Shadow BFA Datamining

[Spicymemer]

Have blizzard talked about shadow at all during the entire Alpha phase?

[Deleted]

Maybe that's because the starter gear on beta sucks balls.
AFAIK a mythic raider (970+) will go into bfa with ilvl ~280 or so, whereas the starter gear is around 180?
Leveling will be a breeze going out of Legion, compared to beta (before character transfer).

True, but why should shadows need raiding gear to make leveling bearable when others do just fine in starter gear.
Plus once you've reached max level you are in leveling gear anyway and once again we're going to suck in open world content until after one or two raid tiers...

[akawhisp]

Weighing in with my impressions from leveling to 120 in alpha. Note that I didn't experiment too heavily with different talent combinations.

Survivability:
Both classes I played (shadow priest and rogue) felt pretty strong early on. Levels 110 to 115 ish were a breeze and I could easily get away with pulling 4+ mobs regularly. As the scaling started to take effect I noticed everything took much longer to die. Shadow has mind bomb (in my case), vampiric embrace, dispersion, and shadow mend as significant defensives. All of these have a fairly significant CD, so pulling chain packs of 3+ mobs after level 115 became difficult. The reduced embrace CD talent seemed mandatory for chain pulling. The only time I found myself able to take on 4 mobs at once was when embrace was available and void explosion was charged. Void explosion does a LOT of damage, and it needs to because every mob hits like a truck at 120. The damage from four sets of dots was not enough to keep me alive while embrace was running. And yes, void explosion procs embrace healing for some reason.

Gameplay:
I started leveling with void torrent simply for familiarity, but quickly switched to legacy of the void. With the removal of mass hysteria and nerf to void form, void torrent lost a lot of its usefulness. Insanity generation is really slow in general, so legacy of the void vastly improved the leveling experience. Mind sear is back, which is cool I guess. I preferred the mind flay = mind sear style of AoE, mainly for keybind simplification, but it is what it is. It does a decent amount of damage in its current state, but it doesn't proc embrace healing, so I found it difficult to work into my rotation when pulling larger packs. With the misery talent I found it easier to multidot everything, mindflay down one target at a time, SW:death, and continue on from there. In short, the only bit that I found particularly satisfying was blowing everything up with void explosion. Everything else felt pretty slow. Maybe just the lack of gear?

Class-unrelated... QUESTING:
Zandalar is amazing. I can honestly say that the Zandalar questing experience is one of the best in the game. I leveled my rogue on alliance and I found it to be far less satisfying.

[qactuar]

I haven't been in this forum for a while.

Shadow over the course of alpha hasn't changed too drastically. Void eruption is frankly the most noticeable change (with talents oc).

I've really noticed the spec's fragility more than ever. I haven't felt this made of paper in such a long time. Basic questing feels like a struggle. I haven't even struggled with questing or even failed to handle 4+ mobs at all times since Burning Crusade.

Where were you at the start of Legion? I had to switch to Disc in order to complete world quests because Shadow fell apart pulling more than one mob at a time and sometimes even one was too many. It wasn't until about 860 or so that I was able to 'comfortably' quest as Shadow.

[Quoi]

Just got beta access this week. Started up a shadow priest.

Previous experience; lots of wotlk, bit of cata, bit of WoD, and lots of Legion.

Thoughts on rotation; It feels like a real mix between wotlk and legion. You have to reup dots, but you have void form. I'm actually okay with the rotation at this point. The caveat with saying that however, is that I've only gotten about 2 hours into playing. Me being okay with the rotation is an initial gut check. I'm sure it will be different (better or worse) as levels increase and gear increases.

One thing that I really don't like is the talent Misery. Because shadow word pain and vampiric embrace have different durations, the choice is to use a gcd to reup shadow word pain for that 5 second gap, or, don't have shadow word pain on the target for those 5 seconds. If the point of the talent was to increase convenience for dotting, I don't think it did a very good job. I believe the talent should also increase the duration of shadow word pain (maintain the same damage per tick) by 5 seconds. That makes the dots line up correctly.

Or am I simply missing something about the talent and it's use?

[davesignal]

Just got beta access this week. Started up a shadow priest.

Previous experience; lots of wotlk, bit of cata, bit of WoD, and lots of Legion.

Thoughts on rotation; It feels like a real mix between wotlk and legion. You have to reup dots, but you have void form. I'm actually okay with the rotation at this point. The caveat with saying that however, is that I've only gotten about 2 hours into playing. Me being okay with the rotation is an initial gut check. I'm sure it will be different (better or worse) as levels increase and gear increases.

One thing that I really don't like is the talent Misery. Because shadow word pain and vampiric embrace have different durations, the choice is to use a gcd to reup shadow word pain for that 5 second gap, or, don't have shadow word pain on the target for those 5 seconds. If the point of the talent was to increase convenience for dotting, I don't think it did a very good job. I believe the talent should also increase the duration of shadow word pain (maintain the same damage per tick) by 5 seconds. That makes the dots line up correctly.

