Thread: [Priest] State of Shadow - 4.1.0

Hoookaaaay. Old thread here.
So what's come up for Shadow, after the rollercoaster knee jerk nerf buried in hotfixes?

• Hymn of Hope and Divine Hymn innately have 100% spellpushback protection. Nothing like dropping shadowform to help on a recovery and losing half your spell.
• Dispel Magic no longer dispels friendly targets, only yourself and enemies. It also only removes one effect from an enemy target, down from two. A pretty consequential PvP nerf.

And because they were dumb and forgot the effect of a hotfix:

• Mind Sear's damage has been doubled

Is there anything else I'm missing? As usual, what's your take?

Originally Posted by Kelesti

Hoookaaaay. Old thread here.
So what's come up for Shadow, after the rollercoaster knee jerk nerf buried in hotfixes?

• Hymn of Hope and Divine Hymn innately have 100% spellpushback protection. Nothing like dropping shadowform to help on a recovery and losing half your spell.
• Dispel Magic no longer dispels friendly targets, only yourself and enemies. It also only removes one effect from an enemy target, down from two. A pretty consequential PvP nerf.

And because they were dumb and forgot the effect of a hotfix:

• Mind Sear's damage has been doubled

Is there anything else I'm missing? As usual, what's your take?

So dispel turned into a better purge? Seems to be fine if you're not shadow. The buff to hymns were good, as well as mind sear. Can't really complain.

"If you're not Shadow" is the key point. Although, to be fair, being the only DPS to effectively cancel out most CCs on your healer was pretty imbalanced.

Originally Posted by Kelesti

"If you're not Shadow" is the key point. Although, to be fair, being the only DPS to effectively cancel out most CCs on your healer was pretty imbalanced.

But if you look at other dispels in the game for non-healers its not balanced either. Come 4.1 priests will be the only class that will drop them out of their spec's talented form to remove stuff off friendly targets. Feral druids don't spec into being a cat or bear and are the only ones that are in the same boat. Balance druids can remove poisons and curses while in moonkin form. All shaman & paladins don't have to worry about spending mana on dispells as they have no form to drop out of when they dispel. Its utter bull that they made shadow priests drop shadow form to remove disease but it was understandable while now the only thing we can remove off other people will make us lose our 15% mitigation and spend mana to go back into form just to dps. That is a huge pvp nerf since we already have horrible mana issues in pvp. I still don't agree with taking away from priests a spell that we have had since release and making it so that only the healers can do it. Priests were always the offensive dispellers and that portion has been brought in line with other offensive dispellers only to have us get nerfed too.

I don't really mind the fact that we will need to use Mass Dispel now to dispel friendly targets, but it would be quite nice if they merged Cure Disease and Dispel Magic into a single spell now like they have done with the other healers dispels.

Originally Posted by Abandon

I don't really mind the fact that we will need to use Mass Dispel now to dispel friendly targets, but it would be quite nice if they merged Cure Disease and Dispel Magic into a single spell now like they have done with the other healers dispels.

Because we are "hybrids"

Now joking aside I see no problem with this since it seems Priests are the only class going oom from dispel spamming atm, even more shadow then the other 2 spec.

To be honest, the pvp nerfs are a little irritating, however. Shadow is still in a good place PvE wise and assuming they haven't just thrown an arbitrary number at the mind sear buff it looks like that deficiency might have finally been fixed also. Seems pretty even handed so far.

Has anybody been on the PTR and tested out Mass Dispel as shadow and seen if it actually dispels friendly targets or just offensive dispelling?

Originally Posted by gaymer77

Its utter bull that they made shadow priests drop shadow form to remove disease but it was understandable while now the only thing we can remove off other people will make us lose our 15% mitigation and spend mana to go back into form just to dps. That is a huge pvp nerf since we already have horrible mana issues in pvp.

Bring it up with the Dev's, now that Dispel Magic can't be cast on allies it makes sense to put Cure Disease as "castable in Shadowform".

I still don't agree with taking away from priests a spell that we have had since release and making it so that only the healers can do it. Priests were always the offensive dispellers and that portion has been brought in line with other offensive dispellers only to have us get nerfed too.

