Intro
Welcome to my Shadow Priest rant that I’ve been holding in for the whole expansion.
The feedback is coming from a mythic raiding and M+ PoV. I will try to mostly focus on the bigger picture of ideas transitioning into a new expansion, not repeat stuff that has been repeatedly posted (like Shadow Word: Feedback) and not go into detail (there is much more to be said).
Quick summary of what I (personally!) enjoy
and would like to see retained come Dragonflight:
- Both fresh and proven ideas appeared in Shadowlands that are fun with lower haste levels and less borrowed power clutter. Devouring Plague dot spender, instant Mind Blasts, Void Form gcd weaving, Shadowflame Prism, Living Shadow.
- The macro and micro complexity of the spec. It is hard to do everything right – correct ability usage order (under pressure), track and manage dots, manage 4 major cds, plan for mechanics and movement in advance. Each point has huge potential for optimization. That complexity resulted in huge differences between a normal Shadow Priest and an excellent one, I dare say much more so than other classes (also it’s part of the reason why I struggle to get invited to a +15 key).
- The ‘shadow’ feel. All the void and tentacle stuff is rather terrible.
Main pain points
Parts of the spec go directly against each other,
forcing you to choose one over the other and creating a weird feeling for the player. Basically every time you choose, you feel like you are missing out on the other part:
- Shadowflame prism vs SN spam
- SN spam vs anything
- Void Torrent vs Voidform (or anything, really) – inevitably sitting on CD or not getting a full use
- Applying dots vs anything – dots themselves are weak, all the power is in cast abilities and re-applying dots feels like missing out on those high-value parts
- Insanity overflow vs e.g. Dark Thought proc
- Monomania and the whole ‘empower the filler’ charade
Many spells do not interact in any way
and act as extra clutter in the rotation and the spec tree. In most cases, raw damage != fun:
- Void Torrent - if it at least procced Dark Thoughts or something
- Shadow Crash – if it at least applied dots or cost insanity or something
- Mindgames – if it at least acted as a glorified Mind Blast and spawned Apparitions
- Shadow Word: Death – if it at least spawned Apparitions or generated insanity
- Shadowfiend – if it at least cleaved (somewhat remedied by investing in Shadowflame Prism)
- Void Eruption – this glorious explosion does nothing, if it at least applied some dots or had no cast time (see the opening effect of Evokers’ Dragonrage for perfect interaction or Syzygy for Balance Druids for dot application)
- Searing Nightmare – by itself it is fine: an insanity spender that applies dots is awesome, but 1. mind sear + CWC and 2. talent competition with Misery are terrible problems
So many pets
Please stop giving us pets. The problem is that it is very hard to make them feel good and the damage they do is mostly additive (i.e. they have to be interactive or integral to the toolkit to alleviate both problems)
- Necrolord pets – gone (did not scale with mastery, afaik)
- Shadowfiend – we never asked for it (although it was undeniably cool back in BC), but I’d expect it to be made interesting and up to today’s standards. Extremely low (pve) damage on extremely long CD. It feels very bad to press as an extra GCD
- Void tentacles/Idol of C’Thun – unreliable, unimpactful, : low proc rate, low effect and mediocre insanity regen
- Living Shadow – this is the only example of a good interaction, where for the Shadowlands version you at least felt the weight of the effect (and could play around it) and for the DF talent version it ‘does what you want it to do’
- Idol of Yogg’Saron – delayed gratification, additive damage, not impactful (funnel talent for cleave is too situational and somewhat contradictory)
Lack of choice
- We were mostly considered the ‘single target spec’, all because of the 30 level talent row: ToF vs Misery/SN and lack of baseline AoE spender. Unless our baseline kit is complete with built-in ways to deal with diverse pull sizes (and talents further positively expanding on that), such choice will always have to be there and will never feel good (again see Evoker toolkit with baseline tools for everything and talents improving that in certain areas)
- Hungering Void vs Surrender to Madness – surrender is something outside of your control (bugged/despawned/summoned enemies or teammates having change of heart during a pull would kill you). It is not a choice and it is not fun
- Vampiric Insight is an incredibly single-minded design. This does not need to be Vampiric Insight specifically, but the kit as a whole could allow us to choose on the fly – spend proc on Mind Blast for ST, spread Vamp Touch to extra target or do some extra aoe with whatever (see Ele Shaman’s Surge of Power for great design openness).
