Hello! I am a former huge Shadow Priest fan, I loved it in MoP all the way through then until the start of Shadowlands. My accomplishments in game are almost all curves from mid WoD and onwards, a handful of cutting edges (hoping to get Jailer on my belt as well), 2.1k in arenas in multiple seasons, and since Legion I’ve hit at least 2k rio score each season, as multiple classes and roles. I love the game, I love the classes, and I love the idea behind Shadow Priest. With introductions out of the way, let me get into the gripes I have with Shadow Priest.
Why I love Shadow Priest
The idea of spreading your damage out evenly and seeing everything die simultaneously has always been enjoyable to me. Everything is dying, slowly but surely, and this damage is consistently either level or ramping up. You’re never slowing down, you’re always keeping your pace and increasing your tempo as enemies increase and their life decreases. In short, spread dotting(cleaving) and execute is a playstyle I heavily enjoy, and major bonus points for when you’re not cooldown reliant or just a damage turret (foreshadowing).
My favorite state of Shadow Priest was…
Definitely Legion-BFA version of Shadow Priest. I have quick fingers and think fast, reactionary gameplay is what I love. And if Legion-BFA spriest had a lot of anything it was APM and proccs. The introduction of Void Form was probably the best thing to happen to Shadow Priest in my opinion. It amplified everything I love about spriest manifold: Spread the dots, generate the insanity, unleash the bolts, refresh the dots, build the stacks, use the proccs, build the stacks, build more insanity, refresh the dots, build the stacks… and so on and so forth. The longer you stayed in, the longer you could stay in the next one, and then you would have a massive VF to build for when all your cooldowns lined back up, and the longer you stayed in, the more haste and crit you had, all building up exponentially.
You never went down in damage, if you played properly, you always would deal more and more. And because of the short globals and proccs and everything, you had so much mobility because you never had to stand still for long periods of time.
My least favorite state of Shadow Priest was…
Current, and most likely not gonna change my mind with the release of Dragonflight, as the philosophy on spriest isn’t really changing. The current state of spriest is sort of this weird amalgamation of old MoP priest and new Legion priest, but none of the cleave or AoE proficiency you had as either or. The current state of spriest is really confusing for new players, and incredibly unsatisfying to me as a veteran of the class. The defacto class for cleave and spread AoE has been watered down to a turrety, resource flooded, unimpactful, cooldown dependent, visually boring, single target tower of mediocre damage.
My problems with the current state of Shadow Priest
Let’s start with a look at the cooldowns Shadow Priest has:
- Shadowfiend - Ye old faithful. 3 minutes cooldown, 15 seconds of crazy amounts of insanity generation, possibility to go down to 1 minute same duration, and because of SFP legendary, this talent is not optional. For optimal spriest gameplay, you HAVE to play this talent. This wouldn’t be a problem, if it wasn’t severely off-centered from the rest of your cooldowns. Let’s continue.
- Void Eruption - My favorite Shadow Priest spell! Except it has simultaneously been extremely watered down and alot more important. A shadow of its former self, it has a static duration of 15 seconds, with possible extension via the Hungering Void talent. It refreshes the cooldown and increases the amount of charges of Mind Blast by 1 for the duration, a call back to the Shadow Word: Void talent. It gives you Void Bolt as a filler spell, which feels awful to press now because the rest of my toolkit wants me to press Mind Flay, Shadow Word: Death, or MB. Let’s continue.
- Power Infusion - A wonderful return, with an awful implementation. This should NOT be castable on another player, ever. It has created an extremely toxic environment whenever there’s a priest involved, even spriests. Nevertheless, PI does what PI has always done, give a huge haste steroid on a 2 minute cooldown. Are you starting to see the problem I’m hinting at here? Let’s continue.
