US Crosspost: Shadowlands Class Update Feedback

Classes Priest
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Cross posting the thread created on the US forums by WCP Shadow Team Member Publik

Link to Original: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/shadowlands-class-update-feedback-shadow-priest/488764/1

Hello there, I’ve been playing Shadow Priest since the launch of Voidform in the Legion pre-patch and have been Mythic raiding as Shadow ever since. These days I do a lot of work in the Priest community; writing guides, developing SimC, and creating resources for the community to use. After seeing the initial round of class updates I figured I would post my thoughts here for others to review and comment on going into Shadowlands Alpha.

Note: Before I get into the weeds, I just want to say thank you to anyone taking the time to read this. Myself and others in the Shadow Priest community are eager to test things and give feedback to make the game we love that much better!

Here are the topics I’d like to talk a bit more about:

  • The Voidform Problem

  • Lack of Utility

  • Cooldown Usage

  • Talent Viability

The Voidform Problem

As others have already pointed out on this forum and on Twitter, Shadow NEEDS something to give Voidform…a point. Without things like Chorus of Insanity (BfA) or Mass Hysteria (Legion) staying in Voidform doesn’t give us much value. Yes, we get access to Void Bolt and some stacking Haste but from a damage point of view this isn’t very enticing. I’m not sure if anyone was particularly fond of these options but they at least gave some amount of meat to Voidform which had a cascading effect on the viability of other talents and abilities that cannot be ignored.

Voidform has evolved to being something that we now maintain with near 80-90% uptime throughout fights and NOT being in Voidform feels quite awful since you are just “waiting” to do damage. Nothing in the current update seems to address the motivation for wanting to be in Voidform, other than simply NOT wanting to be out of it, which is not exciting. Back in Legion we got a significant damage increase for staying in Voidform for as long as possible which was nice but not very exciting. This is probably the main reason why many people are advocating for Voidform to be replaced by something that provides a bit more depth and engagement without feeling too punishing if you mess up.

A fundamental problem with Voidform is that it creates a significant ramp to our DPS. In its current state, with Chorus of Insanity, we usually wait 45-60s before our damage peaks. This wasn’t so bad in the past where we would gain significant benefits from staying in Voidform. With the removal of Chorus of Insanity (Azerite Trait) in Shadowlands that reward has gone away and we nowhave cooldowns that sit adjacent to Voidform like Power Infusion and Shadowfiend. Assuming Power Infusion works similarly to how it did in Legion, we will likely just try to use it to extend our Voidform, get some extra haste, and then cast Shadowfiend with that extra haste. Personally I would rather have something I can hit that instantly feels impactful, even if it means dropping Voidform. Some veteran Shadow Priests would love to see the return of a/Mind Spike type mechanic where we sacrifice our DoTs for some big benefit (similar to the Swiftmend change for Restoration Druids) or a Devouring Plague mega-DoT that interacts with our insanity/Voidform in some way…

Lack of Utility

As someone who enjoys pushing high Mythic+ Keystones, and likes the challenge of timing big keys with my friends, the thing I crave most for Shadow Priest is utility. I’ll acknowledge that part of this problem stems from dungeons lacking things that give Priests, and specifically Shadow Priests, some niche to fill into but going off of the past seasons of Mythic+ it seems that playstyle is here to stay.

From the Class Updates post:

…we also want to give players more opportunities to make impactful choices to customize their gameplay and express their own vision of how their characters engage in combat

This part resonates with me big time. The way I read this is that I should be able to make an impactful choice to customize my gameplay based on the content I want to accomplish. Right now the only choice we can make in regards to utility is if we want an AoE disorient, a single target stun, or a slightly reduced interrupt CD. On top of this, we have some niche things like Mass Dispel, Leap of Faith, and Vampiric Embrace but these don’t see much use in the current set of dungeons and would require a big shift in Shadowlands dungeon design to really compete with other DPS classes’ utility. It would be cool to see maybe an extension of our current abilities, i.e. Shackle Undead just becomes Shackle - similar to how Imprison works for Demon Hunters.