Priests still are the offensive dispellers. It just means Shadow isn't completely imbalanced around laughing your way through people trying to CC your healer.

Well with Mind Sear being buffed, would we be able to effectively use it on fights like Magmaw? I know some people DOT the adds or just Mind Spike them but with current MS damage you lose DPS.

Originally Posted by TourettesHeals

Well with Mind Sear being buffed, would we be able to effectively use it on fights like Magmaw? I know some people DOT the adds or just Mind Spike them but with current MS damage you lose DPS.

You lose DPS, but you make sure they die.

Which was the original point of nerfing all the AoEs going into Cataclysm, making the choice of what to kill instead of "what brings me the most dps"

They unfortunately didn't nerf Howling Blast/Serpent Spread, or Demonology/Starfall, so content was balanced around having those which unfortunately butchered the design, and now are having to buff to compensate.

Originally Posted by Kelesti

Priests still are the offensive dispellers. It just means Shadow isn't completely imbalanced around laughing your way through people trying to CC your healer.

The problem is this upcoming nerf based on pvp has major implications in pve with not being able to dispel silences, sheeps (and versions of it), charms, dots, and debuffs off friendly targets in pve forcing your healers to do double duty with dispels in pve. Right now I help on dispels whenever I can because I know healers sometimes can't spend that extra time dispelling everyone and I've always been that way. With the upcoming nerf (again a nerf that comes from pvp that has major implications for pve) us shadow priests can only dispel ourself leaving the healers on fulltime dispel duty...including on themself when they are silenced or sheeped or charmed.

With the exception of Bastion trash, surely, you're talking 5-mans, right? In which case bo group has any guarantee of having a Shadow Priest, so it's already balanced around healers doing as you put it "double-duty".

It's not really having PvE implications to an extent that it really will have an effect on content. Raid based silences/charms on bosses were already dispel immune, so this again is a Pvp nerf first an foremost, and correcting the imbalance caused by that.

Although your comment on a healer having to dispel off themselves through those effects was kind of humorous

Well the point of the last part of my post was the how idiotic it is that in pve only healers can dispel the stuff that is on them causing the silences & charms & sheeps. I agree fully that the nerf is a pvp nerf but they need to look at how it affects pve. Yes trash and 5 mans is still pve content. I'd rather not pay a repair bill because a healer was unable to heal people because the healer had something on them that could only be removed by another healer that any priest was able to remove prior to 4.1

Yet if they had that trouble without a shadowpriest, it meant something wrong was going on. If you wiped, either your healer sucked or everyone else did. Your "inconvenience" of a repair bill really is that, an inconvenience.

"Content" (5 mans) balanced without needing a Shadow Priest to dispel. In raid trash, you have other healers. Surprising, I know. But if your other healers aren't dispelling, then maybe look at what they're doing to cause a wipe: ignoring debuffs to meter whore, afk through trash, etc.

But it's not having these "serious pve implications" unless your groups are terrible anyways.

Hell, if it's pugs, half the time you made them waste the mana on a dispel anyways.

They don't get started as soon as something's on the PTR. They go roughly halfway through PTR, once enough changes have gone out to warrant a new thread, instead of "well in the PTR, <spec> has X" in a 4.0.6 discussion.

Keeping the info together in one place is generally one of the best ways for a newcomer to get involved in our discussions.

And to be fair, Mind Sear being the new hotness did make it to live. The fact that Shadow Power was hotfixed wouldn't have changed the validity of that statement if I waited for the patch or not.

Originally Posted by Palebane

This is how I feel as well. As someone has already said, priests have had dispel since the game was released. People are just now starting to complain about it? The devs are just now starting to listen to it? I don't buy it and I don't understand. It's kind of imbalanced in arena? Serious business that.

Paladins have had Cleanse since the beginning too. They had the ability to remove magic abilities in general taken away unless they're spec'd into it deep in the Holy Tree.

Shaman had Poison/Disease Cleansing Totems from the beginning. Not only did they have those totems taken away, but the ability to remove those debuffs altogether.

The point was making sure healers had a balance of what debuffs (or opposing buffs) they could take away, and making sure healers are the only ones to bring for Dispel.