I would say It’s all about armour… basic resistance to melee attacks. Since inner fire is gone and shadowform only increase spell dmg. Give us something to survive abit longer against this faceroll melee.
Rogue. When a rogue can global you.
Paladin ret. When a ret crits you for 15k not once but several times.
Warrior. When a warrior just don’t take damage. But deals it insane.
Dk… hi… can I have more resistance to magic says the Dk. Sure here you go. Want damage with that also? No problem. You can’t survive against 5 people? Here you go.
Ferals… no complaint.
Monks. If you are lucky he just started to play the game.
So we get Focused will which procs when we take a melee hit.
Ultimately the problem remains as it has since they decided to give every melee a 15 second CD (or less) interrupt. We hard cast everything and have nothing which allows us to ignore interrupts.
If you have 2 melee on you, any two melee (its worse if one of those melee is a Shaman with their 8 second interrupt -.-), and they cycle interrupts well, you have 5 second cast window in every 15 assuming they use literally no other control. Given they all have one or two other control abilities at least, functionally 2 melee can lock you down for 1 to 1.5 mins pretty reliably.
Its why Shadow basically only runs with healers atm. Our damage is insanely good we just never get to do it. The shadow PvP strategy is literally to sit there and be so dangerous they have to train you, while the healer(s) keep you alive until they run out of CDs to chain lock us then evaporate someone. Mind you, we still pail compared to the arcane canon stupidity which is Convoke the Spirits. Watching a boomkin do 20k damage in one spell, plus 15 others in less than two seconds is always fun. You interrupt it or you die.
Not sure id agree, given spriest rogue is an incredibly viable 2s comp, and sp + another hybrid DPS such as Ret or enhance also appears to be playable.
The only time shadow hasn’t been the spec most reliant on hardcasting was WoD, and outside of that ‘be so dangerous you cannot be allowed to cast’ has literally been our MO for over a decade.
never made that much of a difference tbh. rogue had find weakness, warrior had cs. still better than nothing though but I’d rather have focused will even if it’s a boring passive if we’re getting melee survivability buffs (which I don’t really think we need, it’s just unfun to face meleecleaves as spriest). I really liked the fire/will “dance” though for the extra SP in fire and the movement/mana save in will.
edit: And you need to time stuff correctly (gr. fade/disp/fear/ps. horror/psyfiend(!) - most dps will need at least some luck to get you to 0 through all that without having to work for it! Im just a casual nobody in-terms of rating but i have softened up many a brave alliance Paladin with 40k+ hp charging in like they own the place only to find their mojo has been stolen and they lie face down waiting for spiritmender do do her business.
Absorb shield, huge self heal from dots huge self heal with SM, dispersion that healing you, greater fade, life swap, fear, stun/silence. Spriest is one of the tankiest caster in the game. Noone can beat warrior its not your spec only. You should try this in arena: Choose the smallest pillar and run around it. Use body and soul and only use it when no slow on you or warrior is getting closer. Use instant dots on any target that in line while you running around the pillar. When warrior almost gets you preuse gf + shield and run away dont afraid to disper stun > colossal > battle stance combo. Every time your stun is up stun warrior and pump as much dmg as you can but be careful when it starts to expire start to run again so he cant connect. Sometimes you need to leave them at 15k hp because healer will pop something Anyway dont worth the risky to let connect warrior. At some point warrior will start to try to chase your healer who should do the same as you did before. And you can freely pump some dmg. Noone I repeat noone should 1v1 a warrior not even dks. You play for rotting them down. Its gonna be a long game but 80% win chance. Try to find the best way to counter every connection with warrior.
In 3s you will play with balance, frostm, lock, fmage, rog or warrior all of them are really good in peeling off enemy from you.
The real problem is:
1 The short CD on interrupts
2 Melee’s free no CD snares that lowers speed by up to 70% (I think that’s the highest)
3 Our lack of any movement outside of defensives
4 Shadowy Insight becoming baseline as Dark Thoughts which functions in a very awful way - A rework here to make DT proc of dot ticks rather than MF/MS ticks is highly called for and it could make up a lot for points 1-3
5 Our dispel shield is extremely lackluster - Could be made up for by making the fear non breakable and being outside of DR and lasting 5 secs instead of 3
Biggest problem is all the interupts with shord cd and that all our spells are shadow school. Casting a VT with a melee on you is a huge risk as all our defensives are shadow as well. If a mage gets locked on frost he can just use polymorph which is arcane for example. Maybe bringing flash heal back instead of shadow mend would help a bit. In addition to that we have no mobility at all and are so dependant on our team mates is ridiculous.
i totally agree that shadow lacks movement. At least blizzard could have made mindflay usableon the move , and make dots hit stronger. Plus change shadow mend the flash heal
