Optimisation of the shadow tree

Classes Priest
1

This is a few changes that will make the shadow tree more or less perfect in my eyes

Move Mindsear up to be part of the MF node - It’s two sides of the same coin, don’t make us pay double

Move around Fortress of the Mind and Death and Madness - It makes more sense to have our “mass” death placed alongside our AOE, and MF/MB buffs on the ST side of things

Searing Nightmare - Replace it with a standalone version of Void Eruption

Make two or all of these free nodes, Silence, Dispersion, Vampiric Embrace or Psychic Horror or at least add their secondary nodes into the primary, to make it easier to justify picking them - We’re currently the only ones that have our CC and defensive in our spec tree, so making them free will be the right way to go about it - Even with them given to us for free we won’t have enough points left over to justify the secondary nodes

Void Form - Should be a standalone instant cast

Monomania - Make it a permanent debuff applied by Mind Blast, basically make it work like Fae Guardians - This needs to happen otherwise we end up in a constant MF spam fishing for procs again

Damnation - Rework it to apply SW:P and VT to all targets within 15 yards of the main target - We really need this seeing as you devs for some reason keep locking a lot of our AOE behind VT

Surrender to Madness - Just remove the death part already and and make it a passive modifier then it’ll make a fine talent - Like it’s only the cast while moving part that’s really good about it - Maybe add an interrupt shield for PvP purposes - The choice between 10% more damage or moving while bursting, will equate to roughly the same power while bursting, but be a net loss in total, with the MF proc VB talent

Psychic Link - Move it up to Mind Sears location - will be a very easy AOE tuning knob

Shadow Crash - I don’t see why it’s still a thing, but if it is to remain, make it track the target, rather than it hitting the targeted location long after the tank has moved the enemies away

Mental Fortitude - Rework it to apply a stacking shield for 10-20% of all shadow damage or rework it to make PW:S a passive that reduces all damage taken by X% spellpower per attack. And if chosen Body and Soul becomes permanent but at a 10% penalty

Sanguine Teachings sounds more like a flat leech buff like 10-20% and it should be a 2 point talent - Or leave it as is and implement one of my above mentioned ideas

Abyssal Knowledge, make it a 2 point talent as well

Separate AOE and ST talents better, as they are right now it looks like a hot mess

And just to remove bloat from the tree, add Shadowy Apparitions to our mastery. With damage and proc chance increased based on mastery %. And can be proc’ed by any shadow damage - This will remove 4 pure bloat talents. Or remove at least 2 of them, and let the other 2 buff it after mastery
While on the topic of mastery, remove DP from it and let it stack a bit faster - This will also make us feel like we’re not missing out on as much damage in AOE - Or buff our over all damage a bit and just go with the above mentioned idea instead of keeping the three part mastery

As for the class tree

I only really have one problem, and that’s Shadowflame Prism still being target locked at 5 targets - In a world of uncapped AOE this cap can’t stand! - We don’t want the clutter it adds to our already crammed rotation, so just make it extend duration and make it deal aoe damage

And a suggestion. Make Leap of Faith a choice node and add instant cast Door of Shadows as the second choice - Yes IK everybody have access to that, but thematically it fits priests better especially shadow priests

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I like that shadow can once again have a few healing spells.

Shadow has 9 utility nodes, compared with Disc and Holy’s 2. I get that we don’t need everyone to be the same, but 9 feels excessive.

Vamp Embrace, Psychic Horror and Dispersion should probably stay shadow exclusive, but maybe silence could be put somewhere deep in class tree if it isn’t too op. Shadowflame Prism seems better as a shadow talent to me.

They could consolidate some of these utility talents. i.e. make bake intangibility into dispersion, and San’layn into Vampiric Embrace. The top of the shadow tree is very busy as it is.

3

I chose to not mention the class tree for the purpose that it’s pretty much perfect as it is

I agree on this, But we shouldn’t have to spend points for the base versions, only for the following modifiers

4

i cannot wrap my head around the sanguine shield mechanic, what were they smoking when they thought of that talent?

also it seems like our survivability talents are just too spread out and we will not be getting either vampiric embrace or dispersion (which i’m pretty sad since i was hyped about the 50% healing it gave you coming back from legion)

one last thing: them keeping the clunky mess that searing nightmare is in the game.
just scrap it and rethink how shadow is supposed to deal with a large group of mobs, but please not an ability you need to cast during mind sear which already doesn’t feel good to press.

