I’ll put this in the US thread for you
o/
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Thank you very much, dear sir! Appreciated 
I understand your logic behind it all but how about our power word shield its a holy/discipline spell too. Dont you use it either because it doesnt suit the shadow theme? 
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Fair point, but as shadow, we have a pvp talent called void shield(same as the talent in the core tree come DF), what I’m getting at, is that akin to mages, it would be kind of cool if they gave us each our own coloured shield, even if their effect was the same 
–side note: void shield talent should totally recolour the shield into a more shadow/void’ish theme–
In my head, choosing to spec into the shadow way, you twist your holy school into a darker version(Flash Heal → Shadow Mend, Smite → Mind Flay, Holy Fire → Mind Blast etc.), rather than just using different spells. Kind of the same way holy/disc makes SW: P → Purge the Wicked.
I agree that some spells are neat as just “core priest” spells, it’s only the heals I have an issue with being kind of “mandatory to be optimal” in DF. Bathing myself in light from a fantasy perspective is odd to me. But I’ll just have to accept it if ends up like this, just wanted to voice my two cents in hopes that someone at least considers it. 
Ah right that would make sence. Make a void kinda looking shield. Man to be fair i wouldnt mind it all as long as it looks cool. Pretty sure too that if youd change the way shield look there would still be people who would complain about why it got changed etc etc haha
Forgot another reason why ppl want Voidform gone:
- Because they despise the void aesthetic?
- Just add Glyph options (e.g. Dark Ascension wings are vivid and cool). I know that art is usually the bottleneck in development, but there is still time before shipping and this could go a long way.
- Though I personally hate the void and tentacle part of Shadow, that is not enough to discard the glorious gameplay.
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I’d personally really like this iteration. Kind of like a different take on the now removed Mind Restrain.
On another note, being #voidgang here, I noticed someone mention druids venthyr ability “ravenous frenzy” as something that could be a modifier to voidform/surrender to madness, in some manner, again throwback to the increasing haste, and reward/punishment playstyle of old shadowform. I thought it at least sounded interesting.
After another round of testing:
Class Tree:
- Holy Nova should become baseline ability. Its only use is in PvP to force rogues/druids out of stealth.
- Rhapsody is extremely weak. It takes 100 seconds to build full stacks, but it still hits weaker than Divine Star, which is ready each 15 seconds.
- Leap of Faith should be choice node with Vault of Heavens
- Angelic Bulwark and Void Shift somehow feel not that interesting capstones by themselves and path to them is made rather weak talents.
- Fae Guardians in place of Angelic Bulwark and Greater Fade in place of Void Shift would feel way better
- Void Shield is also kind of weid, even after our PW:S buff.
Discipline:
- Purge the Wicked has been our staple for years now thanks to dot spread mechanic. Now I feel some issues starting to build up with the spell. Smend having CD now makes SW:P our only shadow spell without CD. We have now Vampiric Embrace and Shadow Covenant which reward us for shadow spells and Balance in All Things which rewards us for “spell dancing”. Having only shadow spells with CD make all these three less appealing.
Now I think a rework is in order to support new playstyles. Instead of spell which replace SW:P, let us have passive which cause Penance spread SW:P. Dot spread remaining, as well as SW:P as shadow spell. - Light’s Wrath being twilight instead of radiant damage would also be better for us too.
- Shadow Covenant holy spell effectiveness should be reduced to 25 %. Right now, it nerf majority of our toolkit by 50 %, which makes it way less attractive choice
- Expiation: dmg buff for Mindblast and SW:D are great, dot consumption not that much. I’d rather have it removed.
- Indemnity: with PW:S on CD, this is extremely weak capstone. Longer atonements are great, but it should either trigger from renew now, or provide much longer atonement boost
- Aegis of Wrath: even with PW:S buff, it still feels not that meaningful. Maybe getting 50% absorb increase is more fitting, making PW:S more juicy absorb.
- With Mind Blast absorb removed from class tree, I think it could find it’s way to disc spec tree, in a same way holy got renew healing increase moved from class to spec tree.
I liked the tree. But I saw a problem on the first part of the Shadow Tree. There are many utility spells on this first part.
- Silence : Needed --------> Psychic Horor/Last Word : PH needed (imo) = 2 points
- Dispersion : OFC needed --------> Intangibility/Mental Fortitude : Intangibility needed (imo) =2 points
- Tithe Evasion : Needed = 1 point
5 points for some utiliy and QoL nodes.
- Devouring Plagues : 1 point
- Shadowy Appraitions : 1 point
- Auspicious Spirits/Tormented Spirits : 1point
- Vampiric Insight : 1 point
- Mind Spike : 1 point
- Coalescing Shadows : 1 point
If AoE-Cleave needed Mind Sear : 1 point
12 points for 1st part of the tree. And almost all of them are needed.
I think, at least they should just change some 2 points nodes to 1 point like Piercing Shadows and Whispers of the Damned.
Priests always need utility more than other classes. So they need to take those spells. But if they take those utilities, reaching the last tier of the tree becomes more difficult.
TL;DR Shadow Tree needs 2-3 more points to reach the last nodes of the tree properly.
Shadow thoughts–
Having tried the build a bit in PTR, it feels odd having to go through apparitions and it’s modifer, to get Vampiric Insight. Also, with Deathspeaker now being a thing, Tithe Evasion is not really a choice, but rather a needed pick. Gameplay wise, it feels fantastic to have this many instant spells via procs, but at the same time, it’s a lot of procs to keep track of
– Coalescing Shadows - This whole line just feels extra in my opinion, and while the damage increase is neat, it feels like an excess to what we already have(more to keep track of), and it being consumed by Mind Spike makes it difficult to time a Spike buffed Mind Blast, along with Insidious Ire.
– Mind Spike - Great throwback to a past playstyle, but right now, it’s function along with modifiers dominates our spec, far more than any of our capstones. It will also likely not see much use, outside Surge procs.
– Dark Ascension/Void Eruption - a 20%(40% if using both) damage increase seem great right? Well, the first needs Mind Flay to stacks to use(more about this later), and Voidform itself feels unneeded/doesn’t add enough to feel relevant, even with current modifiers. Also, if they are to finine separate routes in shadow, I’d like if they were a choice node with each other.
- Mind Flay and too many procs issue - Mind Flay holds the filler role in our spec, and procs several damage increasing buffs to keep track of, while this in itself is fine, in my time playing shadow on the ptr, Vampiric Insight, Surge, Unfurling Darkness, Mind Devourer and Deathspeaker procs took all the time I could possibly use to cast Mind Flay, unless I went out of my way to actually use Mind Flay instead of other procs. In turn, this diminished the value of Mind Flay: Insanity, Monomania and Idol of C’thun, which are already not that popular among many priests I’ve spoken to. Along with creating a weird issue in actually entering Dark Ascension when you want to.
Extra note- I’m not even using Damnation and it’s modifier in this build, for even more instants.
– Devouring Plague - With so many procs in our current iteration, our spender have kind of lost it’s meaning, and feels more like an “oh, I need to keep this up as well” button. I’d also like to see Lunacy moved from capstone talent, much higher up, as a modifier to Devouring Plague.
– Idols/Capstones - Frankly, they all feel very underwhelming to what we get earlier in the tree, as well as Idol of Yogg’Saron being about Apparitions which is a talent we can choose to skip. Hope some sort of change happens in the coming weeks. 
Extra extra notes-- A little sad to see Mental Restrain gone, would be interesting to see Mindgames be a modifier to Mind Blast instead, at a reduced effect.
Things that feel good:
– Misery Shadow Crash interaction - We love this, although it does make Dark Void feel a little underwhelming in comparison.
– Vampiric Insight/Surge of Darkness - For mobility’s sake, this is fantastic, they proc enough to let you feel mobile enough to move around without losing time.
– AoE - The combination of Shadow Crash, Psychic Link, Deathspeaker/Pain of Death, along with the Idol of Nzoth, feels fantastic, we’re moving around doing our damage without having to stand still much at all.
– Shadowfiend/Mindbender build - Although it feels a little odd having to pick between an idol as not a capstone, this line, Mindbender, Fiending Dark into SFP, feels great, in that with enough crit, we can pretty much keep the pets up for possibly even 50% of the time, if you try.
- I would love to see a slight alocation of nodes here though, Fiending Dark moved to Harnessed Shadow’s place, Mindbender being it’s own node, followed by SFP into Idol of Y’shaarj as the capstone.
– Deathspeaker - Amazing talent, every single press of a reset Death, feels fantastic(but as stated earlier, makes Tithe Evasion mandatory).
What I personally find less liked:
– Halucinations in the tree - Would love to see this be baseline shadow, and with DF introducing healing into our spec, perhaps let renew casts trigger it as well.
– Flash Heal’s takeover - This feels incredibly weak compared to our Shadow Mend on current live servers. Would love see some sort of reason for shadow to cast it, perhaps hallucinations again? If I were to suggest changes, I’d either love to see Shadow Mend just be our heal as shadow again, or perhaps the Shadow Mend talent in the class tree, replace Flash Heal.
PvP things- Catharsis feels amazing, an offensive defensive tool that functions as a “don’t attack me” talent, love it. Secondly, with Megalomania gone, Surrender to Madness is now completely impossible to use in PvP. Pvp talents are currently home to Delivered From Evil(Leap of Faith), Cardinal Mending(Prayer of Mending), as well as Void Volley, Void Origins and Driven to madness(All Voidform modifiers). But these are all talents we can choose not to pick in the trees. Also sad to see Greater Fade disappear, but perhaps we won’t need it in DF? I realize pvp likely isn’t being looked at as a first, but wanted to mention it anyway.
