State of Spriest MOP BETA

[Celentes]

I don't understand the complaints about the static-ness of the spec, particularly on single target.

Right now, if you aren't MB'ing on cooldown, you're doing it wrong. There's no waiting for orbs. It's been like that for the entire expansion.

4pcT13 is a special case - before that, you also popped AA/SF on cooldown. Everything done on cooldown. Refresh on last tick. The only variable was the amount of damage you did, based on whether you got orbs or not. Some of the complaints I hear about shadow just don't make any sense.

I've played shadow in T11 and T13, and I've become very comfortable (and good) with it. Trust me, I understand - change is scary. I think we need to wait, at this point, for the rest of the tuning changes (elemental shamans) and how actual fights work out.

It's not like the change is scary. You actually will be doing all the same, but on live, there's a point to everything you do - you keep watching uptimes so that the synergy doesn't break, and it feels rewarding if you do it all properly, you also may very well be punished if you're doing it wrong. They cut it all off. It's not scary at all, it is insulting. I'm not afraid of playing arcane mage for that matter, I just won't play it because even tetris is more involving.

Ever seen bbc shows about orangutans living in national parks? How they try to copy what workers there are doing, say, washing clothes or something like? They do it all the same, but you still notice the lack of sense behind it. This is exactly what I feel like when playing spriest on beta. No point in all of that, it's just a very crude copy of what currently is an elegant spec.

[smokeajay]

As an end game raider and with my extensive raid testing on the beta, Shadow is severely lacking and more RNG than it was before. Our biggest damage by a huge margin is Mind Flay (26-30 percent of our total damage on a single target fight) and SW: P combined with VT is 31%ish . Logs are showing 2 of each spell and I can't figure out how it all works in WoLs.
http://imgur.com/Yjky6
http://i.imgur.com/3Gah3

So Shadow has always been a dot class and I wouldn't really think Mind Flay should be that big of a percentage of our DPS. When I see the Affliction break down and play affliction that feels like the Shadow I know and love. The biggest issue is we don't have any type of DPS cooldown so on fights where burst dps is required we will be camping with 3 orbs to use Devouring Plague but it doesn't do enough damage with the most recent nerf to warrant holding it since we need it to keep our DPS sustained due to the amount of damage it does.

Mind Flay has, basically, always been Shadow's top damaging spell: Wrath Recount

We didn't have any CDs in Wrath. And the cooldowns in Cata are...severely lacking. If any fight requires a DPS cooldown, you'll have easy access to Power Infusion.

They are still in the phase of class balancing. I think the issue with Shadow at the moment is PvP vs PvE balancing.

[Shartadin]

It's not like the change is scary. You actually will be doing all the same, but on live, there's a point to everything you do - you keep watching uptimes so that the synergy doesn't break, and it feels rewarding if you do it all properly, you also may very well be punished if you're doing it wrong. They cut it all off. It's not scary at all, it is insulting. I'm not afraid of playing arcane mage for that matter, I just won't play it because even tetris is more involving.

Ever seen bbc shows about orangutans living in national parks? How they try to copy what workers there are doing, say, washing clothes or something like? They do it all the same, but you still notice the lack of sense behind it. This is exactly what I feel like when playing spriest on beta. No point in all of that, it's just a very crude copy of what currently is an elegant spec.

I fail to see the difference. The biggest one on live is being forced to mind flay here and there so your stacks of DE don't fall off. This is literally the only difference I see in how shadow plays on beta - that, and the fact that you can no longer refresh SW:P with MF, so you have to actually recast it.

What are you watching uptimes of that you won't anymore? You still watch DoTs, and you still refresh at the "right" time. If you're advanced enough to watch trinkets, or, simpler yet, herosim, you'll still refresh dots before those buffs end, where appropriate.

If you waste effective time refreshing dots early, you'll still be punished. If you don't MB on cooldown, you'll still be punished (more so than before, now). If you're using DI, if you don't watch that proc, you're going to suffer big time - that is actually completely missing from live. There's no BIG EVENTS to watch for.

