Shadow is the worst spec I have ever played

[Sliske]

Yikes, here I am completely abandoning my holy / prot pala main and playing my shitty spriest alt for the past few days. Way too fun. The fact that it has high APM and a priority system is awesome too. The potential to outplay people with much better gear is fun af. I was out dpsing a guy with a 1,000 ilvl norganns last night with my 940 ilvl derpy spriest with 67 traits.

My 1 complaint with shadow is how they work in low lvl m+. Aka, they don't. You have to go to +12 or so before you start getting big void eruptions off but you need gear to get into +12 or higher... but you need to do m+ to get gear..

[Deleted]

It's a complete abomination, i hate every single thing about it and no longer play my priest. I don't really like ANY class in legion to be honest but words cannot describe how much i hate what shadow has become.

Until we go back to literally any other version of spriest i have totally quit playing priest all together and very near quitting the game full stop since i cannot find a class that i actually enjoy and bfa looks to be making it even worse.

The most worrying part is we have far too many people who rerolled spriest because of s2m and in general great raid dps who exclusively use their spriest as a raid alt who now completely dilute the feedback people give by saying oh i love shadow its great etc while totally ignoring the fact we are absolutely garbage in every single aspect outside of raids. Its not a personal insult or anything but this type of feedback really does not help shadow at all in the grand scheme of things, we are absolutely terrible and frustrating at all content outside of raids and we really need that to change.

Come bfa when we lose that 40+ stack dps that actually makes us raid viable not a single one of them will still be playing spriest, they will all have rerolled to a new class and we will be stuck with this garbage for another expansion, that's a sad truth.

[Aggrophobic]

So, it sucks in m+ and destroys in raids. Not a huge issue at all.
Shadow has been in a pretty solid place in all of Legion (super OP at times even) and beats many other specs. It's also rather entertaining to play.

Sorry OP, I do not agree with you.

- - - Updated - - -

Yikes, here I am completely abandoning my holy / prot pala main and playing my shitty spriest alt for the past few days. Way too fun. The fact that it has high APM and a priority system is awesome too. The potential to outplay people with much better gear is fun af. I was out dpsing a guy with a 1,000 ilvl norganns last night with my 940 ilvl derpy spriest with 67 traits.

My 1 complaint with shadow is how they work in low lvl m+. Aka, they don't. You have to go to +12 or so before you start getting big void eruptions off but you need gear to get into +12 or higher... but you need to do m+ to get gear..

Yeah but who cares? Let the "tank" solo the place while you watch Youtube.

[Gaidax]

In my experience, shadow might be the worst spec to level in the game, and it kind of relates to your issue with it. Just too much ramp up time for leveling, and void form itself isn't that great for leveling because you will have it up for like 10 seconds to kill a couple mobs and then it's over. Void eruption having a cast time doesn't make matters any better. It's sad that the two healing specs (ok, disc is kind of a hybrid) are far better than the classes' dps spec for leveling, since disc has consistent direct damage spells while holy actually has strong aoe for leveling.

You kidding? Void Eruption literally one shots things AoE during leveling for a long long time and with Shadow Word Void you have it up to do that every time. Tab dot shit, pop couple of Shadow Word Voids and insta kill everything with Void Eruption.

Void form itself is not even the point there.

I leveled 7.3.5 Shadow for Heritage to 110 and it is genuinely easy, simply because you can mass pull pretty much from a get go.

[Deleted]

/sign at OP.

I like shadows theme and even the voidform-mechanic. But we are way to slow for todays wow. Being only good in long raidencounters with a good execute-phase and bad @ everything else just sucks. It becomes even worse in farm-content. Everyone gets more gear and everyone increases their dps, but shadows dps hardly improves or gets even lower when adds die faster and/or the execute-phase is shorter.
And that really sucks, getting more gear and doing less dps!

[Deleted]

I just want to reiterate that the playstyle of shadow is extremely fun, the high rampup and super fast paced literal "insane" dps rotation it does at high haste is incredible, some of the most fun I've ever had.

But this makes shadow very hard to balance and thus cripples it everywhere else in the game because it's such a raid oriented spec.

[Arainie]

Shadow sure does have it's issues, but overall I think it's very fun to play. The two main problems in my opinion (besides Affliction simply doing more or less everything shadow does better than shadow) are the reliance on haste & crit for rotation stability (could be fixed by altering the insanity drain curve to be less punishing before 50~ stacks and more punishing after) and the lack of burst (both ST and AoE) in M+. With a less punishing insanity drain we'd have to focus less on gearing for haste and crit in order to maintain our rotation and mistakes around 20-40 stacks would be less punishing making the spec perform better in the hands of less capable players.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

I love Legion's shadow priest.

