It’s not only for Shadowpriests that BfA leveling is painfully slow, even with a 100% xp bonus. Almost 1 million experience per level, mobs that take forever to kill and lack of alternatives makes it terrible for everyone.
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It’s 2-3 dungeons per level.
Cool, and in Legion it takes one per level, and also including how there’s only 3 per faction and they take quite a while to clear don’t make it a good alternative unless you’re paying for someone to boost you or having a friend helping.
Shadow priests weren’t like this before void form though. It hasn’t always existed. WoD was fun as a shadow priest imo.
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As far as leveling is concerned, I think Shadow Priest has always been pretty terrible.
The toolkit just doesn’t fit that general approach of killing one mob, move a bit, kill another mob, and so on.
Melee classes shine at it. Casters don’t. And DoT-reliant casters really don’t.
DoTs and Mind Flay are slow damage dealing-components, always have been.
The cooldown on Mind Blast has always meant that you’re forced to rely on those slow-ticking damage components, so it takes excruciatingly long to kill a single enemy mob. And you don’t have the defensive capabilities to multi-DoT in an effective way.
And then the crowd control has always been the least desirable. Everyone who’s feared a Murloc into a Murloc camp knows what I talk about.
Those are shortcomings Shadow Priests have had since day 1 as far as leveling is concerned. Void Form is another component you can add to the list, but it’s always been a fairly long list.
And it’ll probably be the same for Shadowlands. The toolkit and design relies a lot on endgame gear progression before it starts to flow somewhat decently.
@everyone
in conclusion, im too much of a zoomer to understand the whole shadowpriest issue
I joined wow in legion
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shadowpriest in any kind of solo/lvling content just FEEL horrible and takes forever to kill things. on a fresh 380ilvl dh you slay through things faster than as 470 shadow just horrible crap voidform design
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Then why say anything at all? Nothing more annoying than some ignorant oaf telling people what they should do when they’re evidently clueless on the subject…
well I am not saying that SPriest was OP in the past, but in my opinion it was never that bad as it is today. I was doing fine in WotLk and later on with shadow orbs. I am only talking about solo questing / exploring, no idea how it performs in endgame raids.
Sure.
I would say that endgame performance has always gone up and down like a rollercoaster, depending on the design for a particular expansion (Shadow Orbs, Void Form, etc.).
But as far as leveling is concerned – and solo play and questing at max level – it has always been one of the worst dps specs for that. The core design is simply not suited for it. It never has been. It’s made for raid bosses, preferably with some multi-DoT action going on. And leveling and solo play are as far removed from that as anything can be.
Because i didnt know this entire thread was classic boomers
Learn what a boomer is before trying to sound edgy utilizing it as some feeble nonsensical insult, “zoomer”.
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I dont try to sound le edgy
I try to sound le memey
Ait in your language : I havent played this game a decade ago, so idk how shadowpriest used to be for me to continue into this conversation
maybe you are right or maybe the areas was not dense in mobs and you usually was fighting 1-2 mobs unless you were intentionally wanted to pull more. On new areas now, you are constantly fighting > 3-4 mobs without trying to do so…
even in classic wow that are supposed to have more difficult leveling I did better with my SPriest.
I’m afraid I have to contradict you here, WotLK was decent for shadow levelling and it didn’t suck as much as it did today.
Vampiric embrace was then made a self buff returning % of all damage dealt as health, vampiric touch + mind blast triggered replenishment and dispersion returned 36% mana over its full duration while reducing damage taken by 75%.
You could essentially pull non stop provided you pre cast bubble early enough so you could recast when the mob was hitting you.
There was one particular area in hellfire where the carrions are, the spawn rate was insane and I was caught fighting for 15 minutes non stop until I could little by little move out of the quest zone unto the road. And that “encounter was finished at full health and more than half the mana.
While true that dot classes have it hard due to ramp up, adding another ramp up mechanic such as voidform is just stupid. I’m not saying it’s bad design, it transcends that, it’s just plain ignorance to how a dot spec works.
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Nice to see I’m not the only one disappointed with Shadow Priests.
I thought it was just me being bad at the class, even though in previous expansions my shadow Priest was pretty decent. I just can’t seem to do much in the current expansion and when I play it, it takes ages to get quests done, way longer than all of my other characters.
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Well that is the problem with Shadow Priest kit, right now a Shadow Priest take like 60~ seconds to reach full damage.
It is way too much, I like Shadow playstyle but right now it does not work.
Some people will come out and say “bUt sPrIeSt iS fInE, lOoK aT mYtIcH parses” and yeah shadow can do insane damage right now.
If you play with 3x SA, and something like 2700 crit BEFORE applying Severe corruptions then yeah the class works.
M+ is poop to play, unless you are doing a decent fortified key, by the time you are close to peak damage the pack is dead.
With the insane crit we have right now is not that big deal, but again this is a bandaid fix. Play a shadow in a decent high key without high baseline crit and you will see the problem.
I would not have a problem at being the class that have it slow while leveling if the spec was somewhat rewarding to play at max level.
I have leveled like 10 character during 8.2/8.3 and Shadowpriest is probably the only spec I would tell you not play while gearing because getting geared as shadow will be frustrating af.
I geared myself as holy since I got like 0 good corruption for shadow then slowly built my shadow sloooooowly.
Now thanks to vendor my Shadow is working fine, 5 months after the patch.
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I dunno, possibly because up until Legion shadow priest was working fine and dandy without insanity mechanics and voidform.
Some players are playing shadow priest from before Legion you know.
You get a good 3-4 levels per legion assault if you do all of the world quests that show up there. Doing the major questline in Val’sharah, a Legion assault and the bonus objectives in Val’sharah with the XP boost is generally enough to get to 110, unless you aren’t using heirlooms.
Do not do dungeons in WoD or in Legion. It is simply not worth it because the quest that gives the big xp boost is only given once you finish the main story in the zone the dungeon is connected to.
I don’t know, when I was leveling my warlock (affliction) I had no problem destroying anything that got in my path. I did not even need voidwalker for them either.
I also had no problems killing mobs on my mage, nor do I recall struggling on single mobs on my balance druid. I was leveling my shaman during the time the scaling system was introduced in legion and even on elemental I was not struggling with single mobs.
I think shadow is the one who struggles with this the most out of all the specs I tried leveling on so far (not countil the bonus objectives in Spires of Arak. Those feel slightly overtuned.)
I’ll just put it out here that priest was one of the two classes I had leveled up on Alliance side, but after Legion it felt so bad to go through quests at low itemlevel that I literally abandonned him and leveled a warrior up instead.
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Maybe I should clarify a bit. 
No specs in the game struggles with the leveling experience. You can go from 1 to 120 with relative ease using any spec in the game.
And the same goes for World Quests and Daily Quests. All specs can do them just fine.
But some specs clearly do them faster and more efficiently than other.
Melee dps specs are generally really good at this. Their damage is up-front, little ramp, and rather single-target focused. And the bulk of the damage is immediately applied at will.
By contrast the DoT-reliant caster is always looking at an ability that deals its damage over 15 or 20 seconds, which isn’t very ideal for leveling or questing mobs that you want to kill in 4-7 seconds. It becomes an inefficient way of dealing damage. It’s much more suited for raid bosses that live for countless minutes.
I merely responded the way I did because you specifically mentioned leveling in your post, but yes, generally DoT classes have a slower clear time than others. I still feel no struggle killing mobs one by one on my affliction warlock, though to be fair I haven’t touched my priest since 8.1. It just fel so painfully slow (especially since I liked the way shadow worked during Legion. Now that Void form got gutted entirely it just feels meh.)