Shadow BFA Datamining

[Baelic]

WTB - Old Version of Vampiric Embrace (Passive, heals a small amount) and Mana Battery mechanics.

[zito]

lol wtf they switched SWD and TOF

literally what the fuck are they doing, such a change shouldn't even be tested because it's so out-ragingly stupid having SWD compete against an aoe and spirits and ToF is still the dominating talent of row 3

like what the actual fuck. If they insist on keeping TOF it should be competing with the OTHER boring, unimaginative talent fortress of the mind. I thought the whole reason why they changed the talent trees to this was to cut out the +% talents so why the fuck are they still here.

- - - Updated - - -

It should actually be SWD, TOF and FotM in one row. You keep the execute phase talents together (eventhough SWD shouldn't be a fucking talent) and then FoTM because nobody will pick it anyway

[Relapses]

lol wtf they switched SWD and TOF

literally what the fuck are they doing, such a change shouldn't even be tested because it's so out-ragingly stupid having SWD compete against an aoe and spirits and ToF is still the dominating talent of row 3

like what the actual fuck. If they insist on keeping TOF it should be competing with the OTHER boring, unimaginative talent fortress of the mind. I thought the whole reason why they changed the talent trees to this was to cut out the +% talents so why the fuck are they still here.

- - - Updated - - -

It should actually be SWD, TOF and FotM in one row. You keep the execute phase talents together (eventhough SWD shouldn't be a fucking talent) and then FoTM because nobody will pick it anyway

Spoiler: They're actually fucking idiots.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

Not gonna lie but the lazy caster in me kind of hates what will be competing with Misery.

[RsinRC]

2 things

1) New Mastery: Madness Increases the damage of your Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Void, Mind Flay, Void Eruption, and Void Bolt by [ 140% of Spell Power ]%. Priest - Shadow Spec.

Mastery>haste?

2) The new Warlock Drain Life spell animation is so badass. I look at our updated mindflay and ask, why?

[zito]

Wht even is the point of mastery now. It's basically just a better versatility. It's so boring and un imaginative

[davesignal]

Wht even is the point of mastery now. It's basically just a better versatility. It's so boring and un imaginative

Yeah, that is not terribly compelling. Hopefully it changes to something else.. shit, even if Blizzard just made it scale with the target's HP, that would be more interesting.

Hey, actually, I just had a brilliant idea: make Twist of Fate the Shadow mastery. Have the bonus increase based on your mastery level.

[Lulbalance]

Hmm... this looks O/A like they made the spec worse already.. somehow. Might have to play lock for another xpac

[Ophenia]

Wht even is the point of mastery now. It's basically just a better versatility. It's so boring and un imaginative

Mastery was always the laziest stat in the universe, but now, I don't think they can do worse than that.
That seems so random.
We're one step away from the "Boosts all Shadow damage by xx%", which would make more sense than this "80% of your spells are randomly boosted. Not Mind Blast or any talent though, go fuck yourself".

[zito]

Mastery was always the laziest stat in the universe, but now, I don't think they can do worse than that.
That seems so random.
We're one step away from the "Boosts all Shadow damage by xx%", which would make more sense than this "80% of your spells are randomly boosted. Not Mind Blast or any talent though, go fuck yourself".

It's just so lazy. Like everything they've done to shadow has 1 word that describes everything. Lazy. Like swd being a talent, they didn't even change it in any way it was just a straight rip from baseline into talent and then all the lazy %increase talents that shouldn't exist

[Kaesebrezen]

It's just so lazy. Like everything they've done to shadow has 1 word that describes everything. Lazy. Like swd being a talent, they didn't even change it in any way it was just a straight rip from baseline into talent and then all the lazy %increase talents that shouldn't exist

Lazy, and showing close to zero plan on what shadow actually does.

All spells aside of Shadowy Apparitions and Mind Sear are on it now. Single-Target the new Mastery is well above 90% of all damage done. On spread council fights as well. Only when you Mind Sear it's not. Yet at the same time, having Mind Flay, but not Mind Sear, on the Mastery is just equally bad. The more Mastery you have, the shittier your AoE spell is. Next are all talents excluding SW:V, which also get worse the more mastery you have.

