to maintain optimal DPS when other classes can faceroll out comparable DPS and chumps can out-burst us in low level Mythic / Mythic+ but "ya, it's fine cause we shine at Mythic+10" ... that's nice for you people but what about someone who isn't using S2M? Just a shitty dps no one wants in their mythics or pug raids.

[Djriff]

Even if it misleading datamining, although I have no clue how showing "this number now becomes that number" is misleading -- All PTR notes would be misleading then, it still means even with Shadowform that you are forced to use S2M. I've met Shadow Priests out there who have a lot of troubles doing S2M but Blizzard doesn't care about the high end ability to play a Shadow priest ... if you can't cut it, oh well no one wants your class now for Mythics. Also, that Twitter that was linked was dumb ... Celestalon said that the notes were "misleading datamining" but still had no answer for the guy being declined 55 times in a row.

Celestalon has always been a bit weird about his tweets. I mean the datamined changes aren't going to completely shake up our world and still amount to less than a 1% nerf. I've also met plenty of shadow priests that struggle with StM and that's just the nature of the beast. If anything I think blizzard only cares about the high end ability to play shadow and that's just wrong.

On top of it, our artifact is getting nerfed and I'm sure you did a lot of testing Djriff as well as others did but you guys are like the 1% and now casual shadow priests who possibly can't handle S2M or are clickers etc. who get totally screwed over by our slow ramp up damage, our shit AoE and having to be able to be high skill to maintain optimal DPS when other classes can faceroll out comparable DPS and chumps can out-burst us in low level Mythic / Mythic+ but "ya, it's fine cause we shine at Mythic+10" ... that's nice for you people but what about someone who isn't using S2M? Just a shitty dps no one wants in their mythics or pug raids.

Mass Hysteria is the root of the problem, not to mention the constant buffs they gave to our dots in beta while several of us were like uhhh hey you're making us OP in this aspect and terrible in others (talent wise) you should address this and then got ignored.

That almost sounds like you're blaming the priest community for being a tough class to master. Shadow has been for awhile now the spec that requires the most work for a meh bang. I mean look at dotweaving back in HM/BRF, it had a terrible rotation and a minimal reward with a high risk factor. Then you had the class trinket which basically forced us into ST only unless we wanted to play suboptimally. While StM is definitely an issue, it's not just the talent that is the issue, it's the synergy of ToF and Mass Hysteria that make it an issue. I really wish it wasn't the playstyle, I'm not a fan of spamming my keys and hoping I don't get a lag spike to DPS.

[Ponk]

On top of it, our artifact is getting nerfed and I'm sure you did a lot of testing Djriff as well as others did but you guys are like the 1% and now casual shadow priests who possibly can't handle S2M or are clickers etc. who get totally screwed over by our slow ramp up damage, our shit AoE and having to be able to be high skill to maintain optimal DPS when other classes can faceroll out comparable DPS and chumps can out-burst us in low level Mythic / Mythic+ but "ya, it's fine cause we shine at Mythic+10" ... that's nice for you people but what about someone who isn't using S2M? Just a shitty dps no one wants in their mythics or pug raids.

You act like top Spriests don't want Surrender fixed as well, lol

[Kilee25]

I'm sure many people appreciate your guide here on MMO, but let's face it, it's mostly sourced from other people and guides. You are not an authority on priest anywhere, but in your own mind (and here). I realize Twintop is gone and you seemed to have worked with them, but sadly, you are not them.

(lol at PTR tests showing the changes are true)

I know this may come as a shock to you, but Twintop is just a person, who puts his pants on one leg at a time like all the rest of us. There are a lot of people who contribute to this community with just as much passion and effort.

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You act like top Spriests don't want Surrender fixed as well, lol

Actually...

[Djriff]

Actually...

They do, it's pretty much universally agreed.

[Kilee25]

Let's narrow our definition of "top" priests to those who are realistically on the world Mythic leaderboards, those getting 95% plus parses. Do you honestly think they want S2M gone? From their perspective, shadow hasn't been this pretty in 3 expacs...

Think about it a little more. Any "fix" is probably going to reduce our overall top end damage, and also remove most of our niche.

There's no "fix" for this that doesn't weaken our position on raid teams, no version that could possibly make "top" priests happier...

[Djriff]

Let's narrow our definition of "top" priests to those who are realistically on the world Mythic leaderboards, those getting 95% plus parses. Do you honestly think they want S2M gone? From their perspective, shadow hasn't been this pretty in 3 expacs...

