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  1. #41
    Quote Originally Posted by prejumpton View Post
    i don't like legion shadow, specially how spells work in voidform. how latency, lag spikes and gear are so big deal compared to other classes/specs. It feels really underdeveloped - looks like they threw pile of disconnected spells together and then started fixing it.
    I feel the same. :-/ Well said.
    "There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." by Jiddu Krishnamurti, Philosopher and Educator

  2. #42
    Shadow is getting worse and worse playstyle-wise however the shift from direct damage to dot damage in Legion is a good thing. I love vampiric theme since vanilla but whole void/old gods thing is fine imo. But it shouldn't excuse gameplay atrocities like STM.

    My favorite was ICC shadow priest when dots started to scale with haste but their duration also scaled down with haste. Cataclysm was also good until 4pt13 imo.

    My biggest problem with shadow in Legion is that you either do damage or do the encounter mechanics. 1 second of moving will cost you HUGE amount of DPS if it happens during high stacks in Void form.
    Last edited by Forsay; 2017-07-16 at 08:38 AM.

  3. #43
    I enjoyed Shadow in Legion-Beta. The haste buff you got at the end of Void Form with certain talents made it feel very fast.
    Though now, it doesn't feel like I can get to the level of haste that felt good before.

  4. #44
    Dreadlord RsinRC's Avatar
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    I love shadow in legion. Very unique gameplay, rising damage peaks. I do really miss wod tho and abilities like, spectral guise, cascade, devouring plague, halo and mind flay's insanity talent.
    What I dont like is the emphasis on mindbender. Never liked it.

  5. #45
    Quote Originally Posted by Forsay View Post
    I love vampiric theme since vanilla but whole void/old gods thing is fine imo. But it shouldn't excuse gameplay atrocities like STM.
    This is my biggest beef with Shadows design now. We used to be mini Dreadlords with actual Vampiric Embrace and such. Heck we had Sleep at one point waaaaaaaaay back in the day. I was hoping we'd get a Carrion Wave cone ability at some point, but this whole tentacle void shit is so random and dumb.
    Priest Warrior
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    You are not the mount you ride. You are not the contents of your bank.
    You are not your epic purples. You are not a special and unique snowflake.
    You are the all-grinding, all-farming crap of Azeroth.

  6. #46
    The MoP and WoD shadow orbs mechanic was always really dull. Just a flavorless copy of the paladin holy power mechanic.

    The insanity resource is at least different and for once, the spec isn't just copying some other spec that does it better. Though there isn't much flexibility in how to execute the rotation.

    Having low aoe isn't cool.

    Being niche for council fights isn't a good place to be because those fights are rare and we're largely unrequired there. Being stronger in the execute phase is a better niche. Though we should have more ways to build our spec with talents than "stronger execute".

  7. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by twistedmynd View Post
    The insanity resource is at least different and for once, the spec isn't just copying some other spec that does it better.
    Uh... What is "Demonic Fury and Metamorphosis of Demonology Warlocks in MoP?" for 500, Alex.
    Priest Warrior
    You are not your role. You are not how much gold you have on your account.
    You are not the mount you ride. You are not the contents of your bank.
    You are not your epic purples. You are not a special and unique snowflake.
    You are the all-grinding, all-farming crap of Azeroth.

  8. #48
    Quote Originally Posted by Ansible View Post
    Uh... What is "Demonic Fury and Metamorphosis of Demonology Warlocks in MoP?" for 500, Alex.
    Warlock Demo was more in line with druid forms in gameplay department. You didnt stayed with demo form, just pop in, drop few nukes, go back to regular casting. Or more like stance dancing.

  9. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by Aliven View Post
    Warlock Demo was more in line with druid forms in gameplay department. You didnt stayed with demo form, just pop in, drop few nukes, go back to regular casting. Or more like stance dancing.
    You build demonic fury, enter a form which drains demonic fury, while trying to maintain the form for as much damage as you can get out of it.
    Priest Warrior
    You are not your role. You are not how much gold you have on your account.
    You are not the mount you ride. You are not the contents of your bank.
    You are not your epic purples. You are not a special and unique snowflake.
    You are the all-grinding, all-farming crap of Azeroth.

  10. #50
    It is the same mechanics as old demo lock. But old demo lock was completely destroyed. To clarify I meant we're not just some red-headed step child like we were back when the spec was diet-affliction lock or ret paladin's half brother. We're supposed to be the ranged execute spec niche, which is better than previous niches.

    On topic, it's enjoyable at least. The aoe problem isn't even a problem with some numerical tweaks. I don't know why it's been an expansion wide problem.

