Beta Shadow concerns
by Eliah Hecht 
Aug 23rd 2008 at 8:00PM
A Dwarf Priest is one of my very favorite WoW blogs. The author writes about exactly one topic – Priests – and she does it very well. So when she says that Shadow Priests are "on the endangered list" in Wrath, I think there's probably some truth to that. The core argument is that Shadow Priests' utility is not at the point it was once at (group mana regen is not unique any more; Shadow is not as important for raid synergy), but their DPS has not (yet) been increased accordingly.
One reason why Shadow's DPS is low has to do with spell coefficients. You know how items with +damage or +healing (or now spell power) always say "adds up to [however much] damage"? The coefficient on a spell is what determines exactly how much is applied. Generally it's based on cast times – Greater Heal gets 86% of +healing applied, while Flash Heal only gets 43% – but there are exceptions for spells with added effects, such as Mind Flay and its snare.
Mind Flay, as it turns out, gets only 57% of +damage. Spells with a 3s casting time should generally get 86%, like Greater Heal, but there is a reduction for the slowing effect. However, this is apparently a larger-than-normal penalty: Frostbolt is only dinged for 5% of its coefficient for having a snare. Not to mention we don't even care about the slowing effect in raids. There's a Glyph that recognizes this, trading the slow effect in for increased range. What if it increased the spell damage coefficient as well?
A coefficient that is smaller than it should be is largely a problem for scaling. That is, how much better do Shadow Priests get as we acquire more powerful gear? Smaller coefficients mean spell power, one of the major vectors of scaling, does less – we get less benefit for our gear. Absent other considerations, this means we scale slower. Of course, there are other considerations (talents, etc.), but it's still a risk worth taking into account.
There are additional issues; for instance, Shadow Priests are not really getting any new toys to play with, and they're not really using them in a different way. Overall, I agree that it sounds like Shadow could use some work, as of the current state of the Wrath beta. However, I'm not sure I think Shadow is doomed. This has been a very rapidly-evolving beta, and the devs are very concerned with making everything good before the game ships. If Shadow is not up to par right now, I have faith that it will be buffed.
Edit: As Jill said below, for more information on Shadow Priest concerns and what is being done, please visit the Shadowpriest.com Community Feedback Project.
Filed under: Priest, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tridus Aug 23rd 2008 8:23PM
Priests have barely been touched at this point, as was mentioned in Ask a Beta Tester when I complained about how Holy's new stuff is pretty weak too. :)
I doubt Shadow Priests are going to vanish anytime soon.
Spoonmaster Aug 23rd 2008 8:35PM
"Priests have barely been touched at this point..."
Maybe the priest's are the one doing the touching!
(yay for bad joke)
amasen Aug 24th 2008 11:42AM
Are you kidding? Holy looks down right amazing. Disc still needs some work, but is getting there... IMO holy concentration should be availible to the top level of the disc tree if it is going to continue to build out to be the best single target healing tree for priests (but with holy conc... Holy is still best).
Imp holy concentration: 16% for a free single target heal. 60% haste for the next 3 spells... That's a nearly reliable proc rate...
Serendipity: 60% mana return? Ok thanks... Now I can literally chain heal max rank greater heals and never run OOM.
Test of faith: 15% healing, 10% crit on targets below 50? Awesome, not only will the tanks get a huge heal, but likely a crit, and likely to get inspiration up on them...
Guardian spirit: OMFG. This thing is amazing. +40% healing? Cheat death with 10% max HP returned... God... This thing is simply... Amazing...
Throw this on a tank that is going down and you can single handed out heal any raid bosses damage (especially if Imp concentration procs)...
Discipline:
Grace: The reason you don't have a choice but to bring disc priests to raids... Plain and simple.
Shadd Aug 24th 2008 12:52PM
No offense to whoever did ask a beta tester, but when he said priests have barely been touched he was dead wrong. In fact it is exactly the opposite.
In this thread a blue said that "Druids and Priests the most far along in development."