Well they don't want to lose the spot for sure, but with everything else being so bad in comparison to StM is the main issue. Even they agree that StM is OP atm.

[Dorothyjean]

Celestalon has always been a bit weird about his tweets. I mean the datamined changes aren't going to completely shake up our world and still amount to less than a 1% nerf. I've also met plenty of shadow priests that struggle with StM and that's just the nature of the beast. If anything I think blizzard only cares about the high end ability to play shadow and that's just wrong.

Mass Hysteria is the root of the problem, not to mention the constant buffs they gave to our dots in beta while several of us were like uhhh hey you're making us OP in this aspect and terrible in others (talent wise) you should address this and then got ignored.

That almost sounds like you're blaming the priest community for being a tough class to master. Shadow has been for awhile now the spec that requires the most work for a meh bang. I mean look at dotweaving back in HM/BRF, it had a terrible rotation and a minimal reward with a high risk factor. Then you had the class trinket which basically forced us into ST only unless we wanted to play suboptimally. While StM is definitely an issue, it's not just the talent that is the issue, it's the synergy of ToF and Mass Hysteria that make it an issue. I really wish it wasn't the playstyle, I'm not a fan of spamming my keys and hoping I don't get a lag spike to DPS.

I've always felt they should just redo S2M and just smush it into Voidform and make up another Level 100 talent ... doubtful it'll happen but ya. My problem is it shouldn't be a "nature of the beast" statement to go along with one of our Talents. Like when I look at all the other DPS classes, it's pretty much smooth sailing and/or good lord, don't take this but then it's us "Take this and you're ok" "Don't ever take that" "I hope you can play f'ing awesome cause you will die if you don't" are our options. Factored into Blizzard pushing Mythic+ a lot, they make this clump of people with absolutely insane burst dps and then make ours atrocious until high end M+ so "You'll be awesome later but good luck finding anyone who will take you til then..." kind of mentality which isn't cool. Not everyone has an awesome guild or time to raid.

I'm not blaming us for making the class hard to master, more at Blizzard. I don't mind learning and getting better but where's the incentive outside of 'wanting' to have a tough class? When I was leveling up with my wife and until recently (854 ilvl now) she was constantly out-threating me on her holy pally, out-dpsing me sometimes and she could pull 10+ mobs and more or less laugh at me spam healing through 5+ ... then you finally get some gear and go "Well, crap... now I have to be more than awesome to get into higher raids..." and as you stated, which honestly should be a huge factor...

"Hoping I don't get a lag spike to DPS" ... no class should have to say that ever.

[Twigzy]

I really hope that they don't just blanket nerf us come 7.1 so that literally all shadow DPS's drop out of the race, simply because of S2M and MH. The issue is high parses from a high skill cap on a talent that is too good to not build around when possible.
They are idiots if they think a blanket nerf is going to do anything good to fix the mechanical issues and improve any player's perspective of priest.

[Ponk]

Let's narrow our definition of "top" priests to those who are realistically on the world Mythic leaderboards, those getting 95% plus parses. Do you honestly think they want S2M gone? From their perspective, shadow hasn't been this pretty in 3 expacs...

I think most top end spriests would rather have 2-3 interesting 100 talents that make us strong in different scenerios, as opposed to current Surrender

[Glnger]

the official patch notes have nothing on shadow, or the disc data-mined notes. it seems at least at this point that celestion meant that no changes to our spells were happening, though we still have a few more days before 7.1 and weeks probably before they address our 100 lvl talents.

[Kilee25]

I think most top end spriests would rather have 2-3 interesting 100 talents that make us strong in different scenerios, as opposed to current Surrender

In the mythic race in HFC and even BRF, spriests were being sat because their niche was multi target with focused boss damage, which couldn't be leveraged in pure ST. Their heroism burst was bad too.

Right now, 2 spriests are practically mandatory for mythics. It's a wet dream for "top" spriests. So no, I don't think they would choose to sacrifice S2M for a more "balanced" toolkit. At best, they want the cake and get to eat it too - ie a strong AE (5-man) choice and no change to S2M.

[Jimjam38]

For everyone currently complaining about how only the top performing spriests are viable:

The WCL statistics for mythic EN show that shadow is outperforming every other spec at every percentile above 20th. If I understand this correctly, this means that in mythic, at every percentile above 20th, shadow priests do higher dps than equally 'skilled'(read: same percentile) players of other specs. Bad spriests are still better than bad anything else.