Or am I simply missing something about the talent and it's use?

Effectively, the point of Misery is that you only have to pay attention to Shadow Word: Pain's duration. Simply cast Vampiric Touch whenever Shadow Word: Pain is about to run out and your Vampiric Touch's duration will never expire. This will save you GCDs over the long run, which you can then spend doing other stuff like casting Mind Flay or whatever.

Since you refresh both spells at the same time, with one GCD, it doesn't really matter that you're refreshing Vampiric Touch early. That's where the convenience comes in-- you can apply and manage both dots with one spell, instead of two, slightly reducing ramp-up and making multidot easier. As long as you're refreshing Shadow Word: Pain (by casting Vampiric Touch) on time then you're gold.

[Quoi]

Effectively, the point of Misery is that you only have to pay attention to Shadow Word: Pain's duration. Simply cast Vampiric Touch whenever Shadow Word: Pain is about to run out and your Vampiric Touch's duration will never expire. This will save you GCDs over the long run, which you can then spend doing other stuff like casting Mind Flay or whatever.

Since you refresh both spells at the same time, with one GCD, it doesn't really matter that you're refreshing Vampiric Touch early. That's where the convenience comes in-- you can apply and manage both dots with one spell, instead of two, slightly reducing ramp-up and making multidot easier. As long as you're refreshing Shadow Word: Pain (by casting Vampiric Touch) on time then you're gold.

Cool. I was thinking about it backwards then (focusing on the vampiric touch refresh).

- - - Updated - - -

Played some more yesterday.

still low level for the expansion (111.5).

TLDR: So far (and overall) I'm liking some aspects of the expansion as well as the spriest class design route.

Things I do like;
While annoying, I like how the mobs cluster. Things are a little more tight, making it more likely to pull (accidentally or not) 2-3 mobs, or have that continual stream of 10 mobs one after another after another. While it's annoying if you are looking to do something (mine, quest stuff, open a chest), I find it more engaging. Leveling in Legion and WoD, I felt more like a steam roller coasting through the leveling process.

Paying attention to dots. Again, it can be annoying. But I find that Legion spriest is really mindless when it comes to dots. Current class design has zero focus on the dot mechanics, and more on insanity, mind blast, void bolt, and mind flay. With the change to dots and void bolt's interaction with them, it's something that we have to pay attention to. This coupled with the nerfs to void form/bolt, makes the focus of our class go back to dots + melting faces. I think it's a welcome change. I think it might be a better change to somehow, while in void form, pause the duration of the dots (they would obvs still tick). With that the duration addition from void bolt could be removed. I feel that this change would exemplify that void form is a powerhouse of shadowy goodness, without having nearly as much scaling issues.

Damage numbers and most numbers being low. Personally I think the numbers in Legion and even WoD are/were ridiculous. Having good numbers be between 500 (some dot ticks I've seen) to a few thousand, are easy to process, easier to understand, and don't clog the screen with extra digits. Looking at gear showing net +50 haste is much easier to comprehend it's impact than +736 haste that we can see in Legion. We shouldn't have to have an addon or even have the native gear comparison ui to be able to determine if a piece of gear is an upgrade. A quick glance to each item should be enough.

Things I don't feel good or bad about;
Slowness of killing mobs. I like the change to slower killings of mobs. I think either it should be; longer but more rewarding and engaging, or a little bit shorter (10-20ish % slower). The named quest mobs I feel simply have too much health for how little challenge they provide. I think they should be at least half again as dangerous for how long they take to die. I don't know how well (personally) spriest stacks against other classes with killing mobs. I also don't know if it's simply a gearing issue, or low level issue. I think for the length of time it takes to kill a mob, it isn't dangerous or challenging enough.

Power Word Fortitude. I'm meh about it, mostly because it's been so long since these buffs were around, that I keep forgetting to apply it to myself.

Things I don't really like at the moment;
Like most spriests I've seen on the forum, I don't really like shadow word death being a talent. And like most spriests I've seen, I don't really care for the arrangement of the talents (or that missing talent).

without the shadow word void talent, I really think it's a design flaw to have that mismatch cooldown gap between mind blast and void bolt. I've hated it ever since it existed. Either make the cooldown the same, or increase that gap for a full mind flay duration. The current gap makes the rotation disjointed. Either I do nothing for that gap, or I cancel a mind flay early, or have a delayed mind blast/void bolt.

The stupid 2-4 quests at a time, to 2-4 quests, in the exact same area, is really annoying. While I know it's to progress some story, but perpetual back tracking steps is tiresome. I'd rather see 5-6 quests at a time, with higher quantity of goods needed. Net same time in area.

