[Shadow] Is it safe to assume we will be garbage for mythic+ for the entire expansion

[britishbubba]

I mean, they were running LoTV in a dungeon where you can get good S2M value on two bosses (first and ash'golem, and even cordana if you start building stacks while she's in the air). Not surprising that their boss damage was low.

[snaxattax]

Overall DPS means very little, even in a dungeon

in a 5man with coherent strategy, overall damage done is an *extremely* good marker of group value, unless you bring some special mechanic (cc, or some sort of pull/teleport tool that let you cheese something) or buff (nowadays, just bloodlust).

or are you saying that the aoe damage dealt is 'pad'? because that's the only scenario in which overall damage done becomes meaningless.

[Djriff]

in a 5man with coherent strategy, overall damage done is an *extremely* good marker of group value, unless you bring some special mechanic (cc, or some sort of pull/teleport tool that let you cheese something) or buff (nowadays, just bloodlust).

or are you saying that the aoe damage dealt is 'pad'? because that's the only scenario in which overall damage done becomes meaningless.

Sure, but if you want to blindly look at just overall damage and not look at specific stuff, that's not the correct route to take.

[Jullyx]

in a 5man with coherent strategy, overall damage done is an *extremely* good marker of group value, unless you bring some special mechanic (cc, or some sort of pull/teleport tool that let you cheese something) or buff (nowadays, just bloodlust).

or are you saying that the aoe damage dealt is 'pad'? because that's the only scenario in which overall damage done becomes meaningless.

I agree in general. The problem with overall damage (as you kind of mention) is cleave damage on low health targets. Like in the second pack in BRH, the damage on the big guy weighs so much more in terms of group value, as the others will die by the time he is dead anyway.

Also, it's no problem for a demon hunter/fire mage to do 5-10M dps burst on the packs between the miniboss and first boss in Vault, while we mind sear for 4-500k. This damage is pretty much completely arbitrary.

[Ygorl]

Talented Mind Control is also pretty nice. 30s of unbreakable CC that actually helps your DPS!

[Jullyx]

Talented Mind Control is also pretty nice. 30s of unbreakable CC that actually helps your DPS!

Its nice indeed, but you need a very specific comp to make it better than Mind Bomb.

[Deleted]

Sure, but if you want to blindly look at just overall damage and not look at specific stuff, that's not the correct route to take.

And that's what all of these groups are - organized with good players, which makes your comment about overall damage completely irrelevant.

I see loads of talking and no info backing this up. As I said I'm 99 percentile player and yet I struggle to keep up with every class by loads on speed runs(talking about comparing myself to other 99 percentile players, not your garbage puggers). I am willing to back this up with logs - let me see logs of people pulling 350k overall damage, or vastly topping boss meters.

[Deleted]

Not saying we are amazing in mythic+, but with Bolstering affix (on EU, currently) and +5 level, dungeons start playing to our strengths and we are doing much better than without that specific modifier.

[snaxattax]

And that's what all of these groups are - organized with good players, which makes your comment about overall damage completely irrelevant.

I see loads of talking and no info backing this up. As I said I'm 99 percentile player and yet I struggle to keep up with every class by loads on speed runs(talking about comparing myself to other 99 percentile players, not your garbage puggers). I am willing to back this up with logs - let me see logs of people pulling 350k overall damage, or vastly topping boss meters.

no, dude, you're focusing on numbers, this is about flavor. it's the flavor of scrubs that get benched in casual guilds thinking they have some magic power that makes shadow viable when they play with skilled players of the competitive specs (fire, enh, marks, DH, whatever).

like, yes, if you compare shadow to people with 800ms brain lag then shadow is competitive. but if you try to 'go hard' with people from your raid team playing competitive specs in 5mans you feel like a fucking boatanchor, and it's been this way since they overnerfed mindsear and our dots in mop.

[The Emperor]

Hey

I'd like to start yet another discussion about mythic+ and our viability for 2-3 chest speed runs. First of all, before you say its a learn to play issue I would like to state that I am an ilv 857 shadow priest with average percentile of 98% across all EN bosses, being world ~80-120 on xavius & dragons heroic(can provide logs). I am a good player and I understand how the class works.

