New Shadow nerfs?

[Nyel]

ok so they are about to fall off, cast Mindspike and redot them afther to wait for them to fall off again..

Right? with Voidbolt in mind this sounds super fucked (not fun)

Mind Spike seems to be an ability only used during Shadowform. Using it in Voidform doesn't make that much sense unless your target would die.

- - - Updated - - -

You think I'm wrong because Voidform is everything to you, technically I'm right but you ignore it cause it's not "maximizing damage." Surrender to Madness has spoiled the lot of you.

I'm not even using StM and I'd still say your arguments are pretty... questionable.

DoT weaving in Voidform? Yeah when you have some long living adds. If not you would NEVER cast a DoT in Voidform. That's the whole system around Void Bolt and Void Form. Cast your DoTs outside of Voidform, go into Voidform and don't bother with DoTs anymore, just deal damage.

And there is a difference between "king of mass AoE" and "acceptable AoE at all". Shadow Priests damage outside of Voidform is pretty bad, AoE is pretty bad outside and inside of Voidform. Why make it worse with the changes to Void Bolt? It doesn't make any sense, does it?
_________

The time until you enter the first Voidform as a Shadow Priest is so ridiculous, your damage is non-existant, you're slow and useless. The ramp up time is too high. We once had a talent that gave us 100 Insanity at once - what happened to it?

[Baelic]

I'm not even using StM and I'd still say your arguments are pretty... questionable.

DoT weaving in Voidform? Yeah when you have some long living adds. If not you would NEVER cast a DoT in Voidform. That's the whole system around Void Bolt and Void Form. Cast your DoTs outside of Voidform, go into Voidform and don't bother with DoTs anymore, just deal damage.

Fair enough, but there's nothing stopping you from recasting dots in a pinch. Fun fact: I don't use StM either.

And there is a difference between "king of mass AoE" and "acceptable AoE at all". Shadow Priests damage outside of Voidform is pretty bad, AoE is pretty bad outside and inside of Voidform. Why make it worse with the changes to Void Bolt? It doesn't make any sense, does it?

It does if you think about it critically, if their goal was to give Voidbolt an AoE effect, would you honestly think that a complete refresh wasn't OP? Personally I would like to see the it give more time than the 3secs it is now, but not a full refresh.

The time until you enter the first Voidform as a Shadow Priest is so ridiculous, your damage is non-existant, you're slow and useless. The ramp up time is too high. We once had a talent that gave us 100 Insanity at once - what happened to it?

I hear you on the ramp-up problem, though I don't think giving us an instant voidform is the answer since that'd just end up being the only talent you'd take in that line. Personally I think our non-voidform damage needs to go up while the damage bonus of voidform goes down.

[Rumstein]

Dot weaving is fun, you were effectively doing the same thing with Voidbolts anyway just in less GCDs. We're never going to be kings of mass AoE anyway so why complain about it? 2-3 targets is where we're at and have nearly always been.



I know more than enough to know when people are being whiny little brats who can't adapt, and also enough to understand the limitations and strong-points of Shadow.

You don't though. You don't understand how Spriests work if you think they are useful outside of VF. Our "passive cleave" is worse than it was when we just swapped Mind Flay to Mind Sear, as we simultaneously lose the usefulness of the ring legendary. Hoorah!

Thing is, they didn't NEED to give void bolt an AoE. It feels pointless, when VB worked quite nicely before.

Also bragging about not using S2M is pretty much feeling good about playing the class badly. You might not like it, but there's no doubt that it is necessary for SPriests to compete at the top tier, and not using it is just crippling yourself.

[Baelic]

You don't though. You don't understand how Spriests work if you think they are useful outside of VF. Our "passive cleave" is worse than it was when we just swapped Mind Flay to Mind Sear, as we simultaneously lose the usefulness of the ring legendary. Hoorah!

Thing is, they didn't NEED to give void bolt an AoE. It feels pointless, when VB worked quite nicely before.

Also bragging about not using S2M is pretty much feeling good about playing the class badly. You might not like it, but there's no doubt that it is necessary for SPriests to compete at the top tier, and not using it is just crippling yourself.

I've played Shadow Priest since Burning Crusade, have been consistently in the top 10 dps of Top 3 guilds in my server, and keep tabs on all of the guides and math people tend to do. Don't you fucking DARE suggest I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.

Useful is a subjective term, that can be defined to serve any persons purpose and argument. The fact is that we still deal damage outside of voidform, we don't suddenly become unable to do even 1 damage just because we are no longer in our factually best state during gameplay.

You're also forgetting that numbers passes haven't been done yet, from a mechanics perspective I'm liking the changes right now. VB change FEELS (subjective, again) pointless because the numbers are too low, which I agree with, I also never said that the current live iteration didn't work.