I don't know how well this applies to other specializations when it comes to azerite power, but the Shadow Priest one (more mind sear damage to swp targets) seems pointless so far in the leveling process. Maybe (hopefully) it will be much more useful as gear progresses and more (and different) are unlocked.

[Aggrodesiac]

And yes, void explosion procs embrace healing for some reason.

That's because they've adjusted how Void Eruption damage is dealt - instead of it being an AOE ability, the damage is instead treated as if you were sending two void bolts at each target in range, so it still treats it like a single target ability. I think it's a good change, and it's really helped out with some "oh shit" moments with a bunch of mobs.

[Ophenia]

I hope you all enjoy the SP changes in this build.

Now PW:Shield cost 2.5% base mana instead of 2.3% ! I'm sure this was an important balance hotfix, we were way too overpowered in the previous build

Day 3475, Azerite talents still boring too

[Jervaise]

I hope you all enjoy the SP changes in this build.

Now PW:Shield cost 2.5% base mana instead of 2.3% ! I'm sure this was an important balance hotfix, we were way too overpowered in the previous build

Day 3475, Azerite talents still boring too

Well currently Shadow is close to perfect in the Beta. Almost all talents are worth taking, including the missing one. That's why it was extremely important to start tweaking our defensive abilities to make them in line with other classes.

The PWS mana change was a necessary one for appropriate duels and world PvP.

[Deleted]

First thoughts after playing for a couple hours, being able to cast voidbolt immediately after using void eruption is a nice change, outside of that it honestly feels terrible.
I understand we start at low gear levels and stuff but classes should not feel this bad without gear, voidforms are so short that the entire thing just seems so pointless.
I also noticed i cannot seem to cap insanity at start, for example on live if you have LotV and you pop vf at 65 you can still easily hit 100 insanity, in bfa this seems impossible unless i don't pop vf until 100 insanity, the generation just doesn't seem to be there, i could blame this on delay from playing on us servers from eu but i do not remember this being an issue in legion alpha when i tested there.

Refreshing dots constantly is not fun which makes misery feel almost mandatory so haven't really played with dark void but misery just feels so much better since you cover both dots at once on the refresh.

Two charges of mind blast is really nice but it feels pretty pointless in the grand scheme when voidforms are so short.

Having to choose between shadow crash and shadow word death is just awful, both should be baseline.

Can't see how lingering insanity will ever be wanted in any situation at the moment since voidforms are so short, at this stage it is a completely dead talent, it is essentially a worse version of shamans 6% haste talent that is being removed in bfa, for it to have any hope of competing with mindbender and whatever the new coming soon talent is they would need to completely rework it, perhaps something that allowed for dots to not need to be refreshed like for every x insanity gained/spent your dots gain +1sec duration because otherwise it is a totally worthless talent.

AS competes with 2 actives that should be baseline so probably will never pick that either unless math tells me i have to which i honestly can't see happening.

Surprisingly we do decent damage in dungeons without ramp up so we got that going for us now

Tried some 110 arena skirmishes and it just felt crap, 1 arena was a 1v1 and a mm hunter burst me down through dispersion doing a total of 36k dmg whilst i managed 6k dmg. Hard to gauge these when at 110 and pre number tuning obviously but i didn't really see any difference to live when considering melee dmg and mobility vs us.

Will persevere to max level and see how it goes but honestly i cannot see there being much of a difference overall, could be the final nail in the coffin for me, giving up cop, shadow orbs and all our other good stuff that made us fun over the years is really not worth what we have now.

[kalaratic]

might not be the best idea to hit 120 then, your stats shrink ridiculously and there isn't enough budgeting on items to get much haste. this will probably kill shadow for you if you're ready to see it.

[Deleted]

Since it's not actually on mmo champ yet.

Our pvp talents are at the moment:

Void shield
Pureshadow
Fleeting embrace
Driven to madness
Edge of insanity
Mind trauma
Psychic Link
Void Shift
Void Origins
Shadow Mania
Psyfiend

You can select any 3 of these, You have 4 talents, the 4th is for medallion relentless and adaption, the most notable thing here is if you have war mode on they ARE usable in open world so you can have instant cast void eruptions and psyfiend while leveling, the tooltip for warmode states outdoor, so it won't work in raids or dungeons unfortunately.

[Jaigar]

Since it's not actually on mmo champ yet.

Our pvp talents are at the moment:

Void shield
Pureshadow
Fleeting embrace
Driven to madness
Edge of insanity
Mind trauma
Psychic Link
Void Shift
Void Origins
Shadow Mania
Psyfiend

You can select any 3 of these, You have 4 talents, the 4th is for medallion relentless and adaption, the most notable thing here is if you have war mode on they ARE usable in open world so you can have instant cast void eruptions and psyfiend while leveling, the tooltip for warmode states outdoor, so it won't work in raids or dungeons unfortunately.