I think people are inventing reasons simply because they don't LIKE the way it plays - like as in their opinion is that it sucks. Everything is a flavor. There are people in this very thread that LIKE the changes, and the implication that they are unskilled or healer switches (not necessarily an opinion you would agree with - I don't know) is, simply put, asinine. I count myself as a far above-average shadow priest, and improving still, as I've only played it for T11 and T13, and only for most, not all, of those tiers. My impression at this point is I like the change, and I'm willing to be patient while they fine tune it.

[Slyck]

@Slyck what the hell is RNG about shadows care to explain ? With the nerf to DI and due to Mindbender beeing better than Fdcl the shdaow playstile is absolutly linear no RNG at all

The procs from DI are what i'm referring to, the proc can be back to back and when comparing mind blasts and devouring plague between 2 Spriests who on live are of similar skill, were vastly different.

Mind Flay has, basically, always been Shadow's top damaging spell: Wrath Recount

We didn't have any CDs in Wrath. And the cooldowns in Cata are...severely lacking. If any fight requires a DPS cooldown, you'll have easy access to Power Infusion.

They are still in the phase of class balancing. I think the issue with Shadow at the moment is PvP vs PvE balancing.

If this was a recount was from ICC then that looks absolutely correct since Mind Blast was a dps loss unless you needed to have Replenishment up for the raid. I don't remember Mind Flay being that big of Priest dps prior to ICC. While DAA might have been lacking it was still helpful in creating extra dps, i'm not here saying we need something like Reck or GoAK, but something that gives us a little extra damage.

In reference to PvP balancing they are 100% ok with Warriors having a 300k+ Execute because "once you are under 20% your death is inevitable." I'll find the post to validate my quote. So our nerf to SW: D makes very little sense. I'll post a much more detailed post with what i've seen later once i've gone through all of our 25 man logs from Beta testing.

[mindp]

@Slyck
DPS on Koralon the Flame Watcher (T9)

E: I think that dps is with four piece (t10)

[jonish]

I also really like how Spriest plays right now, compared to Cata. They made shadow orbs a lot more fun, and removed annoying ramp-up BS. I also love that Silence is now baseline.

You lost me , the ramp up time is basically the same , equally long but in a different way. You dont need to get empowered shadows up anymore but you have to wait through 2 CDs of mind blast before you are putting out max effective dps via devouring plague. It is also impossible at current to keep devouring plague up at it's maximum output, no idea if this is fully intended but it is very strange if so.

The casting rotation in the beta just feels very unfinished and derpy. No linear progress in terms of a rotation of spells in comparison to what is on Live. I dont care about the output in terms of final number tweaking at this point because their is plenty of time to fix that issue but the actual rotation feels alot less, smooth, and alot more derpy.

[Celentes]

I fail to see the difference. The biggest one on live is being forced to mind flay here and there so your stacks of DE don't fall off. This is literally the only difference I see in how shadow plays on beta - that, and the fact that you can no longer refresh SW:P with MF, so you have to actually recast it.

What are you watching uptimes of that you won't anymore? You still watch DoTs, and you still refresh at the "right" time. If you're advanced enough to watch trinkets, or, simpler yet, herosim, you'll still refresh dots before those buffs end, where appropriate.

If you waste effective time refreshing dots early, you'll still be punished. If you don't MB on cooldown, you'll still be punished (more so than before, now). If you're using DI, if you don't watch that proc, you're going to suffer big time - that is actually completely missing from live. There's no BIG EVENTS to watch for.

I think people are inventing reasons simply because they don't LIKE the way it plays - like as in their opinion is that it sucks. Everything is a flavor. There are people in this very thread that LIKE the changes, and the implication that they are unskilled or healer switches (not necessarily an opinion you would agree with - I don't know) is, simply put, asinine. I count myself as a far above-average shadow priest, and improving still, as I've only played it for T11 and T13, and only for most, not all, of those tiers. My impression at this point is I like the change, and I'm willing to be patient while they fine tune it.

Where to start with this... I don't consider shadow hard to play on live. It is not too hard and not too easy.
Single target is outright boring, but there's a lot about it. In t11, if you weren't watching your uptimes, you were simply bad. Without all the haste, without t13p4, you have to watch them and you have to make decisions when to cast what, plan in advance.
Haste and set bonuses in DS made it more trivial, but if you were actually progressing yor'sahj, zon'ozz, blackhorn on hc without outgearing the encounter, prior to the nerfs, you had to watch ES at the very least, because it would drop while multidotting, it would drop in heavy aoe period. If you were worth of your raid spot, you had to know how to manage uptimes and make proper decisions, it wasn't all that "MINDBLAST ON CD!!!".

