Hi, just thought I’d post changes I’d like to see for Shadow Priest in 9.1.5 
The biggest problem I have with Shadow Priest is the DPS gap between 1 target and 6+ targets. On any dungeon where you need to take searing nightmare, you’re just making yourself weak at 3-5 targets. In small packs, Mind Sear doesn’t generate enough insanity to use Searing Nightmare often enough to do good damage. But if you take the misery talent then you’ll be hurting your DPS on the larger pulls. Or, if you simply try to manually dot them, it takes ages and it’ll still do low damage.
I suggest a way to plug this hole is to make searing nightmare generate “Spiteful Spirits” (similar to Auspicious Spirts but exclusively for Searing Nightmare) - one per random target up to a maximum of 5. Maybe they could look a bit different or be a darker colour. These spirits would just be a buffed version of the Shadowy Apparitions, generating some insanity and dealing some damage. The reason why I would suggest they have a different name is so they can be independently fine tuned.
This would be better than simply buffing Searing Nightmare, because the amount of Spiteful Spirits can be limited - if you buff Searing Nightmare, for example to deal more damage or cost less insanity, then it’ll be overpowered on the larger pulls. But having something like Spiteful Spirits would be a way of improving the damage in small pulls without making the large pulls overpowered.
Also, I think Searing Nightmare should be baseline instead of being a talent, with the changes above. Then, the Misery talent could be changed to add Vampiric Touch to Searing Nightmare, but Searing Nightmare loses its damaging ability and spirits (it basically becomes a way to spread VT & SW:P). This way Searing Nightmare in combination with Misery and Auspicious Spirits can be used as a way to deal funnel damage quickly, or used with Misery and Psychic Link to deal priority and cleave damage.
A new talent would need to be made to fill the gap left by Searing Nightmare, which could be one of two things I can think of:
- Eternal Nightmare: Searing Nightmare refreshes the Mind Sear cast when it’s applied. This way you don’t have to be so careful about inflicting a GCD on yourself and interrupting your Mind Sear channel - you can just keep spamming the Searing Nightmare key. It means you can pay more attention to mechanics, interrupts, and so on, rather than obsessing so much over your insanity and cast bar. Searing Nightmare feels clunky to use so this would be a nice QoL improvement for dungeons.
- Gluttonous Plague: Devouring Plague takes twice as long to deal its total damage but every 6 seconds will spread to one nearby enemy, who will also spread it after 6 seconds and so on. This is a bit of a weird one and I haven’t given it much thought, I just like the idea of Devouring Plague being like an actual plague
If anything though, the most important thing IMO is to add the Spiteful Spirits to Searing Nightmare, I think its really important. Having that little extra insanity and damage boost would make it feel so much more fluid and fill the gap in damage we have between 2-5 targets really nicely.
Thanks for reading and feel free to let me know your thoughts