[Legion] Shadow Priest Discussion

[Yvaelle]

I need to do a big write-up of my talent assessment - maybe this afternoon.

[Theed]

I think they should keep spectral guise.

[Biomega]

Spectral Guise likely just creates too many problems. It's difficult to balance in PvP, and it has very few uses in PvE that aren't trivializing mechanics (like on Maidens in BRF). Not worth keeping around, imo.

[RsinRC]

I like Spectra; Guise. What I don't like about spectral guise is having to pre shield yourself or hoping that the DoTs on you don't bring you out of it. It should've had a 1.5-3 second immunity to guarantee some kind of escape and not feel like a major waste when instantly taken out of it.

[wombats23]

I've personally disliked SG for awhile now. I don't mind it thematically as a shadow priest, but it does irks me a bit that we have a 30 second pseudo-vanish while rogues are stuck with a 1 min or 1.5 min vanish. I'm personally a huge fan of class identity and so overall I just feel like priests shouldn't have access to it.

Raiding wise, SG was basically usually completely useless, but occasionally borderline game breaking. Obviously I mean situations like Iron Maidens, Paragons in SoO, etc. I just don't like the idea of choosing a talent because if you're "lucky", you'll be able to "exploit" it. It just rubs me the wrong way knowing that a talent is only useful by chance.

In PvP, it was just a matter of one of your enemies using FoK, tclap, blood boil, etc. I just rarely found it too effective when I was getting targeted. Ofc you can PWS prior to guising but it's not entirely out of the ordinary for the shield to break or get purged within that one global. It definitely is awesome when you're running in for a fear but other than that... SG didn't feel all too great.

[deviantcultist]

Bribe (Outlaw Rogue skill)
30 yd range
Instant 3 min cooldown
Requires level 54
Bribe a humanoid target with fool's gold, convincing it to fight for you for 1 min.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wish Dominate Mind had a similar function in Legion

[Deja Thoris]

I've personally disliked SG for awhile now. I don't mind it thematically as a shadow priest, but it does irks me a bit that we have a 30 second pseudo-vanish while rogues are stuck with a 1 min or 1.5 min vanish. I'm personally a huge fan of class identity and so overall I just feel like priests shouldn't have access to it.

Raiding wise, SG was basically usually completely useless, but occasionally borderline game breaking. Obviously I mean situations like Iron Maidens, Paragons in SoO, etc. I just don't like the idea of choosing a talent because if you're "lucky", you'll be able to "exploit" it. It just rubs me the wrong way knowing that a talent is only useful by chance.

In PvP, it was just a matter of one of your enemies using FoK, tclap, blood boil, etc. I just rarely found it too effective when I was getting targeted. Ofc you can PWS prior to guising but it's not entirely out of the ordinary for the shield to break or get purged within that one global. It definitely is awesome when you're running in for a fear but other than that... SG didn't feel all too great.

Sg is situationally amazing. You can cheat iskars chakrams with it and velhari's annihilating strike. Those alone make it worth its weight in gold.

In pvp it's a cool ability. It's hilarious when a rogue saps your guise or a warrior stormbolts it. Best is when a rogue flops to the ground during DFA. I don't see the problem with guise and fear bomb either. It's not particularly OP.

[Yvaelle]

Yva's thoughts on DoT talent synergies in WoD alpha:
(TL;DR at bottom)

I'm seeing a lot of multipliers available to our VT and Pain, let's try to break that first.

Necessarily - without any of these talents (and assuming very low mastery) they still must be valuable enough to cast - or they make the other talent combinations non-functional. This establishes a range of possible VT/Pain low-end values that must at least exceed both Mind Flay and Mind Spike (the higher of the two).

Pain deals: 47.5% + 285% of Spellpower per cast = 332.5% Spellpower

Let's ignore the additional value of Apparition procs for the moment when playing with the DPET, put a pin in that and we'll come back.

