Do you actually enjoy the current state of shadow?

[Setheria]

Shadow got ruined in MoP. That's why I quit. We did zero damage and the spell rotation was incredibly clunky and non-rewarding. In a raid you didn't contribute anything. I haven't gotten a chance to try WoD Beta but I don't know how they are going to make Shadow fun again.

Back on topic, I'd say that shadow has been (in my opinion only of course) been more fun in the past. I didn't mind the ramp up so much as others. In saying that, I still very much enjoy shadow play currently, and most (but not all) of my own disgruntlement is about tuning & numbers rather than mechanics.

[sargior]

I find shadow DPS very very low.. I have alts with the same gear level pulling 100k more dps. This is because Its mostly healing gear gemmed for healing but reforging and regemming will not give me 100k more dps..
I found leveling with it very very tedious.. (this may partly be because I leveled on a alliance dominated pvp server)

Sometimes I just stay disc for survivalbility when questing. Shadow priests are also by far one of the easiest dps classes to play.

Priests are in a pretty bad place atm. Shadow is low dps, holy is low on heals so we are basically stuck with disc if we want a raid spot. Disc is fantastic but healing while doing damage is a complicated process on some fights and I know of a lot of priests that can not do this.

Doing 60k dps while topping healing meters is awesome.

[Dawnrage]

I like shadow's current mechanics, but this is the first expansion I have played an spriest (alt) for. Trying shadow out on beta, CoP is honestly very boring gameplay compared to what we have now (on single target), and it doesn't help that our mastery leans greatly towards it. On the plus side I like the mobility we have now when they are actively looking to reduce it from every other caster. Even then, I really hope there's more options for single target when they do tuning.

We also have a bunch of utility that many people won't give credit for in Void Shift - which I'm going to greatly miss - and our tier 90 talents. Our "tankiness" also took a dive with the loss of inner fire (and subsequently the glyph).

Our problem on live right now (in PvE) essentially boils down to damage, which tuning would have fixed. I feel shadow in it's current status on live truly is a spec that is "easy to play, hard to master", and when we head to WoD, most of what makes shadow hard to master is going to be gone without snapshotting DoTs/Insanity, accounting for movement on fights, using our utility to full effect etc etc. Shadow on beta has nothing to master anymore.

I guess it's beta for a reason...hopefully the gameplay becomes more interesting.

[Deleted]

How do you get beta invite?

[Indifferency Hop]

maybe the cata shadow stats was the best

[JNovster]

Cata was the pinnacle of shadow imo, the way our spells came together in synergy was amazing. Now we have this shadow orb holy power abomination that feels clunky and uninspired. I stuck with it for mop, and wod improves on the style, but I'm still thinking of switching mains. All I could think of during the mop beta was wtf are they doing? They were trying to fix some VERY minimal ramp up and rng issues, and instead completely dumbed down the spec and just made it very boring.

[BalkothWarcraft]

I find shadow DPS very very low.. I have alts with the same gear level pulling 100k more dps. This is because Its mostly healing gear gemmed for healing but reforging and regemming will not give me 100k more dps. Doing 60k dps while topping healing meters is awesome.

If I might throw out these links?

H Garrosh Phase 2 damage (to Garrosh only).

H Garrosh Phase 3 damage (to Garrosh only).

[marathal]

Current state? Yeah, I'm happy with it. I can break into top 6 in a 25 group with iLvL 570 gear against similarly geared people. Have I done better in previous expansions? Sure. I think we will be back at /near the top again in WoD.

What I have noticed, and it was something of an experiment. I have 2 Shadow Priests. One is my main I play 90% of the time, the other was mostly a profession toon. I put both in very similar gear to test out, their Spell power, Haste, Crit, Mastery were all within 0.1% of each other. What I did find is that even with everything being practically identical, one is Pandaran, one Blood Elf, I played and did better with the one I treat as my main. The other felt slower for cast times, felt less powerful, and I did not play as well. There is a lot to be said for playing not only a class, but a particular character you want to play the most. Pretty much, if you have an attitude that you are going to perform sub par because everything you read tells you so, then you will. If you take an attitude that you just don't care what everyone else does, you love the class, you love the character, you will be competitive with others, and sometimes even do better.

Love the class because you love the class, not because Sims say this is the flavor of the month.

[djack210]

Raiding in a top 50 guild as a shadow priest, I'll tell you right now that our top end damage is mediocre at best... and I mean - flawless dps rotation/execution = middle of the pack dps (IF you are raiding in a guild full of excellent dps).