Dropping down to heroic difficulty - shadow still outperforms all other specs above the 80th percentile, and is top 3 until 70th and top 6 until the 50th...

You all get the picture. And if you're below the 50th percentile, well damn son, that's real rough for you. Maybe you should try to improve a little rather than just complain about how you can't automatically top dps. StM is certainly broken af right now, but your impression that only the best spriests can outperform other dps specs is wrong. If you're being beaten in dps by other players, it's probably because they're all better players than you, so damn right they should be beating you. And you're still probably beating some players of higher skill than you (again, by "skill" I mean percentile).

Now don't get me wrong, I like seeing shadow actually have its turn in the spotlight for the first time in two xpacs, and I agree that StM is bad design and needs to be addressed in a way that doesn't kill shadow's viability in raids.
But FFS, lets not pretend that its the "0.1%" that they're balancing for. Because it's just not true.

[Kilee25]

I agree with you and if anything, it supports what I've been saying.

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From your own quote:

Now don't get me wrong, I like seeing shadow actually have its turn in the spotlight for the first time in two xpacs, and I agree that StM is bad design and needs to be addressed in a way that doesn't kill shadow's viability in raids.

That's just it though, isn't it? What people really want is all the weaknesses shored up with as little change as possible where we are strong.

[Khorneflake]

The ability itself isn't OP, it's the combination of ToF and Mass Hysteria that makes it straight up mandatory. Seriously MH is like 70% of the problem, not StM.

And yet, people refer to S2M in almost every single SP nerf discussion, scroll up to see it. Is it worth the risk of butchering one fun talent in the hope that they will make the other two viable? When they have absolutely built the entire class around one talent, it just seems worrying that they would do any radical changes to it, a flat nerf to MH while keeping it's cap at 100 stacks will be reasonable. On top of that, we had prepatch, beta, alpha, lots of youtube videos on the new SP and if people hadn't figured it out by then that the whole class is tailored to one mode of damage and STILL rolled a SP, before complaining about it... it does not make sense.

Yeah...that definitely wouldn't work and we would be right back here come The Nighthold.

I don't see why it wouldn't, hurting our haste hurts our ability to maintain voidform and thus everything that comes with it, the legendaries are making insanity generation so trivial and that should not be the case, it should be harder. The only nerf I could see coming to MH while keeping with their promise of "maintaining VF for a long time to feel rewarding" is to keep it's cap at 100 stacks, and again this is absolutely fine.

We do get VF in content like bosses and elites, sure that's easy. For stuff that only lives for 8 seconds you get VF right as it dies, which makes VF pretty useless. Did you already block out the leveling experience of shadow?

Block out the leveling experience? Not sure what you mean here, we will be out gearing the current trash mobs rather quickly (not including the surarmar city stuff), but for leveling? If you're fighting something that lasts 8secs, chances are you're probably fighting more than one of them, and if you're not pull more to make the most of VF? I didn't find myself not popping VF during my leveling experience.

No, people want to be able to do burst aoe like every other class can. We want a decent aoe talent like affliction has where it's a solid choice for aoe vs ST. Any kind of choice really because let's be real Shadow Crash is a joke. Also the 5 second penalty for StM death was fixed.

Why should we have something every other class can do? I thought the idea of shadow priest was powerful damage over time on 2-3 targets and ST. You can weave your VF stacks between packs in dungeon's since lingering persists for 60secs, which results in incredible damage on the next pack and so on through a quicker VF transition, the only thing we lack is damage on large trash packs in comparison to DH/DK's etc and that's OK as those are few and far between. There needs to be a line drawn on what classes/specs are tailored for, having every class good at everything just dilutes the experience.

[Ilir]

The devs are incompetent. I'm sorry but you must be really incompetent or completely oblivious if as a DEV you didn't see the whole SP situation coming.

We told them times and times again that they were going straight into a wall with this stupid as fuck StM. We told them that our whole talents were garbage. We told them that what they were doing was the dumbest thing in the entire game industry... but no "dw we will just ignore you and act surprised and say "we don't have time to do that big of a change during the 7.1". TOO BAD they had plenty of time during beta. But no, celestalon was busy playing pokémon go/hots/diablo and dying people's hair to blue/purple.