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8557152613&pageNo=1&sid=2000#4
Jill Aug 23rd 2008 8:25PM
For more information about shadow priest concerns and what is being done, please see the Shadowpriest.com Community Feedback Project at: http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=15393
Felade Aug 23rd 2008 8:29PM
Blizzard has stated in the wrath forums, that they first work on the ideas for each class, then they work the numbers. Since the beta level cap has only been 80 for a few days, and they are still making major tweaks to each class' abilities and talent trees (titan's grip...), I think it is too early to worry about the numbers as they are now.
I prefer to worry about the philosophy behind the class design, both stated and implied. I think Vampiric Touch really limited the amount of damage they could give shadowpriests in BC. We already are the equivalent of chain chugging mana pots, if they gave us any more dps we would trivialize encounters by giving effectively infinite mana to our groups. By nerfing Vampiric Touch, Blizzard is opening the door to allow us to have more damage, without our group mana regen becoming overpowered.
As far as how we play, I think that could be a valid concern. But then again, what would you expect? Every class/spec to be completely reworked from the ground up, a la Paladins? We are getting a few new things, although our top tier talent is a pvp talent. If I remember correctly, shadowpriests were a hallowed pvp spec, so I think this is ok. I missed the days of epic face melting and I am looking forward to trying out dispersion in arena if I get a chance.
And on the topic of more classes getting our utility: well, ret pallies are going to be regenerating mana for the group, and look at the broken dps they are doing right now...they could easily "break" shadowpriests too. We've been OP before.
Leag Aug 23rd 2008 8:33PM
Blizz has said that DPS and Tanking will be tuned near the end of beta and that utilitys shoudlnt be so unique.
That kinda makes sense.
Ideally,Spriests will be on the "mana batterys" list and be able to do as much dps as most other DPSers with utility.
Scaling is a serious busines tho, no doubt about it.
Many of blizz formulas are just oudated or unlogical,for scaling gear value etc.
If what GC said is true then everything will(as it should) scale correctly to keep the same relative damage it has with other skills at their base level.
And PVP..Spriests need help in PVP too,Dpriest are pvp gods and holy is ok but Shadow isnt even a shadow of what it used to be in the good times.
Faar Aug 23rd 2008 10:04PM
One concern in the beta is (lack of) shadow priest scaling.
Another concern is the lack of new toys to play with. Since the shadow priest's conception, there's been exactly two new commonly used abilities to the class; vampiric touch and shadow word: death. And death is only routinely used in high-level raids, while leveling and grinding it's more of a liability really.
Lich King brings us exactly zero new commonly used shadow priest abilities, this makes playing a shadow priest repetitive and boring. Druid moonkin is sort of in the same situation; yes they get typhoon - which has a very limited range, there's a fairly big CD on it and is underwhelming at the moment, and then they get starfall, whose use is quite situational, costs major mana and has an even longer CD.
Shadow priests need more toys to play with to stave off stagnation and boredom. I'd say we need an instant spammable spell that doesn't have a CD that makes it into another mind blast, like ice lance for example. Make it less mana efficient than mindflay, the price we'll have to pay for avoiding spell pushback while under fire.
Kaelfurnis Aug 23rd 2008 10:24PM
*I want to preface this by saying I have had no experience in the WOTLK beta other than what I read on websites such as wowinsider.com, and shadowpriest.com.
From what ive seen out of other classes and their evolutions in the expansion WOTLK I must say that I am afraid of what is going to happen to shadow priests. It seems that Blizzard has had the mindset of giving shadow priests one step forward and then taking us two steps back. For example vampiric touch being reduced to 2% mana return. In addition our fear, physic scream, has a 30 sec cooldown untalented. These limitations or "gimps" if you will, seem to continue into WOTLK. for example our new and much needed aoe mind sear costs 67% of our base mana. I dont even understand the logic behind such mana cost, maybe I have overlooked something but why bother? It is if nothing else a tease. In addition, my experience in the realm of pvp has lead me to the conclusion that one of the most needed improvements to shadow priests is some sort of pushback resistance. It seems in WOTLK shadow priests get relief in the talent improved shadowform. Improved shadowform fully talented reduces lost cast time due to damage by 70%, the catch follows suit with most shadow priest spells a lengthy cooldown. In order to engage improved shadowform one must use fade another spell with a 30 cooldown untalented. Shadow Priests are crippled by their lenghty cooldowns, high mana costs, poor dps scaling, and the scaling back of our utilities. Where many classes are looking on with bated breath to Lich King and their new skills and improvements, at the moment i am looking on with fear of impending disapointment. Hopefully my fears are unwarrented, in the mean time I am rerolling in preparation for the possibility of impending disappointment.