So now, they take away all the synergistic effects and make damage of every spell flat without any scaling with other parts of your rotation. Outside the spec, buffs and procs still matter, but that's something you should praise outside the priest forum. So things don't scale each other, you don't need any attention span outside managing two dots, you don't need to make any decisions - now mindblast should always go off cd unless it's a heavy aoe scenario. No point not to refresh the dot or refresh it early unless it's unrelated to the spec mechanics. Multidotting is now multidotting, don't have to manage anything, just dot your heart away. It's not flavor, its the actual gameplay - skillcap lowered by half, judging from the amount of things you don't have to do anymore. They remove about one third of my UI, more so if you exclude things that are outside class mechanics.

So ok, they also gave us something back.
Two clunky procs that are yet to be made viable, and don't bring any synergy to the ongoing gameplay. That may spice up the rotation, but it doesn't make it fluid - it makes it clunky. If they make some proper DI implementation, that would be nice, but that would require something more than immediate cd reset.
Shadowfiend 2.0, thank you, it doesn't do anything new, but we'll remove the dynamic CD reduction because having the same spell is clearly better than having an interesting, dynamic mechanic.
SW:I will be good if they manage to balance it to not be a dps loss in singletarget without it being stupidly op in multitarget, but again, no synergy.
PI option as shadow! Hooray, now we can choose to get it instead of DA if we really really need it because it'll be intentionally worse than other talents (on-demand should be worse). And doesn't scale the bursty parts of our kit either. Thank you for breaking something spriests have been asking for since vanilla.

Again, I don't find shadow hard to play, especially on static fights, especially with t13p4 and 3.2k+ haste. I don't like the different parts of our kit on their own, but I like how everything affects each other so I have to plan ahead if I'm going to alter my rotation for some specific situation. They take it away, ALL of it. Thank you, see you in 6.0 when they bring back designers who actually knew what they're doing.

[JNovster]

Where to start with this... I don't consider shadow hard to play on live. It is not too hard and not too easy.
Single target is outright boring, but there's a lot about it. In t11, if you weren't watching your uptimes, you were simply bad. Without all the haste, without t13p4, you have to watch them and you have to make decisions when to cast what, plan in advance.
Haste and set bonuses in DS made it more trivial, but if you were actually progressing yor'sahj, zon'ozz, blackhorn on hc without outgearing the encounter, prior to the nerfs, you had to watch ES at the very least, because it would drop while multidotting, it would drop in heavy aoe period. If you were worth of your raid spot, you had to know how to manage uptimes and make proper decisions, it wasn't all that "MINDBLAST ON CD!!!".

So now, they take away all the synergistic effects and make damage of every spell flat without any scaling with other parts of your rotation. Outside the spec, buffs and procs still matter, but that's something you should praise outside the priest forum. So things don't scale each other, you don't need any attention span outside managing two dots, you don't need to make any decisions - now mindblast should always go off cd unless it's a heavy aoe scenario. No point not to refresh the dot or refresh it early unless it's unrelated to the spec mechanics. Multidotting is now multidotting, don't have to manage anything, just dot your heart away. It's not flavor, its the actual gameplay - skillcap lowered by half, judging from the amount of things you don't have to do anymore. They remove about one third of my UI, more so if you exclude things that are outside class mechanics.

So ok, they also gave us something back.
Two clunky procs that are yet to be made viable, and don't bring any synergy to the ongoing gameplay. That may spice up the rotation, but it doesn't make it fluid - it makes it clunky. If they make some proper DI implementation, that would be nice, but that would require something more than immediate cd reset.
Shadowfiend 2.0, thank you, it doesn't do anything new, but we'll remove the dynamic CD reduction because having the same spell is clearly better than having an interesting, dynamic mechanic.
SW:I will be good if they manage to balance it to not be a dps loss in singletarget without it being stupidly op in multitarget, but again, no synergy.
PI option as shadow! Hooray, now we can choose to get it instead of DA if we really really need it because it'll be intentionally worse than other talents (on-demand should be worse). And doesn't scale the bursty parts of our kit either. Thank you for breaking something spriests have been asking for since vanilla.

