[Shadow] Are we going to become/remain competitive in 5.4?

[Dierdre]

After the Combustion nerf/Shadow buffs/Boomkin changes I think caster wise it's going to look like this in 5.4:

Lock>Spriest>Arcane Mage>Ele>Fire Mage>Boomkin

I'd like some of that weed you're smoking son.

[Deleted]

I'm just gonna say your group is... bold and creative, for lack of nicer words. 10-man raiders can't afford the luxury of being carried around though.

nah Tbh my server is a bit dead sadly we didint realm change with the refunds so we try to make everyone happy and thats why we are so many spriests ....for us important is the person who play the class the fun,friends>>>>>>>>>>>>>>progress set-ups etc....so keep your stupit opinion for yourself ''pro''

[Vargur]

this is completely false. if you raid extremely casually, as in mostly pug, it is *harder* to raid as shadow than it is in a more serious raid (where you're threatened with being sat/forced into disc due to playing harder content). pug leaders never take someone who is undergeared and especially not if they are a weak class if they can avoid it. you can be a completely toilet geared lock and get pug invites over middlingly-geared spriests if for none else than soulwells and gateways.



wth 4 spriests in a 25 is insane. is this including ra-den alts?

I still don't see why it matters. I was doing mildly OK in 10 and cleared half heroic, so around about the OP's situation. Adding a shadow's damage + healing per fight can be a good indicator as to its usefulness over the other casters. But of course, we're not generally interested in healing :|

[Crudelitas]

After the Combustion nerf/Shadow buffs/Boomkin changes I think caster wise it's going to look like this in 5.4:

Lock>Spriest>Arcane Mage>Ele>Fire Mage>Boomkin

waht is this i don't even

[Deleted]

I suppose from a casual pov it's more or less player > class (to an extent) but yeah I suppose as far as top dps goes it's mostly Rogue/Lock/Mage... Shame, 'coz all 3 of those classes are rather dull to play (atleast after awhile). Here's hoping the devs are kind to us before release

[Dierdre]

nah Tbh my server is a bit dead sadly we didint realm change with the refunds so we try to make everyone happy and thats why we are so many spriests ....for us important is the person who play the class the fun,friends>>>>>>>>>>>>>>progress set-ups etc....so keep your stupit opinion for yourself ''pro''

My server is quite dead too, there's only one 25-man raiding guild, the rest are 10-mans. I'm not "pro" either, but I do enjoy running current content rather than waiting to outgear instances. Kudos for being lucky enough to have a decent raiding group with your friends.

That being said, the question was if shadow will be competitive in 5.4. I'm not saying you can't pull a 25-man with 4 SP, sure you can. Heck I've done 10-druid runs since WotLK, and we just saw a MV clear with 25 DKs. But as you said yourself, you're in it for the fun, not the progress.

People who are in it for the progress will try to set up their raid groups to maximize the advantages given by each spec. In 25-man that's not a problem, but as we've pointed out repeatedly, the majority of raiding groups are 10-man. With only 5-6 dps spots, at least two of which should be melee due to encounter mechanics, a 10-man has to choose between mage/lock/hunter/boomkin/elemental/shadow for those 3 ranged dps spots. Ideally a group should be able to choose any of those specs without significant disadvantages, but the truth is that mage & lock have been (and still are) notorious "outliers", so they are both obvious choices. That leaves ONE spot for hunter/ele/balance/shadow.

For 10-man groups (not only hardcore, this applies to casual too) expecting to progress through an instance, an obvious objective is to gear up their players as soon and efficiently as possible in order to make content more accesible. The unique problem shadow has is that it shares loot with mage/lock, so the obvious choice is to bring a hunter/boomkin/ele so you make proper use of leather / mail drops and you don't have to split one item class between 3 players (or even 4 if you run with a priest healer). And even if, for whatever reason, your group decides to bring another int-cloth player: Why would you bring a shadow priest instead of another mage/lock?

When you're in it just for the fun, you can do all sort of crazy setups. When you aim for progress, saying shadow in its current state is "fine" and "will always have raid spot" is a misguided statement imho. Shadow is currently a very situtional spec with marked deficiencies in single target and heavy-movement fights.

[Deleted]

For 10-man groups (not only hardcore, this applies to casual too) expecting to progress through an instance, an obvious objective is to gear up their players as soon and efficiently as possible in order to make content more accesible. The unique problem shadow has is that it shares loot with mage/lock, so the obvious choice is to bring a hunter/boomkin/ele so you make proper use of leather / mail drops and you don't have to split one item class between 3 players (or even 4 if you run with a priest healer). And even if, for whatever reason, your group decides to bring another int-cloth player: Why would you bring a shadow priest instead of another mage/lock?

Never a truer word said than this.

[Deleted]

I understand that. Mage and Lock are the dominant Ranged, so in a 10 man you'll only have the spot for 1 of the others. Which brings the question then, how are we going to compare with Hunter, Ele and Boomkin assuming we're all geared? I guess the fun thing about Shadow is we will get to skip all the annoying boring progress, hahaha.

