Favorite Shadow Playstyle

[dwightyo39]

The most fun I ever had in WoW was playing shadow in vanilla while stacking spell/shadow power gear.

[derpkitteh]

i like void form itself, but big beefy devouring plagues were pretty fun.

[Quack27]

Thats not what i meant. Thats the philosophy blizzard sometimes tries to use as excuse for balancing classes which never works out =P


What i meant was that having a constant cycle of basically a 20 second cooldown window(60 in legion) interferes with most dungeon and raid designs.
In Legion for example our damage outside of voidform and with low stacks was extremely lackluster. To make up for it every second above ~50 gave us extreme dps in comparison which evened out over the course of a fight. Bfa voidform works slightly similar even though its not such a big damage and time difference.
If you play this at a dummy or via simcraft(or other stuff) you can expect the same results every time. Even with a full raid that does damage on this dummy you have the same results. Minus usual dps variance etc. You get the idea.

Now we add modern raiddesign to it and replace the dummy with a boss and we start to get problems. We have to move at times we can't control. Things may have to be soaked, bosses change or get untargetable, adds spawn etc.
Moving sometimes can be managed by stepping in global cooldowns, but maiden of vigilance for example needed longer movement at a time.
Sisters of the moon, Antoran high command, Imonar, Kin'garoth and aggramar are examples of bosses that run away or get untargetable for a brief/longer period of time in which we couldn't build insanity.
Portal keeper hasabel and demonic inquisition are examples of bosses that require you to do mechanics that directly interfere with our voidform. If you where unlucky every debuff hit you and you have the choice of change rooms mid voidform or do your voidform cycle with 99% less damage.
Some phases like aggramar for example are % based, but you can still not plan it because your raid does a different amount of damage everytime. So maybe week one you have a 20 second voidform when he start his intermission phase, week two you have a 17 second voidform.
You cant event plan around time based intermissions like tichondrius bat phase because you can't drop out or go into voidform as you please.

Which brings me straight to my next point. Voidform requires an extra amount of attention in the raid. If you let your shadow do mechanics like the portals at portalkeeper you destroy his voidform cycle. If you pull bloodlust at the start of an encounter you basically only help him into voidform a few seconds earlier. If you use it at the end of his voidform only your shadow profits.
If we get targeted by something but dispersion is on cooldown we are doomed to drop out of voidform.
Personal experience here; If you have a monk tank in your raidgroup that "accidentaly" uses trancendence at high voidform stacks the boss runs away and your voidform is done.

So now here comes the question of balance. How do you balance a spec that is required 60 seconds of buff uptime when you keep designing bosses that don't allow that? The first attempt was the bfa version of voidform. Burst at the start of voidform and nothing in the meantime. We don't get punished as hard as we used to, but we don't get rewarded either. This makes intermissions etc. less punishing, but it shoved a lot of damage from the end to the begining of the voidform and made the spec feel shallow and uncomplete.
Also i don't want to say other specs don't get hindered by intermission phases and movement, but they can just wait the time and continue their damage when it is over while we have to build up insanity again and start a new voidform.

I know its hard to get what i want to tell you, i tried my best. Raids and dungeons arent designed for voidform and voidform isn't designed for dungeons and raids. Some may claim that it seperates the skilled shadows from the bad ones. I get that. You could cheese some seconds here and there in some fights etc. but after the third raid in legion that fucked with the playstyle of shadow its not fun anymore its straight up annoying. We are permanently reliant on our raid to remember that shadows need special attention to do their damage. This worked fine in emerald nightmare as we carried raidgroups solo, but who cared when we did mediocre damage?

TL;DR: rambled more than i thought i would. But voidform aka "get a buff that increases your damage every second theoretically even infinitely" can't work in an environment that blizzard creates since burning crusade.

Beefy! lol.

Yea I understand what you are getting at. To me Legion's version of Voidform is explained like this: You like hectic, high pace gameplay? Then when things are going good, Voidform is perfect for you! When it's not...meh.

So why did Voidform work in EN? Was the damage just so high that all the negatives were glossed over?

Was it the fight design in EN just did not punish the weaknesses of that version of Voidform?

[Volitar]

Cata for sure. I did like Shadow in MOP but I felt like we were balanced around the amount of healing halo did which made our dps kind of non competitive.

