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  1. #1
    Field Marshal ZombiexCat's Avatar
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    Am I the only one who misses Cata shadow?!

    The playstyle felt soooo much more smooth, and powerful It just flowed really well. Hoping they bring some of that back. Anyone else with me?

  2. #2

  3. #3
    Deleted
    Nostalgia + the effect of topping the meters vs struggling on the bottom.

  4. #4
    Everyone I see who 'misses' Cata shadow seems to only remember DS. Cata shadow prior to 4pc T13 was an RNG nightmare.

    I don't understand why anyone would want to have a mastery that means you have a 10-20% chance of fizzling for the first 90 seconds of a boss encounter. Orb droughts were the worst thing ever brought to shadow.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by Blackmorgrim View Post
    Everyone I see who 'misses' Cata shadow seems to only remember DS. Cata shadow prior to 4pc T13 was an RNG nightmare.

    I don't understand why anyone would want to have a mastery that means you have a 10-20% chance of fizzling for the first 90 seconds of a boss encounter. Orb droughts were the worst thing ever brought to shadow.
    Nah, it wasn't only that and like I said to Drye in the other thread its not just that we are one of the worst multidotters; multidot itself took a massive nerf. We still did good damage despite having bad RNG it was just on very tight DPS checks where it was annoying (do take note its worse now: only the first pull we do good burst). Single target wise I rather have sometimes bad RNG and then do meh damage and always being rock bottom except for first try. If you're in a good guild which one shots everything you're in heaven tho, but in progress you certainly were not in heaven. Its also because Blizzard nerfed multidot to the ground after Cata. If you take the dot archetype of dot spec (Affliction) and ignore its burst they do bad single target. Only if you do quick kills on farm while overgearing Affliction does good due to its burst. We have good burst too and it was good on certain fights in MoP, but we need to carefully plan it which is both harder for us than for say Destruction and also a larger DPS loss if we have to save orbs. Multidot wise there is a council fight in every tier in MoP, but take T11 for example: Nefarian, Robots, Halfus, V&T, Ascendent Council, all massive multidot where we did insanely well. Firelands same story.

  6. #6
    The Lightbringer Lovestar's Avatar
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    Haha, yeah. That thread is full of people remembering Cata as their favorite.

    I agree Cata Shadow was the height of the playstyle. It was like the gameplay equivalent of fine liquor. Acquired taste, but went down so well once you learned to appreciate it.

    MoP is just... eugh. It's hard to even say exactly what's wrong, but it's just not the same.

  7. #7
    Cata playstyle was awesome. I didn't mind the whole orbs-on-the-pull thing as much; the initial burst issue hadn't become quite as big as it is now in MoP, and it generally smoothed itself out. It was great to have a really strong cooldown, and our DOTs hit really hard when backed up with the buffs we had. T13 4pc was amazing, too. Hope we get some of that BOOM back in WoD.

    Multidotting was out of control. Unfortunately, they haven't really figured how to make DOTs fun and competitive without making them overpowered yet.

  8. #8
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    Even during T11/T12 shadow was very good on a pretty good majority of the fights, sure MindSear was garbage during t11, but our multi doting was on par with moonkins and affliction(I think the damage-for multidot- at that time was the closest it ever has been, affliction a little on top at first, but then moonkin was first at the end of the tier, but again the difference was actually very small).
    It is true that the "not getting an orb quick enough" was annoying, but T13 fixed that, and we were still good on pretty much every fight but a few. It's still astonishing how blizzard moved SP T13 to SP MoP...
    What I loved about T13 SP was that it covered our biggest weakness: solo boss. It didn't make us top tier on ultraxion, but we wern't being led by as much as we are being led now, on the same kind of fight.

    And TBH i found cata overall dps chart much more closer than what we have in MoP. A 100% domination by warlocks during the ENTIRE expansion is plain bullshit from blizzard...