Again, I don't find shadow hard to play, especially on static fights, especially with t13p4 and 3.2k+ haste. I don't like the different parts of our kit on their own, but I like how everything affects each other so I have to plan ahead if I'm going to alter my rotation for some specific situation. They take it away, ALL of it. Thank you, see you in 6.0 when they bring back designers who actually knew what they're doing.

This. I love everything you said and you basically summed up my feelings thus far in the beta. Is there anyway you can incorporate this into the beta class discussion on blizz forums? I feel like I havent seen any talk about Shadow Priests or even Priests in general for a while.

[Celentes]

This. I love everything you said and you basically summed up my feelings thus far in the beta. Is there anyway you can incorporate this into the beta class discussion on blizz forums? I feel like I havent seen any talk about Shadow Priests or even Priests in general for a while.

It's been spoken of multiple times on beta forums. On eu forums at least, not sure about the US ones. Feel free to repost, don't have an account there. I don't think they'll change the design direction now, though.

But to be completely honest, this change would have been good if they haven't made shadow better in cata. What shadow is becoming is better for newcomers, works better with default UI, more straighforward and is generally something that blizzard does with specs, except the cataclysm model is simply more interesting, and changing the spec in that way is alienating those players who have learned the current way and enjoyed it.

[Shartadin]

Where to start with this... I don't consider shadow hard to play on live. It is not too hard and not too easy.
Single target is outright boring, but there's a lot about it. In t11, if you weren't watching your uptimes, you were simply bad. Without all the haste, without t13p4, you have to watch them and you have to make decisions when to cast what, plan in advance.
Haste and set bonuses in DS made it more trivial, but if you were actually progressing yor'sahj, zon'ozz, blackhorn on hc without outgearing the encounter, prior to the nerfs, you had to watch ES at the very least, because it would drop while multidotting, it would drop in heavy aoe period. If you were worth of your raid spot, you had to know how to manage uptimes and make proper decisions, it wasn't all that "MINDBLAST ON CD!!!".

So now, they take away all the synergistic effects and make damage of every spell flat without any scaling with other parts of your rotation. Outside the spec, buffs and procs still matter, but that's something you should praise outside the priest forum. So things don't scale each other, you don't need any attention span outside managing two dots, you don't need to make any decisions - now mindblast should always go off cd unless it's a heavy aoe scenario. No point not to refresh the dot or refresh it early unless it's unrelated to the spec mechanics. Multidotting is now multidotting, don't have to manage anything, just dot your heart away. It's not flavor, its the actual gameplay - skillcap lowered by half, judging from the amount of things you don't have to do anymore. They remove about one third of my UI, more so if you exclude things that are outside class mechanics.

So ok, they also gave us something back.
Two clunky procs that are yet to be made viable, and don't bring any synergy to the ongoing gameplay. That may spice up the rotation, but it doesn't make it fluid - it makes it clunky. If they make some proper DI implementation, that would be nice, but that would require something more than immediate cd reset.
Shadowfiend 2.0, thank you, it doesn't do anything new, but we'll remove the dynamic CD reduction because having the same spell is clearly better than having an interesting, dynamic mechanic.
SW:I will be good if they manage to balance it to not be a dps loss in singletarget without it being stupidly op in multitarget, but again, no synergy.
PI option as shadow! Hooray, now we can choose to get it instead of DA if we really really need it because it'll be intentionally worse than other talents (on-demand should be worse). And doesn't scale the bursty parts of our kit either. Thank you for breaking something spriests have been asking for since vanilla.

Again, I don't find shadow hard to play, especially on static fights, especially with t13p4 and 3.2k+ haste. I don't like the different parts of our kit on their own, but I like how everything affects each other so I have to plan ahead if I'm going to alter my rotation for some specific situation. They take it away, ALL of it. Thank you, see you in 6.0 when they bring back designers who actually knew what they're doing.

I took two things from this

1) AH HA, you DO need to watch ES.

