[6.0] Shadow Priest Discussion

[bubblesasc]

The AS change isnt a big deal at all. Our apparitions hardly do any damage. It will be a ~1% dps increase. Cant complain but it is very small. I still dont see us using divine star, the only good changes I see are the mind sear insanity and the cascade change. Even mindbender probably sucks since sfiend itself is so garbage. Unless your going to be incredibly gcd starved it might be used for like 1 fight. VEnt probably still garbage but it would be interesting to see what a theorycrafter thinks. 2% buff to SoD is nice but then i look at the sear insanity change and realise in higmaul if this was live i would have used insanity for tectus rather than SoD, so less reasons to use SoD now

[Deleted]

hah, even with 80% buff on VE it still deals meh dmg, they just compared it's dmg to our other dots. AS is going to rock in BRF and I love that because I do not like this CoP Shadowplay, it's too dull.
Remember someone posting how to fix AS, and blizzard did it the way someone suggested, they just pumped it 4 times stronger than it was suggested here.

[Relapses]

hah, even with 80% buff on VE it still deals meh dmg, they just compared it's dmg to our other dots. AS is going to rock in BRF and I love that because I do not like this CoP Shadowplay, it's too dull.
Remember someone posting how to fix AS, and blizzard did it the way someone suggested, they just pumped it 4 times stronger than it was suggested here.

AS still requires a metric fuckton of Crit we really won't have access to until Mythic BRF; numbers notwithstanding, I don't know if this buff will make it comparable to CoP, especially for progress. My gut feeling is saying otherwise, but a buff is a buff...it just means AS will scale that much better for us.

VEnt needs a pure redesign. I doubt they'd be willing to give it a flat damage increase further than what they've suggested due to PvP concerns, but I guess it's okay for the one or two clueless Shadow Priests still using it.

I'm interested to see how Mind Sear Insanity plays out. I think it'll give us two choices for AE encounters: SoD if adds are spread, Insanity if adds are collapsed. I think the Cascade change was healer-only, also.

[methz]

The AS change isnt a big deal at all. Our apparitions hardly do any damage. It will be a ~1% dps increase. Cant complain but it is very small.

Not sure where you're pulling that out at all. Just messing around with no buffs, 15% crit, it's 2.5-3% of my damage. With actual raid buffs, it's more like 4%. It's not gamebreaking, but it's a lot more substantial than 1%.

Edit: unless you're looking at it in the context of how much damage your apparitions do when you're using CoP. I'm sure you see why that's probably not a good way to gauge it

[bubblesasc]

Not sure where you're pulling that out at all. Just messing around with no buffs, 15% crit, it's 2.5-3% of my damage. With actual raid buffs, it's more like 4%. It's not gamebreaking, but it's a lot more substantial than 1%.

Edit: unless you're looking at it in the context of how much damage your apparitions do when you're using CoP. I'm sure you see why that's probably not a good way to gauge it

You're right, I realised after I was looking at logs of CoP for apparition damage.

[Yvaelle]

Apparitions are typically ~3% of my damage using an AS rotation (just don't take the talent to test the rotation without the effect on live), with +100% damage that will be a ~6% overall damage buff when using AS. That's a pretty significant increase to the ~base effectiveness of AS as a talent: which will make it more competitive with CoP.

If AS didn't love crit before (it did), crit is going to be the only stat that AS even perceives afterwards (except haste for faster crits, but even that will be but a glimmer).

The overall effect of this change is going to be that AS will be the clear winner for multi-target fights I think, while CoP will specialize in single target encounters or possibly a boss encounter with 1-2 low hp adds every now and then (not enough for Pain to be effective, but enough that Spike / Blast / Death are getting used). So when CoP is best, it will coincide with when CoP especially adores mastery: it won't mean the CoP values change, just when we choose to use CoP.

Void Entropy on single target is only about 6% of our damage right now, on a 5 minute 2 target fight it's ~9.5% - it's not 12% because of how long it takes to get and keep multiple Void Entropy's active. So, an 80% buff on the single target fight would be 6 * 1.8 = 10.8 = +4.8% overall damage on a Patchwerk. On a 2-target council fight, it would be 17.1% = +7.6% increase in overall damage.

That's about the same as the ~flat buff to AS on single target, so there is pretty much no way I can see the Void Entropy buff being sufficient to compete with CoP or AS under any circumstance.

[Drye]

I think everyone is forgetting that 6.1 is a latter patch than brf opening up and that cop is still going to be the spec for a while of brf.

[soulyouth]

See that's the thing that kinda bothers me, they said they don't like making class changes mid tier.

So these buffs are going to either come really late or 6.1 is dropping sooner then we think

[Alanar]

Cascade change is pretty nice as well if it's for shadow, means it'll probably be better than halo on 2 targets as it will hit 4 times.

It doesn't say it's for Shadow.. I hope it does! You and probb most of people in this thread are purely talking about pve, but I realy dig the buff to Divine Star it still gets people out of stealth so buff to it's damage is still nice

VEnt is still not used in pvp, doesn't matter the damage at this point. I was hoping for a survivability buff but meh.

[kaamila]

i keep hearing about how we need a fuckton of crit for AS to be viable. how much crit is needed? when i tried AS 1 week in our mythic run, i managed to get to alittle over 27% crit fully raid buffed. one of our healers couldnt be there so i could only dps 1 boss(tectus) where i beat the CoP spriest in the raid at the end where i could pain all the adds and had to heal the rest of the bosses. cuz if i can get by with AS with the amount of crit i can get to currently, id change in a heartbeat. i find CoP boring

[Yvaelle]

It doesn't say it's for Shadow.. I hope it does! You and probb most of people in this thread are purely talking about pve, but I realy dig the buff to Divine Star it still gets people out of stealth so buff to it's damage is still nice

Eh, I would never use Divine Star even buffed during a kill cycle for example - not worth the GCD - it made sense when it was a defensive spell we would use while being tunneled, but without the healing the argument for it is pretty poor unless you're completely incapable of casting and out of Pains to apply or shields or etc.

