I. Void Eruption and time to start to do damage.
I believe it’s the only major CD with… cast time. If you think it’s a good idea, well, maybe if it deals good amount of damage worth 1+ sec cast time.
M+ is a mode of a pretty high game pace. It feels frustrating to see pack melting by other DDs while you’re preparing your spriest to start dealing damage.
Imagine that to get the most of our current damage kit we need: apply some Vampiric Touches (probably 3-5 gcds), trink+pi + covenant spell, pet, mind blast (in order to not waste a stack), sw:d <-> void eruption, more than 8 targets? SN, SN spam - here is your highest damage threshold.
Let’s count it considering that we apply even less VTs - just 2 = 2 gcds, trink+pi+cov spell = 1gcd, pet = 1 gcd, mb = 1 gcd, v.eruption = 1 gcd, swd = 1 gcd, 1st SN = 1 gcd. So before to start doing your real damage you have to spend like 8 gcds for preparation.
Add 2 more gcd if there are less than 8 targets then you have to play around your legendary - shadow flame prism which means you have to hard cast MBs - 2 MBs after VEruption.
This is possible in 2 situations:
- The key lvl is quite high (25+ fortified).
- Tank is setting up pulls very, very slowly.
In other words, if we play in 15-20 keys (and the vast majority of players does) we literaly have no chance to play it properly. We have to give up on trying to do it right which means to forget about some spells almost totally.
So, tell me please what was the idea behind making VEruption to have a cast time?
There are 2 ways of solving this problem:
- Make VEruption damage a lot higher. Like, a lot.
- Make it instant.
II. Vampiric Touch.
I already mentioned the problem of Vampiric Touch but I can repeat it. Players have no chance to get the most out of this spell. It was some kind of a joke when Devs buffed it.
It deals pretty good amount of damage and it’s really bad situation when you have to give up it because if you don’t… you gonna lose even more dps (I will explain in covenatn section). Also, imo VT’s design is very outdated.
What can be done:
- Delete VT.
- Make some more passive source of applying it (e.g unholy nova has a chance to apply VT on every target/5 target max it hits).
- Make it worth of gcd (VT has a chance to provide you with some nice buffs like VT ticks have a chance to grant your mind sear +250% damage like it was in BfA via azerite traits).
III. Abilities confrontation.
As you already know we struggle to give up on some source of our damage to do at least something meaningful. Before covenant legendaries we had to play shadowflame prism.
This legendary even got some nerfs. Ok. But…
I believe this is the only legendary (BiS one) that makes you to chose between 2 things when you obviously want to do both at the same time.
You can say but sfp deals a lot of damage. Well, maybe. But it will cost you - SN damage.
Obviously SFP has terrible design. It should have some other source of triggerting it than something you have spend gcds on.
IV. Covenant.
Even when Spriest played as Night Faes, Necrolords were very close to them. Before that and now Necrolords are again our best covenant. But you have to understand 1 thing that to be the best doesn’t mean to be good, it means that others are just worse. That’s why I don’t think that I have to talk about others covenants and why they are worse than necrolords.
Even though necrolords are pretty easy to play with as you have pretty simple covenant spell, I don’t think it should be taken as a reason to make Unholy Nova to be that bad.
Unholy Nova is a spell that deals pretty low damage and provides you with no utility at all. Like imaging NF ability for mages, it deals if not more but some similar amount of damage through out the whole dungeon but it also gives very strong cdr.
So, in my opinion Unholy Nova should have something more than just “it deals damage and it heals (lol not)”.
It’s very frustrating to have such undertuned spell to be also your only option. Look at how much damage other class bis cov spell deals. Or if it doesn’t do much damage, what additional utilities it gives?.
- Unholy Nova could have a chance to apply some VTs on targets (as I already said).
- It could be a part of our mastery as the 4th source of overall damage buff.
- It could trigger Shadowy Apparition like if target have VT but only with its ticks (without having to trigger it manually through MBs, DP or VB).
- 100500 more ideas could be considered…
Another thing about covenant is Bonesmith soulbound. Even though Marileth is a solid choice, Bonesmith is the best option for 15-20 keys. The main thing about this soulbound is Carver’s Eye trait. It gives you huge amount of mastery if you deal some damage to targets above 90% hp. Duration is quite low though. Since I’m talking about 15-20 keys, the thing about refreshing its duration is out of discussion.
So, this is another reason we can’t play spriest correctly. In order to deal the best possible damage you have to pair Carver’s Eye stacks with crit buff from Ancient Madness talent. As you could already guess our correct opener leads you to a situation where you lose all carver’s eye stacks before Veruption.
It’s not like a problem of the trait but as I promised I gave you some more information why trying to play it right in 15-20 keys could result in a dps loss.
But if you want to address some solutions this way then:
- Carver’s Eye should be something like “dealing damage to targets above 75-80% hp…”.
- Duration could be longer - like 7 sec.
V. AoE.
It’s a sort of summing up our AoE kit. In general we have very weak baseline aoe - mind sear.
All our other sources of aoe come from talents. Which means we can’t buff our aoe through talents we just get it from there.
There is not much to be discussed as the only way to solve this problem is to give us some meaningful baseline aoe spell(s).
- Shadow crash can be one of our baseline aoe kit.
- SN can be out of gcd.
- Considering Shadowy Apparitions to be some sort of aoe/cleave spell it must get some nice damage buff.
Summing up.
Spriest must get some love from Devs as… in SL we’re being constantly nerfed without even being somewhere close to OP/meta spec. All those OP/meta specs even after nerfs are still better than spriest.
Also it must be understood by Devs that Spriest problems come not just from some low damage formulas but mostly from terrible QoL design of spec and our best covenant itself.
I’m not sure I keep playing Spriest if Blizzard keep things for the spec as they do for now or not sure if I even keep playing WoW in the next expansion but I really hope that Spriests can be if not the only but one of the most desirable specs in the game in M+.
Cheers.
PS. Sorry if it’s a bit messy. Did it without any drafts first (actually I had some but I didn’t use it lol) and without any editing to enhance readability.
PPS. One more sorry as I totally forgot one more thing about this spec.
Stats and scaling.
I started to play spriest when it became a haste addict spec. I liked it very much as I like fast casting gameplay.
Correct me if I’m wrong but this was one of Blizzard explanation why Spriest needed rework. They thought that at some point Spriest appeared to become very hard to play spec due to high haste values and some players can’t keep up with it because of “ping”.
Even though it might be true, especially in Legion when we have a very strict gameplay called “55/5” I believe.
In BfA things became more easier I think if talking just about high haste gameplay.
Anyway, haste gives us a lot. Like really a lot. You can check it in Plaguefall if you manage to bring red slime to the 1st boss and start the fight staying within red pool + having buff from red slime. I know only one spec which benefits from haste in a same way - demo warlocks.
And because of that haste thing we were one of the best scaling spec in the game. Which means we start slowly, we can be underpowered within first two tiers but then with all stats (and haste especially) we began to show some good results (in raids ofc).
Today we have nice mastery (which is not useless anymore), also for 15-20 keys crit is also is able to provide us with nice dps numbers but still haste is our bread and butter.
And PI is not enough.
It leads us to a problem of stats diminishing system being introduced in SL.
And to do something about it could be one of the ways to make our QoL and overall performance better.
in m+…which isnt anything new.