Shadowlands shadow wishlist

[Darth-Piekus]

From a PVE standpoint I want a class that can offer me two types of playstyles. One for single target and one for multi target. For single target I want just like everyone else a class that can have a good damage cooldown and able to go toe to toe with the rest. On aoe I want BOTH of my dots and not only one of them to spread quickly instead of being forced to dot every single creature with Misery. Every other single class seems to be able to do more with half the effort.

From a PVP standpoint I want to see my class being able to not get trained with all the disadvantages of getting silenced your only school of magic resulting in 0 dps. If you intend for the class to get trained I demand crazy damage reduction and the ability to be able to damage back. I do not want protection from another class. I want to be able to fight back alone. Also would it be too much if the Psychic Scream of the Shadowpriest is unbreakable for at least some time by any means? That spell is a joke. Breaks like in half a second if it's not removed by every single fear removal ability. I really miss the 4 second aoe stun Mindbomb that couldn't be dispelled.

[Kynario]

I miss cata shadow,the insanity mecanic has clearly been a huge failure,and it simply isnt as cool as it should be,or as cool as it can be,we saw in early legion what happens if its even sligthy tiped on the op side with surender,now its even worse than in bfa,granted they can change stuff until live to make it feel better,but its just gonna be bandaid fixes

Cataclysm Shadow are you kidding me? That literally killed all the Shadow Priests I personally knew (myself included - Shadow Priest main all the way through BC and WoTLK). Mind Spike was a terrible spell, dare I say.

Go look at Shadow Priest posts during the Cataclysm era... people universally hated what Blizzard did to Shadow Priests then.

[deenman]

Cataclysm Shadow are you kidding me? That literally killed all the Shadow Priests I personally knew (myself included - Shadow Priest main all the way through BC and WoTLK). Mind Spike was a terrible spell, dare I say.

Go look at Shadow Priest posts during the Cataclysm era... people universally hated what Blizzard did to Shadow Priests then.

I played shadow since tbc,wile being a mana battery was cool,not doing any competitive dps started to get annoying,and whats the problem with mind spike?it was a spell you rarerly ever used for singletarget mobs that died in a few seconds,i liked how shadow orbs worked,devouring plague,archangel,also its the holy version as well that made cata for me a better priest expansion

[valky94]

not a spriest main, but what id like to see is, removal of the current voidform, bring back shadow orbs and devouring plague, make voidform a (3 min) CD

[Kynario]

not a spriest main, but what id like to see is, removal of the current voidform, bring back shadow orbs and devouring plague, make voidform a (3 min) CD

Agreed! Well said.

[ttylol]

Devouring Plague should return as a talent, cost like 50 Insanity, and replace Void Eruption/Voidform/Void Bolt when chosen. Being able to opt-out would solve a lot of issues and complaints. Would work best in the final talent row I think, prob replace Dark Ascension since S2M gives instant 100 Insanity in alpha?

[Zka]

1) remove the voidform bullshit
2) ???
3) profit

SP hasn't been fun since LK.

[Kilee25]

Cataclysm Shadow are you kidding me? That literally killed all the Shadow Priests I personally knew (myself included - Shadow Priest main all the way through BC and WoTLK). Mind Spike was a terrible spell, dare I say.

Go look at Shadow Priest posts during the Cataclysm era... people universally hated what Blizzard did to Shadow Priests then.

Having written guides and participated in several expansions, the amount of popularity and activity my guide got during Cataclysm was much higher than in any other expansion, at least in terms of how many sites it was spread across and how much feedback I got on it. I'm fairly certain that cataclysm was the high point for shadowpriests in terms of popularity and percentage of players actively playing the class.

From a personal perspective, that era was the best that the class ever played. If I was forced to just pick one version of shadow, that's the one I'd go with.

[Yvaelle]

I would take early Cata design over any time in BFA or Legion.

That said, I totally agree with the hate toward early Cataclysm. Shadow Orbs were at that point super critical to our spec, but also incredibly hard to manage - as they were a buff not a true resource yet, and also just very random generation mechanics.

Late Cataclysm though I agree with Kilee, while I didn't personally like the Mind Spike DoTweaving rotation, that was I think one of the high points for Shadow by Firelands and Dragon Soul.

Personally I prefer the more fleshed out Shadow Orb systems of MOP/WOD, but late Cataclysm comes right behind them. Late TBC would probably rank higher, but that's a completely different game design we'll never see again in WoW.

[dileria]

I didnt play shadow for a while and im also not that into lore...
BUT
Imo i always found it strange to build up insanity instead of losing sanity. (probably some lore reason here...?)
Let Sanity be the main resource, which refills itself over time (compare it to the rogues energy bar but way slower)
The Insanity Generators become Sanity generators.

