Originally Posted by
syanid
- No nuking ability
- Huge cooldowns on CC abilities that require us to gem for hit rating instead of to be offensive
- Our 51 point talent was designed to turn us into tanks for 6 seconds, it doesn't help enough
Basically, there's no such situation in which we can tank for 10-15 sec and wait for opponents to lose their nuking power. Melee maintains their nuking power all the time while they can kick, stun, pummel, mind freeze, strangulate us while delivering huge blows. Shadow's designed poorly for pvp, it's not dispelling that's the problem only. We take a long time to put the dots up, to build up shadow weaving and then to unload our damage which still isn't bursty enough.
Warriors gem for crit, frost mages get +50% crit on frozen targets (and have fingers of frost too), rogues / rets have all above 30% crit chance while in pvp gear. Shadow priest hasn't got over 12% crit in pvp gear. Most of the players at 2k have 1k resilience that completely and totally negates all the crit shadow has. Hence, even if me manage to put up the dots - the damage is sustained and not spiky like rets for example.
We don't get to choose how to fight, since we're either death gripped, repetanced + HoJ-ed, sapped - cheapshotted - kidneyshotted or simply charged. Melee gets to choose how to fight us.
I dig the whole "if the meleer gets to close to you, you die", but we don't even have more powerful ranged attacks and we don't have abilities to quickly get away from them (locks = demonic circle, mages = blink, nova, cone etc., hunter = disengage and traps).
You'll notice I'm talking only about certain classes, I didn't mention shamans and moonkins who are also ranged dps and aren't doing as good even tho moonkin is better than sp in arena fights.
Nothing has changed since tbc really. We're still the punching bag of meleers. Every gear upgrade I obtain - I don't "feel" the change. I still get owned when I'm shadow simply because my attack take really long time to set in and I get huge damage early in the game.
There have been numerous suggestions how to fix shadows in pvp. A lot of people also asked for shadow to be turned into "the" pvp spec or at least made viable to a certain point. And that lasted for 2.5 years so far, yet nothing has been done.
What happened was this:
- we got pushback protection in form of Improved Shadowform - awesome for pve, all the other classes had it in tbc anyway. Nothing new.
- we got more juice at vampiric touch (finally). But it still ticks once per 3 secs.
- we got slightly improved fear, which any class breaks instantly with their talents or racials so it's still the same useless shit. It also requires us to gem for hit instead of for offensiveness.
- we got Dispersion which proved to be one of the most awesome pve talents and quite useless in pvp because we silence ourselves. It also made us tanks and not someone who attacks to push the edge.
- we got dispel protection that's so weak that I laugh when I see I'm playing against SP - I know dispeling of VT will trigger easily bouncing of my PoM between me and my teammate, I'll heal even easier. Not enough of a change.
- we got disarm thingy that's on stupidly long cooldown. I'd quote a blue post but I cba to find it right now where it says that they were afraid that shadow priest could just chain CC opponents. Well brainiacs, that's exactly what locks, mages, rogues do. Fail spell. Also requires gemming for hit rating.
I could go on with suggestions what to do but the fact is that once melee reaches us, we die. Disarm and Dispersion don't help, especially fear. We need a way to either move them away from us or to move ourselves away. We don't have that ability (well, we do in a way in form of our fear that doesn't work). Until someone with half brain in Blizzard sits infront of the drawing board and finally comes up with the same conclusions as 99.99% of priest community did - we won't see a change. Besides, there's disc spec they've been buffing to no end since season 2 so one might argue that we want 2 specs viable in pvp while some have "only" one or none.
Now, I bet there will be a smartass saying "l2p, me and my friend are at 2.2k rating" - please, just spare me such posts, along with "wall of text, didn't read" - just don't comment.