  9. #9
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    T13 was the greatest period I had as a sp during my time in WoW. Even tho DS wasn't the greatest raid in the history, playstyle and mechanics just felt right and made sense. Dotting was more interesting and challenging with mastery/evangelism especially during aoe, T13 4pc gave us burst and boosted single target dps, we even had nice small things (shadow had nice things?! madness) like mf crits reducing sf cd, divine hymn, spamable dp that was healing us which could be used during movement + swd that with 2pc was another thing to cast during movement (also movement dps wasn't so crap as it is now beacuse our dots actually did serious dmg). We were toping multidot fights while still staying in the middle/top for single target.

    It's beyond me would why blizzard change something working near perfectly mechanic wise to the abomination that mop shadow is.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rait View Post
    T13 was the greatest period I had as a sp during my time in WoW. Even tho DS wasn't the greatest raid in the history, playstyle and mechanics just felt right and made sense. Dotting was more interesting and challenging with mastery/evangelism especially during aoe, T13 4pc gave us burst and boosted single target dps, we even had nice small things (shadow had nice things?! madness) like mf crits reducing sf cd, divine hymn, spamable dp that was healing us which could be used during movement + swd that with 2pc was another thing to cast during movement (also movement dps wasn't so crap as it is now beacuse our dots actually did serious dmg). We were toping multidot fights while still staying in the middle/top for single target.

    It's beyond me would why blizzard change something working near perfectly mechanic wise to the abomination that mop shadow is.
    Divine Hymn did fuck all for Shadow (and Disc). It was even more useless than Hymn of Hope is. You were also losing your passive VE from damage at that point (except for rolling dots). Back in DS some random dude was QQing about a shadow not popping it and I decided to do some napkin math and calculated it was a HPS loss. Its also a DPS loss.

    MF crit mechanic was fun, and you felt you were growing stronger throughout the expansion slowly but surely. The RNG was very frustrating in T11 in progress because your ramp up time was slower. In T13 the RNG meant it was sometimes frustrating to plan your sfiend, especially when that mattered a lot with 4pcT13. 4pcT13 was also sometimes frustrating on moving targets like the charging dudes on Warmaster Blackthorn. What I liked about it, it gave you a reason to Mind Flay...

    Being rock bottom single target for an entire expansion -3 patches, and its going to be 2 years- is not fun. Its ridiculous. Moonkins and warlocks didn't suffer this in Cataclysm. I don't think any class (with their best DPS spec) has suffered from such a thing since TBC. Moonkins suffered from being unable to be in the right Eclipse in start of fight but on the same hand "Blizzard does not care about initial burst DPS" which makes me wonder why did they fix Moonkin but gave Shadow a mechanic which they knew beforehand screwed our burst damage on start?

    The problem is also, like I said, multidot got nerfed to the ground and yet cleave (which I'd argue requires less skill and effort) is still going strong. Affliction has Destruction and Demonology as alternatives, and Moonkin scales very well with crit and Starsurge hits like a truck and scales well too. The irony is that a moonkin becomes easier to play with higher ilvl, and also does more damage on the move with higher ilvl. We don't have such a thing. They also made the mistake turning mages into a dot class (bombs) but they'll remove that next expansion. Maybe with dot snapshotting mostly a thing of the past they will make dots stronger again. I don't see why not?

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by lolalola View Post
    Divine Hymn did fuck all for Shadow (and Disc). It was even more useless than Hymn of Hope is. You were also losing your passive VE from damage at that point (except for rolling dots). Back in DS some random dude was QQing about a shadow not popping it and I decided to do some napkin math and calculated it was a HPS loss. Its also a DPS loss.
    I don't agree with that. DH was far from useless especially in DS , it wasn't gamebreaking but you could help your healers alot, hagara's lighting phase, spine searing plasma cleaning, yorshaj yellow+red comes to my mind.

    I also forgot about us having Dark Archangel (still don't get why was it removed and we got pathetic minor glyph instead) and swp being refreshed by mind flay (which made our aoe more interesting than pressing mind sear into oblivion).