It's lazy, and shows whoever did that change has absolutely zero knowledge of shadow priests.

[worcester]

You all are expecting too much. This mastery might be uninteresting but is necessary. This is because pushing either only a ST or cleave mastery always leads to problems (such as MS-MB of WoD; and now currently cleave - already nerfed - and weak in ST).

I am all for interesting mastery like increased insanity gain (would need rework of void form system), or a full on shadowy apparition mastery, or a reverse Deep Healing (i.e. Twist of Fate) mastery but the reality is we need a simple mastery that works in any content for a well rounded spec.

Raid is not the only consideration for balance with m+ becoming a thing. I would rather have shadow be boring as fuck but at least usable in m+ and ST before being interesting and worthless. It's not like our current mastery is innovative and most specs have +% mastery and do just fine.

[Ophenia]

You all are expecting too much. This mastery might be uninteresting but is necessary. This is because pushing either only a ST or cleave mastery always leads to problems (such as MS-MB of WoD; and now currently cleave - already nerfed - and weak in ST).

I am all for interesting mastery like increased insanity gain (would need rework of void form system), or a full on shadowy apparition mastery, or a reverse Deep Healing (i.e. Twist of Fate) mastery but the reality is we need a simple mastery that works in any content for a well rounded spec.

Raid is not the only consideration for balance with m+ becoming a thing. I would rather have shadow be boring as fuck but at least usable in m+ and ST before being interesting and worthless. It's not like our current mastery is innovative and most specs have +% mastery and do just fine.

The problem is that, if Mastery increases all our damage by a flat xx%, just add xx% to all our spells and remove this useless stat ? It is becoming the same for all classes, flat damage increase, utterly boring.
Multistrike was more interesting than this bullshit.

Mastery could've been so much more than that.
- % chance that your insanity-generating spells generates 50% more insanity
- Insanity decay while in Voidform reduced by xx% (4pT20)
- % chance that each tick of SWP/VT generates 2-3 insanity (that would reduce a little bit the necessity to pick Auspicious Spirit in multidotting situations)
- Number of Voidform stacks you'll start with each time you enter Voidform (like Shahraz leggo)
- Why not including Torment of the Weak in our Mastery ? xx% chances on VoidBolt/MindBlast to apply Torment of the Weak on the target, stacking up to 3 times ??

Anything that isn't a flat % dmg on all your spells is better than the current design proposal. At least the Legion's design emphasizes your DoTs, that's still boring but at least you can chose to buff them or not.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

lol wtf they switched SWD and TOF

literally what the fuck are they doing, such a change shouldn't even be tested because it's so out-ragingly stupid having SWD compete against an aoe and spirits and ToF is still the dominating talent of row 3

like what the actual fuck. If they insist on keeping TOF it should be competing with the OTHER boring, unimaginative talent fortress of the mind. I thought the whole reason why they changed the talent trees to this was to cut out the +% talents so why the fuck are they still here.

- - - Updated - - -

It should actually be SWD, TOF and FotM in one row. You keep the execute phase talents together (eventhough SWD shouldn't be a fucking talent) and then FoTM because nobody will pick it anyway

Might be that they're trying it on the principle that you cast Death a lot against many low-health adds, meaning it may result in more meaningful damage in a fight with constant add waves (an aoe fight) than on a straight up big sack of health, since you can use it throughout that sort of fight rather than for the last 2 minutes. It gives you a rotational choice to essentially tunnel boss damage if your raid gets more out of that (like if you have 3 ele shamans or something) ad just use the adds for insanity gen.

Not saying they're right necessarily, or that Death as a talent is a good choice, just trying to rationalise their thought process.

[Deleted]

Might be that they're trying it on the principle that you cast Death a lot against many low-health adds, meaning it may result in more meaningful damage in a fight with constant add waves (an aoe fight) than on a straight up big sack of health, since you can use it throughout that sort of fight rather than for the last 2 minutes. It gives you a rotational choice to essentially tunnel boss damage if your raid gets more out of that (like if you have 3 ele shamans or something) ad just use the adds for insanity gen.