I pointed out the StM thing in response to the person I quoted, personally it's a bit of an inside joke with my guild that I'm "terrible" for preferring not to use it unless the fight let's it shine. Yet they still take me anyway and I'm still being competitive since I geared according to my playstyle.

StM feels necessary because you all want to be the next Method, StM feels necessary because everything else from a design standpoint is subpar. Changes are in flux and all you people do is complain rather than come up with constructive ideas on how it could be fixed.

TL : DR - Saying I am terrible or "don't understand" is nonconstructive, saying X sucks without giving Y reason and Z proposed fix is nonconstructive.

[Myzrael]

Thing is, they didn't NEED to give void bolt an AoE. It feels pointless, when VB worked quite nicely before.

Pretty much this. Void bolt is fine. We don't need aoe dot spread from it.

It's simple: we thrive in fights with 1-3 targets with high HP , we suck at burst/constant AOE with 5+ mobs.
If one gets nerfed, the other needs to be buffed and vice versa.

S2M can never be balanced the way it is now. Death penalty is too high risk to not be compensated in absurd damage (Why bring a spriest, if his damage will be the same as fire mage's who doesn't risk dying). On the same hand, if the damage is too high, top guilds will use and abuse it, no matter what.
My personal preference would be tuning down S2M's potential, cd and removing death penalty while making it baseline.

Obviously, 3rd level 100 talent would then need to be added, and all 3 revamped to completely change play style (like legendary belt completely changes play style).
That way we could have different choice for different play style (5man, raid, pvp, questing) or different boss fights / instances.

Regards,

[Kilee25]

Re: Thread.

My imagined scenerio for all the class changes that happened in Legion is that Blizzard decided to implement a class design based partly on listening to feedback from a select portion of the community (ie. highly progressed raiders). The overwhelming feedback for shadow was that players wanted a talent that rewarded "skill" and complex gameplay. StM was probably born as a response to this, conceptualizing the talent as the embodiment of risk vs reward. I don't know whether the chicken or the egg came first - ie. whether blizzard designed it in response to player feedback, or whether players suggested it - but the bottom line is that I think a portion of the community that had a high degree of influence "asked" for StM.

SPriest became this class that was designed heavily towards raiders, and as such only performed and was balanced (if at all) in that situation, which their feedback group (ie. the only group that they listen to) was probably extremely happy with. The class passed from beta into live because Bliz was under the impression that, on the whole, everyone loved the talent, and anyone complaining about the direction shadow was going was probably unenlightened or not a "real" raider so didn't matter.

After the game came out and statistics started coming in, I suspect the issues that people talked about started to reveal themselves in the form of raw data - in general the good players performing amazingly while the average players collapsed. They probably do have access to raw data from raids and so forth - something like an internal world of logs - and I'm sure that they also get feedback in the form of player participation and canceled subscriptions. The "balance" of shadow only became an issue after the first raid, probably because they were waiting for data before making a decision.

The fact that shadow is getting such extensive changes in the middle of an expac most likely means that the data is looking bad. However, the design of the spec from the bottom up is not conducive to any sort of change that's going to actually fix anything. It's probably, literally, a no-win situation, so the image that you're getting of "throwing shit at a wall" is probably literally that. They are probably so bogged down in other areas of the game that they are throwing the interns at the "shadow problem", and the only changes that they are allowed to make are basically numbers tweaks and small programming behaviors that don't involve extensive rewrites.

The change to Lingering Insanity - to me this is probably an attempt to give people who can't handle the faster play style - either because of internet connection or just simply mechanical or physical reasons - an alternative. I'm pretty sure this is one of the bigger complaints they've been getting from people who quit the class - ie basically carpal tunnel syndrome.

Most of the other changes just look like experiments to me. The Mind Spike change is just another in a long line of attempts to make something useful out of a dead talent. I'm honestly surprised they are even trying - instead of (you know) just letting it go completely unchanged all expac like Void Entropy. On the whole I'm mostly just confused why they are even bothering going through the motions with this talent when their energy could be spent elsewhere. I suspect the reason why is that the development time to change it's behavior was relatively small, so they just threw it in there as a peace offering.

StM won't go away this expac (if ever), and I don't think it's going to significantly change either. People asking for it to go away or get redesigned - imo that's like asking for water not to be wet or something.

.........

I actually find the changes to Mind Sear/Flay interesting, and it has potential, but it needs a numbers pass. I hope that they continue to experiment with this line of reasoning and mature the idea to it's logical conclusion. People have been asking for Mind Sear to get baked into Mind Flay for literally years, so I'm actually pretty excited to see them heading in that direction.

.......