[Quack27]

Sure but it seems kinda boring doesn't it. It doesn't have much interaction. I like the concept but the execution should be different, more complex so its not so mundane.

I agree, it is too boring; how about this:

Your Void Bolt casts generate a stack of Mass Hysteria (capped at X stacks). Your Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain (or maybe only one dot should be an option) casts consume stacks (possibly a cap on the stacks consumed) of Mass Hysteria to increase their damage by X% for their duration or until recast on the same target.

Now instead of just extra maintenance on your dots, there is more thought on when to refresh based on stacks. Maybe there are situations where you want to refresh early due to stacks. Maybe sometimes it is better to have a few stacks for each dot, and other times you need to save more stacks for one very powerful dot.

I am sure there are issues I have not noticed (and some I can see), but generally speaking does that sound pretty cool?

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The rotation felt very satisfying to me. It wasn't the simplest, but also not overly hard while still having the warm feeling when you get it 'just right' for the entire fight. Once I had a taste of it, it was very hard to ever love multi-DoT's again. So after WoD I switch to mage.

Ok, so would you say that you just do not like the maintenance of dots? Do you feel like it makes sense for dotless playstyle to be an option for Shadow again? Would you play it again, or just stick with a class already designed without them?

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I started playing my priest in TBC and I guess that playstyle just defines a shadow priest to me. I've never been someone who promotes change for the sake of change, and with the addition of Mind Sear in WotLK I thought Shadow was a in a pretty good state overall. I also think the shadow class fantasy was much more tight and well defined before turning to the void in the last few expansions, and the class as a whole felt like each spec simply was a different version of a priest. I don't feel much of a connection between Holy Priests and Shadow Priests nowdays, they could just as well be different classes.

Ok, so even though you enjoyed that playstyle, do you feel that it is the class fantasy you miss more or the playstyle?

You say you do not like change for sake of change, but do you feel like you would enjoy the same playstyle if you played it for 9 years?

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The most fun I ever had in WoW was playing shadow in vanilla while stacking spell/shadow power gear.

What about Shadow in Vanilla did you like?

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i like void form itself, but big beefy devouring plagues were pretty fun.

What if you had to choose between the two as a talent, which would you want to pick assuming balance?

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Cata for sure. I did like Shadow in MOP but I felt like we were balanced around the amount of healing halo did which made our dps kind of non competitive.

What about Cataclysm did you like?

Would you have been willing to lose that healing utility for more dps?

[Volitar]

What about Cataclysm did you like?

I liked Shadow Orbs and Shadow Weaving. I liked that good dps came from crisp dot refreshes and mind flay clipping. It felt like the gentlemen's version of Spriest.

Would you have been willing to lose that healing utility for more dps?

This is a tough one. For me personally since I was raiding in a guild that I considered to be below my personal skill level I wasn't ever pushing progression so I kind of focused on my own DPS parsing as a competitive thing I could set goals for. In that sense I would of deff prefered to lose the healing and gain damage but if I was in a guild where my healing would help progress idk the niche might of felt better.

[Quack27]

I liked Shadow Orbs and Shadow Weaving. I liked that good dps came from crisp dot refreshes and mind flay clipping. It felt like the gentlemen's version of Spriest.





This is a tough one. For me personally since I was raiding in a guild that I considered to be below my personal skill level I wasn't ever pushing progression so I kind of focused on my own DPS parsing as a competitive thing I could set goals for. In that sense I would of deff prefered to lose the healing and gain damage but if I was in a guild where my healing would help progress idk the niche might of felt better.

Nice. Have you read any of my previous posts with Ogbunabali? I made a suggestion that I think in a way fills Orbs and Shadow Weaving. This is under the idea that Shadow has changed to instead of building Insanity to enter Voidform, you build Insanity to spend it on Void Bolts:

Your Void Bolt casts generate a stack of Mass Hysteria (capped at X stacks). Your Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain (or maybe only one dot should be an option) casts consume stacks (possibly a cap on the stacks consumed) of Mass Hysteria to increase their damage by X% for their duration or until recast on the same target.

This is similar to that Cataclysm playstyle I believe, what do you think?

