Is There HOPE For Shadow Priests in Season of Discovery?

[@Pants_Gaming]

Do you agree that shadow needs additional changes? Let me know what YOU think shadow priest needs below. Edit: Also wtf is with that 2p tier bonus?!?!

[@aaronheffernan3044]

I don't mind the mind flay being used a "Big" Ability as opposed to a filler (mind spike feels so much better for that) but you are 100% right that the range need to be increased though I think it should be increased to 36yds so that it in line with our other spells (bar mindspike). Even now it feel awful to need to move closer to reapply VE and cast shadowfiend at 30yds. VT is also going to be a problem in that the current strength of VE is putting an spriest in the tank group and being able to run 1 less healer. With VT you are now going to have to chose whether its better to have the healing on the tanks or the mana on the healers unless you are putting most of them in the same group. Which then causes problems for tanks that require other buffs like windfury etc. While it may seem like a buff to our utility in reality one or the other is going to shine unless you are maybe running double warlock tank that can benefit from both the mana and healing or in fights with a lot of raid wide damage where being in the healer group takes the pressure off of them healing themselves. I think we are also going to run into GCD problems, adding another Dot to maintain, that is also a cast and therefore not refresable during movement as well as adding a mind flay gcd after mind blast is going to make it very tight. Picking Pain and suffering over Eye may even be required just to reduce the ammount of gcd's in a standard rotation. I personally am very sad about the Void Plague change. Dispersion is such a strong ability in harder content and losing it just to try to maintain PvP balance feels awful. When it comes down to it, damage is just a number, it could be 10 or 10,000, all that matters is what it is relative to. They could have easily just increased the damage of our other abilities rather than swapping a rune. Unfortunatly we are probably not going to see good DPS numbers while the game continues to to Balance PvE and PvP together.

[@Swiz_sp]

* remove the Eye of the Void rune and put new rune Mind Blast critical strikes reduce the duration of your next Mind Flay by 50% while increasing its total damage by 100% * remove the Homunculi and move head rune Pain and Suffering into legs slot and change it to also refresh Vampiric Touch as well. * Tier 1 bonuses idea 2p - give 2% spell critical chance. 4p - give raw spell power increase. 6p - give % increase of damage over time effects.

[@speach73]

The 2p bonus is great for pvp and useless in pve. Moving void plague to boots is terrible for pvp and good for pve. They clearly don't have a direction for shadow priests.

[@IvanIvanov58]

We discuss PvE .. there is no arena neither rated bgs neither something to fight on with pvp, it's just honor grind and afk in bgs .

[@honestfan420]

They gave us a healing perk for 2 set. Says all you need to know. Blizzard has no idea what to do with shadow priest.

[@CelticGods]

For once I read the SOD patch notes that was the first thing I see for shadows. Definitely didn't make me wanna play sod

[@SkornBB]

Bitch please awesome pvp Perk. Also pve useable as i sometimes have to throw a clutch Flash heal on myself in scary Situations

[@honestfan420]

@@SkornBB bitch please, it’s a PVE SET NOT PVP SET.

[@honestfan420]

@@SkornBB scrawny ass, cringe profile pic 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@CelticGods]

@@SkornBB what is pvp?

[@OMGsJski]

Dispersion should be a spell book not a run, especially since void plague is on boots now

[@Momosu]

They need to add runes to each of the slots with just utility runes for spriest that do damage like Shadowy Apparations on the helm slot so that we have an option to take a utility rune if we need it or take more damage if we dont and then do that for all the utility rune slots like they did for the boot slot.

[@jessierogers4064]

Something important I think you should bring up here is other classes like Hunter and shaman got really strong abilities baseline like heart of the lion and shamanistic rage. So how come we couldn't get despair as a baseline ability?

[@Pants_Gaming]

That’s a very good point and didn’t even cross my mind

[@heroofhyrule9778]

dispair and dispersion baseline. long live spriest. devs need to WAKE UP and realize the pvp whining is NOT OUR FAULT - how about make another dot spec like affliction viable so the entire community will stop shitting on us?

[@jessierogers4064]

@@Pants_Gaming I made a graph doing a side by side comparison of Shadow Priest rotation vs Affliction lock in WOTLK which we all know was one of the strongest classes in WOTLK and its kinda funny when you put them side by side

[@Mug_O_Tea]

Does blizzard play any class in sod?