People keep saying stuff like, "stop complaining, be constructive and offer ideas to make the game better," but personally I don't think this is the forum for suggesting changes. Doing that is kind of like sitting around talking about what all we would do if we had a million dollars. It's wish fulfillment pratter - we don't have any influence on what the devs do, and I think it's more constructive just to talk about the changes - what we like about them, what we don't, how it might change the game for us, etc... Maybe I just think differently than others, but I have no interest in talking about "what they should have done instead," and I find it weird that people are engaging in some kind of notion that "armchair development" is somehow improving the quality of discussion.

....

Sorry for the rantish nature. I'm old and curmudgeonly. Later.

[Rumstein]

--Snip--

Actually from what I've heard, the majority of top end raiders were against S2M, noting that something with high risk needs high reward otherwise there's no point taking it over a less risky class, but at the same time if the reward is high then they will be stacked, in addition to S2M scaling absolutely out of control at higher gear levels.

Not only is MMO-C not the correct outlet for suggesting changes (more for discussion and an outlet to vent really), but Blizzard does not appear to take kindly to suggestions RE Class Design.

[Musta]

Remember Shaman stacking in the start of burning crusade? Expect something in this lines....

[Kilee25]

Actually from what I've heard, the majority of top end raiders were against S2M, noting that something with high risk needs high reward otherwise there's no point taking it over a less risky class, but at the same time if the reward is high then they will be stacked, in addition to S2M scaling absolutely out of control at higher gear levels.

I have no doubt that concerns were voiced, but that's not what I was saying. I haven't seen any top end Shadowpriests posting things like, "This talent needs to be removed." There are only three major priest forums on the net, and the generalized opinion that I see from most of the higher end raiders is something like silent consent - hope that things will be left alone for as long as possible. Occasional outbursts if there's a threat of an StM-breaking nerf in the pipeline. Occasional acknowledgement that the class is imbalanced. But never anything like true unhappiness or anger with the talent choices and spec changes. There's a difference between acknowledging facts about scaling, and disagreeing with design choices.

[Deleted]

ok so they are about to fall off, cast Mindspike and redot them afther to wait for them to fall off again..

Right? with Voidbolt in mind this sounds super fucked (not fun)

I never said it was a good playstyle It definitely seems clunky as fuck. I don't see why Blizzard are so intent on having Mind Spike remove DoTs. Why can't it empower your DoTs or something?

I.E. When you Mind Spike a target with your DoTs on it the damage is added to the next few ticks. Or something.

[Deleted]

Even if I main holy, having to cast dots in Voidform looks very wrong to me.

The design philosophy should be "easy to learn, hard to master". Right now, shadow is quite complex already, and possibly one of the most complex DPS specs. After you enter VF everything is already more frenetic (even outside STM): you have to fight against insanity drain using many new spells you didn't use outside VF, with a new and faster rotation. Errors here are punished by shortening the VF duration, which is quite bad because of how Lingering Insanity and Mass Hysteria works.

I understand that shadow might be OP at high levels because of STM.

However, the solution to that should be lowering the skill cap to perform a decent damage (to be closer to other specs), while nerfing the far high end accordingly.

The new Void Bolt goes exactly in the opposite direction. It forces us to refresh dots inside VF, making the already frenetic part of our rotation even harder to perform, and so raising the skill required to perform a decent damage.

A possible alternative change could be the following:

Mind Flay: as in live (no AoE)
Mind Sear: exact copy of Mind Flay plus the AoE effect if the target has SWP
Void Bolt: refreshes the DoTs on the target, and extends by ~1s the DoTs on other targets
Lingering Insanity: as in live
Mass Hysteria: cap the stacks even more -- if this affects mid-high (non-far high) too much, make it provide 2.5% or 3% per second with a smaller cap

Now, I might be completely off track on these changes. But I really think that the should reduce the spec complexity, and if needed nerf the far high end numbers.

[Deleted]

I always thought about it and this 7.1.5 confirms it... the lack of competence at blizzard is really insane, pathetic I might add. Its not acceptable that they totally rework a spec 3 months into a new expansion... but its not just this, look at how they want to change secondary stats, how they are "surprised" that some classes have secondary stats better than main one... it's like if at blizzard they have several different dev teams, each one not knowing what the others do, and then every few months swap each others so they start cluelessly from scratch. There is no other explaination for this total disaster, they get surprised and want to "fix" things that everyone else saw way ahead before them. They are horrible.

[Uberkafros]

The new flay and the aoe VB are a joke and seem to be battling one another. The new flay supports DoTing main target and maybe SWP a few more while flaying the one with both SWP and VT.
While the new VB while adding some more direct dmg via the multi bolts its lower dot extention would work better if we had an AoE dot applying skill inside VB and the focusing on maintaing them in small increments of 2-4 seconds while doing other things in between VBs.
On split targets, say Odyn fight ect, even the new 4 seconds extension is not enough to guaranty a smooth uptime of all our dots while removing the new functions of flay and VB completely.

