yeah i always tell everyone who asks for it to go take a hike
its my ability
yeah i always tell everyone who asks for it to go take a hike
its my ability
Interesting stuff again, (purely PvP), for shadow priest. Having access to holy spells again such as PoM and renew is awesome, having both Body & Soul and the dispersion talents is awesome aswell. Having damnation and void torrent together aswell? Interesting, very interesting. Looks like I have to come up with alot of new keybinds. Canât wait to test this.
No?! Why delete it, just make it like every other dmg cd - only useable on the priest themselves. Greedy folks, just because you canât get it, you want no one to get it? No. Itâs a priest spell, let priests keep it and in a way that no greedy dps can claim it for themselves.
SP aoe is still down the drain
Blizzard insists on keeping mind flay important
Bringing back a talent after 1 expansion of being gone.
âbruhh Blizzard is listening these changes are gonna be awesome!â
yeah sure see you in live
From a shadow point of view, the class tree is amazing! But the shadow tree is awful, if weâre optimizing for either ST or AOE weâre not really gonna use the bottom two rows at all, just to function. And the fact that Silence and Dispersion is locked behind MS is just awful, like do you guys hate shadow that much in terms of pvp?
And in general blizz, plz separate Void Eruption and Voidform from each other, and make Void Eruption our AOE spender. And rename Searing Nightmare to Erupting Nightmare, make it passive and apply both dotâs. Or make Damnation apply dotâs to all targets within 15 yards of the main target. We really need mass application of dotâs to really make anything work in the tree AOE wise, and ofc part the proposed change to SN, we really donât need that god awful gameplay loop anymore
The claim is that priests are getting harassed in pugs for it. I almost only pug and have only ever had 1 person ask for PI.
As a shadow, I wouldnât care who I PI in pugs seeing as Twin is becoming a talent, but the lucky guy or gal gotta live with me using it when I burst. In a coordinated grp, fine Iâll use it on the guy or gal who benefits the most from it, but Iâll still use it when Iâm bursting, so the lucky guy or gal better line his or her CDâs up with mine
Itâs not about m+ but raidâs that you clearly donât do.
Your statement about using PI on highest DPS in m+ shows you donât even know the value PI brings and who should be getting it, so i donât understand why you would even join this discusion.
Looks silly⊠why even have talents in the general priest tree when half of them are clearly only useful to shadow and the other half to healers? And why does shadow have to decide between AoE and ST dmg? Why is only Mindgames in the tree? If any SL covenanty ability should stay itâs necro nova.
No hunter talents; not interested.
Someone is 20k dps. Rest 14k dps.
I WONDER WHO I WILL USE IT ON.
Someone is rogue that gains 400 dps from PI someone is warlock that gains 2000 dps. And in AOE the difference will be much bigger. Overall dmg dosnât affect PI strenght.
For the love of God, remove PI or make it self cast only. I am shadow but this is such a silly design, theres a reason you removed Dark Intent and this is no better. Either remove it or make it self cast.
Some feedback on the Discipline Talent Options:
TL;DR: Many good ideas, middle of Disc tree very meh, both class and Disc tree have some dead picks, not interested in PI debate.
From the Class Tree:
From the Spec Tree
Hi, I been reading over your changes for holy priest and would like to add a few suggestions. The right hand path seems very much setup for DPS and I love the idea that if a player desired they could build a holy DPS build rather than Holy healing build ending up like a Holy mage of sorts! I would like to see 3 changes to make this more viable as a off meta build. Firstly with ârune of fireâ talent could you make it so it also changes âSurge of lightâ allowing you to cast holy fire even if its on cooldown in exchange for 1 charge changing Surge into a hybird talent.
Secondly I would like to suggest a new endish tallent that changes mastery on holy priest, currently mastery leaves a HoT on the target you heal equal to mastery % of the heal you did with each heal adding its own HoT. this new talent would convert mastery to a DoT dealing mastery % damage of the damage you have dealt to the target over 6 seconds.
