[7.2] Legion Shadow Priest Guide and Discussion

[Alexieel]

you should go with Shadowy Insight with the belt (dunno if you did)... it just makes the talent so much better and life changing. Basically you don't waste the charges like it does sometimes without the belt (the proc gives you a new charge of MB so you if you get a proc during MB you can instantly fire off another MB straight ahead). And if you get several proc => no biggie you just got more MB charges.

I want the belt so bad, maybe in 2220

Yeah thats why I guessed it would be best to sit on 1 charge - if the 2nd charge comes of cooldown and you get a SI procc, so you dont waste either.

[Theed]

I don't have access to US Priest forums. Could someone please create a well written consolidated shadow priest feedback thread including PVE and PVP concerns?

[Deleted]

:'(

Have to say the rotation and gameplay feels much better with 3 charges of MB. My use was pretty bad in HoV Math just now I guess, since I have no Weak Aura which keeps an eye on the charges etc, and I guess its better to sit on 1 charge instead of firing all of them, but it feels so flawless during execute with VB - 2xMB - VB - SW - MB - VB - 2xMB - VB - MB - SW ... and my avarage VFduration went up by like 6-11sec.

icy-veins.com/forums/topic/20367-twintops-legion-weak-auras-updated-20160728/


There is a great MB weakaura made by Twintop

[Deleted]

I don't have access to US Priest forums. Could someone please create a well written consolidated shadow priest feedback thread including PVE and PVP concerns?

Yeah, it's pretty sad that you need to have access to the US forums for most of the concerns to be taken seriously. Warlocks got fawned over by Ion in that developer Q&A. Looking at the summary, almost half of it is warlock related stuff. Pretty lame.

Why does shadow have a dead level 100 talent, and developers just aren't paying attention. Sicks me to be honest. They will surely have data that no one is using that talent. Absolute joke.

[Ilir]

Yeah, it's pretty sad that you need to have access to the US forums for most of the concerns to be taken seriously. Warlocks got fawned over by Ion in that developer Q&A. Looking at the summary, almost half of it is warlock related stuff. Pretty lame.

Why does shadow have a dead level 100 talent, and developers just aren't paying attention. Sicks me to be honest. They will surely have data that no one is using that talent. Absolute joke.

I guess it got lost in the void (entropy).

[Biomega]

Why does shadow have a dead level 100 talent, and developers just aren't paying attention. Sicks me to be honest. They will surely have data that no one is using that talent. Absolute joke.

Void Entropy says hello. That's what, 2 years now that SPs have had only 2 max level talents? I'M SURE IT CAN'T BE MUCH LONGER NOW.

[Theed]

This is not consolidated feedback but useless crying.

[Deleted]

Hey guys, I don't know if this was answered earlier so I apologize in advance. It's regarding stat priority and the balancing of Haste and Crit. Currently I am sitting at 846ilvl, 6554 crit - 24.7% and 9149 haste - 28.1%. I have 5 sockets on my gear 4 with crit and 1 with haste. My question is should we always go for haste no matter what and disregard the other stats or should we follow a certain guidline like not allow us to go below certain crit level if we want to keep something like AS talent in mind(now that they spawn from VTtouch as well). Thanks.

[justflayin]

Hey guys, I don't know if this was answered earlier so I apologize in advance. It's regarding stat priority and the balancing of Haste and Crit. Currently I am sitting at 846ilvl, 6554 crit - 24.7% and 9149 haste - 28.1%. I have 5 sockets on my gear 4 with crit and 1 with haste. My question is should we always go for haste no matter what and disregard the other stats or should we follow a certain guidline like not allow us to go below certain crit level if we want to keep something like AS talent in mind(now that they spawn from VTtouch as well). Thanks.

You just want to keep stacking haste. I'm sure there is some level of crit that makes it more comfortable but haste works for AS as well (more ticks more chances to crit).