[@GaiusUltima]

Appreciate your work and thoughts. Wont fall into my discord memeing here in case aggrend should show his face here again; i want to provide my honest thoughts. And my honest thoughts are, that the fixes you propose are good for fixing the dps output and mention good points what feels wrong when playing shadow currently. But to me that makes one thing much clearer, that the Shadow Priest spec lacks a vision for what it wants to be. The rotation is complex in that you need to hit a lot of buttons in a priority queue, something that ! always liked in classic and TBC SPriest, esp with MF-clipping. But how it is right now, it does not seem to me that anyone really took a step back and tried to look at the whole picture: how should the rotation be played? How does managing the shadow-zoo, 3 dots, 2 short nuke cds and 1(2) fillers with mind spike and mind flay, will feel rewarding to play? Well right now it does not and i think i speak for most SPriests. Yes the utility is strong. But that is only valuable and rewarding whenever it matters which it does not in the current difficulty of SoD. Casters dont go oom, raid heal only hits 25% of the players in raid and casting VE can be ignored if you play with 3 Healers, even in an average group. And DPS wise, which I understand this spec to be until otherwise communicated, playing the rota "close to perfectly grants you a dps gain of like 15% compared to someone who just casts mindspike and mindblast - basing this purely off of myself forgetting to change runes before bossfights from time to time. Many runes that mirror abilities from later expantions just dont work, as the SP kit is just not providing the spellkit that later expansions had. Making dots crit and SWP boost dmg of flay might be a nice idea, but only if you dont introduce a second filler ability that is just better in any way shape or form. New abilities like the eye or homunculi are matched - or even outclassed - in their only purpose at level 60, while mostly not even helping us at all. The AI as you mentioned makes things worse as you need to go to melee a boss in order for your homies to start acting. To my understanding the ShadowPrist is a specc that tapps into the power of the void to grant them strength they dont get from the light. Where is that power? We dont even have a big damage cooldown, but small replicae of ourselfs which dont listen to our commands and dont scale with our magical power.Or is the power of the void, that we help our frinds shine even brighter? Well does not sound very void-y to me honestly... On a last note, if any of the Dev staff reads this: DO NOT MAKE SHADOWS CAST HOLY SPELLS IN SHADOWFORM. You dont want to deal with the whining of PvP players, i guarantee you that. And I dont want to suffer from the nerfs that might befall my puny PvE existence in the collateral. Anyways thanks for reading :)

[@christiand.3348]

Blizzard could design the different spec specializations in a kind of similar way as in Cata. In Cata depending on the selected main spec, mastery has a certain main effect on the played spec. Mastery is not a stat in SoD, but it could easily be replaced with let's say spirit. Hence, if you play Disc, Spririt has a certain strong effect on heals/shields, if you play shadow spririt strongly influences the damage in some way, and so on. Basically Blizzard could do it with every main stat of any class. Depending on the spec, the stat affects the scaling of a class differently. Just my two cents.

[@emberalus2229]

One thing no one seems to be talking about is how we got directly nerfed by the changes to Warlocks. Shadow Weaving does no longer help Warlocks because they are all fire and they don't use shadow bolt so we don't have that 20% from Improved Shadow Bolt, I wish they put in an active effort to not make Destruction so damn ridiculous compared to Affliction for this.

[@123Suffering456]

Thanks for speaking out about this. I quit SoD in P3 because I honestly got used to shadow being a lot more than what it is in SoD. Even TBC classic already frustrated me quickly and SoD feels very similar in that shadow just feels like the support bot and nothing more. Honestly don't have fun playing that. Looking at what we get on the PTR so far, I'm not very hopeful much is going to change. I hope they'll prove me wrong, though.

[@TheGamingInvestor]

I loved Spriest in Wrath! I really don't like it in Cata or SoD, I'm not sure what they can do, it just feels so bad.

[@myopinion8753]

If you don't like Spriest in CATA, your doing something wrong.

[@rct6518]

RIP Shadow Priest in SoD and probably SoD caster dps in general. Cata feels to good to go back to the SoD testing realm. Maybe they will make a sweet Classic+ in a year or 2.

[@hotlikesauce]

100% thissss AND we get a kick ass legendary

[@dancinglight8411]

They need to completely scrap the SoD model. The rune system didn’t encourage exploration, it narrowed it. Where’s the new content in the open word? What about all the areas that couldn’t be accessed that players have wanted to see for years? It just turned the vanilla model into a race to endgame raiding, with nothing new but class changes and events designed to grind xp. Aka, they are designing the game to hook you via dopamine stimulation, as opposed to innovation and enjoyment.

[@felixkrell890]

I stopped playing 4 weeks ago. If they change priest up I'll come back but so far I am just eyeing the big single player games this summer, I am done hoping for SoD to turn around for priests

[@thebenis3219]

Could they not add something to Mind Flay like "During the channel, all of your DoT damage is doubled" or maybe force your effects to crit? I'm not a numbers guy, so I don't really know what would even help at this point :(

[@kywildcats94]

Can you pretty please make a video of your WA Macros and addons ?