[derpkitteh]

What if you had to choose between the two as a talent, which would you want to pick assuming balance?

if i had to choose between the two as a talent, i suppose i'd go with whichever is stronger in whichever situation. if they could both be completely equal, probably void form.

void form is ultimately more simple, but a lot more flashy and spec fantasy fulfilling. also, its legion iteration was much better than in bfa. 8.1's fixing it a bit, but i still want void bolt fully refreshing my dots back.

[HuxNeva]

Ok, so would you say that you just do not like the maintenance of dots? Do you feel like it makes sense for dotless playstyle to be an option for Shadow again? Would you play it again, or just stick with a class already designed without them?

If something like CoP was available as an option today I'd probably main SP again, yes. I wasn't too keen on the Legion SP. I felt it was too fragile built around maintaining voidform, and had the traditional ramp-up problem. I just started leveling my SP for BfA, and it feels better now.
Class fantasy wise the SP will always be one of my favorites. And yes, I'd play a CoP style even if it meant losing a few % dps, but anything over 5% would probably mean having to answer 'but why don't you build ...' over and over.

[Forsay]

Why no ICC (3.3) option? No mastery, just DOTS scaling with haste but no additional ticks! I miss 6 second VT and SWP
Voting Cata because it's the closest one. But MoP was fine too.

[bloodmoth13]

My vote is early MoP beta shadow priest.
It was MoP shadow but instead of using orbs for devouring plague, you used it to summon up to 3 shadow appirations. it just felt really frikkin cool having control over the appirations since they are the most visible part of their kit considering nearly their entire kit has no ability animation and i hated that they replaced it with a boring invisible dot.

My guess is that they removed it because appirations at the time were a total mess, couldnt hit air targets and functioned strangely, but i lament that they never revisited it considering its so much cooler summoning a mini army of exploding spirits as opposed to randomly farting one out without any control whatsoever :/

WotLK was good but had far too much ramp up time, cata shadow orbs were a nonsensical mess, i have to say MoP would be my favorite.

Im really not a fan of legion shadow priests, the new shtick they added doesnt mesh well with their methodical dot weaving playstyle that they had since forever and it feels like a chaotic mess to play along with having terrible aoe gameplay. It was nice visually though so it has that, and the concept was delivered well with the feeling of going insane trying to play your rotation, but it was such a huge departure from what i always considered one of the best designed specs in the game.

[bluesock]

I agree, it is too boring; how about this:

Your Void Bolt casts generate a stack of Mass Hysteria (capped at X stacks). Your Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain (or maybe only one dot should be an option) casts consume stacks (possibly a cap on the stacks consumed) of Mass Hysteria to increase their damage by X% for their duration or until recast on the same target.

Now instead of just extra maintenance on your dots, there is more thought on when to refresh based on stacks. Maybe there are situations where you want to refresh early due to stacks. Maybe sometimes it is better to have a few stacks for each dot, and other times you need to save more stacks for one very powerful dot.

I am sure there are issues I have not noticed (and some I can see), but generally speaking does that sound pretty cool?

It does sound pretty good. Its interactive seems like it would have a high skill ceiling, separating the good shadow from the bad and all that, which is good I like it.
Not without problems tho the duration of dots and how long the stacks last needs to be looked at, because you don't want to incentivize the "I won't put up dots till I have X amount of stacks". Same thing with the stacks if they are on my target it makes multi dotting hard, ok then they are just gonna be used on the nuke target like DP for example, it sounds good but you need to be careful with the stacks so our dots outside of the stacks don't feel like wet noodles like legion shadow out of void form. Although these sound like number tuning issues rather than gameplay issues, so I think this would be a good direction if blizzard took this route.

[Deleted]

Dragon Soul tier set.

[Godslike]

Hello Guys!

Please answer me a question. I wanna know the difficulty to play as Shadow Priest, im currently playing as Rogue, and im having heavy difficulties with Subtley (Assassination is easy). I aways find the priest lore fantastic, and now i wanna reroll for a mdps. Thanks and sorry for my bad english.

[Dalheim]

I liked the Cataclysm one, as that was the first version I played.

But, I did like the MoP version a lot too.

[Quack27]

if i had to choose between the two as a talent, i suppose i'd go with whichever is stronger in whichever situation. if they could both be completely equal, probably void form.

void form is ultimately more simple, but a lot more flashy and spec fantasy fulfilling. also, its legion iteration was much better than in bfa. 8.1's fixing it a bit, but i still want void bolt fully refreshing my dots back.