These choices are not impactful enough to let Shadow Priest be competitive in Keys. I know it is unrealistic to think that we should always see every class/spec in the latest dungeon tournaments but what I want is to feel like my group is benefiting from choosing to bring a Shadow Priest to the group rather than feeling like they need to build the group around what we’re lacking. This has actually gotten worse since Legion as Mind Bomb was an AoE stun back then, which provided a decent amount of utility and kept us competitive with the other classes that also had them. Comparing Shadow utility to Warlocks that have Healthstones, an Interrupt, AoE Stun, Demonic Gateway, and a Battle Resurrection or Elemental Shamans with Bloodlust and Tank/Stun/Speed/Tremor Totems makes it a tough choice to bring a Shadow Priest. I don’t think it’s fair to compare any ranged class to a melee but I will mention that the comparison between Shadow Priests and most melee classes gets even worse more often than not.

Cooldown Usage

I’m tired of the ramping damage. Shadow Priests have been locked into a punishing cycle of ramping damage for the past two expansions and I think it has run its course. Taking up to a minute to see full damage potential is not only detrimental on short fights but also causes a lot of frustration in any fight that has downtime or in Mythic+ when you aren’t able to chain packs of mobs together (i.e. the Bursting affix). While I’m intrigued to see if Power Infusion helps to fix this problem I’m terrified that this will just bring back the Nighthold-style cycle we had of chaining Power Infusion + Shadowfiend inside of Voidform. Compared to other classes, using either of these spells doesn’t make me feel powerful, it makes me feel anxious that if I mess up any part of my Voidform my damage will be ruined while I slowly ramp again or worse while I wait for Power Infusion and Shadowfiend to come off cooldown. The ramp up is just too long and too punishing for encounters where you can’t plan a full Voidform cycle ahead.

N’Zoth is a prime example of this struggle in the current raid. N’Zoth has a few vulnerability phases that get triggered when the group finishes killing Psychus. Unfortunately, there is no way to plan in advance for when Psychus will die as you are relying on this other group to kill several other mobs while bringing down this add. Not being able to have consistent timings here can really throw off our damage as a Shadow Priest because we have to start ramping damage long before Psychus is dead. Unfortunately, adding the proposed Shadowlands changes to our toolkit won’t change the situation much; we’ll likely hold Power Infusion or Shadowfiend for one of these vulnerability windows but if we haven’t been able to ramp up Voidform the potential of these cooldowns just goes to waste.

…we also want to give players more opportunities to make impactful choices to customize their gameplay and express their own vision of how their characters engage in combat

I would love to see an option where we can choose between ramping damage OR on-demand damage in the form of a cooldown. That way we could choose our playstyle for a given fight rather than feeling locked into our baseline abilities.

Talent Viability

The last section I wanted to discuss from this round of feedback is our talent choices. Based on what we know from the post we have two rows that will be changing going into Shadowlands: the Level 75 and 100 rows. Based on the wording, I’m assuming that Death and Madness will replace Shadow Word: Death, and Surrender to Madness will stay put but at a terrible price…

Level 75

The way this row is designed this is where each option has its strength:

  • Auspicious Spirits: Spread Targets/Long Lived general purpose

  • Shadow Crash: Stacked Cleave/AoE

  • Death and Madness: Fights with a lot of adds that die relatively quickly?

The problem here is that Death and Madness is extremely niche. Assuming there is no “grace period”, i.e. Classic Warlocks’ Shadowburn, this talent will struggle next to the other options in a raiding environment, as most adds in raids have 15+ people hitting them, and unless SW:D hits like a truck the reliability of you getting the killing blow is extremely rare. With some play-testing this could be interesting in Mythic+ where you are competing with fewer players for killing blows but then you’re comparing it to the AoE Cleave option: Shadow Crash. Safe to say, I’m a bit hesitant to see how this will play out as in the past, with Reaper of Souls, we almost never saw a reason to use this type of talent.

Level 100

Surrender to Madness is not good enough and is frankly, just boring. This argument mostly circles back to the “Voidform Problem” mentioned previously but without a compelling reason to stay in Voidform longer this talent doesn’t provide much benefit. Sure, we get some more Void Bolts and DoT ticks at the end of a fight but why would we give up a constant 5% damage increase AND a reduction in Void Eruption cast time with Legacy of the Void? This talent seems to try and focus all our damage at the end of an encounter like the original Surrender to Madness from Legion but back then we had Mass Hysteria to prop it up.

For the health of the game this talent scares me. Based on the balancing of Voidform this talent will either be terrible, like it is in BfA OR required like it was at the start of Legion. This is a dangerous place for a talent to live and is one hotfix to Insanity Drain scaling away from getting out of hand or being worthless.

if the caster fails to slay their target during the buff window, they succumb to the shadows and die

For fights with adds, does this mean that as long as you cast it on an enemy that dies within its cooldown you won’t die? Unsure where this would make sense to use, as again we are still forced into an even longer ramp window for us to get at the “peak” of our Voidform.