  11. #51
    Quote Originally Posted by Ansible View Post
    You build demonic fury, enter a form which drains demonic fury, while trying to maintain the form for as much damage as you can get out of it.
    Nope. You can enter demo without maxed out Demonic Fury. You spend as little as possible Demonic Fury to cast as much dmg spells, only essentials. You go back to regular casting and go back only IF you either need to refresh them (Doom) or cap Demonic Fury.

    Basically a stance dancing mechanic.

  12. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by RsinRC View Post
    I love shadow in legion. Very unique gameplay, rising damage peaks. I do really miss wod tho and abilities like, spectral guise, cascade, devouring plague, halo and mind flay's insanity talent.
    What I dont like is the emphasis on mindbender. Never liked it.
    Oh yeah, a lot of those skills were very cool. In my opinion, a CoP talent would be very welcome for me, gutting StM which is frankly shit and I never liked it one bit. I liked CoP playing style a lot, because I could dot adds, dot weave on bosses and nuke the hell out on single target with a very useful instant cast mind blast. My dream build would be CoP, the skills you mention and shadow mend all together, with Dark Archangel on top. Spectral guise was fun and useful, Cascade was also very scenic to watch, and being able to insanity Mind Sear on AoE was quite fun and engaging

    This iteration of shadow is not terrible, but imo it's not so fun, especially when you can screw up all your damage due to fight mechanics (let alone random stuns/knockbacks in dungeons).

  13. #53
    Did 2 M+ last night as Shadow since a buddy was on his Resto Druid. Do not enjoy Shadow in dungeons very much. Been spending most of my time in dungeons as Holy. Still enjoy Shadow in raids right now.

  14. #54
    Fluffy Kitten Yvaelle's Avatar
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    Generally I still enjoy Shadow, but it's not at all how I originally proposed it to be.

    My original proposal was that we had two resources, Willpower and Insanity. Willpower generated very slowly over time (out of 100), and as we gained more Willpower we gained 1% haste per Willpower. Mind Blast was supposed to be instant (combo builder, kind of), but generated a lot of willpower (ex, 5 or 10). So for sustained damage and DoT cleave, Shadow ramps up slowly over the start of a fight, but then ends up dealing a Lot of sustained multi-dot, once at full Willpower.

    Our second resource was Insanity - using our strongest abilities (finishers like Devouring Plague and Psychic Horror) would generate lots of Insanity (ex. 50 out of 100): this is bad, but potentially manageable (that's the game). If we use too many Finishers too quickly, we hit 100 insanity, and go insane, losing all our willpower (and the haste that goes along with it). Insanity decays over time.

    But there was a potential upside (blessing and curse) to hitting 100 Insanity: Apotheosis. If we hit 100 Insanity, we entered Apotheosis for 10 seconds: we lose all Willpower, all haste from Willpower, and all our DoTs on all targets are removed. During Apotheosis we deal significantly more single target burst damage, and all damage we deal heals the lowest health raid member for 100% of damage dealt (Vampiric Embrace replaced here) - and our abilities change slightly (ex. Mind Flay wrecks shit now). We cannot move during Apotheosis, so if we're trigger it accidentally while standing in fire, we die.

    When Apotheosis ends (10 seconds), we have lost our willpower, and it takes a long time to rebuild it - so 90% of the time, triggering Apotheosis is a DPS loss overall. There are exceptions though,
    a) if a priority target absolutely must die or the raid wipes, Apotheosis turns Shadow into one of the burstiest single target specs in the game for 10 seconds, but costs us DPS overall (an interesting trade-off),
    b) if the fight is about to end and there is only 10 seconds left, hit Apotheosis and go nuts,
    c) if the raid is taking crazy damage and we need burst raid healing, Apotheosis does that, but costs us DPS (again an interesting trade-off),
    d) if the boss has a big bonus damage window, ex. takes 400% bonus damage during the next 15 seconds).

    Overall, 9 fights out of 10, Shadow wouldn't want to ever enter Apotheosis - because the haste gained from Willpower would be better overall DPS (sustained) - and our goal would be to cause small amounts of Insanity slowly (ex. Devouring Plague), without hitting 100 Insanity. We use our Willpower (as Priests) to manage our Insanity (as Shadows). Sometimes though, we would choose to lower our overall DPS - for the temporary damage spike - by intentionally triggering Apotheosis: by hitting 100 Insanity.

    I had also assumed that we were going to get new Finishing Moves this expansion, to replace Devouring Plague. One that I had proposed was Mind War - which was just a super Mind Flay that dealt a ton of damage, channeled - so that's kind of like Void Torrent - but I wanted other options for other scenarios (ex. another was Despair, which was supposed to be a powerful 10 second DoT that snared targets by +10% per second, up to 99%).

