Shadow priest cataclysm

[Shonubi]

Well..i am a bit dissapointed...i wanted something with big cooldown so i can use when ppl say ''use your cooldown''.But i am happy at the same time..we finaly get a nuke and we can stop starting our rotation with 2 mindflay for shadow weaving.Also the orbs look cool! wana try it ...tho i miss my long cooldown nuke


edit: OMFG I LOVE LEAP OF FAITH ! GIFE!

[seam]

Shadow orbs might be a major cd of sorts, seeing as you can use em with spells, and you gain them over time.


Keep in mind their basicly gutting the whole tree, so there is a lot we might see.

[Shonubi]

would be nice to have lets say 3 of em...and give a pasive bonus but when consumed give lets say X % more dmg with 30 sec cooldown or something :X multiple posibilities!

[hezzaba]

honestly makes me think of shadowguard from back in the day :]

[Frmercury]

I am happy about new Shadowguard, I'm unsure about MSK unless it replaces MF as a nuke, and extremely disappointed about the removal of our ONLY Raid buff / debuff outside of buttons that are hit before combat starts. EVERY other class / spec brings some kind of raid utility. We can't even Cure Disease in Shadowform anymore.

Aside from DPS, what will we bring to Raids in Cata?

[Danner]

Aside from DPS, what will we bring to Raids in Cata?

Minor raidwide healing, stunning good looks, high survivability and evil cackles which makes professor putricide blush.

[Direshadow]

As much as I like the Shadow Priest changes, I really, really, REALLY hope that they put some mechanics into consuming Shadow Orbs in order to do cool things. That would add so much color to the spec, and give it a very, VERY unique aspect.

[Frmercury]

Minor raidwide healing, stunning good looks, high survivability and evil cackles which makes professor putricide blush.

While I am ravishingly good looking and don't die in stuff, I balk at only being a glorified Healing Stream Totem.

[Abandon]

I am happy about new Shadowguard, I'm unsure about MSK unless it replaces MF as a nuke, and extremely disappointed about the removal of our ONLY Raid buff / debuff outside of buttons that are hit before combat starts. EVERY other class / spec brings some kind of raid utility. We can't even Cure Disease in Shadowform anymore.

Aside from DPS, what will we bring to Raids in Cata?

I could honestly see our passive healing from VE become more useful, and I imagine that we will still provide replenishment, even if it is getting changed. I would need to get a look at the talent trees before I say too much more, but at the very least this looks very interesting.

Also, we don't know that we won't be providing any passive buffs. We will need to see what they do with our talents considering about 1/2 of them are being deleted, due to being passive +damage talents.

[Abandon]

One thing that I noticed that seems quite interesting is how they are doing a number of abilities that require situational awareness for healing. Healing Rain for the Shamans is a targeted AoE, Life Grip will require you to see who actually needs to be pulled out, and Power Word: Barrier is apparently going to be targeted, since they said the closest example they have is Anti-Magic Zone.

[Direshadow]

I would honestly love to see the Shadow Orb mechanic become something very important to manage as a Shadow Priest, and rewarding if the Spriest manages them well. Swirly orbs that up your dps at random is nice, but I've always said this spec lacks something, and this could be that "something".

[Frmercury]

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy about some of the Shadow changes, but I'm overall very disappointed.


Nukes

Mind Spike (level 81): aka MSK
At first I was very happy. No CD / nonchanneled nuke, wootsauce right? Wait....

Spamming Mind Spike will do about as much damage as casting Mind Flay on a target afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain. The idea behind the debuff is that when you cast Mind Spike, we expect you to cast a lot of them; we don't intend you to fit it into an already full Shadow rotation

No, we aren't going to be really getting a replacement to MF. I'm still going to be penalized for latency / fps more than every other DPS class. Great.

If I decide to Shadow PvP, I'm sure I'll be amazingly happy with that change though.

From a PvE standpoint, it just doesn't seem to have a real place. If some mob is low duration I VT then move on. Something like Saurfang adds is the only implementation I could see MSK having in current content (ignoring the need to snare). Unless the content we're raiding changes, I don't see myself finding much of a use for this.

SW

We want to bring back Shadow Word: Death as an "execute" -- something you do when the target is at 25% health.

