As most people know Dps priest is currently the lowest damage of all the specs, and while the developers are giving the buffs, putting a first aid bandage on a gaping wound is not going to help anything.
I know most people will say “Don’t expect to play shadow priest before getting shadow form” and I don’t. But I do expect to play the game and be able to do some damage. Using penance, holy fire, smite, homunculus and wands are fine in the first phase, but even with those tools were are very undertuned.
Honestly Priest are really strong in general. Leveling, World PvP, Soloing, Healing are all things that priest are arguable the strongest at, but the one thing priest is not able to do is damage in PvE content. The main problem is that priest dps is not very different from back in classic (where they were also the worst) and while the runes help, it’s not really going to change a whole class when all we get is a few new dps abilities. I don’t expect to be top of the charts, but doing 1/3rd the damage of other classes is just sad.
It seems Blizzard refuses to change any of the classic abilities, and only buff/nerf runes if they can. I think there should be no reason they can’t change the base but oh well.
Priest got 3 buffs and all of those buffs were 100% or more damage increase on different runes. While I don’t think any ability should ever need 100% or more damage increase (since it should just have been stronger from the start) it’s at least a start. The biggest problem here is the fact that they buffed 2 runes on the same piece. This means that whichever you pick, you can only get 2 of the 3 buffed runes, completely negating 33% of the buffs in essence. I really hope for next phase Blizzards changes some of the gameplay of DPS priest, by giving them a different profile of damage, new rotation and/or a way to not go oom after 30s of combat. My hope is that we get insanity as a new spending tool in Shadowform, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they give us shadowfiend or dispersion and call it a day. Another option is to change penance to a shadow ability (like retail disc priest) whenever you are in shadow form. Using penance for damage is fine imo, but it would suck to go out of shadow form every time you used it. Another option for giving them more damage without changing the class directly is to do like Phoenix Gloves and give us some rep-farmable tailoring recipes that can craft pieces of shadow damage gear which are otherwise difficult/impossible to get outside raid, since this will give us a straight damage increase, even before clearing the raid and getting lucky.
A problem most people point out is the Homunculus. Please give them a pet bar or similar. And if you won’t do that (since you’re likely giving us shadowfiend in a future patch) at least make the spell Homunculus be used while it’s on cooldown to either stop attacks and return to you, or attack the target if you have one. Having them not attack when you need them to, and see them run super far to attack 1 mob/player that you didn’t even want to attack is quite annoying.
Another issue is that Blizzard is buffing runes that were already good in PvP, and it’s now going to create an even bigger problem in PvP and in general in the future. Please don’t just put all the damage from a class into 1 ability, that’s no fun for us, or anyone else who plays against it.
A number of these issues are more or less the same with Balance druid and Elemental shaman, since they are now also getting huge rune buffs that will make them do all of their damage because of 1-2 runes, which will have to be re-balanced next patch, since it will likely ruin PvP for most other classes.
Hope Blizzard will find a better way of doing this (such as making better passives that affect multiple abilities or actually balancing the base kit)