Final notes - The spec feels good to play, you feel mobile with all the instants, and have some interesting interactions. Need a little fixing here and there, but otherwise, I actually wouldn’t mind if an iteration of this went live.
Thank you for listening.
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From the perspective of an AOTC Holy priest:
The class tree is still really underwhelming. I feel like I am taking points just to get to a specific node. This doesn’t feel good to “waste” points in this way.
I get the impression the class tree has no real vision for Holy and is not being designed with them in mind and the focus is more on Shadow and Disc. (If there is a vision, I am not seeing it). Disappointing, considering at the end of SL Holy was given a chance to shine in a way it hasn’t done in an extremely long time. Feels like we are relegated back to an afterthought.
HW:Life and Void Shift feel very much like they are trying to do the same-ish kind of thing, we don’t need both.
As a general comment, as of today I currently actively use about 25 keybinds. Honestly the prospect of trying to reconfigure and try to find extra binds for the additional spells is daunting. I think this comes from trying to encourage us to use more damage abilities, and while I don’t mind that, the button bloat it’s causing is ridiculous. I think Holy could really use a prune.
Please get rid of Holy Nova. Make it baseline. I resent spending a point here.
Please include Cascade.
Thank you for taking away the punishment associated with HW:Life
As a shadowpriest, I agree with these takes. Holy Nova is not interesting as Shadow at all, has no power or heal, even with it’s modifier stacked. Outside niche pvp situations to find stealthers, I don’t see Shadow ever taking this.
Also, Cascade would indeed be great.
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I wrote this in the feedback thread too.
Mind Spike seems to compete with the role of mind blast in the rotation both in aoe and single target, but with less interactions (psychic link, crit buff and insanity gen but no apparition generations, shadowflame prism activation or talbadar’s stratagem buff), so you probably wound’t want to press it without procs and even then, it’s just diluting the rotation.
To me it seems a good solution to maybe have it replace mind blast if chosen, with all its interactions, and have Dark Ascension remove its dot consumption downside for its duration. That way we would have a distinct and uncluttered alternative build and playstyle that might be favored in spread cleave with psychic link versus something like a void form/hungering void build in single target or stacked cleave.
Good call on the addition of void torrent to the builders of dark evangelism, why not include it in all mechanics regarding mind flay and mind sear (monomania, mind decay, mind flay: insanity)?
I would also like to see shadow crash dot application apply to a number of targets closer to dark void.
After many years (almost since the end of WoTLK) as a main Warlock, I thought maybe I can main SP for Dragonflight.
I was really hyped for Shadow Priest for Dragonflight. When the talent trees showed up, I said, thats it. This time SP will be more fun… SP can avoid VF, SP again can be a DoT class, SP can be a burst class. Whatever players choose…
I also tried SP a bit. But all of the good things are on sheet. Not in gameplay.
Nowadays I’m watching some streamers and youtube videos… SP performs really bad. I’m not concerning about damage numbers. Ofc when the tuning come, numbers will be fixed. However, in terms of gameplay and builds, there is a big confusion. It seems people can’t take the nodes they need because of there are so many necessary nodes on the tree. That is the biggest problem I saw for now.
Also, I’m watching Dalaran Gaming PTR Arenas right now. Shadow Priest performs like a training dummy. A hunter hit 3-4 times while Shadow Priest is trying to cast Vampiric Touch. A fDK just melted 2 Shadow Priests in a row in 5-6 seconds. BTW DK healed himself “%60-70 of total health with 2 instant Death Strike” but SP’s “healing spells with cast times” almost heal only %10-15. Also lots of time people can interrupt Sp’s healing. And yeah SP needs to cast more healing spells because of the changes (actually nerf about Shadow Mend).
In short, Shadow seems not good at PvE rotation. Also incapable of doing something on PvP.
TL;DR people say SP talents so good. Yes, they seem good but not perform well. So, for SP’s, I hope they fix the issues. Otherwise, playing SP will be a torture again.
Now with the new Shadow Priest tree, there is a new problem now.
SHADOW MASTERY…
With new tree, Voidform isn’t baseline anymore. So Shadow Priests may prefer not to take it. And many people probably will try to avoid VF. But this time they can’t benefit from Mastery. Because Voidform was the only option that makes mastery activated.
So this causes SP to feel weak. I hope devs change the mastery.
Couple things I hope are unintended, and changes I would like to see:
– Bluepost stated that as shadow, Mind Flay would override Smite,
but Tools of the Cloth, Unwavering Will, and Surge of Light still affects
smite for us as shadow(might be their intention, though I hope not).
– VT no longer horrifies on removal, and Mass Dispel no longer removes bubble/block.