I like using SW in my rotation and I've missed it. Having an execute is very cool as well, but the damage boost would have to be rather significant for it to be a true DPS increase, especially during Heroism / BL where GCDs will still be better used on MF. Considering how many fights call for a burn sub-30% I see it being more useful on low health adds. While when it's going to be used is still a question, I'm quite happy about more complexity being added into the rotation, especially considering the changes to DoTs and that cast times will not be reduced by Haste.


DoTs

So our nuke is a bit of a wash, but after seeing the Warlock Preview and reading:

All warlock damage-over-time (DoT) spells will benefit from crit and haste innately. Haste will no longer act to reduce the DoT's duration, but rather to add additional ticks. When reapplying a DoT, you can no longer "clip" the final tick. Instead, this will just add duration to the spell, similar to how Everlasting Affliction currently works.

My impression was that we would get something pretty much exactly alike. Instead we got:

All HoTs and DoTs will benefit from Haste and Crit innately. Hasted HoTs and DoTs will not have a shorter duration, just a shorter period in between ticks (meaning they will gain extra ticks to fill in the duration as appropriate).

While I'm not concerned about clipping DoTs I thought it was interesting that they would give this ability to the other DoT class, but not us. Why give one class that derives a large amount of DPS through DoTs the inability to lose clip DPS, but not the other? I know this could be an issue of homogenization, but it seems to just be a bit... unfair for lack of a better term.

This also brings up for me:
How much damage will we be doing from DoTs and how much will we be doing from Nukes? We can't do too much or too little with DoTs in my opinion. That constant damage is part of what works so well about Shadow DPS, and needs to stay a significant portion of our DPS without being so much that clipping and delay casting won't overly penalize our DPS.


Philosophy:

We want to improve Shadow for short fights and reduce its susceptibility to school lockouts.

Doesn't have much bearing for PvE as things that live a very short time generally don't require much (if any) DPS from us. MSK accomplishes this where needed and I think is generally what they were referring to with this post.

Shadow Orbs: Casting spells grants a chance for Shadow Orbs to be created that fly around you and increase your shadow damage. This will help lower-level characters feel more like "Shadow priests" before they obtain Shadowform.

Shadow Orbs are cool as hell. I don't think any more really needs to be said, other than make them stack up quickly. Please. All we need is another mechanic adding to our ramp-up time.

Since the Shadow tree has a lot of passive damage-boosting abilities -- something we're trying to avoid in Cataclysm -- we will need to replace several of the tree's talents. One idea is to play off of the new Shadow Orbs mechanic (see Mastery section below), possibly allowing you to consume an orb to increase damage from Mind Blast or reduce Mind Spike's cast time.

This is the shiniest thing in the whole damned thing as far as I'm concerned. YES, I HAVE A DPS COOLDOWN!!! Do you know how sad I get when I hear "Everyone, blow your DPS cooldowns now!" and I look to my action bars and find nothing but Inner Focus macro'd to Divine Hymn. I'm actually recognized as a full fledged DPS class now! Well, no, I don't really have a good nuke. Other than that though...

Misery will no longer affect spell Hit chance. We want players to be able to gear themselves around a Hit cap that isn't variable depending on group composition.

Might as well follow up the happiest thing about the post as far as Shadow is concerned with the worst. Back in BC we were raid buffing kings in a complete class of our own that were a MUST HAVE for each and every serious raid. It was amazing. Then WotLK hit and they gave everyone mana battery power. Awesome. Well at least I can perform some utility with Dispelling and Cure / Abolish Disease

Shadow priests won’t be able to remove disease in Shadowform.

Right and everyone can Dispel now too? Great. So I can come into the raid and be a really awesome Healing Stream Totem, DPS, and not die.

Wow.

Every single other class and spec in this game brings some kind of important raid buff / debuff outside of thing you click before combat starts; except Shadow Priests. I know I'll be able to find a raid spot still, but why sit us in the corner? As much as 3.3 and T10 showed how Blizzard finally got Shadow Priests to see us treated like this is rather disheartening.

I will be leveling a Warlock before Cata and will switch to it if Shadow is not addressed better than what I've seen here.