Void Eruption refills our Sanity completely and puts us into Voidform.
During Voidform we lose Sanity passivly at an increasing rate and do increased damage (increased haste whatever)
Now we are trying to stay "sane" during voidform as long as we can. If we fail to stay sane and reach 0 Sanity -> Hard Voidform Brexit.
After we leave Voidform we have no Sanity and do our normal rotation to become sane enough to enter voidform again.

Its basicly the same cycle as before, but since we start the fight sane and our sanity comes passivly with time we are less punished for mistakes.

Every fight starts with full sanity, we open with Mind Blast , apply dots , Void Eruption-> Voidform.
Mastery can be changed to modify our sanity generation/costs. (Flat DMG% effects are boring, let Mastery interact with the flow of our rotation)

Our only "ramp up time" is applying dots now.
Downtime doesnt mess with us that hard anymore, since we at least can generate sanity passivly during it.
Getting tunneled in PvP doesnt shutdown us completely since after the Stunlocks / Intterupts at least our sanity bar is pretty much full again and we can start doing damage instantly instead of trying to ramp up again.

In the end it doesnt matter if its sanity or insanity, just give us some passive resource generation and a full resource bar at the start of the fight. gg

Alternatively (this is just wishful thinking):
MindBlast and Voidform have no Cooldown but COST sanity, while the other spells and Mastery are Sanity Generators. (active and passiv generators)
Mindblast is a Singletarget and Voideruption is an AoE Spender.
Void Form is a Cooldown and has 2 Charges. (Voidform lasts XX Seconds give you some flat haste/dmg and mindflay is an instant now which spawns a tentacle instead. The tentacle will channel the mindflay)
Simple Generator Spender Spec.
Its not very "unique" but personally i like pooling resources for burst dmg.

[Yvaelle]

Yea "Insanity" being a resource you accumulate, and then you enter voidform and you try to maintain your ...insanity... as long as possible - BUT YOU CAN'T - and you eventually become...sane again?

There isn't a lore reason, the devs are just dumb.

Story time:
So, at Blizzcon during WOD they announced they wanted to give Spriests a new resource called Insanity. It was just a bullet point on a slide at that time, but I fleshed out what that could mean and sent them a design proposal.

My proposal went like this:

Shadow has two resources, Willpower and Insanity:

Every tick of your DOTs and channels increases your DOT & Channel haste by 1%, maxxing out at 100. This is called Willpower. I was basing this off how cool Shadow felt during the Alysrazor flying fight in Firelands. This became Voidform Haste. Willpower buff lasted 60 seconds, so downtime between pulls or boss roleplay phase transitions didn't affect it.

Additionally, Shadow had a 'heat mechanic', called Insanity. Our most powerful spells inflicted Insanity upon us, which slowly cooled off over time.

To maximize overall DPS Shadow would want to achieve 100 Willpower as quickly as possible, and maintain it for the entire fight.
While simultaneously using our most powerful spells only when we wouldn't 'overheat' our Insanity meter.

Our most powerful spells I pitched were:
- Devouring Despair (Devouring Plague renamed for less Undead-lore relation)
- Mind War (became Void Torrent)
- Shadow Crash (there was a dude in a Cataclysm dungeon that threw them at us and I was jealous, but we got it! but our version kinda sucks...).

Each would inflict you with 50 Insanity, and you could only survive 100 Insanity at a time.

If you ever hit 101+ Insanity, you would trigger Dark Apotheosis - losing control of yourself as you slowly give in to the void powers.
Dark Apotheosis would remove all your DOTs from all targets, and it would reduce your Willpower to 0 for the 10 second duration (massive, unrecoverable DPS loss).
It would also root you in place for 10 seconds, making you extremely vulnerable to mechanics.

However, during Dark Apotheosis, accumulating additional Insanity wouldn't matter, because you are already over 100.
So you could spam your most powerful moves for those 10 seconds. This became Surrender To Madness.
Additionally, 100% of damage done during Dark Apotheosis was a raid-wide smart heal (like another Vampiric Embrace cooldown).

So the idea was, Shadow's gameplay would get progressively faster and faster due to Willpower, and it would also involve figuring our the best use of your most powerful spells to mitigate your Insanity, as a negative resource. However, if an add absolutely had to die or your raid was going to wipe - or if your healer died and you needed the healing desperately - you could intentionally choose to trigger Dark Apotheosis at any time.

This would ruin your DPS overall (losing your Willpower stacks), but you would have a 10 second high burst phase which was also a burst healing phase.