– Coalescing Shadows feel very awkward with Mind Spike consuming it.
– The Coalescing Shadows line feel like it’s the pet line, Puppet Master being immediately after, leading into the pet things. With that in mind, remove Harnessed Shadows completely, and let Fiending Dark take it’s place, Mind Bender staying as a node by itself, leading into SFP, and Y’shaarj as the capstone. This would make more sense, at least to me. Could possibly consider changing Coalescing Shadows itself, to affect our pets instead in some manner.
– Mind Flay: Insanity and Monomania/C’thun capstone, while on paper they look great, with the new iteration of shadow, we have such an obscene amount of instant procs, that we have even less time to actually channel Mind Flay. But also, C’thun needs a more reliable proc rate.
– Devouring Plague - speaking of instants procs. In the current iteration, DP feels highly unimpactful, for a spender we’re building our resource to cast. While Derangement talent helps a bit, it still feels very underwhelming, with the large majority of my damage coming from the other procs(Deathspeaker, Vampiric Insight, Surge of Shadows, Mind Devourer, and Damnation/Malediction if talent, along with Crash proccing Unfurling Darkness. Would like to see a possible change to DP, and then possibly have Coalescing Shadows affect DP instead of Spike, so we could choose a blaster, versus a dot style. Personal rework idea: Could also have more power put into the initial damage part of DP, and have the dot instead be based on the initial hit(this would also allow for crit to affect it, as we’ve seen our tree push a bit towards.
– I’d like to see Tithe Evasion built into Deathspeaker, as each Deathspeaker proc executing ourselves for just as much, is rough. Feels like Tithe Evasion isn’t a choice.
– With strength moved away from Voidform, and Spike consuming dots, it indirectly makes our mastery less powerful, so one idea I had, still in priest theme is as an illusory class/spec, could make our spells have a chance(or maybe based on dots), to briefly summon an illusory minion for a couple seconds to attack the target(or aoe minion if the target is surrounded). (Might be personal opinion, but our class still is of the void, and I feel like spreading insanity to others should show in our kit.) Another, more shadow friendly idea for those who hate the void, could be to go back to “Shadowy Recall” from MoP, that gave our dots a chance to do damage twice, when they did dmg. That, or outright just have our damage apply a new dot, based on the damage done, so it also affected blaster style gameplay.
Won’t touch too much on the capstone row, as we still don’t know their intent with this, but it does need some looking at, since right now, you can pretty much ignore it, and bet better off. Will say though, that the Lunacy talent, should probably be moved much higher up, as a modifier to DP/MS.
Personal note: We don’t yet know what changes are in store, but as #voidgang, it’s sad to see Voidform in this state. With how the spec currently plays, even with speccing into Voidform, it feels like it’s just another button to press, even with modifiers. Also, kindly remove the “You die.” part of Surrender. It was flavourful and made sense in legion, not so much anymore. You don’t see any other class with a cooldown that outright kills them, and it’s not like Surrender is stronger. That, or I’d like to see the ability get a complete rework. 
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I’m all for this mastery again, as long as they actually make it affect all of our abilities rather than just SW:P
Or they should turn AS apparitions into our mastery, thus removing 2 nodes from the tree and making in easier to justify taking utility nodes. As long as they keep the 2nd row as a 2 node row with Silence and Dispersion, they can move MS into AS’ location and keep intangability as node with no connections at MS’ location
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now our mastery is dead P: Gl hf blizzard i give up just add back mind sear as it was its useless mastery and aoe we got no aoe.
Here is my build for Dragon flight
https://www.wowhead.com/beta/talent-calc/priest/shadow/DARUFAFFBBFFURKFQiEQBVOVVEUUBkEIlWgAUDRVUjust shadow crash and apply dots once more blizzard gave up on this specc like searing nightmare was boring but now its not worth doing mind sear its more worth mind flaying main target and crashing adds like boring game play dot come in m+ we be d tier-
at lest revert mind sear and make it baseline again like it is in shadowlands you barly have any use on it.-
The main problem I see with the priest tree is a lot of the class tree does not fully interact/enhance each spec or specialization trees.
Some suggestions.
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Vampiric Embrace should transfer spell damage, not just single target shadow damage into healing.
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increase absorption of power word shield in holy/shadow.
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Void shield should Refill power word :shield by 30% damage and healing
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light weaver (holy talent) should move into class tree affecting
- Discipline ( increase the healing of Penance or the absorption power word shield)
- Shadow (increase the healing of Flash heal or increase the absorption power word shield)
- Holy (increase the healing of heal increase the of power word: shield)
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Rapture (discipline talent) should move to class tree.
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Move with grace should have alternative option, trust in the light. (Holy artifact trait, that heals up to %15 of targets health over 6 secs)
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Bring back inner focus as class tree talent.
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