[Gorsameth]

Hey guys, I don't know if this was answered earlier so I apologize in advance. It's regarding stat priority and the balancing of Haste and Crit. Currently I am sitting at 846ilvl, 6554 crit - 24.7% and 9149 haste - 28.1%. I have 5 sockets on my gear 4 with crit and 1 with haste. My question is should we always go for haste no matter what and disregard the other stats or should we follow a certain guidline like not allow us to go below certain crit level if we want to keep something like AS talent in mind(now that they spawn from VTtouch as well). Thanks.

Haste only really loses value with StM where you get 100% or more haste and even then it is only for the final bit of a long fight (assuming raid).
You can keep stacking haste without worries.

[Deleted]

Ok, can anyone explain if Glyph of Shadow still does anything and so yea, what exactly?
I got so much conflicting information and the game ain't helping when it talks about the "innate shadowform" and i don't see any change anywhere.

[Zephirdd]

Ok, can anyone explain if Glyph of Shadow still does anything and so yea, what exactly?
I got so much conflicting information and the game ain't helping when it talks about the "innate shadowform" and i don't see any change anywhere.

glyph of shadow makes your passive(non-combat) shadow form a bit less transparent. that's it.

[Isentropy]

State Of Shadow: 7.0 Version

Legion is out, and the majority of players have finally been able to get their own hands on the version of shadow that some of us have been playing for months in the alpha & beta. The rework shadow received changed quite a few things, but the core of the gameplay remained consistent with what the spec has historically been about. It's a mix of the good parts of several design iterations, and overall I think the rework has succeeded in giving shadow a clear identity once more - both in terms of the fantasy, but also in defining its strengths and weaknesses. However, there are still some things that were not addressed in the rework; things that, in my opinion, hold shadow back from being an absolutely amazing spec. I'm not primarily talking about numbers here, to be clear, mostly talking about mechanics and how they impact the enjoyability of the spec. There's three things that I would primarily like to address here, so let's just get right to it. As a disclaimer, my comments come from a high end PvE perspective but will not be limited to just raids.

1. AoE

AoE is something that has been talked about way too much over the past few years really but it can’t entirely be said that these complaints hold no water. The rework sadly did not fix anything about shadow’s poor AoE mechanics, and in fact, it can be argued that it got worse compared to how it was in WoD. Baseline, the only AoE mechanic we have is Mind Sear - I will discuss why this is a problem later in this paragraph - and in terms of talents we have Void Ray, Mind Spike and Shadow Crash that offer us more AoE damage. Void Ray is a poor talent as its usefulness is practically limited to pure single target. You simply don’t use Mind Flay (or Sear) enough to really grant you much benefit in most situations, outside of the aforementioned pure single target situation. This goes for raids, dungeons and solo content. Additionally, the tuning of it isn’t very good either - it’s not going to turn Mind Sear from bad to good, or even okay. Next up, Mind Spike. Oh boy. Where to start with this one? I’ve already written so much about the issues with this talent in other places, it’s hard to briefly explain the whys without it feeling like I’m missing something. It boils down to a couple of things:

• Poor choice for target switching → most of Mind Spike’s damage is stored in the detonation, so unless you can guarantee that you can get stacks on a target and also detonate them with Mind Blast, the risk of losing damage is too high, while the reward hardly exists.
• Lack of globals → Mind Spike is a filler ability, and as such you will only use it when you have absolutely nothing else to cast at that point. You simply don’t cast Mind Spike (Flay/Sear) very much outside of pure single target fights, and those fights are very uncommon in the first tier of Legion (only Nythendra, essentially).
• Detonation is tied to a rotational ability → Mind Blast is a very important Insanity generation tool for us on a fairly short cooldown, and delaying it in favor of timing the detonation (for an upcoming AoE situation) isn’t very intuitive and in most situations, would result in a DPS loss. This means that making good use of the AoE part of the ability is practically impossible and even if you do manage to get off a good detonation, that’s still a lot of set up and work for not a lot of damage. It’s not a rewarding mechanic.
• It’s a ‘noob’ trap → kind of continuing the previous point, I’ve heard of quite a few players that seem to think that picking Mind Spike means delaying Mind Blast until you have 10 stacks on a target, regardless of the situation. Since the detonation scales linearly (not exponentially) off of your Mind Spike’s actual damage, that’s not a very good idea unless you’re trying to set up an AoE detonation (see previous point).
• It’s another filler replacement → we already have the situation where Mind Flay and Mind Sear are basically connected to one another in regards to their damage output (will elaborate on this a bit later on), do we really need a third version of our filler ability? Mind Sear overtakes Mind Flay in terms of damage and Insanity generation at 3 or more targets, and Mind Spike only does more AoE damage than Mind Sear, on average, at 2 targets. What exactly is Mind Spike’s purpose then? The distinction of when to use what ability isn’t very clear at all, especially not to newer players, and Mind Spike frankly feels redundant.
• It’s very poorly tuned at the moment → sims done by Twintop, as well as what’s been seen in game, show that Mind Spike is a very, very small DPS increase compared to having no level 100 talent.