Lastly I would like to suggest a change to the passive element of Empyreal blaze. Currently the passive as written extends the duration whenever you cast the spell, which though optimal for uptime of the Dot if the Dotâs duration is going beyond the health bar of the mob itâs kind of a waste and that will feel bad and if your goal is Holy DPS then just having long uptime isnât the best. So as an alterative change the passive to neither refresh nor extend but add another Holyfire DoT. allowing you to pile every holy fire proc ontop of the others, all these Cooldowns would have 7s Duration but having all of them running and ticking at once will do higher dps than a permeant x1 stack.
I am excited to experiment with this off meta build and am hopeful that it could grow out into its own play-style ^^
This is a massive post and I will put TL;DRâs at the end of each section alongside conclusions as well, i go into detail about all of the problems shadow currently has and what the tree needs to do (IMO) to help solve these issues and make the tree much better.
Purely from a shadow priest player who only plays PVE and Shadowlands experience: (I dont care about PvP but if something would make it OP in PvP then you can take that part out and introduce it later on in the tree but i think really PvP talents should stay (Im not sure if they are) and then the OP parts are placed in PvP talents)
For completely new things I want shadow priests to have ill mention closer towards the end after I go through the trees themselves
Secondly, i fully understand a core tenant of priest fantasy is this kind of selfless healer i.e. i will grip you out of danger instead of vice versa, my mobility spells can speed YOU up as well as my self etc. etc. but i also believe that shadow is clearly not your typical priest. The Shadow fantasy is being this selfish person who follows the void and madness to gain power and go crazy.
Overall:
Overall opinions Before i get into details. Quite dissapointed with the base class tree for various reasons and extremely dissapointed with the Shadow tree which in some areas amplifys my frustration with the class tree.
It seems appropriate that all of the utility should be on the base class tree and the damage spells should be the spec tree. This tree has it completely mixed up and the style of talents Druids and DKâs got is way better with this being one of the reasons.
Power Infusion
In SL this spell has caused so much controversy in terms of balancing (Demo lock got the best gain from it and it was the best BY FAR in raids until destro came along). Not only to mention all of the hassle that was involved with having the spell like tonnes of people all wanting PI because it was such a MASSIVE damage boost. As a shadow player I could at least ignore it all since most people at least respected im also a dps but it did always hurt in raiding that i was actually hurting my raid groups chance by not giving PI to our warlock and keeping it for myself and i dont really think any spell should have that feeling on you as a player. For the healing specs it wasnt nearly as bad since youre primary job wasnât damage but still kinda sucks you get a big cooldown and youâre considered trolling or bad if you wanted to use PI for yourself.
My best solution would be to remove the ally targeting completely so all of the issues this spell in particular has recieved would be gone. A second solution whilst I really despise raid buffs, considering their not going away any time soon why not let PI be a raid buff since priests is the only raid buff that doesnt increase damage in any way (outside of demo lock) and make it around 3-5% haste buff
TL;DR
Remove ally targeting of PI or at the very least change it into a second raid buff
Mobility
As a shadow player whenever people talk about wheelchair classes i just laugh because they have no idea what their talking about. Paladins and DKâs (especially with their talent tree) look like olympic sprint runners compared to this class. With DF the ONLY extra choice of mobility we get as a SPreist is the option to give up Body&soul for Angelic Feather. This is a cool choice as itâs mobility can serve different purposes but there really needs to be with a deep investment of points another mobility spell. It doesnt have to be some super OP spell but it just needs some further mobility option(s) with some big investment because right now this choice node doesnt solve Shadowâs abysmal mobility at all but it only needs just a little bit more to be ok.
TL;DR
Give Preists atleast 1 more mobility option/enhancement to movement
Defensives
Whilst Shadow priest does get dispersion (even though i hate that spell and will mention it later) it is really nice to see the addition of masochism for all priests combined with the talent for fade later on every 30 seconds you can get a reduction of 20% damage for around 5 seconds which is nice to see. Whether this change comes to dispersion or through a new spell it would be nice for again an investment in a certain area to get a defensive button CD for priests since right now it feels like all we can do is pop fade and DP and pray but given it is very little damage reduction and not that much more max HP it would be nice to get a cooldown that gives us maybe a big shield (There are lots of shield synergy so this would make sense) or some other form of defensive cooldown so that we are more tankier should we need it.