Single target is horrible in MoP. WoD really does not look to be any better. Still very much lacking damage output and really need tuning to occur before more can be said.

[Priority]

As a active raider I do like shadow currently. The dps is a bit low in comparison to other classes. If you are rolling shadow to top meters then roll something else, it's not always about dps. Vampiric Touch and Halo are pretty amazing CD's for raid survival, and both can be used while doing damage.

As far as ramp up time for damage, I don't really understand what people are talking about. Does every class need a ramp up time like a rogue or ret pally? If I am sitting on 3 orbs, my ramp up time is pretty fast, and when I am not it's still pretty fast. If you want a fast ramp up, use your fiend.

I kind of wish we had better CDs, but I also like our fluid play style without a lot of CDs.

Also if you want to see consistent strong numbers you really need to abuse twist of fate every chance you can.

Shadow also has the best execute CD in the game imo.

[Noujou]

I'll be honest, i don't like the current state of spriests, but i been given the privilege of getting into the WoD Beta, and i tried out a premade lvl100 spriest and did some new dungeons. I went with the talent, Clarity of Power, and found that rotation to be more fun, in a way :P...although after about 10 minutes of doing it, i just dubbed it Arcane Mage 2.0 because that talent effectively turns a Spriest into a 3-4 button rotation, (Mind Spike, Mind Blast, Mind Flay (assuming you choice Insanity, otherwise you don't use Mind Flay) and DP), but oddly enough while playing using that Talent i did actually feel like i was doing damage for once. Granted my tested has by no means been extensively, it's quite the opposite, it was just for me to get a feel for how the class is preforming on the beta currently, but i can say, i feel in WoD we prolly are in better shape than currently on Live.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

The current playstyle is quite good, better than the TBC and WotLK playstyle, that's for sure. Still, Cata Shadow was the best. WoD is making some good changes, so we'll just have to wait and see. Our main problem this expansion, has been tuning, not lack of scaling (which was our biggest problem previous expansions).

Spriest is by far the simplest caster dps spec atm. The only thing that mildly complicates things is insanity, which is a talent. I kinda like shadow for its simplicity.

I just realized I had to put the disclaimer of anything that makes shadow "hard", all other classes have to deal with as well. There is nothing unique to spriest that makes it even remotely hard in my book.

When talking about simplest caster dps spec, it's not fair of you to ignore all Mage specs, Destro/Aff Locks, Ele Shamans and Moonkings.

Unless you were actually being serious, then we need a really big facepalm picture here...

[teverin]

As a active raider I do like shadow currently. The dps is a bit low in comparison to other classes. If you are rolling shadow to top meters then roll something else, it's not always about dps. Vampiric Touch and Halo are pretty amazing CD's for raid survival, and both can be used while doing damage.

I don't raid end game anymore but do you think those two abilities justify the lower dps people talk about? If not, then why not just bring a warlock or something that can do more dps?

I'd like to see dps go up, but maybe throw in some more healing into the mix. Maybe a shorter cool down on VE, but that might be too OP...

[Aere]

If I might throw out these links?

H Garrosh Phase 2 damage (to Garrosh only).

H Garrosh Phase 3 damage (to Garrosh only).

I don't mean to be "that guy" but comparatively to other raiders in your guild - you do competitive damage. The rest of your raid is doing no where near the dps it should be doing.

[BalkothWarcraft]

I don't mean to be "that guy" but comparatively to other raiders in your guild - you do competitive damage. The rest of your raid is doing no where near the dps it should be doing.

I'm aware a lot of people are low. But keep in mind the original claim was...

I find shadow DPS very very low.. I have alts with the same gear level pulling 100k more dps. This is because Its mostly healing gear gemmed for healing but reforging and regemming will not give me 100k more dps.

So I'm calling nonsense on the claim that random alts with roughly equivalent gear are doing 100k more DPS because Shadow is bad or something. Shadow could certainly be better, but 100k difference on alts at his gear level solely due to difference specs? Not at all.

[Aere]

So I'm calling nonsense on the claim that random alts with roughly equivalent gear are doing 100k more DPS because Shadow is bad or something. Shadow could certainly be better, but 100k difference on alts at his gear level solely due to difference specs? Not at all.