  12. #12
    I actually enjoyed t11 and t12 more than t13. Mostly because I raided 10 mans and we only (barely) completed one DTR, so the melee got free DTRs through their 10% AP buffs. the Hunters got buffs, and I was 10% behind the rest of the raid purely because I didn't have DTR, like apparently every other caster in the game did.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rait View Post
    I don't agree with that. DH was far from useless especially in DS , it wasn't gamebreaking but you could help your healers alot, hagara's lighting phase, spine searing plasma cleaning, yorshaj yellow+red comes to my mind.
    Its just to make you feel you did something useful while in reality it was not useful. If you did a proper log analysis you'd find it did very little healing (same for Disc) and if really needed you were better off hard casting direct heals. You need to consider the following: you're going to lose DPS either way since you are redotting or your dots fall off. You're also not hard casting while you are channeling. Both impacts your Vampiric Embrace off-healing. You state these examples of AoE damage but you forget you were also losing your 15% passive damage reduction making you take 15% more damage. Because the healing DH does is very little the net gain is low. Whether it was a HPS gain or not, it was incredibly minor and very annoying when retarded raid leaders expected you to pop it (hi Openraid Sinestra undying run!)

    I agree about DA & SWP.

  14. #14
    The Lightbringer Nurvus's Avatar
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    The current iteration of Shadow is the most boring spec I've seen in a very long time.
    The only thing keeping it from being mind-numbingly dull is the Divine Insight Talent, giving it a little reactivity.

    I miss Dark Archangel.
    Would like to see some more interactivity between skills, in a way that makes our rotation more dynamic.
    It's too linear at the moment, even if you use Divine Insight.
    Last edited by Nurvus; 2014-03-01 at 04:50 PM.
    Why did you create a new thread? Use the search function and post in existing threads!
    Why did you necro a thread?

  15. #15
    If you think Shadow is boring then go try Affliction.

  16. #16
    Its just to make you feel you did something useful while in reality it was not useful. If you did a proper log analysis you'd find it did very little healing (same for Disc) and if really needed you were better off hard casting direct heals. You need to consider the following: you're going to lose DPS either way since you are redotting or your dots fall off. You're also not hard casting while you are channeling. Both impacts your Vampiric Embrace off-healing. You state these examples of AoE damage but you forget you were also losing your 15% passive damage reduction making you take 15% more damage. Because the healing DH does is very little the net gain is low. Whether it was a HPS gain or not, it was incredibly minor and very annoying when retarded raid leaders expected you to pop it (hi Openraid Sinestra undying run!)

    I agree about DA & SWP.
    We used Shadow Divine Hymn for Heroic Spine, and it was really noticeable and helpful. Burst healing from a DPS is nothing to laugh at on encounters like that.

    I miss Dark Archangel.
    Truth. You know when you have an ability called "Dark Archangel" as your DPS cooldown, you know its gonna be a good expansion.

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Felade View Post
    We used Shadow Divine Hymn for Heroic Spine, and it was really noticeable and helpful. Burst healing from a DPS is nothing to laugh at on encounters like that.
    Very much doubt it was anything near noticeable or helpful. SLT was.

  18. #18
    The Lightbringer Lovestar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kardacz View Post
    If you think Shadow is boring then go try Affliction.
    SB > SS

    /cry

    I agree that MoP is the blandest Shadow I've ever had. And yes, Dark Archangel was awesome. This stupid minor glyph can go choke on a voidspawn. I miss when popping Shadow Wings meant LET'S MELT FACES.

    It was like playing a Final Fantasy antagonist.
    Last edited by Lovestar; 2014-03-02 at 06:03 AM.

  19. #19
    I miss the early BC shadow days. Man was shadow great then. I tanked every single 5 man instance in BC as a shadow priest just by doing tremendous damage and healing myself with VE faster than enemy mobs could hurt me. Definitely OP, but then we got nerfed like 23 patches in a row or something ridiculous like that.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by AusSpyder View Post
    I miss the early BC shadow days. Man was shadow great then. I tanked every single 5 man instance in BC as a shadow priest just by doing tremendous damage and healing myself with VE faster than enemy mobs could hurt me. Definitely OP, but then we got nerfed like 23 patches in a row or something ridiculous like that.
    This.

    I miss Disc from Cata, though.

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