TL;DR
Nice addition of masochism but we need 1 damage reduction cd for big damage spikes for all priests (Dispersion changes could fit here)
Very Weak Utility
Currently if you were to ask yourself âDo we need a SPriestâ the answer 99.9% of the time you would say no. This is because its utility is all very niche and lots of times not useful at all. The best utility is Mass Dispel but this isnât needed all the time and isnât powerful enough to make shadow priests more favourable in all content regardless. There are also many holes in shadow priest utility i.e. an interrupt. having a 45 second interrupt is a complete joke and for all specs of priests it just feels criminal that even balance druid and resto can get a normal, standard interrupt and shadow priests are stuck with the worst interrupt by far. it offers nothing unique or beneficial in PVE environments and combined with all of the other issues SPreist has it almost always feels like you have to play around the fact 1 of your party members wont be helping the team really at all and in a lot of cases is just a straight up liability to have in your team thanks to its woeful âcoreâ utility functions i.e. interrupt, mobility, defensive etc. and what does shadow, priests in general do to deserve having such terrible tools. I think âSilenceâ should just become a bog standard interrupt but also make a brand new choice node in a deeper investment with the 2 choices being:
Last Word: "Silence CD is now reduced to 12 seconds (On-par with shamans but priests need to invest talent points to get this whereas shamans donât/shouldnât)
OR
[NAME]: "Silence will now perform its original function of silencing enemies (If this is OP in PvP then also increase the cooldown back to 45 seconds)
TL;DR
Priests need a standard interrupt, no justification why ours is so weak
Combination of all previous issues means inviting a Spriest is never desirable unless it was say bursting in a necro lord dungeon where only Spriest can tick both of those boxes generally.
Shadow Specific Utility
Whilst these are all in the shadow tree its only fitting to write it here since im talking about utility right now and all of these spells and abilites should be migrated over to the base class tree but put deep into the shadow spec as not make it easy for holy priests to get them all and slightly hard for disc given theres a clear shadow and holy side of the tree but disc will fall in the middle design wise.
Vampiric Embrace (VE)
Firstly i want to say i dont want this spell to be just as good as say a revival and i also dont want shadow to be performing healing outputs of a healer in a raid setting but i do think this needs massive buffs and can be given choices to alter the spell in cool ways that make SPriest more unqiue (Discpline could even get this spell too which would be really cool albeit at a deep investment of talent points)
Firstly i think VE is currently extremely weak and with all that Iâve played of shadow it outputs very little healing and often feels pointless to use in raid settings because of it. If the tooltip is correct then it seems VE got nerfed baseline from 85% to 50% which is pretty insane given how weak it is now but i feel like it can be buffed in two ways and this shoudl be done with a chocie node.
Choice 1:
[NAME]: Vampiric Embrace is now a passive, Single-target spells you cast will heal an ally passively, no CD just passive.
Choice 2:
[NAME]: Vampiric Embrace will now heal up to 5 targets for 100% of the damage you do. same cooldown as now
IIRC choice 1 was a talent in classic from what i saw on a talent calculator. This is a really cool talent because it makes shadow priests have a cool little factor of utility that their constantly off-healing, this can be pretty nice to have for weeks like Grievous in M+ and would be pretty unique. The second choice would make it much better for what its current purpose is right now which is big moments of healing other players like big damage phases in raids for example. Of-course numbers can be tuned but i really dont see either idea being super OP in any way. It just allows SPriests to help out with the healing but could also be used as a kind of defensive whether its more passive healing or bigger burst healing but the focus is on group utility here.
