For me, legion’s extra focus on putting lore into classes really did it for me.
Reading into WoW’s lore from the very beginning, I feel like Spriests have been
borrowing power in exchange for their faith in the biggest bad we could find, which for
us meant the void and it’s lords(even if we didn’t know what it was then). And Legion built nicely on that with mass hysteria and surrendering to madness actually being flavourful(opposite what surrender is now).
Yes I know legion’s Spriest was a balancing nightmare, but so flavourful it was though…
The purpose of this thread is not to start arguments, what’s best is subjective after all, but I’ve seen people playing Spriest not liking the void way, so I was kind of curious as to why this is, since to me it doesn’t get more on flavour with what the Spriest class is.
Looking forward to hearing you all’s view on this, especially those differing from my own.
Spriest prior to legion wasn’t void, that’s the thing. It was just vaguely occult and it’s general vagueness left things very much up to the player’s interpretation, when legion rolled around it invalidated people’s interpretations of what their characters were.
As for gameplay? Having a good mix of meaningful dots and chunky direct damage has always been the thing I loved most about Shadow, so MoP and WoD are the times the gameplay felt the best to me. Definitely still flawed by modern WoW standards, and lacking a bit in thematic direction, but a solid foundation. Legion was fun too, but it felt too all consuming and put literally of our damage into dots, something I didn’t like, not to mention blizzards handling of it in terms of balance and iteration felt very clueless.
I’m looking forward to whatever comes next, because something has to or the spec’s dead in the water.
Spriest felt amazing in cataclysm. And was pretty damn strong.
I likely am slightly bias however, cata was when i quit my boomkin and moved to shadow. So obviously was the version of spriest that sold me on maining the class.
I rly enjoyed the shadow orbs fueling mindblast aswell as the raven aesthetic supplied by glyphs
Agree, definitely need some sort of direction, since the theme right now seem to pull us in multiple different directions.
Shadow orb mechanic as a sort of combo point’ish mindblast fueler
was fantastic, and I hope to see a return of this sometime. who knows
since our current lead designer quit, we may even “fingers crossed”
see something like it with when our talents start seeing changes.
Ye. Ive mentioned this couple of times but since you asked…here i go again.
So for pve - raids - legion…the most fun spec ive ever played in raids by a lot.
M+ BFA S4. The ghost tsunami build with azerite beam and fully decked in coruption gear made this spec insanely fun in dungeons. Imho.
PvP mix of wod and shadowlands. Wod was bursty and you could delete ppl on your own. In shadowlands you could do that too in Season 2. Now we lack the damage but the toolkit is amazing.
My #1 is WoD for pretty much the same reasons as Elipsis
MoP is #2
This is focusing on ST and PvP #3 SL 9.0 was good before the SFP got buffed, Talbd felt awful as well but not as much due to it not changing our rotation. Back then the spec felt pretty much like WoD but just with a burst ability, and frankly a pretty awful mastery. I would really like to see us return to a multi hit based mastery, but with it working for everything not just SW:P or just simply get Apparitions as mastery with X% proc form any damage
Looking at the Idol of Yogg’Saron talent revealed in DF, I’d love to see something done with our Shadowy Apparitions, perhaps a route actually focused on them.
I’d honestly be happy with any other mastery, since right now it has no real interaction with our gameplay, just keep dots up for damage but we always have dots up anyway, so what our current mastery actually says, is “deal % more damage always” which is kind of dull, I think.
I’d love to see past iterations of Spriest possibly brought back through
different routes in the shadow tree, like a route that possibly activates shadow orbs of some kind in a mind blast build, or something else, lot of room right now for changes.
With our current mastery I would’ve preferred the basic straight % more damage, not tied to dot’s. That’s one of the things that made our aoe feel awful because we only ever realistically only get 1/3 stacks of it, unless ofc we pop VF
Legion shadow has the most potential, they just need to fix a few things.
Give the ability to spread dots as their aoe, and lower the requirement for insanity to get into voidform.
Doing both of these will decrease the ramp up time by a lot, and give shadow some actual form of aoe, that fits with the spec idea.
The insanity reduction requirement for voidform, will not make shadow op, at low stacks your insanity drains slowly, with a couple of blasts and spirit procs and voidbolts you will be at 100 %, then as the voidform stacks up the insanity will drain faster and faster until you can’t sustain it anymore.