Other talent rows

For those of you still reading, thanks for bearing with me. I think it’s worth going over some other talent rows that need some help going into Shadowlands. Currently, with the way things work, the Level 15 and 90 rows hardly see any swapping, partially because they are just different spells that all kind of do similar things. We’ve talked about these problems at length in other posts but safe to say I would be sad to see these talent rows get ignored to leave us with our cookie cutter build going into Shadowlands.

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on point, everythig you wrote! on point!

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Finally. Someone saying things as they are. It’s good that shadow priest differs from other classes, has a ramping playstyle and all, but God damn, we need active spells, cool downs, not just niche talents that fit a cool theme and brain dead passive talents after that. We’ve had the orb playstyle, the devouring plague, mind spike and all and now we’re stuck with a playstyle that is thematically cool but just stuck into a loop and feels burstless. Voidform and the whole stacking/ramping style is difficult to balance out as well, as shown in 8.2. As we scale in an xpac we’re bound to be powerful but blizz seems to trying to put us down on purpose even though its our only time of an xpac to shine. I hope more people make this topic trending and submit their problems in the Early alpha stages cause I hate seeing classes getting so many of their traits and theme back as talents or baseline abilities and us getting an ability we’ve had forever as a baseline back and considering that a change. Peace

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Gonna interject with my personal opinion. Waiting 50-60 seconds before you can do anything resembling good damage is awful, the ramping playstyle is just not something shadow should need to keep lugging with it.

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Agreeing with most if not all of it.
Surrender to Madness seems like a waste of “design space”. You either end up with a must have pick - or a useless talent (like on live).

Voidform is a decent mechanic but with varying flaws. If you buff it (by applying stacking dmg increases) newer players (or bad latency) get punished by not staying in void form as long as humanly possible. And lets be honest in a world where firemages can burst for up to 250k dps+ on a single target, a 40 second dmg buildup is not something that should be in the game… .
Moving our dmg outside of Voidform just makes it pointless and right now it feels pointless. We get 1 instant cast that hits decently and extends our buffs and honestly that feels so underwhelming.

In mythic+ were borderline useless and even if by some misclick we get invited to a grp you feel absolutely useless and bring nothing to the table what other classes cant just do better.

I personally hated the mindspike playstyle from WOD and would never advertise for it to come back - but at the same time i loved the Devouring Plague mechanic.

Not sure exactly how to fix our spec - but please remove Surrender to Madness, give us talent rows with choices and address some of our utility problems.

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We bounced around the idea of throwing that in the post, (Well they did, I was doing Nzoth progress). Personally I don’t want to see its function of removing dots return, and I don’t think that was the point of mentioning it. I think it was an old ability we had that could be repurposed into giving us a way to create our own burst windows within our rotation, it’s mentioned alongside devouring plague for that very reason.

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First of all, I would like to thank all the guys who work hard for the community of shadow priests. I try to follow your advice from the times of “shadowpriest . com” and I know that I can always count on you.
Personally I consider myself a mediocre player, I am not one of those who make 90%+ in the logs but I have always played shadow to the best of my potential since the time of TBC. The surrender of madness was traumatic for me. Very cute but too punitive. Same thing with the ramping playstyle. Too long before generating damage comparable to others and at the same time useless when you need to do fast damage on a certain add that must die as soon as possible. I also agree on the lack of important CDs. It’s really frustrating to hear your classmates say “ok now I have the CDs again, let’s do this” while you can only watch. If I can have my say, I would like to be able to use different spells for different situations and an example was the mindspike. If the raid leader tells all to burn the nightmare orb, I must have the opportunity to be “on the same level” as the other players. Thanks for what you do.