[AetherMcLoud]

They already replied with a few clarifications, saying that of course clipping dots is going away for EVERY class, not just warlocks. I think this also implies clipping Mindflay will be a thing of the past, seeing as MF has always been handled (close to) as if it were a dot.

The Problem I see with Mind Spike, as cool as it is, is the following:

PVE: When it does around the same damage as Mindflay (3 second channel) with SWP on the enemy, then why not just cast 2 Mindspikes instead of 1 Mindflay - which would mean the second mindspike does more damage than the first (and the first is supposed to already do the damage mindflay does in half the casttime) - meaning 2 Mindspikes do double the damage of 1 Mindflay in the same amount of time. Of course if they meant it does the same damage as MF over 3 seconds, 1 cast of spike will only do half the damage of MF. But still... why not just cast MF to refresh SWP and use the spike all the other time when you don't have to dot or MB?

PVP: Seeing as they didn't mention a frost snare on Mindspike, this means we still won't be able to try to kite melees, meaning we still have to tank them...

[Abandon]

PVE: When it does around the same damage as Mindflay (3 second channel) with SWP on the enemy, then why not just cast 2 Mindspikes instead of 1 Mindflay - which would mean the second mindspike does more damage than the first (and the first is supposed to already do the damage mindflay does in half the casttime) - meaning 2 Mindspikes do double the damage of 1 Mindflay in the same amount of time. Of course if they meant it does the same damage as MF over 3 seconds, 1 cast of spike will only do half the damage of MF. But still... why not just cast MF to refresh SWP and use the spike all the other time when you don't have to dot or MB?

Have they said that Mind Spike is going to be a 1.5 second cast? Considering it's more of a straight nuke, it would most likely be closer to 3 seconds. So you can't cast two Mind Spikes in the time it takes to channel 1 Mind Flay.

[Venara]

Have they said that Mind Spike is going to be a 1.5 second cast? Considering it's more of a straight nuke, it would most likely be closer to 3 seconds. So you can't cast two Mind Spikes in the time it takes to channel 1 Mind Flay.

Frontpage Let me quote it:

Mind Spike (level 81): [...] 1.5-second cast. 30-yard range. No cooldown.

[advent89]

PVP: Seeing as they didn't mention a frost snare on Mindspike, this means we still won't be able to try to kite melees, meaning we still have to tank them...

Well with that movement speed buff/armor we might stand a little more of a chance kiting, at least till fear is back up

[Shonubi]

we can only wait and hope we get something cool and a cooldown ability:|

[Abandon]

Cooldown ability is very likely to be tied to the Shadow Orbs mastery.

"Since the Shadow tree has a lot of passive damage-boosting abilities -- something we're trying to avoid in Cataclysm -- we will need to replace several of the tree's talents. One idea is to play off of the new Shadow Orbs mechanic (see Mastery section below), possibly allowing you to consume an orb to increase damage from Mind Blast or reduce Mind Spike's cast time."

[Worshaka]

I'll be interested to see how MSK plays out... considering it's a 1.5sec cast time it won't enjoy the SP coeffecient of MF which says to me that MF will probably be the spell at high gear levels.

I'm also interested in seeing how the new DoT refresh mechanic will work. I know it's only been mentioned for warlocks but I have no doubt it will apply to spriests as well. Depending on how it's implemented you might do nothing but cast VT during trinket procs (assuming there is going to be a decent amount of time left in the encounter). Imagine a BL right off the bat, just cast VT and all of a suddent you have a VT that lasts the entire encounter at 40% more haste...

Either dots are going to have their damage calcs changed regularly or the refresh is only going to work when a dot is sub 5 seconds duration or so.

[SPC7R0]

Shadow orbs might be a major cd of sorts, seeing as you can use em with spells, and you gain them over time.

I believe Shadow Orbs will work much like Soul Shards will in Warlocks, except you will gain them trough spells, crit or chance on hit, you will probably have one skill called "Redeem Shadow Orb" or something to use them to increase power in your spells in some way other than just +% damage, from what i understood they will fly around you, probably like the shaman shields but permanent, smaller and less annoying I hope.

This is from the enchant Black Magic, i seriously hope the Shadow Orb design is something like this =D

Link from WoWhead