Finally, Shadow Crash is a decent burst AoE option. It’s not fantastic, it’s not terrible - the idea of the talent is fine, the damage is alright, but considering it’s the only good (as in, not terrible) option we have in our talent tree it cannot be reasonably expected that Shadow Crash will single handedly carry our bad baseline AoE. Shadow Crash isn’t the problem here, it’s the fact that we have no good followup after we used Shadow Crash, and our talents don’t offer us much in that regard either as I’ve explained.

So let’s talk about our baseline AoE a little bit. First off, let me just say that manual multidotting is by no means the same as AoE, should there be any confusion about terminology here. When the imps spawn on Mannoroth, you don’t dot up each individual imp, you AoE them down - multidotting the way shadow has to do it is not efficient enough for that. In Legion, the only option we have for the example I just gave, baseline, is Mind Sear. Now, as I’ve already touched upon a little bit earlier, Mind Flay and Mind Sear are essentially tied to each other. What I mean by this is that Mind Sear is designed to be the filler at 3+ targets instead of Mind Flay - ergo, Mind Sear is not allowed to do more damage than Mind Flay at 1 or 2 targets. Continuing this train of thought: only when Mind Flay is strong can Mind Sear be strong as well. In Legion, Mind Flay is not very strong if you look at its damage compared to how much time we spend casting it on single target. Our dots are really strong and we have 2 pretty hard hitting, short cooldown single target nukes that make up a big part of our damage breakdown. There’s no room for Mind Flay to be much stronger than it currently is, so by proxy Mind Sear cannot be strong either. And this is where I want to make the important note that Mind Sear, by design, is an AoE filler. It cannot be tuned to be an actual AoE tool as it is currently designed, there are simply too many limitations for that to be possible. The only reason we use it AS an AoE tool is because we don’t have anything better to use in a high mob count situation. Mechanically speaking, shadow is in a poor state when it comes to AoE for that reason first and foremost. To briefly talk about Void Eruption and why I don’t consider it AoE: it’s merely an extension of our multidotting. If you’re in an AoE situation where dotting isn’t worth it (again, think of Mannoroth imps as an example), you’re not getting anything out of it. It doesn’t help that it requires both of your dots on a target in order for it to do some good damage.

2. Ramp up

In the most recent Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas, Ion addressed the ramp up issues that warlocks have been bringing up recently. Entirely a fair point, but shadow suffers from exactly the same problem, arguably even more so than warlocks are, and while we technically have two talents that help with this (Legacy of the Void and Shadow Word: Void, respectively) they simply do not help enough. The ramp up, especially without Lingering Insanity, can only be described as slow and painful. Shadow Word: Void is completely overshadowed by Twist of Fate (Surrender to Madness synergy is very relevant here too), first of all, and secondly because of the awkward amount of Insanity it generates it still requires multiple globals of Shadow Word: Void most of the time. As such, the actual ramp up this takes away in practice really isn’t very much.

Legacy of the Void doesn’t offer much of an overall DPS increase; even with Legacy of the Void, the initial ramp up to get into Voidform (without any Lingering Insanity) takes a good 15 seconds, possibly more or less depending on the situation, and then there’s additional ramp up because of Voidform’s stacking haste buff & our major artifact trait Mass Hysteria. The point where shadow starts doing good damage doesn’t just start right as we enter Voidform, basically. A similar change that warlocks are receiving would be very welcome, and would go a long way to make the spec a bit less frustrating to play outside of raids, where Voidform cannot be used to its full potential.