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this post is pretty accurate to how most shadow priests feel i think. I had a lot of fun playing surrender to madness at the begining of legion, but it was unbalancable .

there is just no way that you can make it consistant, and the lack of power on comannd that it leaves you with when you choose it means you will go 100 wipes into a progress fight before you ever get to start pressing that cooldown, the insanity mechanic needs a full rework, its not fit for purpose anymore, we need something that lets us do damge consistantly and reliably on command without the need for almost a minute of set up between.

please listen to the WCP team they put so much work in and its time that shadow changed into something that can be competitive with mages and locks consistantly without us either being massivly overpowered or dramiticaly weak.

we just want consistant, predictable damge

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You’d think 100% of all the sp player not taking surrender to madness would give them a hint by now but nope… LETS TRY AN MAKE S2M HAPPEN

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Voidform appears in Legion and BFA, it was bad and good things for us due to many changes which it makes difference how we play. Shadow has been very strong or weak after many changes as I said and now I am talking about design of shadow class. I know you did dps so well, pure st or multi, no matter what you are doing so I think of one thing is Voidform. It costs you insanity if you are doing mechanics, you have to stop dps for some reasons, you need to plan before you can use abilities, you have to run and more things you have to think about it. What is reasonable? You cant keep your insanity, it means you have to rebuild insanity which it takes 40-50s before your can do decent dps again. It is is simply to understand, no insanity no dps. It is not fun anymore. Other classes dont have insanity, only shadow class.

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I have played shadow priest from BFA launch until this point, and my personal opinion on the matter is that voidform and the sanity system in general has to go. It forced people to play around your chorus stacks in mythic+, not to have an excellent reward in return but to keep your output at a decent level, a bit closer yet below others. Downtime is unavoidable at some points (as it could be a boss phasing or just plain traveling from a pack to another) and every class has a way to work things around in their favor. This is of couse only present in classes impacted by downtime (eg: Frost DKs choosing between icecap or Breath of Sindragosa to deal with the Downtime). This makes people perceive you as annoyance more than a spec that you invest in attention and play around to reap the rewards.

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I think the major problems with the voidform, and spriest in general can be summed up in one sentence:

No DPS spec should be bad at questing.

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I cant believe when I read about New Class Abilities Shadowlands for shadow, you are doing the same thing over and over, nothing is new to me. When are you going to listen to us? Shadow needs completetly rework so we can get rid of voidform. Thanks!

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SP since TBC here and always tried to raid on hardest difficulty. I’ve been in really good guilds and made it to top 50 at some point and also played in range between 100-500 guilds in general. I completely agree with the original post. I also have couple things to add.

Voidform: I know some people really like ramp up style. I dont. But thats what we have right now. My main issue is punishment to movement. SPs got nerfs at start of Nyalotha we also need really specific corruptions to be able to do decent amount of dmg. But most SPs are warming the bench at Nzoth because of downtime and movement. Wrathion goes away, Vexiona flies away(at mythic you have some adds but they are twilight devastated by hungry folks). In general couple things punish SP way too much. Movement, if we cant hit any target for a brief amount of time, doing mechanics. Every other class can hold up their cds for a while and still do well when they have to do mechanics/movement/boss is afk. I really would like to have a complete rework but thats abit risky aswell. We might end up with something completely broken. So instead I have another suggestion. Ability to stop insanity gain and drain at will. Everything related to voidform like Lingering Insanity also stops during this time. Self silence. You cant cast/gain insanity from any source. So you can run other side of the boss room, run another pack in dungeon, do whatever you want. Basicly dispersion at will but no dmg reduction or anything. Just stops time for the shadow priest. This kind of ability would fix alot of the issues listed above.

Regarding talents and cds in general: I’ll have to go back in time for a bit for this. When Blizzard was trying to balance surrender to madness we had alot of changes. Most of them stayed with us when S2M is completely killed off. For the record I did not enjoyed S2M. I’ll never enjoy S2M. If you use it early you die, if you use it late that feels like you wasted a great oppurtunity. On top of that bosses dies on a different timer every week. Always feels like you are doing something wrong and not playing your class to full potential. But let me go back… Lingering Insanity was part of our toolkit. It became a talent during that time. Insanity drain formulas changed and they stayed like that since. Dispersion, we should not have to use our defensive as a dps cd, also changed and did not stop insanity drain after its duration is over. Most of these changes happened between EN-ToV while S2M balance is happening. My suggestion about this is bring back Lingering Insanity to our main toolkit, also add Auspicious Spirit to main toolkit with SW:D aswell. These are really core part of SP playstyle. Auspicious Spirit change might seems like a huge change but you can bring back devouring plague or make vampiric touch one target only and then AS procs only from devouring plag or vampiric touch. This will limit AS. And now you can balance our aoe multi dot dmg by changing SW:P and single target by changing devouring plag(or VT if its only 1 target ability now). Easy to balance. Now we have 2 different slot for talents. About S2M, its a cool idea but again. Death punishment is too much. Even at BFA version, 90% of hp is basicly death or we have to use dispersion, our only defensive cd. Just make S2M you can move while casting for some amount of time and add a little bit of a dmg bonus on top of it. PvP players will love that, PvE players will find some use for that at certain combats. Its just a cool idea. Probaby wont be popular tho. I’ve wrote alot about these kind of suggestions at start of BFA. I would like to have some feedback aswell.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for the long post and bad grammer. English is not my native. If something is not clear I’ll try to rephrase it. Huge thanks to shadowpriest/warcraftpriests teams for sims and everything else.

