Is shadow the worst its ever been?

[Teaklog]

If you people are so dense that you can’t understand what a spriest main means when they say they feel compellled to play disc because shadow is so bad, then there is no point to having a conversation.

No one is says disc dps is superior to shadow, or that we earn our raid spot with disc dps that we can’t with shadow.

What they are saying, is they are priest mains. Thy don’t wish to reeoll. Thy want to play a priest. Typically, disc/holy and shadow are different roles, fulfilling different play styles and attracting different players. However, shadow is so bad you often can’t get a spot. So, as you are a priest, that leaves you with disc and holy. Despite both being healing roles, there is greater similarity between disc and shadow than shadow and holy.

In the days of dual specs, disc would have been my offspec.

The viability of disc, as it relates to a spriest, is only relevant when shadow itself is non viable compared to other ranged dps specs. That is the case currently. My own opinions on the state of disc aside, if you nerf disc to the point where the only viable priest healing spec is holy, while not budding shadow. There is no role or quasi role to fill for the many priests who consider themselves first and foremost as ranged dps.

My 367 disc is specced entirely for dps. I sim 12.5k dos. I usually pull 18-20k hps with 10k dps. Sure I can heal more if I focused on it, but as is I join raids as a dps while letting them take one less healer.

Earlier on in the xpac I simmed higher as disc than I did as shadow

[Kanariya]

I don't even care about the mediocre damage. It's the mechanics, the playstyle, and mostly, the gimmick known as voidform. DoTs are nothing but insanity generators, our filler is nothing but an insanity generator, anything we do outside of Voidform is nothing but an insanity generator. Then we get into vf, gain actual damage but have to stand still and spam as much as possible to keep vf up, and any mistake is extreme punishment.

This isn't what Shadow was about until 2016. It's horrific, and I really miss my old spriest.

Honestly, if we have to keep Voidform, I'd rather it go to being a 3m cd with a fixed duration like old metamorphosis (pre-MoP) was for Warlocks.

[Deleted]

I really dont get why people dislike shadow so much. I really enjoy them and ive been playing shadow since wotlk. All the people I see complain about shadowpriest really sucks, DPS-wise. I love the aoe burst, I love the rotation, everything feels nice especially together with dark void and dark ascension and mindbender. Im not saying we are the best, but we are definitly not the worst. I think we are fine atm, and with the buffs incoming, without a nerf...we are going to be OP.

[Awsyme]

I really dont get why people dislike shadow so much. I really enjoy them and ive been playing shadow since wotlk. All the people I see complain about shadowpriest really sucks, DPS-wise. I love the aoe burst, I love the rotation, everything feels nice especially together with dark void and dark ascension and mindbender. Im not saying we are the best, but we are definitly not the worst. I think we are fine atm, and with the buffs incoming, without a nerf...we are going to be OP.

To each their own. My own experience is shadow being... poor. The Burst pales compared to other classes (even when heavily talented), the single target is average at best. It's probably one of if not THE hardest spec to play in the game and the rewards are.... middling at best. On my priest I do about 2/3rds of my fury warrior who's 15 ilvls lower.

Holy and disc are great. Shadow is... not.

[Stratcaster]

Someone never played during TBC, when the only reason to bring a shadowpriest was as a mana sponge

Indeed, remember it well. SPs were fun to play back then.

[krl]

To each their own. My own experience is shadow being... poor. The Burst pales compared to other classes (even when heavily talented), the single target is average at best. It's probably one of if not THE hardest spec to play in the game and the rewards are.... middling at best. On my priest I do about 2/3rds of my fury warrior who's 15 ilvls lower.

Holy and disc are great. Shadow is... not.

Same situation. I think I grasp the intricacies of my 385, MM raiding spriest, but my crappy rogue (yay Zul) is so much better in every aspect of the game it's not even funny. Damage, burst, survivability, immunities, group utilities, flow of the spec, it's like I'm playing a different game.

[Chillside]

Generally speaking, historically SP's have been pretty weak compared to other classes in the beginning of the expansions, but i always say that we scale really well as the secondary stats progress through the expansion, now... considering the fact that it's still the first raid tier and first pvp season, we're in a pretty fair spot, i wouldn't complain

[Ophenia]

Generally speaking, historically SP's have been pretty weak compared to other classes in the beginning of the expansions, but i always say that we scale really well as the secondary stats progress through the expansion, now... considering the fact that it's still the first raid tier and first pvp season, we're in a pretty fair spot, i wouldn't complain

The problem is that, Shadow's scaling was always linked to secondaries. With the 40-ish% haste "caps", the ever increasing Crit, plus some mastery here and there, everything worked very well.