So Voidform Haste is really meant to be called Willpower, and Insanity is meant to be a negative resource. But since they 'simplified' it, to just Insanity, they made Insanity appear to be a a positive resource, which is very confusing.

[Nefarious Tea]

Having written guides and participated in several expansions, the amount of popularity and activity my guide got during Cataclysm was much higher than in any other expansion, at least in terms of how many sites it was spread across and how much feedback I got on it. I'm fairly certain that cataclysm was the high point for shadowpriests in terms of popularity and percentage of players actively playing the class.

From a personal perspective, that era was the best that the class ever played. If I was forced to just pick one version of shadow, that's the one I'd go with.

Correlation does not equal causation. Your Cata guide likely got a ton of hits not because Spriest was popular then, but because the game still had 10 million players when you wrote it towards the beginning of the expansion.

[Venara]

Your design sounds really interesting Yvaelle!

I'd even love just a very simple mechanic instead of Voidform these days personally. Something much along the lines of Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify from Holy Priest. Make Insanity a building resource, then have spenders where one is a ST and the other an AoE ability.

It's bugged me to no end for the longest time that Shadow has such a massive ramp and AoE is so slow that stuff is usually dead by the time you apply dots. Making Insanity a spending resource and having designated ST/AOE buttons would simplify the mess that Shadow currently is and address these issues.

[Yvaelle]

Your design sounds really interesting Yvaelle!

I'd even love just a very simple mechanic instead of Voidform these days personally. Something much along the lines of Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify from Holy Priest. Make Insanity a building resource, then have spenders where one is a ST and the other an AoE ability.

It's bugged me to no end for the longest time that Shadow has such a massive ramp and AoE is so slow that stuff is usually dead by the time you apply dots. Making Insanity a spending resource and having designated ST/AOE buttons would simplify the mess that Shadow currently is and address these issues.

Thanks!

I'd love a simplified Voidform at this point too.

In that case, I'd like to them to make the following Insanity spenders:

- Multidot: Devouring Plague (or Devouring Despair if they want to rename it)
- Single target: Void Torrent
- AOE: Void Eruption, possibly with Dark Void's Shadow Word: Pain spread built in (then delete Dark Void)

Agreed that the long ramps in Shadow absolutely must go, they are unbalanceable.
And that redesigning Shadow to a build/spend resources would make it much easier to design.
Currently since Voidform scales exponentially, they nerf us every single tier - balancing only the Mythic/BIS gear, and leaving every other Spriest under-tuned.

[Venara]

Yep, that's very much along the lines of what I was thinking. Perhaps even Void Bolt as the Single Target spender so we don't have another channel. I loved Void Torrent but I feel like having a quick one-press spender and being able to move back into Mind Flay/Blast might flow better. You could end up wasting MB/SW:V charges if you had a lengthy channel.

I think we all agree that the "insane" (ha!) ramp really needs to go though. It's counter-productive virtually everywhere. The only time it feels somewhat okay is a purley singletarget boss like Sha'dhar and even then it feels awful that you do no real damage for the first minute of the fight and have to catch up in the meters from far behind. And even on what are essentially single target bosses, like Wrathion or Skitra, it feels really bad when your ramp is interrupted prematurely because the boss does a phase change and your Voidform stacks just evaporate and you have to start from scratch. Pardon my french but it's just a retarded mechanic at this point when there are so many bosses where you are severely punished in DPS for having this long of a ramp up time.

I do too agree that frequent changes to keep the exponential nature of Voidform and gear scaling under control also feels bad. If you need to adjust it this often, it can't be that great a mechanic, can it? Plus, as you said, if you're not at the top end of the gearing curve, or close to it, it's gonna suck to be you until you get there.

At this point, we can only hope that major changes are still to come as that dev hinted at during the recent interview where they specifically asked about Shadow. He didn't quite say what's to come other than that Shadow is very much on their radar. It's early enough that a rework may be possible yet but, call me a pessimist, I think it's unlikely given that they've already put some effort into their concept for the "new" shadow with Void Bolt castable during MF, SW:D returning and the S2M change. At best, I think we might see some additional talent changes like finally making SW:V baseline as it should've been ever since the community identified that Shadow is pretty much unplayable without it.

Who knows, maybe they'll even scrap S2M already. The new design is just as awful as all they other iterations of it. I'm not sure how this talent keeps making the pass when nobody ever picks it and the design is still as flawed as it was day one.

[Kilee25]

Correlation does not equal causation. Your Cata guide likely got a ton of hits not because Spriest was popular then, but because the game still had 10 million players when you wrote it towards the beginning of the expansion.

