Shadow Priest RIP - Blue Tracker

#1 - Aug. 8, 2012, 5:55 a.m.

Okay,

Over the duration of beta Shadow Priest have been the least consistent of pretty much every class. You've swapped talents around, and changed abilities at random like you are just shooting in the dark. Quite frankly it's becoming insulting what you are doing to a spec that some players actually love the feel and play style of.

We don't need new mages, we don't need new warlocks, and we don't need new anything. Classes should stick to their roots. Shadow Priest were extremely popular during wotlk-cata respectively. Now after this joke of beta nearly every spriest I know is rerolling due to the fact that the class just sucks right now.

1. We have no burst CD. Our burst CD is save orbs and lose overall damage.
2. We are a dot class, and our dots are our worst abilities.
3. Our damage relative to other classes is low, this really can't be argued with. Single target we are trash, and sometimes if we get lucky multitarget we can compete, but you nerfed us many times due to our multidot ability. I've read mixed feelings from you all on multitarget damage classes like spriest, warlocks, etc. It seems like sometimes you want a balance between multitarget and single target, then other times you are fine with low single high multi. Fact is, Shadow Priest have always been a class that scales better on multiple target fights. raidbots doesn't lie, look at the stats for shadow priest on multitarget fights vs single and how we preform vs other specs. WE ARE FINE WITH THAT.

I really just don't understand what you all are doing with us, and it sure as hell seems like you have no idea either. You want a tip? Stop taking advice from the 1,000,000 casuals that probably don't even theorycraft on beta and get some direct input from players that actually know how to play the spec and see how they feel about the changes.

Want to know the major issues with shadow priest in Cata that we would have liked changed?

1. Orb generation could suck at times. You fixed this pretty much with the t13 set bonus. Making that baseline would be OP, we understand this. However, having to rely on the current orb generation system we ideally have to have 3 orbs on pull to get a good opener, then bank on casting MB as soon as its up. The only time we MIGHT be able to hold orbs is at 3 and MB is on CD. Other than that its a DPS loss to hold them, which is our burst CD, and goes back to the 1st problem we have on beta. You need to find a better system than this. You know what you could do? Bring evanglism back and dumb shadow orbs. You don't need 2 holy power classes anyway. Then you just gave us a burst cool down too if you pair archangel in with the evanglism. WAHHH !@#$IN LAHHH that wasn't very hard now was it.

2. There aren't any other major issues with shadow priest this expansion. What wasn't broke doesn't need to be fixed. We like having strong dots. Look at wol parses and our top damage abilities outside of the t13 set bonus rotation are dots. Don't get me wrong, the t13 bonus is fun, but that isn't the way our class should go. I like the bonus because its a temporary change that gets back to the roots of a shadow priest, but I would never want a class that bases on procs all the time.

The major overall problem isn't our damage, that can be fixed by you all just by changing the spell coeffiencents or whatever the %^-* it is you all do. The problem is we DONT feel like shadow priest anymore. I don't understand why you think that classes need major changes. We DONT. The changes from WOTLK to CATA stayed with the spriest feel. You added in a few cool mechanics, and what did you do with them? You got rid of them. Why? Whats the point? Is it too hard for people to manage archangel? Too hard for them to track evanglism? Too hard for them to track the number of orbs that had even though I think you should get rid of that !@#$ mechanic in general?

Now that I'm done ranting about spriest in general I'll rant about something you are doing with this game that really shouldn't be done in any game ever. You are taking abilities from certain classes and reworking them into other classes. This should never be done. A shaman signature for awhile was bloodlust, then you gave that to mages, and other classes too. Now your moving the paladin holy power over to shadow priest. Just stop. Be original with what you are doing.

You know what other shadow priest are telling me to do if I want to play spriest in MoP? Roll affliction warlock because it feels more like a shadow priest. How the hell does this make any sense at all....

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#44 - Aug. 8, 2012, 6:37 p.m.

I really just don't understand what you all are doing with us, and it sure as hell seems like you have no idea either. You want a tip? Stop taking advice from the 1,000,000 casuals that probably don't even theorycraft on beta and get some direct input from players that actually know how to play the spec and see how they feel about the changes.