I was also calling nonsense on the logs that you linked that suggest shadowpriests are extremely high single target damage
I know that the difference is not in the grounds of 100k. But linking those logs of sub-par raiders doesn't prove anything. You would've been much better linking dps of classes as a whole, not a very terrible and poor example.

[Dierdre]

People using a talent sub-optimally and getting low insanity percentages doesn't reflect it's potential, in the same way someone not utilising FDCL procs won't get the best from that talent. Mindbender is of course far far easier to use, so may pull ahead for players that struggle to multi-task and are unable to manage their toolkit effectively

You see, using MFI in Immerseus is managing your toolkit suboptimally, because there is no instance in which you'll get more DPS / DPET from it than from mindbender / mindsear except if you're running with 4 destro locks burning down stuff instantly (possible but unlikely). Same for protectors, you'll get more damage out of keeping DoTs up on every target than from your filler spells. You'll barely have space to keep DoTs up and spend your FDCL procs, let alone spending 4 GCDs on MFI.

The cleave trinket though really IS absolute rubbish.
For a shadow priest, the cleave trinket is inferior in every regard to any other dps trinket in the instance, and is outperformed in relevant damage by Lei Shen's one too.

The cleave trinket is suboptimal when compared to any other trinket in the instance of the same ilvl, yes. When upgrading though, most people avoid trading it for lfr / flex / normal trinkets "because it sucks" when the intelect proc alone makes the trade worth it, even if cleave won't hit a thing: Multistrike and cleave account for less than 2.5% damage on average; a huge chunk of Haromm / Frenzied Crystal's value comes from the intelect proc, and keeping a flex Haromm instead of a H Frenzied Crystal "because it sucks" is just silly. Even HF UVLS isn't a better option, without even considering the extreme randomness of its benefit.

[Aere]

Same for protectors, you'll get more damage out of keeping DoTs up on every target than from your filler spells. You'll barely have space to keep DoT's up and spend your FDCL procs, let alone spending 4 GCDs on MFI.

MFI is superior on protectors. You don't have enough GCDs to use all of your mind spikes, whereas Insanity keeps your GCD usage the same for your filler spells.

[mindp]

I preferred shadow before shadow orbs. With the whole shadow weaving and misery. People complained about ramp up but I loved it.

Generally not liking the direction shadow is going which started in cata

My feelings ^^^

[Setheria]

You see, using MFI in Immerseus is managing your toolkit suboptimally, because there is no instance in which you'll get more DPS / DPET from it than from mindbender / mindsear except if you're running with 4 destro locks burning down stuff instantly (possible but unlikely). Same for protectors, you'll get more damage out of keeping DoTs up on every target than from your filler spells. You'll barely have space to keep DoTs up and spend your FDCL procs, let alone spending 4 GCDs on MFI.

I don't want to overstate the differences for a handful of the fights, but I'd suggest you have a look through the top logs to see who is using Insanity and how. Even for non cheese logs, the stronger ranks are disproportionately done with Insanity. However an 'average' (by which I mean no insult merely that they represent the broad level of skill) priest will probably not maximise Insanity as well as say Mindbender because the latter is so easy to fire and forget. Mind Sear is of course stronger with sufficient targets, but the kills of strong groups are smashing him down before he even spawns adds for most phases, so you're barely searing at all even if the aim is to pad.

I'd also note that for progression Insanity provides better on demand sustained damage on priority targets.

Re protectors specifically, skilled use of insanity is close to as easy to weave in as FDCL. I've swapped back and forth between both and found the difference to be within standard deviations. And that's on one of the two fights that you can consider not taking insanity.

The cleave trinket is suboptimal when compared to any other trinket in the instance of the same ilvl, yes. When upgrading though, most people avoid trading it for lfr / flex / normal trinkets "because it sucks" when the intelect proc alone makes the trade worth it, even if cleave won't hit a thing: Multistrike and cleave account for less than 2.5% damage on average; a huge chunk of Haromm / Frenzied Crystal's value comes from the intelect proc, and keeping a flex Haromm instead of a H Frenzied Crystal "because it sucks" is just silly. Even HF UVLS isn't a better option, without even considering the extreme randomness of its benefit.

The cleave trinket is always a worse choice even if a whole difficulty or two lower ilvl than 2 of the 3 trinkets, and it's worse unless a higher level than the third and that is including sim data taking into account it's low cleave damage. I do agree with your example however that keeping a flex haromm instead of a H Cleave would indicate a poor decision.