My issue is that we are the worst dps class for mythic+. Sure we are capable of finishing within the timer on all keystone difficulties but when it comes to 2 or even 3 chests - really really really hard, to the point where nobody that understands the game will take us. For those that don't know yet, 3 chest runs basically gives you triple loot at the end of the dungeon, as opposed to 1 chest. This is huge, instead of running dungeon 3 times you only run it once with amazing DPS and bam. Other classes that struggle for mythic+ always have another good dps spec, such as elemental shamans having the choice to go enha. Nothing for shadow, unless you want to heal. That raises another question, is shadow made bad for dungeons on purpose so we have more healers? I have had to switch to holy recently to get those +3 runs on mythic6, maybe this is the developers goal?

To me it is clear that mythic+ endgame will turn into "keystone +10, 3 chest run" in a couple of months from now, and in this world shadow priests sadly will have no place. I've heard the common argument - in higher level mythics they have more hp and live longer so our dots will tick, well yes that is true however then DHs + Fire mages and all other good specs will start reaching up to 2-3 million dps on 5-6 mobs, something we can never ever imagine to reach. The problem is we have no aoe burst and I can't see this being changed in major patches, I believe the "RNG" legendary ring changes little too. Is it fair to assume that we will be poop in mythic+ speed runs for the entire expansion?

I myself play a warlock, and I think you priests pretty much deserve that, for being one of the top ST damagers, like 100k dps ahead of us on many-many fights, you may think its unjustified, you may want to excel at everything, but that's just not going to happen.

I have seen my share of shadow priests in mythics +6-7, and while it is true that they have problem speeding up on aoe packs, I doubt that most of mythic group's leaders would just turn you down, because of your perfomance in certain aspects

And before you decide to bring up the learn to play issue, I can assure you, that I'm in the higher league as well, so you should concentrate more on ways to maximize your average aoe perfomance, than play the "unjustified" card.

[Deleted]

I myself play a warlock, and I think you priests pretty much deserve that, for being one of the top ST damagers, like 100k dps ahead of us on many-many fights, you may think its unjustified, you may want to excel at everything, but that's just not going to happen.

I have seen my share of shadow priests in mythics +6-7, and while it is true that they have problem speeding up on aoe packs, I doubt that most of mythic group's leaders would just turn you down, because of your perfomance in certain aspects

And before you decide to bring up the learn to play issue, I can assure you, that I'm in the higher league as well, so you should concentrate more on ways to maximize your average aoe perfomance, than play the "unjustified" card.

Then explain to me, why are there specs that excel at mythic+, aoe, cleave and single target? Talking about mages, shamans, hunters, rogues etc. If you look at EN we are hardly that strong, first on xavius because for some stupid reason they allow us to use s2m twice and dragons because obv we can multi dot - other than that we ain't top dogs on other bosses - even if we are that does not justify us being garbage for mythic+ when other specs are amazing at everything. About concetrating on ways to maximize our average "aoe" perfromance. There are no ways, ive learned the class and I'm doing everything I can do and still feel useless in mythic+.

[Deleted]

We're for sure not top tier but shadow is stronger then people give it credit for , for lower speed runs generally 1 class with burst aoe is more then enough to carry on low hp mobs while you carry on bosses/high hp targets. Play to your strengths, let your partners carry your weaknesses and you'll do more then fine. We have among the very best cleave/single target if played properly and 0 aoe but like I've said, let your other dps partner worry about that and you'll generally be fine.

[Jullyx]

And that's what all of these groups are - organized with good players, which makes your comment about overall damage completely irrelevant.

I see loads of talking and no info backing this up. As I said I'm 99 percentile player and yet I struggle to keep up with every class by loads on speed runs(talking about comparing myself to other 99 percentile players, not your garbage puggers). I am willing to back this up with logs - let me see logs of people pulling 350k overall damage, or vastly topping boss meters.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...tj8fv#fight=11
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/gZp1XqCyzA3k4Nf9#

edit: just realised 2nd link is broken. cut off half way through, but w/e. Warcraftlogs was really buggy yesterday.

1) I don't nit pick logs. I started logging when I started doing dungeons and turned it off when I was done. If I perform poorly, like I did in NL (first one), I still keep the log.
2) I couldn't do as much on bosses as normal because we were boosting and bosses died super slow. In main group I usually do 500k+/- 30k on bosses with hero. I never go S2M in dungeons other than CoS.