3. Shadow’s level 100 row

This row is pretty problematic because two out of the three options aren’t very big DPS increases at all, and then the third option - Surrender to Madness - brings several limitations along with it that make it a talent that can only be used properly in raids. It also means that shadow has no good option in the row for content outside of raids. I’ve already went fairly in depth about why Mind Spike isn’t in a good place at the moment under the AoE paragraph, but let’s briefly talk about Legacy of the Void and Surrender to Madness.

Legacy of the Void is fairly useful through reducing ramp up slightly - this is noticed mostly while leveling, doing worldquests or dungeons. The overall value Legacy of the Void brings for your DPS is really low, and it will only continue to get worse as time goes on. The 30 Insanity it shaves off is going to be pretty much irrelevant once we get a bit of Emerald Nightmare gear, which means that its usefulness will be restricted to being a slight convenience. For a level 100 talent this is a bit weird, but I can forgive it being this way - after all, a talent doesn't need to be good in all types of content for it to be considered a good talent, as long as it has reasonable uses. And Legacy of the Void certainly has some uses, just not in the DPS increasing type of way. The problem is that both Legacy of the Void AND Mind Spike are mediocre DPS talents, so even though Legacy of the Void serves a purpose, it still leaves the row as a whole in a bad spot. If Mind Spike was better, mechanically and numerically, I wouldn’t mind Legacy being the way it is.

Surrender to Madness is the strongest cooldown in the game with the harshest penalty attached to it at the same time: death - so it being considered 'strong' is not necessarily bad. However, there's a combination of factors that make Surrender to Madness a problem in my eyes in its current state, and I'll try to explain why that is briefly.

The biggest reason is our major artifact trait Mass Hysteria. The synergy is nice, but at the same time it's just way too strong, there's really no denying that. There were multiple buffs to our dots near the end of beta, and those only serve to make Mass Hysteria and therefore Surrender to Madness stronger, something that really isn't necessary.

The second reason is that staying in Surrender to Madness for a long time isn't exceptionally difficult if you know the correct timings of when to use Mindbender/Dispersion/Void Torrent/Power Infusion. Aside from that, the rest is just a matter of pressing your buttons quickly and in the correct order. Getting to the third Void Torrent (a little over 2 minutes in Voidform) is tough, but will be more easily possible once raids open and with more gear (the T19 2 piece especially) we will be able to stay in Voidform for significantly longer if we can dot multiple targets up.

Finally, there are a number of talents that are practically mandatory to pick in combination with Surrender to Madness right now: Twist of Fate, Reaper of Souls, Auspicious Spirits (or Shadowy Insight with the legendary belt) and Power Infusion. Not only does Surrender to Madness rule the row it’s in itself, it also limits choice in the other rows by proxy.
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In closing, I would just like to say that it’s a real shame to see so many people scared off by how shadow is performing as of right now, in the current content people have access to. The stigma that has existed within the community for years that shadow is a bad spec is only being reinforced based on shadow’s questing/dungeon performance. Shadow will do well in raids as things are right now, but for many people that just doesn’t cut it - the spec very much feels like it was designed with raids in mind only, as the tools we have available, both baseline and through talents, do not provide shadow with a good enough toolkit to thrive in other content besides raids. I hope that more will be done in the future to truly fulfill the potential shadow has.

[Ysgarthiad]

So any word on how to unlock the "Twisted Reflection" appearance from our artifact? I can't find it anywhere.

[Theed]

So any word on how to unlock the "Twisted Reflection" appearance from our artifact? I can't find it anywhere.

It is probably one of the appearances that are not obtainable until a later patch.