I guess that question is hard to answer considering we're still in PTR. Ofcourse for progress you'd rather take Hunter, Ele or Boomer due to the Mail/Leather slots.

Edit: From what i've gathered from a few top-end raiders on the ptr at the moment. Ele shines nicer than hunter/spriest/boomkin on most SoO fights (lock/mage>ele>rest)

[Caliph]

The problem is with multidotting imo. As long as we have an ability to multidot and take advantage of ToF to inflate our dps somehow blizzard will never fix the horrible mechanics of tab target dot, tab target dot. The excuse will always be "We think spreists are fine as is, we're not seeing any problems". I would rather have powerful single target with decreased aoe power. In this manner we can still compete, still aoe, and still be desirable. They have to address priests ancient mechanics and allow for some kind of movement capability, and multidot application.

It might be a little like warlocks but that's blizzards fault in the first place. plus since when has homogenization been cared about by blizzard. most classes are relatively the same. if they want to differentiate dot classes then i think spriests need a whole new design. Do you think GC (idiot) would do that?

in the end bring the player but if the other players are equally good you'll still be behind.

[Dierdre]

As long as we have an ability to multidot and take advantage of ToF to inflate our dps somehow blizzard will never fix the horrible mechanics of tab target dot, tab target dot. The excuse will always be "We think spreists are fine as is, we're not seeing any problems".

I've said it since Mogushan Vaults: Twist of Fate is the worst thing that's ever happened to shadow priests. It prevents the spec from proper balancing outside of ToF cheesing scenarios (Elegon / Will / Horridon). It was the reason the 5.2 +25% SWP buff got reverted within a week. That DoT buff was spot on, it addressed our imbalances on single target and also helped (slightly) with movement, as we pointed out since 5.2 ptr. If shadow ever required a nerf at all, it was to the abomination that is ToF.

[mindp]

It was the reason the 5.2 +25% SWP buff got reverted within a week.

That's kind of a tall statement.

[Drye]

That's kind of a tall statement.

especially when almost all those statements are incorrect.

[Dierdre]

That's kind of a tall statement.

You think? I'd say a tall statement would've been "It was the reason why mage bombs got a +40% buff even after blizzard stated 'multidot is too high'". Which is why I'd never say such a thing.

But yes, I stand corrected:

"It was most likely the reason the 5.2 +25% SWP buff got reverted within a week."

[Mctriple]

We will be fine in 5.4 and if we are good players we will always have raid spot dont destroy everything lets have faith...we are 4 spriests in my 25 m group and we always have spot they can repalce everyone except us and locks...and for example which dps spec is more important in fights like megaera hc?? ofc spriests and locks...and locks damage is nothing compare arcane mages and assasins rogues in 5.4

My old guild cleared the tier in 25m with 3 spriests as well, with one of the healing priests joining us on his shadow OS for a 4th spriest even for a few progression kills. My current guild did the same until one of them quit wow recently, and now we just have 2. Shadow wasn't in a terrible spot this tier. We weren't OP, but we were hardly fury warriors.

[Frmercury]

Just nabbed our first H Lei Shen kill with 3 Spriests.

Granted one was dead most of the fight...

We've had 3 Spriests throughout T15 and it hasn't been too much of an issue.

[Holydee]

I have raided with good spriest this teir...You guys are just bad...Spriest are mid in the pack of dps...and top 5 for top 100...Sounds like user error to me. Go do some more flavor of the expac class swapping...

[veiledy0]

Just nabbed our first H Lei Shen kill with 3 Spriests.

Granted one was dead most of the fight...

Granted you also outgear the encounter by 20+ ilvls the setup you used doesn't count as proof if SP is ok or not. The fact none of the top10 guilds used a single one does.

[Frmercury]

Granted you also outgear the encounter by 20+ ilvls the setup you used doesn't count as proof if SP is ok or not. The fact none of the top10 guilds used a single one does.

The 80 other (US) guilds that we beat to it that had better gear than us... #justsayin

Not the point though. Shadow's low in 5.2/5.3, but not detrimentally so. We're finally getting buffed in 5.4, so let's wait to see all of this round of numbers tuning to get implemented on the PTR. We should get a pretty good idea from the 25 man testing coming up here.

Then we can make remarks on where we sit because as of right now the honest answer is that we don't really know.

[Gilian]

Keep switching to FotM classes... I guess you are all in world top 10 guilds? And then when you finally got your arcane mage going shadow priests are in the top 5 and you wasted your time for your rank 1000 guild to put out a little bit more dps you don't really need .

[veiledy0]

Keep switching to FotM classes...

Thing is there shouldn't be a FotM class. It's a tad bit sad when I score top10 parses, but am still 20-50k bellow the warlocks in the raid, who aren't even parsing top200.