[@ekualaizer]

Brother, it hurts to have to chose betwwen dispersion and the plague. Please give us both!

[@D_Mpyre]

Some Ideas: _Rune Head - replaces Eye of the Void._ -Your Mind Spike increases the Damage of Mind Flay by 50% and reduces channel time 0.5 seconds per stack consumed by Mind Blast. Your Mind Flay (full cast) make your next Mind Spike an instant cast and increases the damage by 50%. (That would be indeed a f**** Shadow Priest Rune - because i have the feeling, head Runes should be powerful. (Like Meta Gems?)) _Chest Rune - Occultism_ -Additionally, your Mind Blast resets the Duration from SW:Pain to its max. (Delete Pain and Suffering rune from the Head Rune Table) _Homunculi_ -improve AI or make it a Debuff. Which resets when the enemy dies with it. (Last 2minutes) _Shared Pain_ -SW:Pain now cast to all enemys near your target (max of 5). _Dispersion Baseline_ (level 50) _Despair_ -Additionally increases your crit damage on damage over time effects by 25%. _Voidzone_ -Additionally, your next cast of SW:Pain do his full dmg in half the duration (buff lasts 20seconds). _Mind Sear baseline_ (level 40?) -can be used on friendly targets _Rings_ -Shadow Specialization: 6% hit + increases your range of shadow spells by 20%. _Mindflay itself (Talent, Ranks)_ -Please increase the Range of each new Rank of Mind Flay by 2m/y. Is this too strong? Greetings Fellas

[@Victorlindelltattoo]

Greedy with the 20% shadow range tbh 😂

[@D_Mpyre]

@@Victorlindelltattoo Yeah, this Mid Range kinda thingy is meehhh - but would otherwise be imbalanced im pvp. Don't get me wrong, vanilla balance is not existing, but i don't wanna be that warrior on 40y range that get mind flayed till warbringer is in range. Just to die on DoT's while priest sits in Dispersion ^^ But the changes now are good though :) Better than before 110%

[@Swiz_sp]

Thanks for @Pants_Gaming for making shadow priest video about our situation right now. Many don't even understand it and trying to judge by patchwerk design fight and calm us we are good.. We are already minority and good priests already either quit and go Cata or just change class or just quit completely.. First feedback long time ago whole priest discord was given out.. they didnt even read it and just go easy way and give us 8% shadow damage increase.. and promise us thats just a minor fix and most incoming for P4..well nothing from what feedback land out that days came to reality with PTR.. its disappointing and they just dont care.. In forums already going 1 big thread about this rotation problems and another that suggesting changes to existing runes and new runes. I really hope in next week updates to see finally the revamp of the new shadow spec as they mention.. Share/comment and go one last time push in forums guys and give feedback and deffend us.. we need the changes.

[@increasegas2221]

phase 1: shadow doesn't exist phase 2: sucked after the nerfs phase 3: zoo sucks + no damage phase 4: ill come back if they do a full rework, ill stay with cata

[@heroofhyrule9778]

dont say that, cata is where bobby wants you to play

[@SirMouse003]

Pretty confident that no one on the dev team plays Spriest - been that way for a while .. and they always excuse it with "Well if we balance it for PvE they will be OP in PvP"

[@Rakschas666]

They could simply balance this with uping spell power scaling and giving us additional consumeables. The type of non tradeable, easy to farm, pick up from the ground in an area or from a repeatable quest like Felwood Dragons Breath or the crystal stuff from Un'goro. What matters is that their effect is lost on death, and voila or even dispellable. As long as you do that, theres no negative impact on PvP balance. To make priest scale with base stats like willpower and intelligence is literally a copy and paste level job. There already is a talent just like that in the holy tree, but sadly out of reach. This would not require a complicated change to fix a major problem. It is frustrating to see nothing being done on that end.

[@charlesmolnar8588]

Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but I really don't understand why Blizzard doesn't just add additional damage to non-player targets, say 50% on all shadow priest dots across the board. If target equals player, X damage, if target is mob, 1.5X damage. Sure, it's only a start, and the number might need to be tweaked, but wouldn't that stop the tears of all the people who don't understand how to battle shadow in PvP (way more than letting heals happen without dropping shadow form) while also giving shadow real raid damage?

[@Reapathy]

I sometimes ask myself if they even play their own game 💀

[@heroofhyrule9778]

yeah they play an STV once in a blue moon and die to dots, "eh, shadow priest are bad people, let them rot another phase"

[@Jathiel88]

SoD Spriest made it an easy decision to play Cata at least.