TL;DR
Make VE a choice node in the base tree either big burst aoe healing or a complete passive
Dispersion
This is an ability that I also feel would be fitting for a choice node because right now this ability tries to be a very awkward catch-all as it performs as a big defensive, functions like a immunity and currently is Spriest ONLY base mobility option. I simply think splitting the mobility and defensive part into two different abilities which both require lots of investment of points would fix both issues of movement and defensive right away. Furthermore i feel like there should be an option for the defensive to focus on the two aspects I mentioned above (Immunity or Damage Reduction), maybe this can stay in the Shadow tree and replace the talent Intangibility, the choice is either dispersion becomes a full immunity or it becomes a say 50% damage reduction but you CAN cast spells while its active. This would give dispersion a clear and defined purpose based on player choice and in any scenario it is used would not make the ability feel like hell to use i.e.(use it for mobility but then i have no defensives and cant cast, use it for defensive but Iâm gonna be screwed in the movement portion etc. etc.
TL;DR
Split the movement and defensive aspect into two different abilities
Make defensive side of dispersion a choice, either full immunity or 50% damage reduction and can cast spells.
Mind Bomb/Psychic Scream + Psychic Horror
Two small points but should also try and go into the base tree. Firstly, if im reading the choice node correctly why would anyone ever choose psychic scream ever? the only downside of mind bomb is the 2 second delay but other than that feel like the same ability but one is ranged and the other is melee so its a really awkward choice, psychic scream needs to affect the abiility in an additional way to make going into melee range worth it.
Psychic horror is a great ability and just should be in the base class tree deep into the shadow side.
TL;DR
Buff psychic scream as right now there is almost no choice, move abilities into base tree like the others.
Conclusion
If the talent tree addressed all of these issues I think the base class tree would be in a really good place (PI not causing so much controversy for balancing and it already being a hated spell by a lot of players) Priests gaining multiple options for mobility if the fight is movement heavy, the same is true for defensives. Shadow also gaining more powerful and unique options for its utility spells
Now ill just talk here about all of the damage aspects of the shadow tree (The utility stuff was talked about above)
Theres pretty cool choices like death and madness being a side talent as its not always super useful but in certain scenarios can be amazing so its a really good placement.
Misery/Searing Nightmare(SN)
I know a lot of people hate SN and Iâm not necessarily a huge fan of it myself I do appreciate the idea here for SN to be more focused on big, mass aoe and misery to be more centred around single target and cleave so having this as a choice node is pretty good. Side note, really glad we dont have to really choose The execute talent anymore, it was really boring
Concern about lack of choice for AOE
Generally pretty decent options but this may sound weird but it kind of feels like in this section we get everything i.e. if we wanted to go for aoe we can easily get shadow crash, psychic link, auspicious spirits etc, etc. and this is probably because of how i mentioned about misery and SN being more cleave aoe vs mass aoe. and this will make more sense when i mention about brand new things shadow should have (one is dark void but applies VT). But in shadowlands we have choices like psychic link versus shadow crash vs auspicious spirits which promote ideas of mass aoe (SC) cleave (Psychic Link/Auspicious) and this talent tree that feels lost. Of course if we moved all the utility stuff to the base tree new additions could amend that i.e. if a spell summons spirits that chase multiple targets they do more damage or something like that, to promote a more kind of auspicious sprit cleaving style gameplay or with spells that really buff mind blast alongside what the tree has now to promote bigger mind blast cleaving but right now it kind of feels like we can get have our cake and eat it too
TL;DR
For the left side it feels like we get all the tools for aoe and we lose out on some cool choices we had for aoe (even if tuning meant we would always take SC we still had the ideas for other styles of gameplay)
The Middle Branch
Very cool we get to choose between Surrender and Hungering as well as get Ancient Madness for ânoâ choice. A huge problem SPriest has is by the time you were ready to do your damage and kill the mobs a fury warrior blade stormed them all and killed them 10 seconds ago so this new change is nice to see. Iâm not fully sure if this would be OP or not but it would be really cool if Surrender gave its full benefits of being surrender (Cast while moving, 100% extra insnaity) even after you killed the mob you marked or at the very least gave a small lingering effect of it afterwards because right now the places where we could abuse this talent the special bonuses of surrender goes in almost 5 seconds which is disappointing but i know if not kept in check can easily become OP
TL;DR
Cool middle choices, potentially make the effects of surrender persist after the chosen mob dies until Void form ends or linger for a brief time.