VEnt is still not used in pvp, doesn't matter the damage at this point. I was hoping for a survivability buff but meh.

Yea, somebody made a comment about a bigger VEnt buff wouldn't be possible because of PvP concerns... my mind was like "They could literally buff it 1000%, and until it kills people on it's first tick and we can Silence->VEnt, it's never going to do more than one tick of damage before it gets dispelled - in which case even 1000% damage buff wouldn't make it viable."

- - - Updated - - -

i keep hearing about how we need a fuckton of crit for AS to be viable. how much crit is needed? when i tried AS 1 week in our mythic run, i managed to get to alittle over 27% crit fully raid buffed. one of our healers couldnt be there so i could only dps 1 boss(tectus) where i beat the CoP spriest in the raid at the end where i could pain all the adds and had to heal the rest of the bosses. cuz if i can get by with AS with the amount of crit i can get to currently, id change in a heartbeat. i find CoP boring

Anything over 25% crit should be effective given the right kind of fight, a lot of Spriests are only in the 15-22% range though - not much crit gear in Highmaul.

[kaamila]

ya im lucky enough to have 5 sockets in my gear which definitely helps with crit lol

[Bullettime]

See that's the thing that kinda bothers me, they said they don't like making class changes mid tier.

So these buffs are going to either come really late or 6.1 is dropping sooner then we think

It's entirely possible, and maybe even likely, for them to push out the class change part of the patch early. 6.1 also doesn't add much of anything in terms of content so they could honestly drop the whole thing early and it wouldn't be odd. It's mostly more garrison stuff, class balance fixes, and bug/tooltip updates. Nothing that requires sufficient test time. 5.1 wasn't on the PTR for very long either and it had far more than what this is adding with adding a full new daily hub, phasing, etc.

[Setheria]

It's entirely possible, and maybe even likely, for them to push out the class change part of the patch early. 6.1 also doesn't add much of anything in terms of content so they could honestly drop the whole thing early and it wouldn't be odd. It's mostly more garrison stuff, class balance fixes, and bug/tooltip updates. Nothing that requires sufficient test time. 5.1 wasn't on the PTR for very long either and it had far more than what this is adding with adding a full new daily hub, phasing, etc.

We can hope. From a balance perspective some of the changes make me scratch my head (warrior buffs?) and as shadow I think we will need further assistance to shine in BRF encounters.

[Ponkster]

when will the latest changes be on the ptr?

[Bullettime]

We can hope. From a balance perspective some of the changes make me scratch my head (warrior buffs?) and as shadow I think we will need further assistance to shine in BRF encounters.

If the class changes don't go live, Shadow will have to be hotfix buffed within 2 weeks due the nature of the encounters. CoP simply lacks much room to shine in a tier dominated by council cleaves and AoE, while Auspicious Spirits, without the changes, needs so much crit to properly function that Shadow will need gear from killing the bosses, gear you won't have during progression, to actually do ok.

Shadow during the beta was only doing mediocre anyways in BRF and that was with secondary stat flasks propping up AS a bit. And then they removed secondary flasks, nerfed dots, nerfed Entropy, and buffed Mastery in a series of mind boggling changes. Being more dependent on CoP during progress will be a disaster.

[Shandalar]

If the class changes don't go live, Shadow will have to be hotfix buffed within 2 weeks due the nature of the encounters. CoP simply lacks much room to shine in a tier dominated by council cleaves and AoE, while Auspicious Spirits, without the changes, needs so much crit to properly function that Shadow will need gear from killing the bosses, gear you won't have during progression, to actually do ok.

Shadow during the beta was only doing mediocre anyways in BRF and that was with secondary stat flasks propping up AS a bit. And then they removed secondary flasks, nerfed dots, nerfed Entropy, and buffed Mastery in a series of mind boggling changes. Being more dependent on CoP during progress will be a disaster.

People in this forum said tons of times in beta "Shadow is ok", "U re a cryer", "Stop crying, u suck", "Shadow is the best caster", "Shadow is perfect", etc.

Where are they now? Are they going to say the same things?

[Setheria]

People in this forum said tons of times in beta "Shadow is ok", "U re a cryer", "Stop crying, u suck", "Shadow is the best caster", "Shadow is perfect", etc.

Where are they now? Are they going to say the same things?

In fairness, that was well before significant buffs to almost every other class.

[bubblesasc]

People in this forum said tons of times in beta "Shadow is ok", "U re a cryer", "Stop crying, u suck", "Shadow is the best caster", "Shadow is perfect", etc.

Where are they now? Are they going to say the same things?

I was one of them and I still think Shadow priests are good, just because of our lack of AoE pre-6.1 doesn't make us a bad class. I also think Shadow is currently the hardest class in the game to play well so I don't blame a bunch of people complaining about our state, since they probably still have trouble tying their shoelace.

[Ilir]

I was one of them and I still think Shadow priests are good, just because of our lack of AoE pre-6.1 doesn't make us a bad class. I also think Shadow is currently the hardest class in the game to play well so I don't blame a bunch of people complaining about our state, since they probably still have trouble tying their shoelace.

I still have trouble tying my shoelace :x