[@Auditioneere]

I already quit my shadow priest once I realized blizzard basically gave priests 3 healing/utility specs and no damage one. It's very clear they have no intention of making a priest anything but a healer.

[@casmako]

Thank you for making this!!

[@OMGsJski]

They could have make the head rune similar to that tier set bonus but not as strong. Reduce cast time by 33% and 30% damage increase to mindflay

[@increasegas2221]

mindflay is so trash keeping it the same would be fine

[@tonysopranope4268]

Great point about mindflay being useless if the tier set is not 6 piece equipped! Hopefully blizzard does the dps priest right at the endgame…

[@cfunch]

THANK YOU

[@armenchiky]

Awesome video, well said. I would also add 2 things to it #1 for PVP plz we need psychic horror for survival, most melee running us all over and #2 they need to change the rune slots for AOE, it's really annoying to change the gear every time changing from single target to AOE, then back again.

[@Pants_Gaming]

Agreed on both points. The problem is they try fix everything with shadow using runes so without any aoe being added baseline it’s impossible to get rid of rune swapping for aoe and single target

[@heroofhyrule9778]

@@Pants_Gaming There is a way to streamline it I found - using /click [actionbarbutton] macro, i have a proxy macro that clicks different macros depending on my rune /click [known:Shadow Word: Death]BT4Button100 /click [known:Penance]...etc

[@Pants_Gaming]

Keybinds aren't the issue, it's that runes are mutually exclusive for ST or AoE. Adding a baseline AoE ability or allowing despair/void zone to be a passive ability would be a great fix for this

[@narthvader6298]

I was going to come back to SOD but they proved to me it's not worth my time.

[@nightcult1741]

This is effectively why I stopped playing SoD, the classic team (and the developers in general) don't know or don't care to know what shadow ought to be. It's current iteration is a bizarre playstyle so non-akin to what it is in Wrath, Cata, and beyond. It doesn't feel good to play, much like it didn't really feel good to play in DF. Blizzard constantly fumbles around with the spec with each expansion and often times does little to improve upon it.

[@hotlikesauce]

not too sure why they didn’t just make SW:Death baseline, & move Void Plague rune to gloves. it would open up Twisted Faith in chest, & we can keep Dispersion on boots. you’re so right by asking if they play spriest, it’s looking like a no, not really. it’s always been the argument of too strong in pvp blablabla but why the devs don’t utilize “effective only in pve” or “pvp” coding is just sickening at this point.

[@heroofhyrule9778]

better yet give classic pvp utility which are lacking and adjust pvp globally

[@Azot333]

lol the title

[@throwinbubbs]

Sounds like SOD kinda sucks lol

[@Rakschas666]

Dear god yes, ofc shadow priest needs additional changes. At this point what needs to change is the person on the dev team that is making these moronic decisions. If ANYONE at Blizzard could do grade school level math they would count the number of synergistic buffs on a melee vs a caster, or the amount of stackable consumeables on a meleee (ESPECIALLY hybrids like paladins and enhancers) vs a caster dps. You can literally count this with your fingers, even if you worked at a saw mill and hand a few accidents. This is ridiculous. They have 15 years of iterations of all classes and playstyles that they can choose the cream of the crop from. And to some degree they do just that. Sooo... where are the shadow orbs? Where are the mirages/illusions? Where is... stat scaling (you've mentioned this too!)? I and of course many others have suggested this to them, independendly solely based on our personal experiences we all came to close to the same conclusions. There was no scism, no major controversy about direction of the spec. All they have to do is make a low budget scuffed cosplay version of the most popular abilities off all time and staple it together. Players usually figure out the rest. Please dear god, make the LLM AI robot overlords take over, I cant stand this shit any longer.

[@TankingPriestVideos]

/nod

[@eLmasten1991]

PREACH ❤

[@atlash6387]

Delete stupid mind spike, add crit dependant mechanics (like maybe a short buff doubling the ticking speed of Dots for a few seconds from mind blast/swd crits), add mind flay insanity (keeping in mind mf acts like a DoT in classic), make eye of the void the only pet and improve it.

[@heroofhyrule9778]

after being horrible in pve and hated by the entire community and dev team (for pressing my buttons) in pvp, all im seeing is another timid afterthough nudge towards bringing viable dps, at the cost of getting absolutely castrated in pvp

[@Psycho-Pano]

Long story short, its ruined.

[@Pants_Gaming]

TBF it's been ruined for a while. It's that they did nothing to make it better

[@StevenWilson-nq6cz]

Spriest still owns in pvp though