[Palaryel]

State Of Shadow: 7.0 Version

Legion is out, and the majority of players have finally been able to get their own hands on the version of shadow that some of us have been playing for months in the alpha & beta. The rework shadow received changed quite a few things, but the core of the gameplay remained consistent with what the spec has historically been about. It's a mix of the good parts of several design iterations, and overall I think the rework has succeeded in giving shadow a clear identity once more - both in terms of the fantasy, but also in defining its strengths and weaknesses. However, there are still some things that were not addressed in the rework; things that, in my opinion, hold shadow back from being an absolutely amazing spec. I'm not primarily talking about numbers here, to be clear, mostly talking about mechanics and how they impact the enjoyability of the spec. There's three things that I would primarily like to address here, so let's just get right to it. As a disclaimer, my comments come from a high end PvE perspective but will not be limited to just raids.

1. AoE

AoE is something that has been talked about way too much over the past few years really but it can’t entirely be said that these complaints hold no water. The rework sadly did not fix anything about shadow’s poor AoE mechanics, and in fact, it can be argued that it got worse compared to how it was in WoD. Baseline, the only AoE mechanic we have is Mind Sear - I will discuss why this is a problem later in this paragraph - and in terms of talents we have Void Ray, Mind Spike and Shadow Crash that offer us more AoE damage. Void Ray is a poor talent as its usefulness is practically limited to pure single target. You simply don’t use Mind Flay (or Sear) enough to really grant you much benefit in most situations, outside of the aforementioned pure single target situation. This goes for raids, dungeons and solo content. Additionally, the tuning of it isn’t very good either - it’s not going to turn Mind Sear from bad to good, or even okay. Next up, Mind Spike. Oh boy. Where to start with this one? I’ve already written so much about the issues with this talent in other places, it’s hard to briefly explain the whys without it feeling like I’m missing something. It boils down to a couple of things:

• Poor choice for target switching → most of Mind Spike’s damage is stored in the detonation, so unless you can guarantee that you can get stacks on a target and also detonate them with Mind Blast, the risk of losing damage is too high, while the reward hardly exists.
• Lack of globals → Mind Spike is a filler ability, and as such you will only use it when you have absolutely nothing else to cast at that point. You simply don’t cast Mind Spike (Flay/Sear) very much outside of pure single target fights, and those fights are very uncommon in the first tier of Legion (only Nythendra, essentially).
• Detonation is tied to a rotational ability → Mind Blast is a very important Insanity generation tool for us on a fairly short cooldown, and delaying it in favor of timing the detonation (for an upcoming AoE situation) isn’t very intuitive and in most situations, would result in a DPS loss. This means that making good use of the AoE part of the ability is practically impossible and even if you do manage to get off a good detonation, that’s still a lot of set up and work for not a lot of damage. It’s not a rewarding mechanic.
• It’s a ‘noob’ trap → kind of continuing the previous point, I’ve heard of quite a few players that seem to think that picking Mind Spike means delaying Mind Blast until you have 10 stacks on a target, regardless of the situation. Since the detonation scales linearly (not exponentially) off of your Mind Spike’s actual damage, that’s not a very good idea unless you’re trying to set up an AoE detonation (see previous point).
• It’s another filler replacement → we already have the situation where Mind Flay and Mind Sear are basically connected to one another in regards to their damage output (will elaborate on this a bit later on), do we really need a third version of our filler ability? Mind Sear overtakes Mind Flay in terms of damage and Insanity generation at 3 or more targets, and Mind Spike only does more AoE damage than Mind Sear, on average, at 2 targets. What exactly is Mind Spike’s purpose then? The distinction of when to use what ability isn’t very clear at all, especially not to newer players, and Mind Spike frankly feels redundant.
• It’s very poorly tuned at the moment → sims done by Twintop, as well as what’s been seen in game, show that Mind Spike is a very, very small DPS increase compared to having no level 100 talent.

Finally, Shadow Crash is a decent burst AoE option. It’s not fantastic, it’s not terrible - the idea of the talent is fine, the damage is alright, but considering it’s the only good (as in, not terrible) option we have in our talent tree it cannot be reasonably expected that Shadow Crash will single handedly carry our bad baseline AoE. Shadow Crash isn’t the problem here, it’s the fact that we have no good followup after we used Shadow Crash, and our talents don’t offer us much in that regard either as I’ve explained.