The right branch
Cool, has what youâd expect but it would be neat to possibly remove damnation and place it somewhere else and give a new ability to focus on single target though I have no solid ideas. Possibly make it a choice node between damnation and say a talent that works where its a proc for your mind flay that does all of its âchannelâ instantly to generate a lot of insanity but primarily to better synergize with talents like âIdol of Câthunâ later in the tree since using mind flay would feel more natural and less of a hassle with a talent like that to help summon more tentacles.
TL;DR
pretty good would be nice to see a talent with some mind flay synergy to boost the talents later in the tree like one that does an instant cast mind flay that functions as though you fully channelled it. This would be a choice node with damnation
Ill start with talking about the effects that require you to be shielded then move onto everything else
Sheilding Mechanics Overview
This of course completely depends on tuning and how it works out but this can be a major break for someone wanting to play a shadow priest. Firstly i do like the idea of getting some small passive sheilding thanks to âMental Fortitudeâ , it helps with the tankiness of SPriest but depending on how this functions especially when theres talents like âSanguine Teachingsâ this can be an awful style of play and needs to be done right to be fun.
TL;DR
Can be a great idea but has the possibility to become an extremely frustrating mechanic
The Good
As mentioned above it gives some nice additional layers of tank-iness and combined with talents like masochism and the fade talent you can reliably get a fair amount of baseline damage absorption and reduction making you less susceptible to one-shots or high-damage phases. I also love a part of the idea of âMental Fortitudeâ where youâre gaining passive shielding because if this didnt exist then we would move onto the bad
The Bad
Whilst we would need to test it to be sure (Alpha soon please) if this is a very small amount of shielding combined with the point that âMental Fortitudeâ only works on overhealing this could sadly mean that in order to gain the affects of being shielded consistently, an SPriest player may need to weave in PW: Shields which sounds absolutely miserable. So i do think the requirement of being at full hp should removed so that even if the shield is small most of the time you will have some form of shield to proc things like âSanguine Teachingsâ consistently and not have to PW: shield yourself to get the affect.
TL;DR
Good on paper but if you have to PW:shield yourself to consistently get the affect then it will feel terrible
Rot and Wither and Abyssal Knowledge
Talents are pretty good with the mind flay/sear synergy though the synergys with mind sear seem really weird considering it only affects the current target, i guess its some priority damage but it would be neat to see some slight benefits to multiple targets with your dot. Combining with a suggestion i made earlier like a instant-cast âfully channelledâ mind flay can really bring these talents to life as well as Idol of Câthun.
TL;DR
cool would be better with talent suggestion i made to further enhance mind flay/sear( a proc which functions as an instant-cast fully channeled mind flay)
also make mind sears perform these benefits in aoe to a lesser degree
First Choice node
Nâzoth is pretty decent just passive bursts of damage not much interesting but hey its ok. Y;sharaaj⊠I mean it seems fun but i guess weâll have to wait until alpha to see what this is. Are we gonna have to be therapists to see what emotional state enemies are in before we fight them? i dunno.
Void apparitions
Super boring, but if this talent is to buff our spirits could it at least summon more spirits so it looks cooler
Living Shadow
Seems cool that it replicates our abilities will need to see alpha to see the implications of this i.e. Mindblast into Psychic link will the shadow proc Psychic??
Eidolic
Seems kinda mandatory given how SFP is in the base tree but sure more free procs of instant cast spells ill take.
Second Choice Node
Its the legendary Eternal call to the void (ECV) from shadowlands but this ability would become even cooler with a new talent passive i suggested in previous sections. an passive to proc mind flay instant-cast and act as a full-channel to really amp up the power of this talent and not make us sit channelling mind flay since right now ECV is boring because we have to constantly sit and channel.
As for Yoggâsaron this is a really cool sounding ability which really gives in to shadow priest class fantasy and i love it. This talent would be perfect however if it worked like Ritual of Ruin (2pc) for destro warlocks where once you summon 50 spirits it activates and then you can summon the Thing from Beyond whenever you want as an ability so as to make sure this really cool end-point talent is never wasted on a mob thatâs just about to die.
