5.4 Shadowform change - Blue Tracker

#1 - June 13, 2013, 8:40 p.m.

Let me first say I haven't been on the ptr and this is purely a rational argument on Shadowfrom change in 5.4.

For the few who may not know, as of date on this post, the ptr patch notes state: Shadowform no longer reduces all damage taken by 15%. I feel this is a mistake for two reasons. First being the obvious that now shadow priests will be taking a lot more damage from players. It will roughly increase a player's damage to a shadow priest by 18%. That's huge for pvp. It will be as if everyone in the game suddenly now has 18% more pvp power from the Shadow Priest's perspective. If there are plans to lower pvp damage by approximately 15% across the board for all classes, then maybe this will be okay. But taken by itself is major nerf to Shadow Priest's survivability in PvP.

The second reason for why this shouldn't go live is there will be no sacrifice for the Shadow Priest to start healing. Currently in live game, dropping shadow to heal is major risk since the priest will be taking more damage. For me personally, I feel that's part of the fun of playing a Shadow Priest, knowing when to take that risk. If Shadowform no longer reduces all damage taken by any percentage, then from the Priest's perspective there's no reason to not heal when the priest is shadow school locked out, or just simply trying to heal their partner at any given time, because there's no added risk in doing so.

Again, let me reiterate that I haven't played on the ptr. So it's quite possible I'm missing something completely. But if I am reading the ptr note accurately and the ptr notes are complete, this would be major issue for a lot Shadow Priests.

Lore

Community Manager

#37 - June 14, 2013, 6:28 p.m.

This change (along with the other passive damage reduction changes) is something we're going to balance around. We're just extremely early in the PTR cycle at the moment, so that balancing hasn't taken place yet.

To give some insight as to where we're headed, we wanted to chill out on some of the passive damage reduction in favor of moving to more active sources of mitigation. It just doesn't feel very good to have certain players in your raid (for example) who always take more damage from the big hits than others, even though neither player is doing anything special. We'd rather the players themselves be more in control.

For those concerned about the impact this will have in PvP, there are plenty of other ways we can balance things out that do not carry over into the other parts of the game. Resilience is an obvious example, but there's plenty of knobs that can be tweaked to make that feel right.

Lore

Community Manager

#43 - June 14, 2013, 6:45 p.m.

You took the reduction from shadow priest and moonkins but not hunters? any reason hunters get love?

We did lower the passive reduction from Aspect of the Iron Hawk a bit, but since it's a talent, it wouldn't make much sense to remove it entirely. We're okay with the passive effect in this case since it's a choice (and we're hoping that this change will help make the other talents in the tier more attractive).