Twist of Fate increases all damage done by 20%.
Dark Visions increases Pain and VT damage by 20%.
San'layn increases VT damage by 20%.
Legacy of the Void increases next Shadow Word damage by 50%, stacking twice.
Mastery: Madness increases VT and Pain damage by 20% baseline.
Voidform increases all damage by 30%.

Only base mastery applies to the spell's SP multiplier consistently (and Void Form, but I'm just listing it to acknowledge later).

This means that in a talent build with none of the above talents, and no mastery from gear, a tick of Pain deals 57% of spellpower. Lets use 10k spellpower as example, a tick deals 5700 damage baseline.

If you have all of the above talents, and they are all active, but before any mastery from gear. A tick potentially deals:
47.5% * 10k * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 2.0 = 164% of spellpower = 16400 damage per tick = Pain can almost triple damage based on talent choices, before mastery.

Let's try to get a feel for Mastery's scaling - because we still need to factor that in here:

Mastery increases the damage of our VT and Pain alone (or Spike if you're into that, but ignore that because we're talking DoTs here) - in order for it to be competitive with other stats like Crit and Haste - stats which benefit all our of spells simultaneously - Mastery must significantly increase DoT damage to compensate: how much mastery is needed to equal 1% of haste?

First we need a breakdown of what our damage profile will look like, but we can filter it to assume mastery must remain somewhat relevant even when none of the above talents are chosen (it can't just become a dead stat if you don't take all the DoT talents).

That means we can use the initial Pain formula at the top, since mastery needs to be relevant even when no talents are synergizing DoTs, let's assume 15% haste and crit in starting gear:

A 1 minute damage window consists of:
3.3 Pain casts at 332.5% Spellpower = 1097.25% * 1.15 (haste) * 1.15 (crit) = 1450%
4 VT casts at 468% Spellpower * 1.2 (Mastery) = 561.6% Spellpower = 2246.6% = 2970%
5.7 Mind Blast casts at 220% spellpower = 1254% = 1442%
34 (incl. haste) GCDs of Mind Flay at 59.5% spellpower (per gcd) = 2023% * 1.15 (crit) = 2326%
3.4 Apparitions (single target) per minute at 45% spellpower = 153% * 1.15 (crit) = 176%

Total Spellpower per minute = 8364%
Pain = 17.3% of Damage Done
VT = 35.5% of Damage Done

1% haste = ~83.64% spellpower per minute

Equivalent mastery stat value must ~equal:

1450 + 2970 => 4420 (sum of VT+Pain per minute)
1450 / 4420 = 33% (one third of mastery scaling benefits Pain)
83.64 * .33 = 27.6% (Pain must increase by this per minute)
3.3 (pain casts) 6 (ticks per cast) * 1.15 (haste) = 22.77 (ticks/min)
27.6 / 22.77 = 1.212 (spellpower increase per tick)
(47.5 + 1.212) / 47.5 = 2.55%

Mastery must scale at minimum at 2.55% DoT increase per equivalent stat value to 1% haste (regardless of how much rating that is worth, which we don't know yet).

Let's assume you could re-itemize your 15% haste and crit, to being 15% haste and 15% equivalent stat value worth of mastery (ditching the crit since we have no synergy with Crit anymore for DoT specs).

That would mean your mastery multiplier is now:

2.55% * 15 = 38.25% (mastery from gear)
38.25% + 20% (baseline mastery) = 58.25% mastery (in our mastery build, using the minimum viable mastery scaling calculation above as assumption)

That means we can then redo the DoT Maximization Talent Build above using our new mastery assumption:
Twist of Fate +20%
Dark Visions +20%
Legacy of the Void +100%
Mastery +58.25%

47.5% (baseline Pain tick) * 1.2 * 1.2 * 2 * 1.5825 = 216.486% Spellpower per tick

In Void Form, a critical would deal = 216.486 * 1.3 * 2 = 562.86% Spellpower per (Critical Void) tick

TL;DR:

That means in a full DoT build, each Pain tick hits for about the same as Mind Blast (220% of Spellpower). It means that Pain's damage is extremely variable - anything from 57% to 216%, or three and a half times stronger depending on your talent build, just in the first raid tier (even more variable by end of expansion). A pain tick from a non-DoT spec Spriest could deal as little as 5,700 damage (assuming 10k spellpower), or as much as 56,286 damage! The Maximum ticks deals 10 Times the damage of the minimum tick!