But in BfA, Secondaries aren't worth shit, 3 out of the 4 items that brought the most secondaries now don't bring any (Azerite), and Primaries are worth a shitton more than secondaries.

I don't expect Shadow Priest to scale as good as in previous expacs.

Edit: Reminder

[Chillside]

The problem is that, Shadow's scaling was always linked to secondaries. With the 40-ish% haste "caps", the ever increasing Crit, plus some mastery here and there, everything worked very well.

But in BfA, Secondaries aren't worth shit, 3 out of the 4 items that brought the most secondaries now don't bring any (Azerite), and Primaries are worth a shitton more than secondaries.

I don't expect Shadow Priest to scale as good as in previous expacs.

Edit: Reminder

Yes, maybe not as good as in previous expacs, but we're still going to scale better than most classes i'd say. To give you the most primitive example, if i were to compare my personal progression from ~350 ilvl to ~380 to any given class through same ilvl, I just scaled better... not because i got used to my rotation better by the way, i still do the same thing that i've been doing 2-3 months ago. Also, the fact that we can still maintain roughly the same dps throughout the fight leads me to believe that we'll still scale better than others, because you have few classes that just go nuts on pull right.. hitting 40-50k dps while we're sweating at ~25 with bl, but we all know they're gonna be below us towards the end of the bossfight and our secodary stat scaling plays a huge role in that particular aspect.
But yea, i agree that azerite pieces changed a thing or two, now you have few.. sort of paths to follow, for example I have absolutely no intention of playing a crit build with shadow apparition's trait. I have a 390 chest piece with shadow app trait but i'm not using, because i have no respect to that playstyle and i think it defeats the whole purpose of playing SP, and I'll probably stay true haste/matery, plus as you mentioned the ever increasing crit as the expansion progresses and ilvl raises .

[Malix Farwin]

Yes, maybe not as good as in previous expacs, but we're still going to scale better than most classes i'd say. To give you the most primitive example, if i were to compare my personal progression from ~350 ilvl to ~380 to any given class through same ilvl, I just scaled better... not because i got used to my rotation better by the way, i still do the same thing that i've been doing 2-3 months ago. Also, the fact that we can still maintain roughly the same dps throughout the fight leads me to believe that we'll still scale better than others, because you have few classes that just go nuts on pull right.. hitting 40-50k dps while we're sweating at ~25 with bl, but we all know they're gonna be below us towards the end of the bossfight and our secodary stat scaling plays a huge role in that particular aspect.
But yea, i agree that azerite pieces changed a thing or two, now you have few.. sort of paths to follow, for example I have absolutely no intention of playing a crit build with shadow apparition's trait. I have a 390 chest piece with shadow app trait but i'm not using, because i have no respect to that playstyle and i think it defeats the whole purpose of playing SP, and I'll probably stay true haste/matery, plus as you mentioned the ever increasing crit as the expansion progresses and ilvl raises .

Sims have reflected the opposite thus far. Going from 340 to 385 we actually scaled down. Specs now who scale better with primary stats are going to scale better then us actually.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Dunno about sims, but we did scale quite well in Uldir. Shadow performance now (relative to other classes) is way better than it was in early progression.

Ofc, the Shadow community realizing that the sims for CoI were bugged, which actually turned out to be our BiS trait, was another decent "buff" to our dmg, compared to the early days of Thunderous Blast stacking. Still, scaling for Shadow was definitely good, which is a welcome change, because our scaling is usually far down on the low side.

[Pillerina]

I really dont get why people dislike shadow so much. I really enjoy them and ive been playing shadow since wotlk. All the people I see complain about shadowpriest really sucks, DPS-wise. I love the aoe burst, I love the rotation, everything feels nice especially together with dark void and dark ascension and mindbender. Im not saying we are the best, but we are definitly not the worst. I think we are fine atm, and with the buffs incoming, without a nerf...we are going to be OP.

Go over to the warcraftpriests discord and you'll find the people who don't just want to complain, the spec is nice.

[Malix Farwin]

Dunno about sims, but we did scale quite well in Uldir. Shadow performance now (relative to other classes) is way better than it was in early progression.

Ofc, the Shadow community realizing that the sims for CoI were bugged, which actually turned out to be our BiS trait, was another decent "buff" to our dmg, compared to the early days of Thunderous Blast stacking. Still, scaling for Shadow was definitely good, which is a welcome change, because our scaling is usually far down on the low side.

Thats not true though and even preach showed that as the difficulty went up, Shadows rank went down and thats because they are scaling down with gear, not up.

