Hello! I’m Ellipsis, a shadow theorycrafter, guide writer, and discord moderator.
Shadow’s getting a lot of different nerfs going into 8.3, some we’re fine with, other’s we’re apprehensive about, but there’s one thing I’d like to cover before we go into the details of those nerfs and what they do / mean.
- Firstly, a history lesson:
Shadow was doing very badly at the start of the expansion, and received a whole host of changes in BFA’s 8.1 patch. One of the major changes was to our azerite traits, Spiteful apparitions. The trait was buffed by 75% to make it generally usable, but to avoid scaling issues with shadow’s Auspicious Spirits talent, the buff was only applied to the trait when AS was not talented.
Alongside all of this, dots for all specs took a massive hit going into BFA, Blizzard citing that they didn’t want multi dotting to reign in the same way it had in legion, though they still wanted dotters to feel important on the fights they were built for.
This sets the scene for the current situation, a massive buff to a target scaling and stat scaling trait, and the rhetoric of multi dot not being a focus for the expansion.
Going into BoD, with the addition of the 2nd major trait ring, a problem was arising. The SA trait, which had been buffed (Though only without AS, not relevant at this point) had begun scaling not only with targets, but with a massively increased amount of crit from COI. This lead to a trait setup of 3 COI 2 SA 1 Whispers, which basically boils down to 3 things that give a tonne of crit, and 3 things that scale off crit insanely well.
This turned shadow into a haste and crit fueled high powered ghost machine, these ghosts hit like trucks and scaled as more targets were added to fights, going completely against blizzard’s initial idea to tone back on multi dot.
Blizzard promptly and repeatedly nerfed shadow to try and combat this, the problem is they nerfed the wrong things. Instead of nerfing the interaction between the two traits, or even the traits that were causing the massive aoe damage, they nerfed shadow’s dots themselves. This became a repeated and expected part of every patch cycle, as blizzard nerfed the base spec to compensate for increased azerite scaling.
Blizzard also attempted to nerf AS as part of this (The talent that the trait doesn’t scale with), but these nerfs also fell relatively flat because of the hidden buff to SA when AS wasn’t talented (Now 65%, not the original 75%). Which has lead to where we are in EP, where with the correct trait setup, our ghosts amusingly do less damage with AS than without it.
This brings us to the present day. Reading about nerfs to all shadow’s scaling factors, but also again more nerfs to the base spec, and a worrying lack of admittance that the problem is one of their design (Writing off the SA nerf as a “bug fix” when it’s a documented hotfix from september 26th 2018).
Now let’s look at the nerfs and go over them one by one.
COI reduced by 25%: Good. Nerfing scaling factors of shadow is what we want to see, it’s also making us slightly less reliant on those specific azerite traits I was talking about earlier. This nerf is also very survivable and warranted. We’re fine with this.
SA nerfed by 75% (It’s actually 65%) without AS talented: Again, scaling factors, though the problem with this is that this nerf is not a bug fix, and because of the situation we’ve gotten into with EP and SA scaling. This nerf only affects single target, M+, and PvP, when blizzard deliberately state they want this to help nerf shadow’s damage at high target counts?
SWP and VT nerfed by another 8%: This isn’t big but it just again smacks a bit. We’re finally seeing nerfs to the scaling factors which should have been nerfed way way before this INSTEAD of dots. And now those scaling factors are being gutted alongside yet more dot nerfs?
As it stands on the PTR, all of these changes have been pushed except the SA “Bug FIx” nerf of 65%. That’s the one we’re worried about, and we’re even more worried because we still haven’t got to test it. Our preliminary sims show this + everything else to be a pretty unsurvivable nerf to single target, but again to not really affect mass multi target, which is what many of the fights are.
Blizzard will also likely be doing a round of heroic week tuning, in which we’d hope to see buffs to our single target damage spells, or a reverting of the dot nerfs, to compensate for all of this. But with one nerf not even in on the PTR, shadow’s are apprehensive that blizzard understands the spec enough to know what to do to balance it.
Tldr / Diet version (JFC this was long):
The nerfs are mostly fine, except for one which as of yet remains untested. Blizzard’s historic lack of checking on shadow’s scaling factors, and instead repeated nerfs to dots and other elements the spec has at a baseline (Not azerite) have put shadow in a position where in EP it relies almost entirely on azerite traits. Nerfing those traits heavily is good, but it had to come with buffs to those baseline abilities that had been wrongly nerfed in the past, instead it has come with yet more nerfs to those things.
Shadow will, after heroic week hotfixes, hopefully shake out to be fine for raids, but it’s hard to see the spec have a strong niche against affliction warlock’s single target and light multi dot, the nerfs also affect M+ and PvP with seemingly no compensation.