Shadowpriests in the Arena

[Aureact]

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?

Might aswell have a boomkin or resto instead then. If he has to CC all the time he will spend little time in cat form.

[AetherMcLoud]

Relying on your arena partner to pull melees off you is a class concept failure par excellance.

DK, Mage, Paladin, Rogue couldn't care less about their respective partners. Yeah there are better partners and worse, but still they do OK with all classes (besides priest and warlock probably).

Yet shadowpriests and warlocks HAVE to have a class capable of high CC and peeling in order to do ANYTHING AT ALL.

How is this fair?

Btw, I haven't logged in to my priest apart from raiding since my DK hit 80 - it's just so amazingly fun. *sadpanda*

[Ananan]

I don't think we'll see a change to the design that priests are cloth-tanks with very little mobility (for my part I think that it would be cool to make holy the more mobile spec in pvp, but that's just an aside). I really doubt that Fade breaking snares is to be seen as a change in direction of the shadowpriest design.

I'm sure that pure survivability can be tuned somewhat easily. What's more interesting is to see if priests' mana efficiency and ability to perform well even under heavy pressure will be adequate.

Being easy to pin down and put under pressure means that mana efficiency is a huge deal for the healing specs. It's also a big deal for shadow since they have a bad case of the oom-disease in pvp now (that will be more noticable if burst gets nerfed). I guess we can hope for Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend changes to help with that part.

As for ability to perform well even under heavy pressure, that's where shadow truly needs help. If I'm supposed to be a cloth tank I need to feel that I'm able to do stuff while tanking. For that to happen at least shadow needs a pretty powerful anti-interruption mechanic, or a frequent proc that makes the next spell take 1.5 secs less time to cast, or something similar.

Poisons are a bit of a worry for both these issues, but that has been covered before...