So let’s talk about our baseline AoE a little bit. First off, let me just say that manual multidotting is by no means the same as AoE, should there be any confusion about terminology here. When the imps spawn on Mannoroth, you don’t dot up each individual imp, you AoE them down - multidotting the way shadow has to do it is not efficient enough for that. In Legion, the only option we have for the example I just gave, baseline, is Mind Sear. Now, as I’ve already touched upon a little bit earlier, Mind Flay and Mind Sear are essentially tied to each other. What I mean by this is that Mind Sear is designed to be the filler at 3+ targets instead of Mind Flay - ergo, Mind Sear is not allowed to do more damage than Mind Flay at 1 or 2 targets. Continuing this train of thought: only when Mind Flay is strong can Mind Sear be strong as well. In Legion, Mind Flay is not very strong if you look at its damage compared to how much time we spend casting it on single target. Our dots are really strong and we have 2 pretty hard hitting, short cooldown single target nukes that make up a big part of our damage breakdown. There’s no room for Mind Flay to be much stronger than it currently is, so by proxy Mind Sear cannot be strong either. And this is where I want to make the important note that Mind Sear, by design, is an AoE filler. It cannot be tuned to be an actual AoE tool as it is currently designed, there are simply too many limitations for that to be possible. The only reason we use it AS an AoE tool is because we don’t have anything better to use in a high mob count situation. Mechanically speaking, shadow is in a poor state when it comes to AoE for that reason first and foremost. To briefly talk about Void Eruption and why I don’t consider it AoE: it’s merely an extension of our multidotting. If you’re in an AoE situation where dotting isn’t worth it (again, think of Mannoroth imps as an example), you’re not getting anything out of it. It doesn’t help that it requires both of your dots on a target in order for it to do some good damage.

2. Ramp up

In the most recent Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas, Ion addressed the ramp up issues that warlocks have been bringing up recently. Entirely a fair point, but shadow suffers from exactly the same problem, arguably even more so than warlocks are, and while we technically have two talents that help with this (Legacy of the Void and Shadow Word: Void, respectively) they simply do not help enough. The ramp up, especially without Lingering Insanity, can only be described as slow and painful. Shadow Word: Void is completely overshadowed by Twist of Fate (Surrender to Madness synergy is very relevant here too), first of all, and secondly because of the awkward amount of Insanity it generates it still requires multiple globals of Shadow Word: Void most of the time. As such, the actual ramp up this takes away in practice really isn’t very much.

Legacy of the Void doesn’t offer much of an overall DPS increase; even with Legacy of the Void, the initial ramp up to get into Voidform (without any Lingering Insanity) takes a good 15 seconds, possibly more or less depending on the situation, and then there’s additional ramp up because of Voidform’s stacking haste buff & our major artifact trait Mass Hysteria. The point where shadow starts doing good damage doesn’t just start right as we enter Voidform, basically. A similar change that warlocks are receiving would be very welcome, and would go a long way to make the spec a bit less frustrating to play outside of raids, where Voidform cannot be used to its full potential.

3. Shadow’s level 100 row

This row is pretty problematic because two out of the three options aren’t very big DPS increases at all, and then the third option - Surrender to Madness - brings several limitations along with it that make it a talent that can only be used properly in raids. It also means that shadow has no good option in the row for content outside of raids. I’ve already went fairly in depth about why Mind Spike isn’t in a good place at the moment under the AoE paragraph, but let’s briefly talk about Legacy of the Void and Surrender to Madness.

Legacy of the Void is fairly useful through reducing ramp up slightly - this is noticed mostly while leveling, doing worldquests or dungeons. The overall value Legacy of the Void brings for your DPS is really low, and it will only continue to get worse as time goes on. The 30 Insanity it shaves off is going to be pretty much irrelevant once we get a bit of Emerald Nightmare gear, which means that its usefulness will be restricted to being a slight convenience. For a level 100 talent this is a bit weird, but I can forgive it being this way - after all, a talent doesn't need to be good in all types of content for it to be considered a good talent, as long as it has reasonable uses. And Legacy of the Void certainly has some uses, just not in the DPS increasing type of way. The problem is that both Legacy of the Void AND Mind Spike are mediocre DPS talents, so even though Legacy of the Void serves a purpose, it still leaves the row as a whole in a bad spot. If Mind Spike was better, mechanically and numerically, I wouldn’t mind Legacy being the way it is.