[Gorsameth]

The new flay and the aoe VB are a joke and seem to be battling one another. The new flay supports DoTing main target and maybe SWP a few more while flaying the one with both SWP and VT.
While the new VB while adding some more direct dmg via the multi bolts its lower dot extention would work better if we had an AoE dot applying skill inside VB and the focusing on maintaing them in small increments of 2-4 seconds while doing other things in between VBs.
On split targets, say Odyn fight ect, even the new 4 seconds extension is not enough to guaranty a smooth uptime of all our dots while removing the new functions of flay and VB completely.

Hate to break it to you but Voidbolt got nerfed to 2 seconds. not buffed to 4.

[Tharid]

It looks like the Voidbolt's DoT extention is indeed 4 seconds but only when it crits. Source: Viklund's stream.

Can anyone confirm/deny?

[Deleted]

I posted this in another thread but this is my thought about the, in my eyes, worst change they are implementing.

Void Bolt : No longer refreshes DoTs duration instead adds 2 seconds to allnearby targets.


This is by far the most egregious change to me. While change to LI, StM and our AoE is all something i don't like but i could live with the VB changes is in my eyes a total overhaul of how the shadow priest playes.

Currently the SP excels at dps 2-4 spread out high hp targets, what i would call spread out cleave. We are stong at this because we can keep out dots rolling with our VB and a big part of the current shadow priest is tracking what DoT's are about to fall off and reapply them with the VB in time so that it can actually hit the target before the dots fall off, that is how you currently play a Shadowpriest. With this VB change that is no longer how we are going to play the class. We are going to always be casting VB on our current target so the entire "what dots should i refresh next" aspect of our playstyle is gone. Our strength will be move from spread out cleave fight to fights where everything is tanked on the samme spot essentially making us passive cleave like so many other specs.

Even on singel target this is going to be a huge change to the way we play our spec. As it is now you are incentivised to get into your next void form quick as you can then use your VB to refresh your current dots without having to recast them. In the 7.1.5 build you DoT's are going to continually lose duration at all times (depending on if it's 3 or 2 seconds of added time they go with). This mean that you will always have to recast your DoT's right before your next voidform so you won't have to spend time refreshing them during your voidform thus removing a big part of the reward for getting to your next voidform quickly.

If i wanted to spend my time casting DoT's on all available targets i would have picked an affliction warlock, if i wanted to passively cleave around my singel target i would have chosen a fire mage, i chose a priest. Please allow me to still play a priest after the 7.1.5 update.

[kalaratic]

https://clips.twitch.tv/slootbag/Sto...lloFPSMarksman

look at this smug little fuck. you know our issues with the row, right chadd? is that why you changed fucking mind spike to be something that plays even worse with our gameplay? is that why legacy is just chilling there with no changes? oh but i bet that 150 to 100% change on surrender was so fucking easy. just knock another 50 off and call it a day. glad you could really pin down the glaring issues in the row. you really got it right with these changes

[Nyel]

Oh, another issue I have with Mind Spike: absolutely no synergy with Mastery. It's even counterproductive to our Mastery.

[Rumstein]

I have no doubt that concerns were voiced, but that's not what I was saying. I haven't seen any top end Shadowpriests posting things like, "This talent needs to be removed." There are only three major priest forums on the net, and the generalized opinion that I see from most of the higher end raiders is something like silent consent - hope that things will be left alone for as long as possible. Occasional outbursts if there's a threat of an StM-breaking nerf in the pipeline. Occasional acknowledgement that the class is imbalanced. But never anything like true unhappiness or anger with the talent choices and spec changes. There's a difference between acknowledging facts about scaling, and disagreeing with design choices.

Multiple top SPriests have been saying that with S2M in it's current form, it's near impossible to balance SPriests properly, so it should not exist. They are also well aware that if it were to be nuked without complete overhaul of T100 talents and the class in general, SPriests would be pretty much crippled. One big example of this was Isentropy's "State of Shadow" post prior to 7.1.

[Clavicle]

Void Bolt: refreshes the DoTs on the target, and extends by ~1s the DoTs on other targets

When I saw that the Void Bolt duration increase had been lowered, my first thought after "that makes absolutely no sense" was that this is possibly where they are heading, but they are still working on the code and it wasn't ready for this release; except I think the DoT increase will be the 2s that is on PTR now.
So Shadow Priests will be able to do the DoT refresh with Void Bolt that we are doing on Live now, however the players with slightly less skill (like me) will have a little more help with being able to get those VBs off before the DoTs completely drop off.