As a final mini-note it would be cool( as long a it doesnât compromise the quality of the talent tree) to split these two choices up just for the simple reason of having tonnes of void minions being summoned, if this breaks balance or the design then donât but it would be cool have a void army.
There are some major red-flags with this spec tree. Of-course having all of that weak utility there but also the feeling of a little choice in AOE settings since we seemingly get everything we want and a potential dangerous new mechanic of shielding yourself to do more damage. But also i love the fact that in this tree there are lots of new spells, passives and abilities that we didnât have in SL. It does feel like a lot of new ideas came into this tree and its great to see.
These are final things that i think would greatly benefit the tree and add to the choices and themes the tree offers. Completely new abilities and talents that arent mentioned or hinted at in the current tree at all.
Dark Void
I never played BFA but I saw this as a talent which basically casted a spell and afflicted all enemies with SW: Pain. This would be an amazing spell to have for SPreists now but instead of applying Pain it applies Vampiric Touch instead. You probably would have to hard-cap this since VT is way more powerful but a huge problem SPriests have is that by the time they dot everything up and are ready to blast in their voidform, the fury warrior ran in, blade stormed and the mobs are all dead before youâre able to dot all the mobs. Also Shadow priest has never felt like a traditional dot class like say Feral used to be. With feral it used to be all about bleed management whereas shadow its naturally felt like in SL that the dots are just there to give you your mastery, summon your sprirts etc. etc. the dots always felt like a set-up to what you were actually doing so having a talent like dark void will let us instantly dot everything with our primary dot so we can massively speed up the set-up required and get straight into our void form where we can actually do our damage.
Final Note this also heavily synergises with this brand new shielding mechanic which would be cool.
Instant Proc Mind Flay
This is to benefit the talents like Idol of Câthun and others but a way to not make us constantly hard channel mind flay just to try and proc these talents, it would make this style of play way more engaging and be the thing these talents need to make them shine. (As for things like increasing damage of dots it can consume a portion of the dot to blast the target, another ability works in this exact way though i cant remember)
AOE buffs for cleave style fights
I mentioned in the middle section for AOE about not too much choice and the feeling of loss of the different styles of aoe we could specialize and focus on. One idea to buff a kind of auspicious spirit style aoe would be to have a talent where if a non-crit spell summons 2 or more apparitions those apparitions deal more damage, if a critted spell summons 3 or more apparitions they do more damage. This could be a decent talent to properly focus in on and promote an apparition based cleave.
The same is true but more centered around mind blast to get more value out of psychic link, possibly have a talent that can replicate mind blasts for smaller amounts of damage but its proccing psychic link more. These two additions would really help enshrine a more cleave-based aoe style of play as opposed to what it feels like currently where we get almost everything we could want.
Others
Im sure there are way more seasoned and experienced SPâs who can think of old spells to bring back or new spells that would work well but my gameplay experience has only been in SL and what iâve watched from previous expansions so im sure there are a bunch of things iâve missed out which could be amazing but i guess those players will bring those things up.
Final Conclusion
Thereâs lots of potential with this tree and from the current expansion in the various synergyâs the spec has and how it all nicely connects together so the potential for shadow to become an amazing spec is there but sadly right now looking at the tree im just not seeing how shadow priests will get better going forward with the awkward and weak choices they have to make with a lot of other choices being potentially too weak or not impactful.
Serious, massive changes need to be made if this spec is going to be good but hopefully mine and everyone elseâs feedback can make some big improvements.
Something i literally forgot but is why PI needs to be changed.
Imagine using your PI to buff a class that benefits from it more than you do in your CDâs and so your left with a voidform with no PI. Ofcourse this stuff would only happen in super co-ordinated high end groups but imagine how horrible it much be to play the shadow priest in that situation haha
Choose Twins of the Sun Priestess then.
#remove void form and everything related to it from SHADOW priests.
That will just bring us even further away from the #Meta
The class tree is amazing and that is one of the reasons why, seeing as we pretty much canât avoid taking it