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Ye sanity drain pause button would be nice.
Also ive read recently datamined talent S2M is 2min cd and gives 25 sec buff where you have to kill…i mean without mass hysteria its not enough of a boost to our damage to even be considered against LotV…you dont have to be Brainiac to see this talent is going to be waste of space for next expansion. I was kinda hoping that new S2M would be baseline. It wouldnt hurt anybody and leave some space for experimenting, without hysteria s2m beign a talent isnt even a choice.
Also for the LI …if LI is a talent…nothing in that row will be even an option…again…

Edit: Also some more datamined stuff.
Voidbolt can be casted while chanelling mind flay. Nice.
Fortress of the mind is still a talent. Oof.
Embrace healing increased. w/e
Void eruption cast reduced by 25%. w/e
SW:death baseline, usable on all hp targets and damage youself if target doesnt die…basicaly wotlk sw:d with only one charge. Oof.
Also some new covenant abilities vere datamined and by just looking at it we can already tell without even trying it out that for example night fae is absolutely useless for shadow and maybe some niche for m+, everything is healing oriented and im afraid that covenan “choice” will really by just an illusion…ffs.
Nothing else catched my eye there except for some number tuning etc.

edit2:@ellipsìs

May i ask who is that guy Kaesebrezen pandaren 10 priest on us forums? It seems like some member of warcraftpriest community. I love his comments, really thoughtout ideas and criticism.

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+1, i agree 110% please do so it feels meaningful.

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Copying over something I said regarding surrender to madness on the US forums.

Extending voidform is not an inherently interesting concept, especially when every cooldown we already have is used to the same effect. The problems with this continual desire to extend voidform as the only way to interact with our damage are threefold in my view.

1: Voidform has to be rewarding to make any cooldown involve it’s extension justified, the current design of voidform lacks this reward and leans on BFA’s external systems to provide it. These systems are going away.

2: Extending voidform provides damage at very specific intervals in shadows rotation if it does at all. This is, in my view, antithetic to one of the core purposes of a cooldown in the first place, to provide some method of dealing meaningful damage in the immediate or near immediate.

3: The void form arms race. Put more plainly, the more tools and design quirks that are able to extend voidform, the more shadows damage and damage pattern is balanced around voidform extension, and the worse shadow gets in content where continual voidform extension isn’t possible.

What would a potential solution to this be? Give shadow priest a cooldown that subverts the standard nature of voidform, instead of just making it longer. Give us a super voidform with an upfront damage bonus or empowered baseline spells that do cool and powerful things, or reverse the stack system so we start high and tick down to provide that power in the immediate.

Do something, anything, as long as it isn’t just make it longer.

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Absolutely true.
Would love to get Shadoworbs back for a big DoT/Damage on demand.
Maybe the Orbs build up according to time in Voidform.

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I kinda like the idea of a class that ramp up damage tbh, but right now i feel that Shadow do that in a wrong way. We actually need to use our only cd (MoLD) at the first Voidform, just to having enough LI and Chorus stack for doing something. And, of top of that, failing just one Voidform can be tremendous for our dps. Add that if we don’t have uptime into a target (Like Wrathion) we basically need to use our defensive for dont go out of VF and sometimes this is not enough though.

What i would like to see is rebalancing the stat. Let’s be honest, no one cares about Mastery. We just want crit/haste, because.

The concept of Shadow is a caster that slowly drain he’s foes. Right now, the only way we do that is Twist of Fate, for an execute phase. If mastery would be something like “Increase your VT, SWD, SWP, MF damage for x% of your target missing health”, that would be pretty cool. We can even have some abilities available only when our target is below a certain amount of %, or some new or empowered DoTs.

Regarding S2M, as said is the broken or useless talent. We really dont need that. It would be cool to have something to balance, with great power and great downsides, but not like “Hey, kill someone or ur rekt”.

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Best feedback so far so it is great idea, just remove insanity and voidform will be powerful with cd or something.

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