If you think all of these suck I can get better ones with main group next week.
Also, I'm not saying that shadow is the best class you can bring to mythic+, but we're probably the second best caster.

[Warlen]

Sure, but if you want to blindly look at just overall damage and not look at specific stuff, that's not the correct route to take.

What “specific stuff” are you speaking of? If you’re talking about “Current Damage” from pull to pull, instead of “Total Damage” for the entire dungeon, then I’d have to strongly disagree. Looking at Total Damage for the entire dungeon is a pretty solid indicator of how well SPriests do in Dungeons. However, everyone must keep in mind that the Total Damage per dungeon is much more complex and cannot simply be put as “Shadow Priests are garbage for Mythic+”.
The key to Mythic+ is clear time. And Total Damage is one of the directly correlated reasons of your group’s clear time (read: Pull order, path, pull size + cc combinations, where or if your group decides to invis pot, etc). And while Total Damage is a really big indicator of performance of a spec, people must remember that SPriests have a limited kit in terms of burst AOE. If you’re strictly farming Mythic 2-5 for +3 chests, then yes, SPriests are quite a bit weaker than the median DPS spec.
With the recent change to AP drops, I would imagine Blizzard’s approach is to try to make changes to the game to encourage higher level Mythic+ farming. Which is a good thing for SPriests, since the primary reason of why we cannot keep up at the higher end is because our damage is completely back-loaded. So competing with other specs that front-load their damage and have the mobs killed before our damage kicks in, or for front-loaded damage to drop off, it’s natural that we cannot compete in those scenarios.

[Djriff]

That's actually exactly what I meant. If people are just looking at overall damage and saying oh shadow sucks without looking at pull order, path, etc etc then they'll get a lot of very skewed results and jump to conclusions.

[GT4]

Can people stop talking about single target being shadow's strength? Once again, look at the log that was supposedly posted to support SP and you can actually see that the SP wasn't even highest damage on any of the bosses. In fact, if you look at all bosses combined, he was behind the other 2 DPS and only ahead of the tank for bosses only and actually behind the tank for trash. This is also consistent with pretty much all 10+ SP logs I've seen (and my own experience) and also logical given that S2M is extremely impractical in Mythic+ (you lose at least 5 seconds on the timer from dying + ~7 seconds from rezzing + all stacks of void form and buff food for the upcoming trash + 10 min CD if something goes wrong) and SP single target DPS is pretty average outside of S2M (if you have good gear, below average otherwise).

It's like you're intentionally ignoring that fact and instead decided to talk about how overall damage doesn't mean anything because it's easier to argue for even though it's ultimately irrelevant to the topic.

In the end, it seems like a lot of people just cannot accept that SP is worse than a lot of other classes even in higher Mythic+ and going from low Mythic+ to high Mythic+ merely moves SPs from "absolutely terrible" to "one of the worst but not miles behind".

This isn't only about the lack of overall DPS either but at higher Mythic+ other factors also play a big role. Among other shortcomings, we're looking at a general lack of burst damage, a long cooldown on the interrupt, negligible utility and sub-par defensive cooldowns.

E.g. when doing Arcway+10 as on EU last week (Raging/Necrotic/Fortified), having enough low CD interrupts helps immensely with forgotten spirits. Having burst damage helps immensely with dreadborne seers which deal tons of group damage at >30% and completely destroy anybody without a defensive cooldown <30%. In addition to that, a lot of dungeons in general have small enemies you really want to burst down quickly because they apply debuffs (all of them do when you have necrotic) or do a lot of damage. Lastly, having good defensive cooldowns that are frequently available and don't cut into your DPS are also really useful to survive random oneshots (e.g. nightmare bolt on xavius shade) and lower required healing in general. Warlocks, for example, have way higher passive healing with demon skin compared to vampiric touch as well as way stronger defensive cooldowns with dark pact/unending resolve compared to dispersion - vampiric embrace is honestly not worth counting here because it doesn't help against oneshots, has a 3 minutes cooldown and even the healing it provides is only significant if the SP is currently at a high DPS point in the rotation.

[snaxattax]

yeah well maybe if the tank put his pants on his head before pulling the boss shadow would magically do 30% more damage.

you just can't get to these conclusions without making assumptions about pull order.