This will literally only reduce the initial ramp up time, and the time you are outside of voidform, but aside that it won’t really increase your damage by a whole lot.
And if it does, they can just tune down the numbers, and problem solved.
But yea, legion shadow was far better.
To avoid shadow becoming insane in aoe with the dot spreading, they should keep current dot damage, not legion dot damage, otherwise the aoe will be absurd.
You have to remember that its the raid content that drives the changes needed for shadow spec. Shadow was redesigned to be able to move more. Getting very high void form stacks runs counter to this goal.
Blizzard I guess wanted a more dynamic shadow spec. Asking to go back to legion or bfa for shadow is asking to return to that type of content. The content is why you like that version of shadow priest. Also the state of other classes in the game, at that time.
In legion there were fights where you still moved a lot, and the mobility of this class really hasn;t changed a lot.
In fact i would say that right now it’s less, you could get into voidforms more in legion, casing voidbolt would give you just that split second to move slightly and you could cast a lot of them, right now it’s devouring plague and voidbolt which allow you to move during the gcd, but the casts are overall less. Right now you are more mobile than before during voidform, but voidform is only a 2 min cd, while it was a rotational ability in legion/bfa.
I don’t know what made you think this was correct, but it isn’t.
Only shadow problem was caused by boss phases while you had no target to attack. Shadow mobility was very good back then, you could move a bit every second w/o dps penalty. 24/7 acess to voidbolt was perfect, you could dot the pack once and dots hardly ever fell off anything. And i liked void erruption more as it used to hit all doted targets around you and not in small aoe near your target.
The other problem is the way people spec as a shadow priest. They focus on single target dps and then ignore talent builds that focus more on AoE. All to get a few more single target dps. They follow guilds on websites, spreadsheets, discord and blindly follow raidbots.
Then complain about problems with AoE in content. Shadow priests have been a top class in the meters/warcraft logs in raids (still is currently at heroic but middle bottom mythic/warcraft logs) and they still complained.
This forum is full of shadow priest complaints and the messiah’s that will fix them.
My build is not copy paste or from Ask Mr Robot. Ask Mr Robot gives the normal build. Hint my build sims the same for healing at my ilvl and gear as the copy paste builds from other sources with a differnt lego. I do mythic+ and raids when I can. When I do I don’t perform less than the website, sim or discord builds. Yes I have my own sim.
My current gear 11,514 HPS.
My current gear Flash Concentration 11,956 HPS
Check my old logs, they are the same in raid for content for my ilvl. So yes ask mr robot works, you get the improvement in raids and yes my builds is the same in raids. I didn’t get my build from ask mr robot, websites, discord or the toxic meta arguements. Meta arguements that create all these toxic negative shadow priest threads every expansion.
Someone has to get that shadow priest will never be good enough. Some people would spec for AoE but want to do as much damage as other classes with full AoE specs. In fact if you take on board all the threads for shadow priest. The only conclusion is a shadow priedt must have the best features of every spec in the game. So that it can rule the top meta wise.
Every expansion shadow priest sucks because blizzard cannot create a shadow spec so broken that toxic meta people will be happy. There is no change blizzard can make to shadow priest that will make it better. There will always be a grass is greener for some other class/spec and thus arguements for why shadow priest suck/needs to be fixed.
Then threads about which past spec was best, thus bring back old spells, new spells to make things better and bliz fix SP now. It never ends.
Players enjoyed older spec because of the way other classes and specs worked. Also the how the spec played and performed in the content at the time. None of this is every going the become current again in the game. Other classes and spec will never be the same in future. The content wont be the old mythic+ and raid content. I does not matter if you liked old shadow specs, what make them good for you is gone and is not comming back.
Let’s get back on topic. Just comment which iteration of Spriest you enjoyed the most, perhaps with a short explanation of why, and move on, thank you.
This thread is not a discussion if which is best, or which had what issues, but which you all personally enjoyed.
Never looked at the log did you. Note this was my gear level ilvl 215. Note the ilvl% 100 and Parse % 99. This shows in the first log I am a top gear build. Second boss I am ilvl% 99 and Parse % 98. Work it out dude.
These results are first time without knowing the tactics for the raid. This means my build is a top build at the time of the logs which was shown in my sim. The game has a number of equal gear builds for each class. I just went with the one that is fun to play for me and still performs well. I didnt use websites, discord or networking to pick my lego.
I guess you networked for your gear build. You cant even read logs correctly.