Ok, so did you still enjoy Voidform in Legion after EN when it was no longer considered particularly strong? Do you feel like the playstyle is enjoyable enough to deal with the lows that will often come with certain fights? Would you rather Voidform just be an option instead of the core class aspect?

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If something like CoP was available as an option today I'd probably main SP again, yes. I wasn't too keen on the Legion SP. I felt it was too fragile built around maintaining voidform, and had the traditional ramp-up problem. I just started leveling my SP for BfA, and it feels better now.
Class fantasy wise the SP will always be one of my favorites. And yes, I'd play a CoP style even if it meant losing a few % dps, but anything over 5% would probably mean having to answer 'but why don't you build ...' over and over.

Ok, so you essentially you like the Shadow class fantasy, but not more than you like a dotless caster playstyle?

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Why no ICC (3.3) option? No mastery, just DOTS scaling with haste but no additional ticks! I miss 6 second VT and SWP
Voting Cata because it's the closest one. But MoP was fine too.

So basically with in Wrath with high haste you were mostly just refreshing dots constantly?

If so, would you enjoy a playstyle with shorter duration dots that you were constantly refreshing? That could feel good on short lived packs, but really tough on cleave?

Any specific things about Cataclysm and MoP that you liked?

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My vote is early MoP beta shadow priest.
It was MoP shadow but instead of using orbs for devouring plague, you used it to summon up to 3 shadow appirations. it just felt really frikkin cool having control over the appirations since they are the most visible part of their kit considering nearly their entire kit has no ability animation and i hated that they replaced it with a boring invisible dot.

My guess is that they removed it because appirations at the time were a total mess, couldnt hit air targets and functioned strangely, but i lament that they never revisited it considering its so much cooler summoning a mini army of exploding spirits as opposed to randomly farting one out without any control whatsoever :/

WotLK was good but had far too much ramp up time, cata shadow orbs were a nonsensical mess, i have to say MoP would be my favorite.

Im really not a fan of legion shadow priests, the new shtick they added doesnt mesh well with their methodical dot weaving playstyle that they had since forever and it feels like a chaotic mess to play along with having terrible aoe gameplay. It was nice visually though so it has that, and the concept was delivered well with the feeling of going insane trying to play your rotation, but it was such a huge departure from what i always considered one of the best designed specs in the game.

Yea multiple shadow fiends actually sounds really cool.

What else did you like about MoP specifically that made you feel it was well desgined? Did you just like the orb mechanic? Something else?

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It does sound pretty good. Its interactive seems like it would have a high skill ceiling, separating the good shadow from the bad and all that, which is good I like it.
Not without problems tho the duration of dots and how long the stacks last needs to be looked at, because you don't want to incentivize the "I won't put up dots till I have X amount of stacks". Same thing with the stacks if they are on my target it makes multi dotting hard, ok then they are just gonna be used on the nuke target like DP for example, it sounds good but you need to be careful with the stacks so our dots outside of the stacks don't feel like wet noodles like legion shadow out of void form. Although these sound like number tuning issues rather than gameplay issues, so I think this would be a good direction if blizzard took this route.

Yea, obviously the rate at which you generate stacks, the cap on stacks generated, and the amount of stacks that can be consumed per spellcast would make the difference.

This may be getting too complex, but maybe VT consumes all stacks and SWP only consumes up to X stacks (a low number like 1 or 2).

SWP would then be a little more maintenancy, but since it is instant it is fairly easy to maintain, and it would also be the option for when you have a lot of ads coming out. Save 8 stacks, 4 adds pop, hit each with your 2 stack SWP.

VT would be more of a fat dot. Could be some very fun gameplay and a skill gap by squeezing in as many Void Bolts as possible before your next VT to make it super fat. When you have one priority add, you can also bank stacks to do big damage to it when it comes out.

Thoughts?

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Dragon Soul tier set.

What did you like about that specific tier?

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I liked the Cataclysm one, as that was the first version I played.

But, I did like the MoP version a lot too.

What did you like so much about each of those?

[Dalheim]

What did you like so much about each of those?

I'm not sure, was quite some time ago. I suppose I liked the Shadow Orb system, the buffs you had (Permanent vampiric embrace for example), Devouring Plague.