Response: True, point taken, but what happens when you just aren't getting orbs? Is that fun gameplay? No. Other procs, you should be watching now just as you did then if you really want to be maximizing DPS, the difference is that this tier, if you had the right trinkets, there was nothing to watch. In contrast, in T11, watching Mirror, for example, was a huge deal. That kind of gameplay isn't changing.

2) My opinion on the SUBJECTIVE matter of whether the new spec is "fun" is... it's not.

Response: Cool. Lots of people agree with you, and at the same time, lots of people do not. My primary objection was the remark I saw elsewhere in this thread (again, not from you, I think -- too lazy to check) that people who enjoy the new design are either bad or healer switches.


Also, I never said it was hard either - playing shadow and doing "decent" DPS is among the easiest specs in the game, especially in 1-2 static target cases. I think its less easy (certainly no more easy than MOST other specs) to really squeeze top end damage out of the spec though. I don't see that really being different. Like I said, I played shadow extensively in T11 as well, so I know what you mean.

[Deleted]

@Shartadin (didnt want to make a massive quote chain)
I think, on your point about fun, many shadow priests like the challenge of managing buffs, actually having to think about using MB rather than just on CD if youre unlucky with orbs. Personally, the fun of the spec comes from all of these factors combined. Working hard to keep Evangalism stacked, keep up ES, gaming procs for even larger buffed ES. Making sure you dont go OOM if you have to withold your CDs for a certain part of the fight is also a bit of a challenge that is almost removed from beta as SW: D (unglyphed) is only available below 20%. The fun comes from all the different ways the spec synergises with itself and using all these ways to the greatest effect gives the greatest satisfaction.

With regards to MoP the "live-choices" made by the player during a fight are removed. And I think this is what many people see as the problem, or downfall of the new spec. It makes it an easier spec to do better dps, because the choices made by more experienced, better players, may be different to lesser players.
It is true that trink procs are still to be watched but isnt that the same for EVERY spec in the game? Therefore relatively, the spec has been made less engaging, and that isn't what a lot of experienced shadow priests want.

[Shartadin]

@Shartadin (didnt want to make a massive quote chain)
I think, on your point about fun, many shadow priests like the challenge of managing buffs, actually having to think about using MB rather than just on CD if youre unlucky with orbs. Personally, the fun of the spec comes from all of these factors combined. Working hard to keep Evangalism stacked, keep up ES, gaming procs for even larger buffed ES. Making sure you dont go OOM if you have to withold your CDs for a certain part of the fight is also a bit of a challenge that is almost removed from beta as SW: D (unglyphed) is only available below 20%. The fun comes from all the different ways the spec synergises with itself and using all these ways to the greatest effect gives the greatest satisfaction.

With regards to MoP the "live-choices" made by the player during a fight are removed. And I think this is what many people see as the problem, or downfall of the new spec. It makes it an easier spec to do better dps, because the choices made by more experienced, better players, may be different to lesser players.
It is true that trink procs are still to be watched but isnt that the same for EVERY spec in the game? Therefore relatively, the spec has been made less engaging, and that isn't what a lot of experienced shadow priests want.

I understand that, but my whole point was that it doesn't make a huge difference in how you play anyway. The choices you were making were not really that interesting, to me at least. Waiting on an orb for ES was decently fun gameplay until that wait became way too damn long. Then it became garbage. Just my opinion.

Keeping up DE is not really something to bring up - most of the time, it happened on its own even for a "bad" priest, and the good ones are generally sneaking in mindflays anyway, so in almost no case that I can think of was it of any great difficulty to keep in DE. Not really an interesting facet of the gameplay, as it adds virtually no challenge - when did you ever "work hard" to keep this up? Just my opinion - again.

The changes about mana and OOM'ing I think spawn more from the mana system overhaul rather than them removing flavor from the class.

I'm not trying to say Shadow in Cata hasn't been fun. It has, which is why I left my priest (out of necessity) then came back to it as soon as I could.

I just perceive arguments against "new Shadow" to be subjective and/or based on changes I'd characterize as "cosmetic" - the removal of choices which either weren't actually choices, or lead occasionally, in the case of orbs, to some really frustrating gameplay.

