Shadowpriests in the Arena

[hannibaal]

I wonder if it was intended that the shadow tree not be viable for PVP or the arena. I'm looking at the top priest 2v2 teams. All are disc. I thought blizzard did not want folks to spec XXX for YYY.

http://www.arenajunkies.com/rankings/2v2/Priest/

Did I miss something?

[heriana]

Shadowpriests in pvp are heavily gimped as of now. Everyone seems to know this except for Blizzard

[Sausagefan]

The pre-release version of Dispersion gave Spriests some hope; it had health regen and a damage increase at some point. The current version really isn't enough. It's a bad Ice Block. Other than that, we have a crappy fear we can use every 24 seconds (assuming talented Imp Psychic Scream and the glove bonus) and an RNG stun that Blizzard has stated is on the chopping block.

Yeah, we're that awful.

[Nezoia]

tbh, just spec disc allready, and go faceroll.

Shadow is not even fun the way it's been whole TBC. Being a boxingball the entire match, and spending more time healing than dps'ing as shadow.

Might as well roll full healer at once.

[heriana]

tbh, just spec disc allready, and go faceroll.

Shadow is not even fun the way it's been whole TBC. Being a boxingball the entire match, and spending more time healing than dps'ing as shadow.

Might as well roll full healer at once.

That's so true. I tried to do 2's as shadow with 800 resilience, but I still spend virtually the entire time trying to run away and heal. Out of almost 40 games I never once was able to get my full dot rotation on a target. Disc is a lot more practical and to be honest I'm found it to be a lot more fun.

[Hajbett]

Yeah having the same rotation problem, tried for about the same 40 games last week and got 2 proper rotations due to a double blackoutproc vs. dps+healer team,
in 2 vs 2. But i guess i could find a teammate with more CC for them melees, like a mage or destro lock rather than my match with a aff lock. Afterwards i decided to try somewhat of a Holy/shadow spec since all i seem to do is healing and dots anyway.

think it went something like this:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bZfVzhZ0xfwRfkcisfdAo

made the time i can focus on dps a bit longer.

I might add that my gear is basicly 90% non-PvP items but the spec acctually made me survive with ease and we where 2 games from the hot streak achivement =P, including me soloing a boomkin/warr combo after my teammate died within the first 7 secs of the game and yes my rng was fantastic that game.

Anyway ill prolly just go disc to spare me the trouble and frustration.

[AetherMcLoud]

I have around 900 resilience, and still die after 6 seconds as a shadowpriest. I can't do damage as a shadow priest.

If specced holy or disc, 1 DD can't bring me down as long as I have mana. 2 need serious CC to get me down.

Something has to be done. I can do more burst damage with a holy or disc spec than with a shadow spec.

[syanid]

I find it awful and fucking irritating that a class that's supposed to do damage is always running away and every single piece of equipment we equip doesn't show any difference at all. It's just constant running and running and running and eventually healing. I can't remember when I dealt damage as shadow in arena.
Disc is freakin' boring to play in arena and I think they really need to sort the state of the shadow priest because we want to be able to play a damaging class in pvp, not the one that just receives more damage than tanks in pve.

[Ananan]

I really think they should reconsider the whole idea that some classes are just better to focus your dps on in pvp than others. You generally want to nuke someone who:
1. doesn't have much passive damage mitigation.
2. have few ways to kite or otherwise avoid the damage.
3. doesn't have good panic buttons to swing the fight around.
4. when nuked suffers horribly in terms of effectiveness.

The class design doesn't work like that, hence some classes are "targets" over and over again and there is very little strategy in deciding whom to focus. I think they definately need to rework it so that the four points above not all apply to the same class, while at least one of them applies to any class. If we could get some sort of "nuke the player, not the class" balance then it would become a lot more fun for everyone. More strategy would simply be involved than the current:
"Warlock, go for the warlock! No wait, they have a SHADOWPRIEST!"

I think the worst problem for mostly shadowpriests, elemental shamans and warlocks is that they get reduced to such utter uselessness when focused. As a shadowpriest your dps drops by 80% as soon as there is a hostile meleer within 10 yards, and you can just forget about spells like Mana Burn and Mind Control. What they need even more than survivability and dot protection is anti-interruption mechanics or next-spell-instant procs from being hit. As it is currently, and pretty much was in TBC as well, is just no fun.

[AetherMcLoud]

I really think they should reconsider the whole idea that some classes are just better to focus your dps on in pvp than others. You generally want to nuke someone who:
1. doesn't have much passive damage mitigation.
2. have few ways to kite or otherwise avoid the damage.
3. doesn't have good panic buttons to swing the fight around.
4. when nuked suffers horribly in terms of effectiveness.

The class design doesn't work like that, hence some classes are "targets" over and over again and there is very little strategy in deciding whom to focus. I think they definately need to rework it so that the four points above not all apply to the same class, while at least one of them applies to any class. If we could get some sort of "nuke the player, not the class" balance then it would become a lot more fun for everyone. More strategy would simply be involved than the current:
"Warlock, go for the warlock! No wait, they have a SHADOWPRIEST!"