- Class tree is much different from any other class hybrid in several ways:
- in e.g. the Shaman and Evoker trees, you want everything, because it is impactful, efficient (one point nodes) and interesting, which forces you to choose (in a positive way)
- in Priest tree, you don’t care about the ‘holy’ or ‘disc’ stuff, because it has 0 value. Similarly, you don’t care much about ‘utility’ stuff, because it is too situational and mostly borderline bad (talenting into Shackle Undead is borderline desperate)
- there is much throughput in the form of Twist of Fate and Shadowflame Prism that you simply cannot omit – class tree + throughput = bad
- you can never leave out PI and Twins
- the bottom part (read ‘the strongest’) talents give us 10% damage reduction for 5 sec. How can you justify that, when shaman get ‘2% avoidance & leech’, ‘8% max health’ and ‘4% magic dmg reduction’ just casually lying around
- on a similar note, Shadow loses damage in talents (and in combat) for 6 sec of 75% dmg reduction, while ‘20% dmg reduction in ghost wolf’, ‘15% max health from Earth ele’ and a casual ‘55% Astral Shift’ are all in the first part of the tree
Tickling damage profile
It is typical with Shadow that all damage occurs more often in lesser chunks (compared to blasters such as Arms or Arcane). But even with this in mind and even with the focus shifted very much away from dots, our ‘blaster’ abilities, like Mind Blast and Devo Plague feel like a wet noodle to press (12k Devo Plague total avg vs 25k Starsurge avg).
Part of the problem is that as we get more diverse abilities and damage sources (and additive damage clutter from pets), each of them has to be weaker and ‘less interesting’ to fit the global ‘budget’ of class tuning and instead of feeling like a bone grinder, you feel like a jelly grinder (this also mostly fits Fury warriors ).
The good parts
- 2pc Dark Thought proc was great – it added meticulousness to the rotation and weight to spenders (proc occurs semi-deterministically), you had to think on your toes, you had more chances to cast while moving, – sad to see it go
- Idol of N’Zoth – although void shizzle again, the principal design is outstanding. I get the Epidemic N^2 scaling vibes. The proc rate is low and targets dying are huge problem, but all can be remedied
- Living Shadow – for reasons already mentioned
- Mind Restrain (absorb damage from enemy on Mind Blast) – the ultimate way how to combine damage and healing and correctly hybridize shadow (not by casting Renews, even though I looked forward to slapping instant impactful PoMs around)
- Vampiric Embrace – if it behaved more like Ancestral Guidance – no GCD, more splash healing and a sane place in the talent trees
- Shadowy Apparitions – finally a build to embrace focus on ghosts
- Twist of Fate – finally independent and easily accessible – enables deeper levels of play optimization
- Rot and Wither – another way to extend dots (than Void Bolt). I’m looking forward to what you guys come up with, since it probably cannot stay tied to filler damage
Side notes
From my scouring of all Shadowlands and Dragonflight content, one thing is clear: you switched to a development approach that incorporates the users and is not only driven internally. This is an extremely good direction that you took as game devs. There is nothing more valuable than maximizing your feedback and failing as early and as often as possible (huge for Hunter designers). I still, however, think that you guys do not understand (or much worse don’t want to understand) how the players feel.
This ‘feeling’ is what you get from players posting on forums, rambling about on streams and discords, by actually playing the game (even the most raw features). It is not the same as analytics data, usage % of talents, winrates, deathrates, killrates, balancing etc. Going against such feelings is the best way to drive players away, reduce retention and earnings (as confirmed again and again by player feedback about many shadowlands systems).
Hand in hand with this is the ongoing disparity with PI. You ‘designing for the so-called game 1’ again goes against the user ‘feeling’, instead of trying to find a common ground that benefits both and empowering those ideas. I totally agree that this is a good thing for the top 1% high-end players (that are the most publicly visible ones) and a decent percentage of the rest of us. But otherwise, it directly poses real issues wrt. subscription motivation.
Either make Shadow a support-first class (it used to be a passive healer + mana battery + mediocre damage back in the day) or Shadow’s PI castable only on self. Again please note that this is solely from Shadow standpoint, healer personas mostly have the support mentality in their blood .