Not saying they're right necessarily, or that Death as a talent is a good choice, just trying to rationalise their thought process.

Death really isn't suited for that kind of application though. Not with 2 charges on a 9s base cooldown and with its effects on a single target. Compared to classes with the toolkit to deal with large amounts of low-health trash, you're not even going to register

[Niwes]

This is all a butthole of a mess, too many compromises and not enough genuine thought have gone into SPs lately.

yep. as i said 2 pages ago, if they really wanna fix that class, they should stop fixing endless around the base problem to come up with the next „add x, change x, change x, nerf x, buff x, nerf x, delete x, add y, change y, change y, nerf y...“.

instead they should sit down, think about how and what niches SP should cater to, how they can stay agile and how it fits encounter design. and this means NOT catering to niches, that make that class literally unable to even be mediocre on all other niches! after that, design a solid class base for that from the ground up. then add a completey new class mechanic on top of it, that fits that goal (ofc this could be near what we have, and ofc this could include builder/spender pattern, it must be just done clean). after that, they can „paint“ it, with the actual resources, spells and styles.

even a retarded ape could realize that no other class has that much black/white problems. no other class is, dependent on encounter design, such overpowered in specific situation 1, while that absurdly underpowered in specific situation 2. regardless if it is S2M (EN totally OP, now useless 90%+), or void form, or aoe... no other class scales to overall content that spiky, class mechanic wise, like SP. not realizing that this is the classes base problem, looking how they solved that at all other classes, and fix it at the base of the classes design, is just pathetic.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Death really isn't suited for that kind of application though. Not with 2 charges on a 9s base cooldown and with its effects on a single target. Compared to classes with the toolkit to deal with large amounts of low-health trash, you're not even going to register

True, but the other options are less likely to register also, so you focus your damage where you can make it count, while also taking the benefits that you can from the dying adds that are being burst down.

[worcester]

The problem is that, if Mastery increases all our damage by a flat xx%, just add xx% to all our spells and remove this useless stat ? It is becoming the same for all classes, flat damage increase, utterly boring.
Multistrike was more interesting than this bullshit.

Mastery could've been so much more than that.
- % chance that your insanity-generating spells generates 50% more insanity
- Insanity decay while in Voidform reduced by xx% (4pT20)
- % chance that each tick of SWP/VT generates 2-3 insanity (that would reduce a little bit the necessity to pick Auspicious Spirit in multidotting situations)
- Number of Voidform stacks you'll start with each time you enter Voidform (like Shahraz leggo)
- Why not including Torment of the Weak in our Mastery ? xx% chances on VoidBolt/MindBlast to apply Torment of the Weak on the target, stacking up to 3 times ??

Anything that isn't a flat % dmg on all your spells is better than the current design proposal. At least the Legion's design emphasizes your DoTs, that's still boring but at least you can chose to buff them or not.

But you see, all those mastery affect specific abilities which I've explained is not good. On void form stuff, they want to reduce the vf cycle otherwise we are too reliant on it for damage which leads to ramping problems, so none of the vf based mastery you mention is useful. The SWP/VT mastery you suggest is skewed to multidot once again, and will get nerfed and we will suffer in every other case. Torment the weak thing is a flat damage increase which is different +% shadow damage how?

You would think they could just come up with a magic solution, but sometimes the best solution is to keep things simple albeit boring.

[Lucrece]

2 things

1) New Mastery: Madness Increases the damage of your Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Void, Mind Flay, Void Eruption, and Void Bolt by [ 140% of Spell Power ]%. Priest - Shadow Spec.

Mastery>haste?

2) The new Warlock Drain Life spell animation is so badass. I look at our updated mindflay and ask, why?

Why? Because you got fucking tentacles, your spells whisper to you, and you float like a fucking boss when you enter voidform to become a being of void supersayan, that’s why.

[zito]

Why? Because you got fucking tentacles, your spells whisper to you, and you float like a fucking boss when you enter voidform to become a being of void supersayan, that’s why.

It's gone in bfa