More thoughts later, need to get some actual work done - screwed around for an hour - but it's an interesting peek into what's to come, I think!

[snaxattax]

I don't get why spriests are the only ranged spec without a spec specific unique legendary - especially when warlocks and mages have like 6 each

maybe they'll make voidform gameplay uniquely bad to make up for it

also re: dots you have to factor in that the +% damage dot talents compete with resource generation talents. so even though you're looking at a gigantic difference in the spellpower coefficient per tick, there's a big haste and voidform uptime disparity here (unless we can snapshot voidform into our dots on cast). especially when looking at legacy of the void vs reaper of souls + surrender to madness. until we have a better understanding of how we can game voidform via resource generating talents and what it means in gameplay terms by 'drains faster and faster' we can't really assume much about numerical balance/throughput.

also are we no longer getting mindblast cooldown scaling with haste? really hoping we keep that since we're getting all this extra haste and don't have the bullshit reducing-duration insanity buff to bother with.

[Yvaelle]

I don't get why spriests are the only ranged spec without a spec specific unique legendary - especially when warlocks and mages have like 6 each

maybe they'll make voidform gameplay uniquely bad to make up for it

also re: dots you have to factor in that the +% damage dot talents compete with resource generation talents. so even though you're looking at a gigantic difference in the spellpower coefficient per tick, there's a big haste and voidform uptime disparity here (unless we can snapshot voidform into our dots on cast). especially when looking at legacy of the void vs reaper of souls + surrender to madness.

I'd have to factor that in if I were trying to estimate DPS between builds/specs, but that's beyond what I was hoping to do here - just pointing out how colossally different the value of a Pain tick can be, depending on talents and gear

also are we no longer getting mindblast cooldown scaling with haste? really hoping we keep that since we're getting all this extra haste and don't have the bullshit reducing-duration insanity buff to bother with.

I'm not sure, so assumed not - I hope that assumption is wrong, but it's a pretty important piece to mention and they haven't addressed it yet

[davesignal]

I don't get why spriests are the only ranged spec without a spec specific unique legendary - especially when warlocks and mages have like 6 each

I, too, wonder why every item is not yet present, accounted for, and finalized in early public alpha.

[MoanaLisa]

Early times yet snaxattax. Too soon to assume that everything datamined is final or even complete.

[snaxattax]

o damn totally forgot it was early beta.

[Yvaelle]

o damn totally forgot it was early beta.

Not even in beta yet, it's Alpha

Be surprised they have W-A-S-D- mapped at this point, knowing Blizzard ^^

[Deleted]

Not even in beta yet, it's Alpha

Be surprised they have W-A-S-D- mapped at this point, knowing Blizzard ^^

I bet they have S mapped.................for back peddle

[Yvaelle]

I bet they have S mapped.................for back peddle

Variously I've used S as either a /stopcasting or a Silence keybind - though on some toons (particularly melee/tanks) backpeddling can actually be a useful key.

[Djriff]

I back pedal in pve quite a bit, sometimes you run to far foward by mistake or strafe casting just isn't a viable option. Is it also bad i'll use my keyboard to turn my screen when i'm healing/dotting a bunch of stuff because i can't afford to hold my right MB down for a second?

[deviantcultist]

also are we no longer getting mindblast cooldown scaling with haste? really hoping we keep that since we're getting all this extra haste and don't have the bullshit reducing-duration insanity buff to bother with.

I think that they are still considering the reduced cooldown of Void Blast first before applying haste scaling.

[Blackmorgrim]

Mind blast still scales with haste, inside and outside of void form.

[heinz0r]

Do we actually give up shadowform for this new voidform? Or will this just be added ontop of shadowform as some kind of ultimate?