I was going to post this at the wow forums but turns out i cant post anything since my subscription ended 2 days ago and to be honest i'm not sure if i'm going to resubstribe after reading all the changes and feedbacks people are giving regarding Shadow Priests. Personally i dont like these changes and i find it stupid that the class designers are still trying to balance the whole spec around a talent (S2M).
I have been playing Shadow since Burning Crusade and up to this day there are things (from cosmetics to gameplay) that i would like see for Shadow Priests. So, this is a thread about how i would have aproached shadow priests, if i was responsible for the spec. (maybe its better that i'm not )

Ok! First of all, Talents!!!
Right now Blizzard thinks that we have moved away from the old talent tree to a 3 colum-multiple choice system. Before we had an already chosen path to follow, while right now we can costumize our gameplay. Or atleast that was the idea behind it! In reality dps sets what talents we choose, leaving us with little, to no choice. The same thing is happening with gear. Blizzard wants us to choose gear based on ilvl and not based on stats. I have felt this first hand when i started getting some 880+ gear with no haste, thinking that since it has higher ilvl it wont have impact on my dps. Now, i have replaced most of my gear with haste, i even equiped 845 pants (860 previous) and my dps started to rise.

The way i "designed" talents is by having 3 different playstyles that have different stat as their primary. That way you can choose a playstyle and chase the gear with the corresponding stat and when you happen to get higher ilvl gear with a different stat you can always change your talents to suit that specific stat.

Note: 7.1.5 ptr changes doesnt take place. So here are the talents and the 3 different playstyles.
http://imgur.com/a/JOuG7
(Green text= Inscreased/descreased/missing %)
http://imgur.com/lXa9fnL
  • For the Critical Strike option i went for something similar to Dot weaving playstyle we had on WoD. By having Mind spike not remove dots in voidform we keep all the artifact trait benefits.
  • For the Mastery option i wanted a slow but heavy damage dot playstyle . Like a disease or mental illness that is slowly eating you.
  • For the Haste option i wanted a really fast, end fight, high damage, execute playstyle. So i kept Surrender to Madness since some people really enjoy it.

And here are some cosmetic ideas:
Glyph of Mind Spike: Mind Spike is now a Projectile.
Glyph of Voidform: When you enter voidform you take the appearance of a voidwraith.

Artifact appearance cosmetic:
When you have "The Fallen Blade" appearance, Call of the Void summons a Deathglare tentacle instead of a void tentacle.

So, what do you guys think?

Ps: i might add more things in the future