Fair point, although I think it's still likely that this was a high point for popularity with the class in relation to the distribution of players playing ranged classes. Shadowpriests were qutie popular in Cata compared to many other expansions in terms of raid representation and also the amount of respect they got in raids. I feel that in later expansions, they began a slow decline that they just never really recovered from. The last two expansions I played, shadow was widely regarded as a bit of a trash spec, and it was difficult to prove my worth in pick-up groups. This is a stark difference from Cata where I felt welcome and desired in groups. Perhaps perception has changed in Legion and BFA, but just before I quit playing in WoD, shadow was in a pretty all time low. Once a week or more I had some variation of a whisper saying something like, "Wow I thought shadowpriets totally sucked. You aren't too bad."

Our reputation was pretty good coming out of of Cata, comparatively. That to me is a high point.

Also, my opinion still stands that I love the way the class played in that expansion, and it's the version that I would play if I could.

I agree that TBC was probably better, but I'm no longer "dreaming" that that sort of play style will ever make a comeback... so I don't really want to talk about it too much. But yes of course I love TBC as well.

[Nefarious Tea]

Fair point, although I think it's still likely that this was a high point for popularity with the class in relation to the distribution of players playing ranged classes. Shadowpriests were qutie popular in Cata compared to many other expansions in terms of raid representation and also the amount of respect they got in raids. I feel that in later expansions, they began a slow decline that they just never really recovered from. The last two expansions I played, shadow was widely regarded as a bit of a trash spec, and it was difficult to prove my worth in pick-up groups. This is a stark difference from Cata where I felt welcome and desired in groups. Perhaps perception has changed in Legion and BFA, but just before I quit playing in WoD, shadow was in a pretty all time low. Once a week or more I had some variation of a whisper saying something like, "Wow I thought shadowpriets totally sucked. You aren't too bad."

Our reputation was pretty good coming out of of Cata, comparatively. That to me is a high point.

Also, my opinion still stands that I love the way the class played in that expansion, and it's the version that I would play if I could.

I agree that TBC was probably better, but I'm no longer "dreaming" that that sort of play style will ever make a comeback... so I don't really want to talk about it too much. But yes of course I love TBC as well.

Shadow also likely gained popularity because the Vanilla/BC/Wotlk-era disdain as "mana batteries" with damage secondary began to wane as blizzard began to change healer and caster DPS mechanics in Cata, making that role less necessary.

SPriests, I must say, always have been a very polarizing spec though, much like Survival hunters post-Legion: you either love them or you hate them. (And I love both!) I loved Spriest from BC all the way to WoD, and I LOVED it all the more when they made it old-god themed, because I've always loved the H.P> Lovecraft stories that blizzard basically plagiarized. Even if said author's blatant racism is a bit consternating.

And I absolutely ADORE <3 @Yvaelle's spec redesign concept, because it makes the spec all the more mechanically and thematically complementary.

[Eapoe]

Yea "Insanity" being a resource you accumulate, and then you enter voidform and you try to maintain your ...insanity... as long as possible - BUT YOU CAN'T - and you eventually become...sane again?

There isn't a lore reason, the devs are just dumb.

Actually it makes sense if you just take a step to think back on it.
SPriests use shadow magic, walking a line between staying sane or going insane. They temporarily succumb to it to get a major power boost and then fight to control it without going overboard. When it ends and they become sane again it’s basically regain yourself sanity or die/stay insane for ever. Isn’t there even a name for the talent “surrender to the void?”
It actually makes a surprising amount of sense when given some thought.

[Daedius]

The removal of Voidform+Insanity.

One can only dream...

[Yvaelle]

Actually it makes sense if you just take a step to think back on it.

It doesn't.

SPriests use shadow magic, walking a line between staying sane or going insane.

Shadow magic is different than Void magic. Void magic is Shadow magic corrupted by the old gods, it is their influence that drives you insane.
All the old gods are dead now. N'zoth was the last and we just killed him. And Blizzard confirmed he was the last, and that he is now dead.

They temporarily succumb to it to get a major power boost and then fight to control it without going overboard.

This implies that being insane is beneficial (it's not), a choice (it's not), and temporary (it's not).
You also don't fight to control it, you fight to... continue being insane... but you become sane anyways.

When it ends and they become sane again it’s basically regain yourself sanity or die/stay insane for ever. Isn’t there even a name for the talent “surrender to the void?”

So we choose to become insane, and then while insane, we choose to no longer be insane? This is not at all how insanity works.

It actually makes a surprising amount of sense when given some thought.

Hopefully you see this isn't the case.