I’m glad blizzard is taking another look at shadow priest but there are still some very troubling things, especially regarding tier set bonuses. Here’s some feedback for the devs, hopefully they read it.
Despair Buff: Fixing crit scaling has been asked for a long time so this is a welcome change, good job on finally implementing it. Our pets still don’t scale, we might reach a point in a future phase where the global to summon the pet is just not worth it at all, should keep an eye on that.
Vampiric Embrace Nerf: This is a welcome change for any shadow priest who cares about his DPS more than his utility, because it reduces our likelihood to get nerfed due to “utility tax” if we ever move up on meters. For shadow priests who enjoy the support aspect, this changes absolutely nothing in terms of gameplay. If Blizzard wants to make the utility aspect of shadow priest more engaging, while also leaving more room for higher dps, I think something that requires active decision making, like Shamans Ancestral Guidance, would fit much better than the current version of VE.
Tier 2 - 2P Bonus: It simplifies the rotation because you are now able to use 1x SWD in every MB cycle. It doesn’t necessarily remove skill expression though, as now we have more opportunities to remove downtime during movement. It is also a decent buff to our DPS, imo it fits nicely as a 2-set. A small boost once you start collecting T2 while also not feeling bad once we end up replacing it in a future raid.
Tier 2 - 4P Bonus: A massive disappointment. This does absolutely nothing in raids if you don’t have the 6P bonus also. This feels like something that should’ve been added to Spirit Tap baseline since it’s already useless in raids. Also why does it only trigger on SWP? Tuning can still be adjusted, but the current proc rate of 2.5% with 5/5 Spirit Tap is much too low. SWP ticks every 3 seconds, meaning 20 ticks per minute. On a 60s encounter, we have a 60% chance of getting 0 procs.
Tier 2 - 6P Bonus: We currently don’t exactly know how this works, so I’ll go through both cases.
Case 1, it snapshots: This makes for horrible gameplay, having to get the proc on a trash pack before every single boss feels horrible for everyone else in the raid. It would also mean the proc doesn’t do anything if you get it during combat since the snapshotted dots from start of combat don’t get updated.
Case 2, it doesn’t snapshot: It’s good enough if you don’t care about doing optimal DPS. If you do care about doing optimal DPS, this leads to absolutely degenerate gameplay. If this dynamically increases DoT, you will want 100% uptime on spirit tap. With the low proc rate of the 4p bonus, this would require people to have trash in on boss fights, where you finish 1 mob every 15 seconds so shadow priests can keep full uptime on the buff.
Either way, the 4p needs major tuning and the 6p needs a complete rework, otherwise the gap between an optimized shadow priest and an average shadow priest will be massive. Of course this only applies if the T2 6p was actually used, currently it looks like we’ll be running T1 6p bonus all of p5, which is also a bit disappointing as it effectively means we don’t get any new tier bonus.
T1 set bonuses on T2: Might enable some interesting combinations in the future for other classes, but for shadow priest the T1 6p is so strong that we will likely run it till the end of SoD, making any future set bonuses beyond 2p worthless. The T1 6p needs to either be nerfed or made into a rune to prevent this. Obviously a nerf to our already average dps wouldn’t feel good, so I’m hoping we’ll get a new rune. Eye of the Void is currently a dead rune in PvE, maybe something can be done. Potentially move Shared Pain to head slot and T1 6p replacing Eye of the Void and moved to leg slot.
Overall some good and some bad changes. Hopefully Blizzard adjusts the bad stuff before P5 release.