You might have missed the post where I said class designers are required to take a drink every time we read “the devs don’t know what we’re doing with the class.” It’s hard to tune things when we take too many drinks, so please keep that in mind.

We do take feedback from experienced, intelligent players very seriously. It’s awkward for us to state outright in threads “Yeah, dude, I read your feedback, but you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, so we’re doing to discount it.” On the other hand, there are brilliant theorycrafters who never step foot in raids, as hard as that might be to believe, and there are plenty of very hardcore raiders who are terrible armchair designers. Ultimately, one of the Blizzard core values is “every voice matters,” and we try to practice it here. Your words will convince us more than your deeds anyway. Stick to the strength of your arguments, not the awesomeness of your achievements.

We are a dot class, and our dots are our worst abilities.

I believe SW:Pain and VT do about 25% of Shadow’s damage, which seems fine for a dot class. Your dots don’t need to be your highest damage button in order to be a dot class, and in fact when they are, that leads to ignoring everything but the dots. Multi-dotting is cool, but we're not thrilled with the gameplay that is just dot everything in the room and ignore Mind Blast and Mind Flay. Dotting only is fine for large groups of weak mobs, but in a more traditional multi-dot situation, we want the dot juggling to be layered on top of the nukes, not to the exclusion of them.

Shadow does very well on Will of the Emperor, which is pretty much the best case scenario for multi-dotting. Yes, Affliction does even more dot damage, but that’s partially because Affliction has 3 dots. I’m not sure it’s a requirement for Shadow to do as much dotting as Affliction in order to be a fun spec and still feel like a dot class (and keeping up 3 dots on multiple targets can be harder than 2).

Overall, we do want specs like Shadow, Affliction and Balance to do well when multi-dotting is possible. What we don’t want is for those specs to dominate in multi-dot situations and be at the bottom on every other fight. We just can’t guarantee that every raid tier will have an equal number of single-target to multi-target fights, and unlike say a warlock, the Shadow priest doesn’t even have the option to respec to a different DPS spec to meet the needs of the encounter. All we’re trying to do is bring the extremes closer together.

We have no burst CD. Our burst CD is save orbs and lose overall damage.

I think this is a valid concern. Power Infusion is available as a talent, but there is still some pressure to use it on another character. On the other hand, it’s not absolutely essential that every single spec have the same spells. That's the sort of thing that leads to class homogenization. We’ll consider some options here.

Our damage relative to other classes is low, this really can't be argued with.

I’ll argue with it. Slyck was the only one to try and post numbers in this thread, and those logs show Shadow doing well on Will of the Emperor and less well on Grand Empress. But there is also a mage and a warrior down there with the priest, and you would have to dig into these logs more thoroughly anyway, since Grand Empress puts debuffs on casters than can cause them to go stand in the corner for periods of time. I’m not sure what the argument is with the Feng parse. The priest seem to be in the pack with many other classes. Slyck’s argument is that their damage barely goes up in execute range, but it does go up, and seems to mirror that of the warriors, who have a great execute.

Also keep in mind, many buffs and nerfs have gone out since these parses were made (partially as a response to all of the raid parses we got). We’re going to be doing some more raid tests this week, so we’ll get more data. Please keep an eye on it.

But don't rage over this ^ SW:Insanity is supposed to be a baseline ability for Shadow.

I can’t tell if this was intended to be sarcasm or not, but Insanity is what happens when you choose the Solace talent and go Shadowform.

Item - Priest T14 Shadow 4P Bonus now also increases the damage done by Shadow Word: Insanity by 15%.

How in the world does that make sense, work with your desire for Mists of Pandaria nor even not come across as hypocritical?

The original set bonus change is essentially a nerf to the Insanity talent, so the change we made was just to keep it breaking even. We don’t consider, and haven’t seen any evidence, that Insanity is a mandatory talent. Surge of Darkness and Mindbender should provide similar DPS over the course of a fight. Insanity is probably the most complex of the talents do to the consuming mechanic, so we definitely don’t want it to be mandatory.