[Celentes]

It doesn't make a huge difference on what buttons you push. It does make a huge difference on how you actually play.
I feel that I play when I make choices. The more parameters I have to count in, the harder it is to make a correct decision, the better I feel if I do perform up to the task.
The amount of things you should be watching may or may not be excessive at the moment, and the current shadow model may or may not be good. Choices that haven't been choices due to static fights or the gearlevel is actually a problem that they should be solving, instead of removing them completely. I agree that some of them were probably redundant, although they didn't affect much so you weren't punished too heavily if you disregarded them at all (evangelism, for example). But now the spec is just naked - there isn't anything at all.
It's just... I don't mind the new model on its own. But it isn't a shadowpriest, it isn't a successor to the current spec, and it's definitely not designed for those who have mastered shadow. If they think that the current model was too hard, they shouldn't have made it in the first place and let those who can deal with it learn it and get to love it.

[Kaesebrezen]

Working hard to keep Evangalism stacked

You don't have to work hard to keep Evangelism stacked...

having to think about using MB rather than just on CD if youre unlucky with orbs

That unlucky case was only happening during T11, and partially during T12. In T13, it was highely unlikely to happen, and the setbonus took care of the opening.

Making sure you dont go OOM if you have to withold your CDs

Masochism combined with the encounter design made sure that you wouldn't run oom.

The thing with the ES is, that you had to manage it at the beginning of the addon, at the end, you could mostly ignore it, because you should always have a orb for a mb (unless you have to AoE for a longer time). Further, having bad luck, especially at the beginning of a fight, was frustrating and not fun.

If they think that the current model was too hard

It wasn't too hard, it was just too random based.
Sometime during firelands, we had the feedback threads on the board. The most common shadow feedback was:
1) SW kills us
2) Shadoworbs are too random

The bandaid fix for T13 were our setboni. For MoP they had to think of a more permanent solution. SW was redesigned (twice). Shadow Orbs randomness wasn't something that could've been fixed with just a procrate increase (that would ultimately result in "you always have one orb for MB").

[Serj Tankian]

Here's the SimCraft results from the latest build.

http://simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_...st_Shadow_T14H

[Celentes]

Well, on beta I feel like I'm boomkin with shadow orbs. Talking about which, orbs are an amazingly dull and uninteresting resource at this point. They have to design a) better ways to generate them and b) better ways to spend them.

[Deleted]

I think at this point its clear that this mop spec is a love/hate thing and comes down to personal preference to which way you prefer to play. For example I'll also miss the heavier dot damage, its why I chose shadow in the first place. In early beta, going back to apparations being a usable ability and losing a dot I was really not looking forward to mop and meant a swift reroll to my lock.

orbs are an amazingly dull and uninteresting resource at this point. They have to design a) better ways to generate them and b) better ways to spend them.

I totally agree here, its a more boring holy power. Even if they had a proc where we generate an extra orb when using MB or something like that rather than the monotony of MB MB MB DP MB MB MB DP. Having raided T12 and T13 as shadow the RNG was, at times, kinda frustrating in FL, but I think the critics will miss the RNG/non-linear/"surprising" way that shadow has played in cata after a while in mop simply because we are used to an engaging rotation and are now getting a more boring one.

Where as in cata the dps was restricted less by GCDs and mechanics and more by the skill of the player in mop it seems like we are to be restricted to the 8sec cd on MB and less by the skill of the player. In mop our whole core rotation is based on a 24 second flat damage "rotation" no matter what happens and I just find that a little boring - again its all personal and opinions. I mean, who doesn't like seeing that MB button light up with 3 orbs and a nice int proc and seeing 120k show on the screen. That might not make sense but I know what I mean atleast.

[Annesh]

This. I love everything you said and you basically summed up my feelings thus far in the beta. Is there anyway you can incorporate this into the beta class discussion on blizz forums? I feel like I havent seen any talk about Shadow Priests or even Priests in general for a while.

There's the recent post in my sig. Even though it's kinda long, and mainly focused on PvP, you could bump it with some of that general feedback, all of which I support.

[Drye]

http://simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_T14H.html

[Auro]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Unfortunately, Spriest undergoes more acrobatics than almost every other spec... almost every expansion, though lock has been giving spriest a run for its money the last 2 xpacks in terms of how many/often they change stuff.