[bluesock]

Yea, obviously the rate at which you generate stacks, the cap on stacks generated, and the amount of stacks that can be consumed per spellcast would make the difference.

This may be getting too complex, but maybe VT consumes all stacks and SWP only consumes up to X stacks (a low number like 1 or 2).

SWP would then be a little more maintenancy, but since it is instant it is fairly easy to maintain, and it would also be the option for when you have a lot of ads coming out. Save 8 stacks, 4 adds pop, hit each with your 2 stack SWP.

VT would be more of a fat dot. Could be some very fun gameplay and a skill gap by squeezing in as many Void Bolts as possible before your next VT to make it super fat. When you have one priority add, you can also bank stacks to do big damage to it when it comes out.

Thoughts?

I like it but I wonder whether the low stack consumption on sw pain makes it redundant. Because you run into the question of if its so low why not make it base. Tho that's just details that can be sorted out if this was a fully fleshed out in detail. All in all I like this one it has potential.

Hello Guys!

Please answer me a question. I wanna know the difficulty to play as Shadow Priest, im currently playing as Rogue, and im having heavy difficulties with Subtley (Assassination is easy). I aways find the priest lore fantastic, and now i wanna reroll for a mdps. Thanks and sorry for my bad english.

Right now shadow is pretty damn easy to play. The rotation boils down to "press everything that doesn't have a cooldown" it's a very dumbed down version of legion. In 8.1 they are making some changes (not big ones) that may or may not change this, tho I doubt it.

[Arainie]

Ok, so even though you enjoyed that playstyle, do you feel that it is the class fantasy you miss more or the playstyle?

You say you do not like change for sake of change, but do you feel like you would enjoy the same playstyle if you played it for 9 years?

I probably would enjoy it yes, but let me elaborate on that.

For me WoW is very little about "myself" and almost entirely about the team/group, hence I much prefer it that people genuinely master their class rather than keep hopping around between characters due to playstyle changes disrupting our raid balance every tier/expansion, and the same goes for myself. I've raided on my priest (mostly as disc/holy, a bit as shadow) for as long as I've played a game and have never had any serious intention to swap character. I picked a priest because I thought both specs (holy/shadow, as disc was honestly just a PvP spec in TBC) seemed fun and I liked the priest fantasy, but the reason I stick to it is because it's "my character" with all the history to it, and I think the class fantasy has strayed a bit too far from it's origin (the same could be said for many classes and specs).

Whether the playstyle is TBC/WotLK (fairly similar), Shadow Orbs/DP or WoD AS doesn't bother me too much, but I'm not a fan of CoP and Insanity in general (Void form is "fun" in general but it's not what I want for my class) as I think they stray too far from what I consider a shadow priest to be. So all in all I guess it's the class fantasy I miss more rather than the actual gameplay which isn't too important for me.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Do you believe that the Cataclysm playstyle can translate into today's game without snapshotting?

Was Cataclysm more about the playstyle or the overall power of Shadow during that time?

Copypasting the exact Cata playstyle into the modern game, just without snapshotting? Nah that would be lame, because Cata was the era when snapshotting REALLY mattered for SP, as opposed to MoP, where our DoTs were so fucking weak, that if your DoTs still had a long duration left, it was better to just spend your trinket procs empowering your MFI, rather than refreshing DoTs.

It would work perfectly fine if they just used the Cata playstyle as a skeleton for a modern version of it though. Heck, it would be easily fixable by just porting the Cata SP skeleton into live, while giving us "something" from the later versions of the spec. We have had so many different spells/talents since Cata, that could easily be brought back to spice up the Cata skeleton. That said, I do think a pure copy/paste of Cata Shadow without snapshotting, would be an improvement over Legion Shadow, and especially BFA Shadow.



And no, our performance was not really the main factor that made Cata Shadow great. Cata SPs were dogshit for the 1st month of the expansion, before the 4.0.6 buffs that made us OP for the rest of t11 and all of t12. In t13 Shadow got outscaled quite hard by Arms Warrs, Rogues and Fire Mages, while Hunters got buffed through the roof for... reasons. Shadow was middle of the pack for all of Dragon Soul, but I still enjoyed the spec. Many ppl also cite t13 as their favourite era, despite our performance relative to the other classes being significantly lower than it had been in t11 and t12.