    So part of me is personally pretty happy with Shadow - because it clearly bears some of those influences in the design now - but part of me also feels responsible: because thematically I wanted Shadowpriests to be different than Warlocks, we used our Willpower to prevent our Insanity, through our priestly discipline and faiths. Shadowpriests walked a dangerous line by wielding void magic, but we had the restraint to control it - unless we were willing to make a personal sacrifice (overall DPS), generally for the benefit of the raid (killing a priority add, raid healing, etc). As it is, we are the opposite of what I hoped - insane people wielding our insanity for personal power.

    Not sure what I'll propose for next expansion - but it's probably time to start thinking about it.

    I will always be Shadow for life though
    Last edited by Yvaelle; 2017-07-19 at 12:00 AM.
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  15. #55
    Right now I'm finding it hard to. The Insanity mechanic sounds great in paper and is engaging and challenging on a target dummy. But in practice, as others have said, it just creates a very punishing experience in a raid setting. Combine that with the current toolkit and tuning and you're left with a very difficult spec to play that does not produce worthwhile results.

    - Single target is middle of the pack when tunneling, but next to nothing with any sort of movement at the wrong time.
    - AoE is probably the worst in the game, which is unfortunate considering the prevalence of M+.
    - has a niche strength of being the 2-3 long-lived add cleave God, which is an uncommon situation.

    I love the spec's theme and fantasy, but that kind of falls to the wayside compared to the frustrations of playing the spec in any M+ that isn't super high and on many raid fights. Really does feel like both the toolkit and tuning are currently lacking for the content I use my character to play.

  16. #56
    Deleted
    The only thing that makes me want to log off from whenever i say "Let's give this pg a try" it's a quick AoE tool. Every other class can kill 20 small imp with 30 hp in seconds, while you can just cry or respec holy. Really really sad, because the class theme is amazing, specially in Legion.

  17. #57
    I suppose a single change could make Shadow a lot less punished by movement:

    While moving, Insanity drain is slowed by 80%, but Voidform stacking is paused until you stand still again.

    That way you can move around without losing tons of insanity/voidform stacks, but you can't cheese it by just running around spamming void bolt or whatever, because you don't gain voidform stacks while moving.

    Then you just go ahead and make Shadow Crash baseline and in its place, a talent that makes Void Bolt spread DoTs to 1 or 2 other targets within range, and bam, Shadow is no longer hot garbage

  18. #58
    Fluffy Kitten Yvaelle's Avatar
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    When they changed Mind Sear to a talent something I proposed that I still really like, would just be to remove Mind Sear entirely. At which point we would have no AOE spells at all.

    Then give us Shadow Crash baseline, on a 20 second cooldown (shorter due to loss of mind sear). The Shadow Crash talent could then be replaced with a talent that reduces the cooldown of Shadow Crash by 5 seconds, and gives Shadow Crash 3 charges: so we could drop 1 Shadow Crash every 15 seconds, or - we could drop 3 Shadow Crashes on the same pack in 3 GCDs, once every 45 seconds.

    This would mean Shadow would have no sustained AOE at all (which is fine, that's when we want to multi-dot anyways) - but would mean Shadow has pretty good burst AOE (baseline shadow crash), and potentially some of the best burst AOE in the game if we also take the Shadow Crash talent (Bladestorm-esque): but we have to aim those crashes or we lose our damage (compared to other burst aoe specs who generally don't have to skillshot their bladestorms, eye beams, etc).

    I think that sounds pretty fair to me - also we'd all have a good tool for those quests that are like, "Here's 50 mobs each with 10hp, press Divine Storm, oh wait you don't have that.... stab them to death individually with your dagger over the course of the next minute and a half! Or run until you are out of combat, respec to Holy, run back, press Holy Nova, then respec back - because that's faster than AOEing as Shadow!".

    Plus the talent would make doing old world content as a Shadowpriest not-the-worst-thing-ever (fortunately my girlfriend is a BM hunter, so I can dual-box my 927 Spriest through old world content to carry Yva.. because I need a fucking carry to do AQ40 apparently).
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  19. #59

  20. #60
    I enjoy my shadow priest on single targets that live long enough for my DoTs to tick for close to their full duration (aka: bosses and exceptionally tough trash mobs). The insanity mechanic (and visuals) are really fun.

    I don't enjoy the lack of AoE. It makes trying to solo old content tedious since stuff dies just by applying SW:P. Even something like a shadow version of holy nova (shadow nova?) would be better than having our only AoE tied into SW:P and mind flay.

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