[Onyd]

This spec does absolutely nothing "alright" to "great" except DPS in a prolonged raiding environment

It's pretty good in battlegrounds. At least, good enough that people playing shadow priests complain about being a priority pile-on target.

I think the utility is a bit more-than-meets-the-eye. More than once I've saved m+ from complete failure due to SM, VE, dispels, that sort of thing. Fade is a hidden gem when the boss has to run all the way across the room to hit me.

I personally enjoy the playstyle; the mix of mobility, damage, utility, and healing.

[Marrilaife]

destroys in raids.

Since S2M nerf, it doesn't. Atm, spriest only good on 2 fights, coven and dogs, and aff lock is still better on these, while spriest is average on rest and plain out garbo on some like Kin'garoth.

[Frozenbeef]

Enjoyed dotting stuff + being a mana battery since tbc, at the moment it feels like a pre legion demonolgy warlock and everything feels neutered..so thought to myself why don't i just play the real thing, rolled warlock and haven't locked back since the start of legion.

I can now solo pretty much everything, it's pretty difficult to gank me in world pvp, i do more damage for less effort, i self heal constantly rather than once every 3mintues, can move and still do tons of dps, pets for utility, look awsome.

I wish i made the change years ago.

[Deleted]

So, it sucks in m+ and destroys in raids.

Except it doesn't actually destroy anything. In single target fights our damage is tragic, and when there are multiple targets there are specs (Affliction mainly) that do it better.

[Aggrophobic]

Since S2M nerf, it doesn't. Atm, spriest only good on 2 fights, coven and dogs, and aff lock is still better on these, while spriest is average on rest and plain out garbo on some like Kin'garoth.

It does well enough to beat quite a few specs such as feral, elemental, arms, demo and so on. It has been doing well enough to be picked by the top guilds all expansion long.

[Jingoism]

It's pretty damn strong in pvp, give it a try there.

[Fritters154]

I honestly love the play style but the damage does feel undertuned. That's more a numbers issue than a play issue though.

[Deleted]

It's pretty good in battlegrounds. At least, good enough that people playing shadow priests complain about being a priority pile-on target.
I personally enjoy the playstyle; the mix of mobility, damage, utility, and healing.

What? The lack of mobility is one of the leading reasons people pile on us in pvp, they know fine well that we have no mobility and as soon as we use dispersion our survival is no longer within our control.

It's pretty damn strong in pvp, give it a try there.

If people decide to ignore us then sure we can do damage, but if you're playing against people who let you do this then you could play literally anything and have it seem "strong". However overall damage done is not a measurement of being strong in pvp, priority damage is, we pretty much just do rot damage because we have no burst potential at all.

We only have 1 school to work with which means any successful interrupt (which all have pretty short cooldowns on melee who ALL have high mobility) is effectively a silence on an spriest, wod pvp was infinitely better with mind spike and some actual instant casts that let us actually cast something when people are on us.

Even death knights are able to stay glued to us.

[Steelangel]

I really can't agree more with the OP. If you don't have the right legendaries (Manzaga) then you are stuck wasting a lot of time with mind flay while in voidform. Voidform takes for-freaking-ever to get rolling and punishes you relentlessly if you're on a high movement fight. Oh no, have to dodge this huge hit? Goodbye stacks if dispersion isn't up. Tentacle doesn't proc? That's an extra three seconds of waiting to get back into voidform. Mistime Void Torrent? Oh well. No 50 for you.

I liked shadow way more when we had orbs. And then I could make those orbs ravens. Because that was fucking awesome.

Now? It's frustrating to be 940 and have to time each button and movement 30 seconds in advance or I'll not be able to break 1m dps while Bob the Demon Hunter is sleeping and doing twice my DPS.

[Deleted]

I know this will sound petty, but I don't really care that we don't do that good overall, but I am upset that warlocks consistently do better. We were the dot class before all of the fancy affliction warlocks, feral and balance druids were even a real spec. And now we don't even have a fighting chance. But I find solace in how soul-crushingly boring affliction is.

[hulkgor]

I just want to reiterate that the playstyle of shadow is extremely fun, the high rampup and super fast paced literal "insane" dps rotation it does at high haste is incredible, some of the most fun I've ever had..

Yet your hyperbolic topic name is "shadow is the worst spec i have ever played".

You literally make no sense.

I find the playstyle to be extremely fun, even if it underperforms on the lower mythic+s... most specs have issues, go figure.

[Sithalos]

You should try Arcane. You'll be begging to play Shadow again.