Surrender to Madness is the strongest cooldown in the game with the harshest penalty attached to it at the same time: death - so it being considered 'strong' is not necessarily bad. However, there's a combination of factors that make Surrender to Madness a problem in my eyes in its current state, and I'll try to explain why that is briefly.

The biggest reason is our major artifact trait Mass Hysteria. The synergy is nice, but at the same time it's just way too strong, there's really no denying that. There were multiple buffs to our dots near the end of beta, and those only serve to make Mass Hysteria and therefore Surrender to Madness stronger, something that really isn't necessary.

The second reason is that staying in Surrender to Madness for a long time isn't exceptionally difficult if you know the correct timings of when to use Mindbender/Dispersion/Void Torrent. Aside from that, the rest is just a matter of pressing your buttons quickly and in the correct order. Getting to the third Void Torrent (a little over 2 minutes in Voidform) is tough, but will be more easily possible once raids open and with more gear (the T19 2 piece especially) we will be able to stay in Voidform for significantly longer if we can dot multiple targets up.

Finally, there are a number of talents that are practically mandatory to pick in combination with Surrender to Madness right now: Twist of Fate, Reaper of Souls, Auspicious Spirits (or Shadowy Insight with the legendary belt) and Power Infusion. Not only does Surrender to Madness rule the row it’s in itself, it also limits choice in the other rows by proxy.
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In closing, I would just like to say that it’s a real shame to see so many people scared off by how shadow is performing as of right now, in the current content people have access to. The stigma that has existed within the community for years that shadow is a bad spec is only being reinforced based on shadow’s questing/dungeon performance. Shadow will do well in raids as things are right now, but for many people that just doesn’t cut it - the spec very much feels like it was designed with raids in mind only, as the tools we have available, both baseline and through talents, do not provide shadow with a good enough toolkit to thrive in other content besides raids. I hope that more will be done in the future to truly fulfill the potential shadow has.

Can someone with an US account copy paste this to the US BNET forums, and at the same time make a reply in the warlock forums to point the community manager to shadow priest as well. That way the lead designer can't say we didn't supply relevant feedback.

Sent from my LG-D855 using Tapatalk

[britishbubba]

Not sure if this has been discussed, but I don't remember seeing it. Just got moonlit prism from our mythic clear and I noticed something a little odd about it.

1) Void Torrent gives a stack on cast, but not on tick.
2) Mind Sear gives a stack on each tick.
3) Mind Flay gives a stack on cast, but not on tick.

Not sure if that qualifies as a bug. Since they're all channeled spells I'd assume they're supposed to act the same in their interaction with the trinket.

[Deleted]

Haste only really loses value with StM where you get 100% or more haste and even then it is only for the final bit of a long fight (assuming raid).
You can keep stacking haste without worries.

Please don't mislead people man.

[Deleted]

Great summary Isentropy. I hope you have posted this somewhere on the US forums (if possible).

[Sinistrem]

My main problem with shadow is that whenever i play it, i feel like i could've been more useful as another class or even spec. I had no access to raids so i can't comment on that yet, but in 5mans it feels like any other class can pull ahead of me, not to mention monks/dhs/hunters who are miles away, since s2m is not a 5man friendly talent. It feels like i'm hindering my group by playing shadow instead of specing holy and getting another monk/dh/hunter as a dd.

Even if shadow is going to be very good in raids and manage to stay that way without being nerfed (which i unfortunately doubt) is a spec that niche worth maining? Having a single talent and a single game enviroment defining your spec at the cost of being mediocre in the rest of the game? Compared to shadow, as a holy you are literally loved and welcomed everywhere (not sure about pvp since i don't participate in it), be it open world, mythic+ or raids. It's a shame since i love shadow so much, but it seems i'd have to keep it shelved untill raids are out / raid class balance pass is out.