Why is Shadow Word: Death so bad?

[Nyel]

Can somebody tell me? This used to be a finisher and I remember the time when it did 3x / 4x the usual damage on targets below X% health. Now it hits like a wet noodle and does less damage than Mind Blast.

What was the purpose to butcher this skill and make it pretty much useless?

[Coffeh]

It exists to generate insanity.

[TheSerialSniper]

It sucks shit because before priests complained they didn't get to use it enough, now that it is less limited it has to be weaker to make up for it.

[MisterBigglez]

Its purpose is to give you more insanity during the part of the fight where you do the most dps, so its not useless in any means.

[Yvaelle]

I'd definitely like to have it hit harder again, and lose some damage elsewhere in our kit to make Death actually feel powerful.

Part of what hurt Shadow Word: Death was actually Twist of Fate. Now that all our damage is increased by 20% in execute range, the potency of Death declined ~accordingly.

What I would like to propose would actually be to remove Twist of Fate entirely, because it's really not that interesting - and buff accordingly. Most notably, significantly increase the damage of Shadow Word: Death - and potentially increase our other damage as well. Twist of Fate is a problematic talent because it's ~mandatory, I would much rather see that tier have a third competitive talent in it, eliminate ToF entirely, and have our execute range damage in our execute spell (Death).

Without TOF, how hard would Death need to hit to compensate?

Assumptions:
- assuming a single target fight since that is easiest
- assuming Reaper of Souls, since that is also easiest (kicks in at 35% the same as TOF)
- assuming 1M overall DPS single target (typical of ~heroic TOS gear).

This would mean that TOF increases our DPS by 20%, 1/3rd of the fight, which means it increases our DPS in execute range (35% in this case), by 62,500 DPS.
Since Death has a 9 second cooldown, this means Death would need to deal 62,500 * 9 = 562,500 more damage per average cast.

So what this means is, if we doubled the damage of Shadow Word: Death, and removed the Twist of Fate, on single target fights our DPS would remain the same.
On multi-target fights, and when we don't have Reaper of Souls (~doubles the number of Deaths we can cast in a fight), this change would still be a DPS loss.

So, to address that, I would propose the replacement to TOF should buff our DPS on multi-dot / cleave / AOE fights. Given the other two talents in the tier are about generating insanity, Fortress of the Mind and Shadow Word: Whatever-Nobody-Uses-This. My recommendation would be to return a variation of the 2p bonus from Nighthold:

*New* Psychic Vampire - "Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word Pain, and Mind Sear generate 1 additional Insanity each time they deal damage."


I think that would be a pretty fair set of changes overall. TOF removed. Insanity smoothing talent replaces it. Death deals double damage (from live).

Edit: The other potential upside to these changes, would be they might bring S2M back into the fold for some circumstances. These changes would boost Reaper of Souls against Lingering Insanity, where LI is clearly the current winner. It would also smooth & boost S2M insanity generation through Psychic Vampire (S2M). Personally I'm not a fan of S2M and never have been, but if we're going to have it as a keystone talent, it should at least be situationally useful: this would make it so.

[Deleted]

i think it's good game design that sw:d impacts your dps in a more complex manner than a straight up execute

[RsinRC]

Just cut the cd by 2 seconds and combine both SWD charges into one super hard juicy finisher.

[Pawstruck]

For some reason, SW used to be one of my absolute favorite spells in the game... Part of why I quit WoW was the watering-down of unique spells like it.

[Nyel]

It exists to generate insanity.

Its purpose is to give you more insanity during the part of the fight where you do the most dps, so its not useless in any means.

Thanks Captain Obvious, I know that.

It's still a bad spell.

Mind Blast generates Insanity as well (guess what, 15 Insanity as Shadow Word: Death does) and hits harder than SW: D, we can use it anytime we want and it has a lower CD (okay, we need to cast it, you got me). The sole purpose of generating Insanity is not enough to explain why this skill is so bad.

With useless I was rather talking about "very bad" and not "remove it from the bars".

- - - Updated - - -

Just cut the cd by 2 seconds and combine both SWD charges into one super hard juicy finisher.

Yeah would prefer this as well.

[l33t]

Can somebody tell me? This used to be a finisher and I remember the time when it did 3x / 4x the usual damage on targets below X% health. Now it hits like a wet noodle and does less damage than Mind Blast.

What was the purpose to butcher this skill and make it pretty much useless?

Because you're not allowed to own people in pvp with huge damage skills anymore. Only warriorz are. #WorldOfMeleecraft

[Coffeh]

Thanks Captain Obvious, I know that.

It's still a bad spell.

Mind Blast generates Insanity as well (guess what, 15 Insanity as Shadow Word: Death does) and hits harder than SW: D, we can use it anytime we want and it has a lower CD (okay, we need to cast it, you got me). The sole purpose of generating Insanity is not enough to explain why this skill is so bad.

With useless I was rather talking about "very bad" and not "remove it from the bars".

I didn't say it was good design. As far as I'm concerned they've butchered the shadow spec. Why I don't play it anymore, when I do play the game. That and the fact shadowform is not shadowform anymore; it's Purpleform.

