Shadow Priest talent trees require urgent changes (proof)

Community General Discussion
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Title

While everyone is up and arms and roars about one god damn ability called power infusion, there is a way more important issue with the revealed priest talent tree, specifically shadow but it also applies to that of the class talent tree.

Here is a word-on-word copy from Blizzard stating their intent with these new talent trees:

"The class tree contains a core set of abilities available to all specs in a class and has a higher proportion of utility choices. It’s a place where you can, among other things, choose some abilities or passives that draw from the identity of other specializations to give your character some hybrid flavor, or simply to grab something particularly useful for certain content. The specialization tree is predominantly focused on bonuses that enhance your power in your main role. Keeping these separate is one way of ensuring that you have some choices in both areas without, for example, feeling compelled to give up all your utility or off-spec buttons in order to maximize main role performance."

And, for the most part, that has been the case. Both of the Death knight damage specs for example have only one pure utility talent, Absolute Zero, for Frost death knights.

Meanwhile, feral druid has 3:

  • Predatory Swiftness
  • Survival Instincts
  • Infected wounds

And balance druid has one, in the form of solar beam.

So, more or less, the mantra has for all it’s flaws at least held through. Until we get to shadow priests.

Shadow priests, as it stands, have 9 pure utility based nodes in their talent tree. That is more than all the dps specs combined have above.

These are as listed:

Psychic Scream / mind bomb
Silence
Last word
Dispersion
Intangibility
Vampiric embrace
San’layn
Hallucinations
Psychic horror

This is by far the biggest issue the tree has and it needs to be addressed. Either all those abilities, save for maybe silence, should be baked baseline into the spec or into the class talent tree (seeing as that is where they seem to fit the best).

The class talent tree also has some completely deadweight nodes, notably:
Tithe evasion
Charitable soul
Mind restrain

This is all said without even mentioning how you completely ignored the ±2 years of feedback people wanting to get rid of searing nightmare, how our dots hit like wet noodles always at the end of an expansion and we become reliant on external damage sources like set bonuses, trinkets and essences / corruptions, and how void form still manages to exist in the spec when it has been in an identity crisis since you made this abomination in Legion.

You also do some very odd takes where you say you want people to move away from relying on mind flay by moving the mind blast procs into vampiric touch (instead of just putting it back to SW:P like it was since before always), but then the talent tree is filled with abilities like monomania, void touched, rot and wither and abyssal knowledge which all directly rely on mind flay to be channeled in order to be effective.

It feels to me as if you took the worst parts of shadow priest based on what people run in different content types because you read it as “this must be good”, and then just plastered them into the tree and called it a day, without ever consulting or even looking at the feedback that has been accumulated in multiple platforms across the game since SL alpha.

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9 utility talents don’t seem like an issue. It’s also unfair, that you count priest cc talents as utility, and the cc talents from DK/Druid aren’t counted by your analysis.
With the rest of the post, I’d like to ask, if you’ve taken into consideration, that those talents, you call useless, might be for pvp?
(I ask, because I’m rerolling to shadow priest right now, because I thought, that the talents sound really cool)

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Well if that’s the case why isn’t anti magic shell an unholy dk spec specific talent or icy chains a frost talent tree specific talent?

That’s right, that’d be idiotic. Just as it is to restrict a spec’s utility as majorly as SP has, when Blizzard has stated that’s not how this is supposed to work.

I did count them up, I even listed them in my example. I just took the utility talents from the -spec- tree in all the cases, not the -class- tree.

And as it stands, the fact is that Shadow Priest has more utility in it’s spec specific tree (where it should not be, period) compared to all the other DPS specs shown combined.

The whole point of my argument is that the utility of SP should have no place in the spec talent tree and it should instead be part of the class talent tree or indeed just be baseline.

All of the talents I listed from class talent tree are useless because they scale way too low and killing yourself with SW:D is only ever an issue if you are doing torghast or mega low on health. That doesn’t warrant wasting 2 points on it, especially so high down the tree.

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Ahh that’s the issue. If you count it with class talents, and make sure you take ones, that are reasonable for shadow, then it stops looking as grimm :smile:
I mean in the shadow tree, you can get those additional cc talents for pvp, but you don’t have to, right?

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But that’s the whole god damn point I’m making!

The utility spells that shadow has in the SHADOW TALENT TREE SHOULD NOT BE THERE.

They should either

a) Be in the CLASS TALENT TREE AS OPTIONS, as is the case with the other classes showcased so far.
b) Be baked BASELINE into the SPEC.

Because if they aren’t, Blizzard lies. They said, and I quote:

Word-on-word, the shadow utility spells should be in the class talent tree. Because you are exactly now in the situation where you need to ask yourself do you want vampiric embrace and/or dispersion or do you want to have meaningful damage- Which, is exactly what they claimed they would avoid doing.

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Let’s actually look at the claims throughly:

" The class tree contains a core set of abilities available to all specs in a class and has a higher proportion of utility choices."

The class tree for priests has more utility than the shadow spec tree does. Therefore this statement is still true. You compare the shadow tree with other dps when the statement you bring forth is comparing the spec with the class tree.

" The specialization tree is predominantly focused on bonuses that enhance your power in your main role."

As you have counted there are nine utility talents in the shadow tree. Therefore this also holds true as it does predominantly focus on power for the majority of the talents.

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Then why is it that all the other specs so far have not nearly as much of their utility forced to compete with their throughput choices as shadow priest has?

After all, if this philosophy you and I quote is universal across the classes, then it should also be implemented equally across them.

Same as above.

Also, you left out the last bit:

In which case, please explain to me and everybody else here, how is choosing between any of the throughput talent choices and for example dispersion, a pure defensive utility a spell, not a glaring example of a lie?

Again, if this is the case, why isn’t anti-magic shell a talent choice for unholy death knights? Or cyclone for Balance druids? Or any other ridiculous example.

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