I think the worst problem for mostly shadowpriests, elemental shamans and warlocks is that they get reduced to such utter uselessness when focused. As a shadowpriest your dps drops by 80% as soon as there is a hostile meleer within 10 yards, and you can just forget about spells like Mana Burn and Mind Control. What they need even more than survivability and dot protection is anti-interruption mechanics or next-spell-instant procs from being hit. As it is currently, and pretty much was in TBC as well, is just no fun.

This is a very good analysis and conclusion. And that's indeed the problem at the core, and I don't think they can fix such things with just changing talents and/or spells. They would have to change the core mechanics of some classes.

In a raid setting I can do comparable DPS to a mage. But in a PVP setting the mage just owns while I get raped. This is because he has two handful of ways to get melees of his ass, he has burst on no cooldown, he doesn't have to work damage over time, and such things.

Alas, I don't think they will change the complete shadowpriest class over in 3.1.

[Nezoia]

Disciplin 5on5 is super fun btw. , try it out.

You get to play alot more offensive than the other two brackets.

[hannibaal]

4 years play I have played a Shadowpriest. Never once respecing to disc or holy. PVE content is nice, but PVP is much better. So as it stands now, after the dual spec patch comes out, I'll raid as a shadowpriest, and PVP as disc. I'm done giving other players free points pvp'ing as a shadowpriest.

Oh BTW, Blizzard about the getting resilience will help thing... I guess you were not completely wrong (I missed the note about excluding shadowpriests). I have about 800 resilience and yes I don't get one shotted any more. However, i have about 20% of my health left, no way to either disperse again, fear, or fade...all on cool down. Oh yeah I can drop shadow and heal (losing what little extra protection I had as shadow) only to get interrupted/silenced. Thank you for the extra 3 seconds of life.

[Abandon]

Shadow Priests have been a target since vanilla, when Anathema was basically a "kill me" flag, but at least back then we could melt the face off anyone who actually attacked us instead of staring at my shoes humming the "I'm Stunned" song.

[talrob]

Humm just thought, has anyone tried with a decent feral druid maybe? Our problem comes from melee in our face constantly. What would happen if you had a feral druid to cyclone/root/charge (one of the) melee while you burst the other one in 2v2?

[Synge]

shadowpriest is mainly nuked in arenas(BC) because he would burn and kill the whole team if you let him...thats how all started with "oooo hey nuke the SHADOWPRIEST!" he wasnt been "ohh easy to kill"...
now its "kill the Spriest,its a free target after 6 sec"

Uh? Shadow Priests are targeted first because they have absolutely zero defenses once the fear is popped. They are, hands down, the easiest class to kill in the arena.

As such, they are targeted first. It's not rocket science.

An unchecked Rogue will annihilate classes far faster than a Shadow Priest, but they're typically CC'd. No one CC's a Shadow Priest... you just kill it and spend the rest of your time playing the game.

Shadow Priests are like that cockroach up the stairs to fight Kargath Bladefist. You're running up the steps to win the fight and some poor bastard wands the cockroach. You don't think about it anymore, it's just habitual at this point.

[Ntrails]

'Dispersion resets the fear cooldown.'


My fabulous idea for helping vs melee.



I assume you could macro

/cancelaura
/castfear?

[wildraven]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=1

For those who missed it. The whole SP state described by Noxn

[Nezoia]

Awesome topic

Dispersion
Change: The damage reduction now works on traveling spells.
Reason: I know Blizzard is already working out this one, so there's no reason to waste time talking about it, as we all know how Dispersion is lacking something. But if there was one thing I could change about this spell is having it work on traveling spells.

Unlike most defensive cooldowns, once you see that pyroblast coming you can't dispersion to mitigate the damage. Even though you'll gain dispersion before the enemy spell lands, the damage won't be reduced at all. I don't know if its impossible to change that given the current mechanic of the spell, but what if it had a brief window of damage immunity, just like vanish, for something around 0.3 seconds? That would fix this, wouldn't it?

W T F

I actually assumed it worked for traveling spells allready. Lame

[AetherMcLoud]

Shadow Priests have been a target since vanilla, when Anathema was basically a "kill me" flag, but at least back then we could melt the face off anyone who actually attacked us instead of staring at my shoes humming the "I'm Stunned" song.

This. 10 times this.

[Daneel]

Uh? Shadow Priests are targeted first because they have absolutely zero defenses once the fear is popped. They are, hands down, the easiest class to kill in the arena.

As such, they are targeted first. It's not rocket science.

An unchecked Rogue will annihilate classes far faster than a Shadow Priest, but they're typically CC'd. No one CC's a Shadow Priest... you just kill it and spend the rest of your time playing the game.

Shadow Priests are like that cockroach up the stairs to fight Kargath Bladefist. You're running up the steps to win the fight and some poor bastard wands the cockroach. You don't think about it anymore, it's just habitual at this point.

I don't know when you started playing wow, but shadowpriest in vanilla and in tbc IF left alone would destroy any target in 3-4 seconds.
Remeber how nasty the shadowcomp was: warlock + sp?