How hard is to return as shadow priest?

[Tyris Flare]

I...don't just assume it's about the numbers? My priest was created the day the game launched. The question for the thread is: how hard is it to pug as a returning shadow priest?

The answer is: about as hard as any class that isn't considered meta, however the spec is in a pretty good place in terms of power for difficult group content if you can get over that hump. It is, however, one of the weakest specs for solo content.

[Echeyakee]

I mean that's true of almost every class, though. You can't play a fire mage without tons of mastery and 2 on-use trinkets, you can't compete as a warrior or lock without all haste, etc.

Most classes will have the "ideal" setup, sure. And there are several that have somewhat strict requirements, like demonology needing implosion traits, enhancement's harmony, or hpala's glimmer. Not having them generally puts you out of the running, but once you have that, it's a matter of optimizing. Fire is one of the more extreme cases, where you need the mechagon bracers to really push it, on top of blaster traits and lucid dreams major. But even as fire you can still do ok-ish DPS as you gear up.

Shadow just falls apart without the right conditions. You need the haste and crit from gear and corruptions to get long enough VF so that your chorus traits give you insane amounts of crit, so that you create ungodly amounts of apparitions that push your next VF even further, while scaling the apparitions trait beyond what was intended. Apparitions were never a major part of shadow's damage done, residing way below any active spells (except maybe shadowfiend), usually fighting with trinkets and minor essences in total damage done. But now they are a major part, usually in the top 3, and are undisputed top position with 2/3/1 traits.

Shadow goes from underwhelming to godly(ish) once you reach the critical mass of stats, once again proving that balancing VF is too hard for AB. Most other classes will just see a major bump in performance once you get the "prerequisites", and then will scale more linearly as you approach the elusive "BiS singularity".

You can look back through the logs and ranking in early 8.3. People are running the 3/2/1 builds and are still using the usual haste/crit gear, but most people are still not mythic geared and corruptions are rare and random. And shadow's performance is pretty bad, it's not even middle of the pack, it's down with the "reject" specs of pure dps classes (and windwalkers). But as months roll by, people get better gear and corrupted items roll the right bonuses, shadow surges up in performance. Warlocks also had a similar surge, but for them all 3 specs rose dramatically. Most other specs either fell of hard because they did not scale well, like unholy and fury, or remained more or less in the same relative place.

And that is my point. If you're looking to start playing shadow now, you will be stuck playing the under performing version of shadow from early 8.3 progression for a while, as you grind to reach that nebulous "critical mass". And most people will not understand this, they will look at a shadow priest's damage and assume that the player is just bad, despite the class being rather simplistic. Or even because of that. So yeah, it's not the best time to try shadow. Although looking at beta, maybe there won't be a better time to do it in a foreseeable future.