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That’s why I want Void Eruption as a stand alone to take it’s place, and have Damnation to be mass dot apply

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Agreed to everything you mentioned

For Damnation, perhaps make the enhancement node let it AoE instead of the reduced cd, or have it be a choice node for either of the two I mentioned.

In the class tree, Taming the Shadows just needs to go, as long as Masochism is a thing, unless there’s something I don’t know.

Since the utility line is a dead end, I’d personality like it a lot better, if Intangibility and Last Word replaced the spell version(Silence and Dispersion), and they just let us have those spells. Psychic Horror can stay down there, so if people want a stun, they still have to spend a little.

I suppose those are my current thoughts on the matter, that I didn’t believe was mentioned in this matter. :smile:

Sidenote: I think it’s really cool that shadow gets access to Mind Restrain(class tree).

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Taming the Shadows is to not hurt your allies, Masochism is to give yourself a hot

This way they’ll have to reduce the CD of the ability baseline, having a 45 sec CD on our aoe could potentially mean that we’ll only deal any real damage every third pull. And keeping the casual end in mind, having a pretty basic aoe on a 45 sec CD means we’ll still have no spot in +2-15’s, so the ideal CD would be 15 secs for the low amount of damage the dot’s bring

So I’d say have the ability’s base CD at 30 sec, which is more than fine for ST, and the have the 2nd node bring in aoe and 15 sec CD reduction. We really need it for every fight to remain competitive in m+

8

that makes sense, I didn’t consider it from that standpoint.

Now that could definitely work. :smiley:

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Hello, rotation was too simple, add more stuff.

Void Eruption would be fantastic as an insanity spender or on a short ish CD. It feels great to use but so long in between ;_;

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I would say it would be best as a spender otherwise insanity is useless in aoe. But for an aoe with a CD that’s where I want Damnation to mass apply SW:P and VT

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I’d personally love to see more ways for our insanity bar to be utilized
also, right now, if you don’t pick DP, what is insanity for then? :thinking:

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That is a very good question, I’d say put DP in the choice node with SN, and move Misery up to DP’s location. And have the DP/SN choice node link to Silence and the mind bomb node as horizontal connections. And VT and MS nodes only link to the DP/SN choice node and the nodes that doesn’t link to anything else

Or (Just a simple recreation)
.,.,.,.,.,.,MF/MS
,.,.,.,.,DP-VT-SN (pref Eruption)
MB/PV-Misery/PL-Silence

I feel like Blizz should just hire me for a short while to fix shadow

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Just give us back the old voidform, and give us some sort of Chorus of Insanity baseline. This iteration of shadow priest is so so badly designed.

Old voidform definitely had problems, but it played unlike any other class. It required a decent amount of skill to reach high stacks of voidform.

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Old VF had a lot more problems than current version. The only down side of the current VF is the cast time on a burst ability. On the old VF the ramp up made us more or less useless in M+. Burst is the meta and if we don’t adhere to that we’re just gonna dig our already extremely deep hole even deeper

But what makes the current Shadow, bad is the bloated rotation with SFP, and the awful interaction with SN.

Oh and if you really liked how the old VF played, go play Demo lock on classic. Yes we got another specs hand me downs, which they were ecstatic to get rid of

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This not true. I regularly topped overall dps in BfA, even in a comp with meta classes, in 19-22 keys. You can top the meters without burst. The main issue is just the rotation and the way shadow does AoE. The damage is fine unless you’re doing really high keys.

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Not to mention the majority of pug tanks let our stacks hit 0 between pulls

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Annoying, but not enough to make spriests useless in M+ as you said. You had stacks of CoI and Lingering Insanity between packs

The problem with the old void form was that it was reliant on borrowed power. Instead of trying to fix it by making Chorus of Inanity for instance baseline, they scrapped the entire thing.

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And again we’re seeing a shadow priest tree where almost nothing is baseline.

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Let’s see what happens soon https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-announces-updates-for-priest-specs-coming-soon-328013

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I for one was never a fan of Devouring Plague, so I hope that we either get alternative ways to spend insanity, or perhaps some sort of effect, based on insanity levels. Never felt “plague” belongs to us, we’re shadow/void, with some vampirism included, plague is more affliction warlock’ish, I feel. Alternatively, just rename the spell :upside_down_face: