Hi,
Shadow priest is underperforming in P1, thats a reality. In P2, however, we get access to a 50% damage boost in shadow spells, but I wonder if that’s enough to catch up to the other DPSS that will too have some power spikes.
Shadow priest will also suffer in Gnomeregan due to the fact that almost every mob will be mechanical, and void plague (the most damaging spell in our kit) will be unusable, since mechanicals are inmune to diseases.
Now, the chest rune that would act as second choice, is twisted faith, which increases the damage of mind flay and mind blast by 50% on targets with Shadow word: pain. With that in mind, I wonder how the math will act in that regard; if we get a +25% shadow damage from talents (voidform and others), we will get a +50% dmg after that shadow damage increase, and also, that will be even increased from shadow weaving at 5 stacks, which will also increase the damage done to that target by an extra 25%; with DMF +10% damage buff, that will increase even more, in the same way that warriors do scale damage I’d say.
This could seem a huge damage boost at first glance, and it is, but Mind Blast is a high threat generation ability, and relaying on big crits from it can be a miserable gameplay for the spec. So let’s discuss about what abilities or things should SP have in their kit for P2 to compete with others:
SPs need a spammable way to do relevant DPS. Mind flay is good, and it scales with every talent point, and the said chest rune; but I fear that its damage would be not impactful in comparation with other classes’ filler spells.
We will need to compete with DPSS out there that will be doing 500+ DPS (probably 800+ DPS), so adding more dots to the rotation, would fix the “filler” ability problem for SPs, by making the rotation more "dot-uptime"ish, rather than a 2 button spam with 1 ability to mantain.
As for single target, we should be okay by adding a Devouring plague in a magic version; and probably vampiric touch.
As for AoE; we need more interactions from runes. In order to make Twisted faith chest rune more mandatory, it would be awesome to make it increase our damage from mind sear to other targets as long as our main target has shadow word pain, and it should also scale from our damage in that main target; that would alow us to avoid taking shared pain over homunculi, since our AoE damage would be okay by just having to setup the main target. It would be nice to add main target damage to mind sear too, making it less viable than mindflay in single target (and also less mana efficient), but rewarding to cast on 3+ target scenarios.
Some runes that could be useful are Shadowcrash, which would do AoE damage in a pointed area, and also apply Shadow word: pain to every mob.
The rotation could get more spicy if we could have a way to reset our Mind Blast CD and make it instant with no mana cost, let’s say, a 5% per shadow word: pain damage tick, with an internal CD of 5s or so.
An ability that could be nice, is Mind Spike, acting as a filler for our rotation, and also increasing Mind Blast damage after every cast (from 33% to 100% on 3 casts).
Finaly, the game changer would be a mymic ability version of Void form, a CD that would put us in steroids regarding spellcrit or spellpower (since haste is not a thing in Classic).
As for mana, it would be nice for Shadow priests to have a way to proc Spirit tap by doing their rotation; let’s say, per every mind blast crit, you get a full Spirit tap buff; that would make us paired with other caster DPSs in the case that our damage numbers aren’t good enough.
Well, those are some ideas that I hope to see in P2, but honestly, since there are too many; I expect Blizzard adding them as we get in P3 or P4; but again, I’d like to remark that SPs need huge boosts to their numbers/gameplay if Blizzard really wants every class to be viable in SoD, another phase with a meme SP version, would be sad xd.
to OP.