[Yvaelle]

i think it's good game design that sw:d impacts your dps in a more complex manner than a straight up execute

Insanity generation on damage spells isn't complex or interesting (re: good game design) because in 99.99% of scenarios you are going to cast Death, Mind Blast, Void Bolt, etc - when they are called for in your damage priorities.

The only exception is when you would delay your entire spell priority to avoid capping out your insanity during S2M. In which case it's still not altering your spell priorities, just delaying them all.

Now, if you had some spells that did little or no damage, but generated lots of insanity, and other spells that generated no insanity but did lots of damage, that would be a complex and interesting design for insanity - but as it stands insanity generation has ~no impact on your spell priorities, it's entirely driven off of what does the most damage and/or has the highest damage penalty to delayed casting when available.

IMO, Insanity by itself isn't an interesting mechanic. It would be like saying Bloodthirst is an interesting (re: good game design) and complex ability because it generates Rage.

[Nyel]

I just hope they're redesigning Shadow in the next expansion (again). Imho this spec has never been worse than now (okay, in Vanilla and TBC but the specs haven't been that fleshed out back then). It was a million times better in MoP and even in WoD. The idea of Void Form is nice but how they implemented it is beyond abysmal.

[Yvaelle]

I just hope they're redesigning Shadow in the next expansion (again). Imho this spec has never been worse than now (okay, in Vanilla and TBC but the specs haven't been that fleshed out back then). It was a million times better in MoP and even in WoD. The idea of Void Form is nice but how they implemented it is beyond abysmal.

Vanilla was actually not so bad, geared shadowpriests had very high potential damage, both single target and AOE, balanced by our Mind Blast effectively being a taunt (not only did it hit hard, it had "generates very high threat" as a feature on it. That didn't matter though if you were multi-dotting adds and/or mind blasting adds. Or, once your tank got Thunderfury, you could give them a proc or two lead, then just start Mind Blasting pretty much on cooldown and not pull it off them after that (TF threat was game-changing).

TBC is actually one of my favorite Shadow designs. Everyone remembers our single target being low, but what I was remember was that we took -25% damage from Shadowform, healed all our party members for 25% of the damage we did each (125% damage = hp) and that was an permanent aura type effect, not a 10 second buff, gave our party member 5% damage = mana each, meaning healers couldn't run OOM in our groups, and mages coveted us over themselves. We also applied +10% spell damage to anything we were attacking, and an additional +5% shadow damage as well. Meaning that Destruction Warlocks, the highest DPS spec in the game, demanded a Shadowpriest present - and people tend to listen to their top DPS (even if they didn't see all the other benefits we brought). Finally, while our single target was very bad, our multi-DOT was one of the strongest of any expansion.

TBC was very much a support spec not intended to be a real DPS (we were the lowest single target spec,sometimes getting out damage by high DPS tanks), but nobody came close to contributing as much to a raid as a Shadowpriest back then.

I probably wouldn't be comfortable going back to a full support spec nowadays, but at the time - when support specs were a thing - Shadow was doing great

[Nyel]

I remember those times. Priest was an alt during Vanilla and I started to max it in TBC. I remember the times when you actually had great support (and I somehow miss it). I excluded Vanilla because we had only a few skills, Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay and Mind Blast were the only Shadow spells we had (unless you were a Troll and had that fancy racial disease as well), Vampiric Touch became a thing with TBC when I remember correctly.

I just liked MoP and even WoD most. I really loved the early iterations of SP in MoP with Shadow Word: Insanity and I even thought the COP playstyle in WoD offered a nice new aspect of the spec. But what we have now in Legion is just sad.

[Ynna]

For some reason, SW used to be one of my absolute favorite spells in the game... Part of why I quit WoW was the watering-down of unique spells like it.

I must admit to being pretty upset that I couldn't pull off the Prayer of Mending: Shadow Word: Death anymore when I started playing again.

[nodq]

I just hope they're redesigning Shadow in the next expansion (again). Imho this spec has never been worse than now (okay, in Vanilla and TBC but the specs haven't been that fleshed out back then). It was a million times better in MoP and even in WoD. The idea of Void Form is nice but how they implemented it is beyond abysmal.

What? Shadow priest in TBC had by far the best design. You actually needed some Mana-Management and genereal skill to handle your spells. Even PVE was fun back then.

[Nyel]

What? Shadow priest in TBC had by far the best design. You actually needed some Mana-Management and genereal skill to handle your spells. Even PVE was fun back then.

I don't remember it that good tbh. I just meant the spec was not very fleshed out and did not offer so much options as in later expansions.

[Alvito]

i think it's good game design that sw:d impacts your dps in a more complex manner than a straight up execute

They did also remove almost all execute abilities in Legion. The ones that stayed were turned into something completely different or were gutted. Save maybe warriors.

[Azalar]

SW isn't a finisher whatsoever. Finishers are supposed to be a big burst of damage to finish off enemies. As of now, it only helps in building insanity, thus more sustained damage. This in turn adds less overall versatility to an already non-versatile core mechanic.

Shadow desperately needs to be more useful outside a raid, which is the only environment shadow seems designed for.