Mind Trauma does not work. Tried Mind Flaying some mobs in a WQ to get it to proc, nope. Doesn't work at all. Disc traits work though. Had to switch to disc because some dude thought he was so skilled killing me in the middle of a high HP mob.

[Theed]

Since it's not actually on mmo champ yet.

Our pvp talents are at the moment:

Void shield
Pureshadow
Fleeting embrace
Driven to madness
Edge of insanity
Mind trauma
Psychic Link
Void Shift
Void Origins
Shadow Mania
Psyfiend

You can select any 3 of these, You have 4 talents, the 4th is for medallion relentless and adaption, the most notable thing here is if you have war mode on they ARE usable in open world so you can have instant cast void eruptions and psyfiend while leveling, the tooltip for warmode states outdoor, so it won't work in raids or dungeons unfortunately.

Thank you. So nothing new to compensate the loss of dispersion heal, and vt heal perks. So we're Melee punching bag for another expansion. No, thanks.

[Deleted]

Thank you. So nothing new to compensate the loss of dispersion heal, and vt heal perks. So we're Melee punching bag for another expansion. No, thanks.

At the moment yes, but they did state this is a rough draft just to include them and nothing is final, warlocks still have drain life pvp talents for example.

Experience tells me though they will think psychic horror solves everything for us and not much else will change.

[Theed]

At the moment yes, but they did state this is a rough draft just to include them and nothing is final, warlocks still have drain life pvp talents for example.

Experience tells me though they will think psychic horror solves everything for us and not much else will change.

Let's be realistic. There are ~3 Month left. In the past they always said "its too late for drastic changes at this stage of development".

Extreme high versatility pvp template values are the only thing making us viable and it was a bandaid fix. Or so i thought. What a shame.

[Deleted]

Let's be realistic. There are ~3 Month left. In the past they always said "its too late for drastic changes at this stage of development".

Extreme high versatility pvp template values are the only thing making us viable and it was a bandaid fix. Or so i thought. What a shame.

Yup i can see them baking in dispersion heal on pure shadow but other than that i don't see much else.

I am furious we still don't have guise back, that would solve a fair amount.

When i get back from work im gonna be spamming the feedback for guise and the disarm from my steroid talent thread. I feel so fragile in pvp and coming out of the expansion where melee just train on you till you finally drop nothing has changed so far, everyone still just focuses you knowing full well you only have dispersion and if they manage to interupt ANYTHING you are completely silenced from doing anything bar a very weak pws it is just not fun at all. It is just pure frustration.

Also rogues have something like a 6 sec silence on garrote now so surely we can get some ridiculously strong thing to help us? We have literally a 3 sec speed burst tied to a defensive tied to a limited mana pool that is also shared with our heal and dispel, we NEED to be tanky if we are so low mobility wise, we need some massive physical dr or dodge chance in shadowform because right now we are paper with the speed of rock.

I am not sold at all so far.

It's annoying though i can't seem to post on forums, i managed once to post on the us starter pack a gm set up so i could post on during legion alpha but it never lets me log in anymore since the one little hour i was logged in last week.

[Alanar]

Something interesting I noticed in the beta with war mode available


both the pvp and normal talent to reduce the cd on embrace stack.
crazy stuff, trying to find more usefull things Il come back

I can now take that talent and also pick void shield.. yea I lose some stuff, but it doesn't matter.

[Deleted]

Since it's not actually on mmo champ yet.

Our pvp talents are at the moment:

Void shield
Pureshadow
Fleeting embrace
Driven to madness
Edge of insanity
Mind trauma
Psychic Link
Void Shift
Void Origins
Shadow Mania
Psyfiend

You can select any 3 of these, You have 4 talents, the 4th is for medallion relentless and adaption, the most notable thing here is if you have war mode on they ARE usable in open world so you can have instant cast void eruptions and psyfiend while leveling, the tooltip for warmode states outdoor, so it won't work in raids or dungeons unfortunately.

So basically we lost 2 talents and gained nothing in terms of choice for competitive pvp, in fact its even worse.

The new system is a complete let down if they do not address or add new talents and just run with old ones from legion which were also balanced around having the artifact. You are locked into Pureshadow/Void Origins pretty much 100% of the time and that leaves only 1 talent, which will most likely be void shift due to our trainability, fiend just dies to any but the dumbest players. So no more shadow mania basically which was the only thing that would have improved a current piss poor voidform uptime. If it stays like this shadow is going to take a huge hit in pvp viability and needs some stupid propping up with stats.

Hell looking at it, taking Edge provides more of a damage buff that Current voidform, lol and actually negates half the pve tree talents if you take it as well as the whole 100 row. Shit needs changing but to have them say dont expect any sweeping changes regarding pvp talents is quite frankly a little concerning as to whether the pvp dev team has even seen the pve tree!!