Even if you do not believe him, look at the trends livegoing from normal to mythic you see them going down.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Thats not true though and even preach showed that as the difficulty went up, Shadows rank went down and thats because they are scaling down with gear, not up.

Even if you do not believe him, look at the trends livegoing from normal to mythic you see them going down.

No idea which logs you are looking at, but what you described is not what happened, at all. In fact it's the exact opposite of the what actually happened during the Uldir patch. Shadow was shit at Uldir launch, so shit that all SPs in top guilds were benched and forced to play their Lock alts.

The top Shadow logs right before 8.1 were still not the best in the game, but they were a lot more competitive than any Shadow during progress or our performance with lower gear.

[Malix Farwin]

No idea which logs you are looking at, but what you described is not what happened, at all. In fact it's the exact opposite of the what actually happened during the Uldir patch. Shadow was shit at Uldir launch, so shit that all SPs in top guilds were benched and forced to play their Lock alts.

The top Shadow logs right before 8.1 were still not the best in the game, but they were a lot more competitive than any Shadow during progress or our performance with lower gear.

Normal: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...7&difficulty=3

Heroic: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...7&difficulty=4

Mythic: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...cs/19#sample=7

Bonus: 8.0

Normal: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...1&difficulty=3

Heroic: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...1&difficulty=4

Mythic: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...ple=7&region=1

And finally percentiles:

Max: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...=7&dataset=100

75th: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...cs/19#sample=7

Notice how Max is lower then 75th.

What does all of this tell you combined? They don't actually scale that well.

I mean i've even ran sims to stat weights of similar geared specs and the ones that always out-scaled shadow were the ones who scaled the best with Primary stats which makes perfect sense when you account for the changes they did with secondary stats on gear going into this xpac.

Alternatively, things that didnt scale that well with secondaries but did with primary stats are scaling better now.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

How does any of what you linked in any way, shape or form, indicate that Shadow scales poorly? Nothing that you just linked gives any indication towards how good or bad our scaling is. Completely irrelevant data.

And Shadow being lower in the Max bracket than it the 75% bracket, means that the difference between perfect play and mediocre play is big. It tells you nothing about scaling.


Look at 95-100% logs from the last resets before 8.0. Then compare them to what the 95-100% logs looked like during progression and the weeks following it. And if it wasn't obvious after my last comment: Our position relative to the other specs, is significantly higher now than it was back then.

[Super Kami Dende]

No because Vanilla existed.

[MisterBigglez]

I'm reallly enjoying my spriest. The main complaints im seeing is that people don't like how punishing it is, which is actually a breath of fresh air considering they butchered most classes and made them faceroll to play. Even then, I don't think shadow is particularily difficult, it just requires some knowledge of the encounters you're in so you can manage any sort of movement efficiently.

To each their own. My own experience is shadow being... poor. The Burst pales compared to other classes (even when heavily talented), the single target is average at best. It's probably one of if not THE hardest spec to play in the game and the rewards are.... middling at best. On my priest I do about 2/3rds of my fury warrior who's 15 ilvls lower.

Holy and disc are great. Shadow is... not.

Fury and Shadow are not two specs you can fairly compare. One is very easy to play, the other is considered one of the hardest to play. Stick the average player on both and the results are going to favour Fury

[Ophenia]

Look at 95-100% logs from the last resets before 8.0. Then compare them to what the 95-100% logs looked like during progression and the weeks following it. And if it wasn't obvious after my last comment: Our position relative to the other specs, is significantly higher now than it was back then.

That's not at all linked to the fact encounters are shorter (and in zerg mode, aka ignore everything) after 3 months of farming, must be because of scaling !

That's interesting to note that you're still in your flawed perception : you're still glad that Shadow performs well when the content is no longer relevant, even though it means we suck when the content is actually interesting and important (progress).
"Hey, we were dead last during progress, but the most important is here: we can rank #1 for the 70th kill !"

[ThrashMetalFtw]

That's not at all linked to the fact encounters are shorter (and in zerg mode, aka ignore everything) after 3 months of farming, must be because of scaling !

That's interesting to note that you're still in your flawed perception : you're still glad that Shadow performs well when the content is no longer relevant, even though it means we suck when the content is actually interesting and important (progress).
"Hey, we were dead last during progress, but the most important is here: we can rank #1 for the 70th kill !"

That would be a compelling argument, if you ignored our entire toolkit and how the class works. We don't have any CDs to blow on pull, and thus, don't benefit from having shorter fights, compared to the other classes that actually have proper 2/3min burst CDs. Try again.