We look at these 3 main offensive cooldowns spriest has at its disposal, and there’s a very huge issue that is easily noticeable. None of these share a cooldown. 1/3 minutes, 1.5 minutes, 2 minutes. As a new priest player, what are you supposed to do if you’re not looking up a guide and want to do some decent damage? Do I just rip it and ship each cooldown individually? Do you hold one for 30 seconds to line it up with the next? Do you use Mindbender so you can use MiB + VE + PI on pull, then a minute later you use MiB again, then hold my VE until PI is back, and then rip them all again after 2 minutes? Do you hold my 2nd MiB and VE to line it back up with PI? Do you hold MiB to line up with VE and use PI at the end of your VE, further disaligning your cooldowns? I personally wouldn’t be able to tell you because I gave up on spriest halfway through the 2nd patch of Shadowlands. But when we use all of these at once, it feels great! …right? Back in the first and second season of Shadowlands, when Night Fae was the main covenant for spriest I noticed something very quickly, I was flooding super hard because of SFP. When in cooldowns, you have 4 buttons baseline you use for building your insanity bar, but you only have ONE to spend it on, and in the meantime you have your Mindbender wreaking havoc on your main target that you’re not gonna swap from because you deal 10% more damage to it because you’re playing Hungering Void and that’s the one with Devouring Plague on it, and you have PI going so this source of generation is going absolutely crazy passively, so you press DP again but whoops because of your lopsided haste you now missed half a cast of void bolt which in the end is gonna cause you to miss multiple globals or multiple VBs in your VE window, which feels tragic and inefficient. In the meantime, your 2nd MB stack is halfway through its cooldowns and your MiB has generated another 30 insanity since your last global, with MB coming up again, and VB having been off CD for half a global now. In short, to a new player the cooldowns feel extremely confusing, as even I felt confused at first as a veteran of the class. And even when you get the hang of it, the weird cooldown and haste cooldown reduction interaction of VB makes it feel really extremely inefficient to press, you WILL get insanity flooded or miss VB or MB casts. And then we also have Void Torrent to factor in that some players are gonna talent into for god knows what reason, but that’s another insanity generator that gives you way too much to spend during cooldown windows, and you’ll miss out on even more insanity.
All of this can almost be forgiven as well, if it wasn’t for one thing, how insanely important it is to channel and keep channeling Mind Flay/Sear is. It’s the only way to refresh MB cooldown, it’s your main source of insanity generation, your only way of doing AoE damage, and when you’re refreshing your VT’s in AoE situations you’re just gonna catch yourself feeling “Man, I should be pressing Mind Sear right now.” It’s just dreadful.
What are my suggestions?
First of all, make one change to PI, just one of the following:
- Make it personal only
- Remove it
- Make it baseline and make twin priestess talent a 1 point investment, also make it in line with predicted main path of holy/discipline in the base tree
Second of all: - One has got to give. Devouring Plague and Void Eruption should not exist together. My personal change would be just bring back old Void Eruption and Void Form please, and if you have to have DP in the game, make it a like 20 second cooldown that gives a chunk of insanity or something. But current VE is not satisfying at all, and DP is not fun to press. One has to go.
Third of all: - Please buff dots and Shadowy Apparitions, and bring back the SA’s that spawn on dot crits instead of being force spawned by MB, DP, or VB. And add a way to easily refresh VT on targets in AoE situations, right now it feels awful.
Fourth of all - No one likes Searing Nightmare, or that you can cast MB proccs while channeling Mind Flay or Mind Sear, it feels super weird.
Fifth of all - Please don’t make Dispersion into a talent, it’s the only defensive spriest has got.
Conclusion
In my opinion, the current state of Shadow Priest feels super janky, very static, cooldown dependent, and the cooldowns don’t even feel good. If it was up to me, I’d just revert spriest to how it was back in BFA and make the good azerite traits into talents. But as it stands right now, considering how close we are to release and what a balancing nightmare old spriest was apparently it was because of azerite trait scalings but don’t let the devs think they made a bad job with azerite armor, please just add another off-global insanity spender or something, and do not reintroduce SFP into the spriests toolkit. It’s janky and not fun at all. This has been my thoughts on the state of spriest in Shadowlands, and probably the state of spriest in Dragonflight. Thanks for reading, and have fun.