Shadow priest class fantasy is all over the place and always has been

Classes Priest
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Hi fellow priests, hope all is well during these troubling times.

Hopefully my thoughts here don’t come off as too much of a rant.

I’ve been a shadow player since TBC, played at least a part in every expansion except for WoD/Legion, and I also play some other classes like paladin, druid and mage but priest playing shadow and/or disc is always my number 1.

Coming up to the launch of another expansion and reading through the changes is again hitting me with a feeling that I’ve had a few times throughout various expansions and that is that the WoW team have no idea what they want the feel/core concept of a shadow priest to be - they don’t understand what they want ‘shadow’ magic to be or who would use it and why.

For example, on a caster druid their abilities are easily classified under one umbrella of ‘nature’ spells, all of their class fantasy is neatly related and gels together, you get a clear picture of what a balance druid is and where their powers comes from.

But compared to shadow priests…

Are we supposed to be vampires? Psychics? Tentacle monsters? Plague doctors? Dark magic? - we have core abilities which are totally unrelated to one another from so many different eras/interpretations of a shadow priest

Rather than one clean & cohesive feel our abilities are an amalgamation of;

  • -Vampires/Sanlayn

  • -Psychic powers

  • -Ghosts/spirits

  • -Old Gods & tentacles

  • -Insanity

  • -Generic shadow magic

It leaves a very murky class fantasy and I feel this is partly why shadowpriest is so heavily reworked each expansion, devouring plague has been added/removed countless times, same with the new insanity/voidform mechanic - there is just no clear direction of what we are supposed to be so they don’t know what to keep and what to prune. Like, where does a disease fit into our powers? If they wanted to add an insanity spender, why not just create a spell which fits into the vampiric side of the fantasy and get rid of the out-of-place disease?

I know nostalgia might play a part in this but my favourite era of shadowpriest was TBC where we were clearly a mana/health vampire - the only thing that felt out of place fantasy-wise was devouring plague, this really could have been reworked into another vampiric style spell or even a bleed and we would have had a way more cohesive class fantasy of ‘only’ 3 aspects, vampiric spells like VT, psychic spells like MB and generic shadow magic like shadowform. Still a way bloated & unclear class fantasy but a step in the right direction. But since then we’ve had ghosts added, insanity, old God whispers, the void - it’s just mad.

If I had total control to rework just the c lass fantasy of shadow priests, not necessarily the mechanics - just the fantasy/feel - I’d trim off the ghost aspect entirely, auspicious spirits doesn’t need to be there and we’re never shown as channeling ghosts or anything similar, change all spells to focus around shadow magic [mind blast = shadow blast, mind flay = tormented shadow, VT = dark harvest or the such] - again, no need to have vampires or psychics unless we want to be a dedicated vampire or psychic class [which I could actually get behind - they just need to pick one], get rid of insanity/links to old Gods - focus on being a user of modern Azerothian black magic.

A dedicated shadow mage like this would be a way more clear class fantasy. The mix we have right now is just a bad blend of spells/class fantasy aspects from long ago that couldn’t be committed to probably for balance reasons and new spells which are going off in so many different directions.

Would love to hear yous guyses thoughts & feelings on it

3 Likes
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Do not change the spell name of a single thing I’ve had since vanilla. Otherwise relatively fair game, shadow is all over the place, but honestly I liked that until blizzard pushed a cohesive theme of the void in legion.

The fact we’re taking steps back from that (Mechanically rightly so) is what’s muddying the waters. Insanity is the odd one out here, the rest are fine.

Shadow priests are shunned, ostracised, and often if not self taught then certainly self mastered. We pick up different traits and skills from various avenues within the scope of “Shadow magic” and patch it together to create our own identity, one I truly believe to be greater than the sum of its parts.

3 Likes
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Only criticism in “Devouring Plague”… should be called “Corrupting Shadows”, or something like that.

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It is somewhat vampiric in nature as it heals you as it damages. As for the issue with the whole range of different themes (ie: Tentacles and Shadow), I understand the confusion people have, but the truth is, void and shadow are basically one in the same in the WoW universe. So personally I think SP looks and feels just how it should.
According to Chronicle volume 1, the Void is referred as “a dark and vampiric force driven to devour all energy”. So the vampiric named abilities such as Vampiric Touch, once again, also make sense.

1 Like
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So, I was thinking.
To save a keybind if you pick the Searing Nightmare talent, we could macro it to a Mind Sear keybind when casting it. I found this Marco on MMOC

/use [channeling:Mind Sear] Searing Nightmare
/use [nochanneling:Mind Sear] Mind Sear

This ALMOST works as intended, except for one thing. You can’t recast Mind Sear until the Channeling is over, which makes it a bit wonky

Is there any “macro expert” who can do this? Or is it the only available option?

Edit:
I tired with a /stopcasting at the end, it also almost works the way I intended, but this is not really it yet, because there’s a fraction of second I lose because I have to stop it, and recast again. And I just want to renew the cast of Sear like we’re able to do without the macro

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I made my own macro which essentially does that same as yours:
/use [channeling:Mind Sear] Searing Nightmare; Mind Sear

Which says
IF casting mind sear:
cast searing nightmare
ELSE:
cast mind sear

I tried to make a macro that said the following:
IF casting mind sear AND insanity > 30:
cast searing nightmare
ELSE:
cast mind sear

Based on Wowpedia’s documentation, there is no macro conditional for resources. Unless there’s a different condition we can use then I’m stuck.

In practise it may be best to just use two separate buttons.

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I’ll try to tweet at Chris and ask him if it makes sense to have it as separate button.

If it’s tied to Mind Sear, it should be a passive that when triggered, Mind Sear glows and if you press it when it’s glowing, it uses Searing Nightmare during it. If it’s not glowing, it works normally and you’ll recast mind sear

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I quite like the variance in themes. Means if I want to make a transmog thats vampiric, I have enough abilities to make it feel authentic. If I want a cultist, easy. A more ‘RPG’ style priest? Ez pz.

Voidform and the heavy theming on void kind of ruined that for me when it came out since it felt very one note at that point.

Only thing I don’t like is that insanity is used to create a plague which doesn’t make much sense but to be honest, outside of Voidform I can just pretend it’s a purple energy bar.

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What I hate about the insanity meter and void form is that, to me, the fantasy got reversed. I always viewed Shadow Priests as these coolheaded masterful schemers who with their dark magics made others insane – not themselves!

To simplify it, I feel like an antagonist playing the Shadow Priest. I’m a mad cultist just like the guys who follow the Twilight Hammer.

Was Devouring Plague not limited to only Undead in TBC? In that regard, I thought Devouring Plague was neat, as were most of the unique racial abilities (even if they were imbalanced). When I started playing WoW and learned that Priests had some unique abilities depending on race, I thought that was a really cool niche. A Priest is a representative of their race’s faith.

Personally I want Shadow Priests to play mind games. Stuff like Mirror Images or even Stealth would suit Shadow Priests perfectly, but instead we get shadow orbs and weird ghosts, Insanity and tentacles. Void form because one form wasn’t enough. I actually miss the days when you had to toggle off Shadowform in order to heal, it made Shadowform somewhat dynamic. Nowadays? You might as well leave it on because there’s no gameplay reason to turn it off.

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More tentacles, way more tentacles.

Shadowpriest class philosophy = tentacles !

In all seriousness though, I always thought of Shadow (and Discipline for that matter)Priests to be having a contract with old gods, having the ability to summon lesser parts of the realms of madness.
Therefore they become insane and produce insanity in others in a Lovecraftian way.

So corrupting the mind, and summoning lesser parts of Madness (like tentacles) are their main abilities.

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