GamerJunkie Aug 24th 2008 12:11AM
Admit you guys were OP in BC, guilds use to reserve 3-4 spots specifically for Spriests just for mana regen and combine that with solid raid DPS, every other class other than healers don't get reserved spots. It's ridiculous that Spriests can regen mana and healing topping the healing meters too. No wonder Vampiric touch got toned down.. The spec needs rework, it's too early to tell what's in store.
theRaptor Aug 24th 2008 1:22AM
Uh, maybe before BT came out. VT got nerfed around that time, and spriests stopped scaling properly after T5. Shadow priests are kings in T4 and T5, they are a barely needed utility class after that (and partially to buff overly synergetic warlocks).
Eisengel Aug 24th 2008 12:39AM
Koraa, the priest class designer, replied to a Beta Priest thread decrying the complete lack of scaling for Shadow Priests, saying only:
" We're going to do some further tweaks to Shadow soon : ] "
In this post on the Beta forums:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765740755&sid=2000&pageNo=3
This is somewhat promising because it means somewhere someone has something planned... however 'tweaks' sounds uninspiring. Druids are fully functional melee DPS, spell DPS, tanks and healers based on talent spec. Shammys are now being fixed and may not be able to tank per se, but can push out melee and spell DPS and can heal, same thing with Paladins (DPS, healing, tanking based on talents). Priests need to be re-engineered to be the same way. It seems Shadow is just tacked on to the great Holy and Discipline trees. Personally I love Shadow, but it is currently the red-headed stepchild of the Priest tree.
I posted previously on some glyphs I'd like to see to enhance the shadowy line we walk. As Priests we know how to expend mana to 'remake' a being, healing damage... when you go shadow you use that same knowledge to deplete health... to 'unmake' a creature.
Some suggestions:
talent, 4th+ tier:
- Horrid Dreams: 2 ranks
per talent point 50% chance to cause Psychic Scream to invoke Horror effect rather than Fear
-- Fear is essentially useless and resistible by nearly everything you want to fear... at least if something gets Feared, it will stay feared. We have a version of this in Beta, but this is much stronger
talent, 3rd+ tier, requires Imp PsyScream:
- Vicious Nightmares: 3 ranks
per talent point 33% chance to inflict all feared/horrified targets with Rank 3 sw:P, or refresh sw:P duration if they are already afflicted with it
-- Makes Fear an actual weapon for dealing with crowds, additionally damage won't break a Horror effect. This makes fear a lot more useful... both as an escape mechanism and as an attack.
trainable spell, req level 60
- Dark Mending, n ranks
15% base mana, on spell GCD, 3sec cast
if cast on self: restore 600-800 health (affected by ~72% spell power)
if cast on hostile creature: deal 600-800 damage to target (affected by 60% Shadow spell power) and entire party receives 75% of that damage as health, 50% as mana
if cast on friendly target: deal 600-800 damage to self (affected by 60% Shadow spell power) and target recieves 100% of that damage as health and 80% as mana
-- How come Shadow Priest and Warlock mobs, some of them humanoids, all know this spell, but I don't? Besides this, there is no single-target or self-heal in the Spriest's arsenal. This spell always has a cost... mana to heal self, mana and health to heal others, but it dovetails nicely into the Spriest role; restore mana and health while providing damage.
talentable spell, 5th+ tier
- Twisted Soul,
instant cast, 2 minute cooldown
for the next 45 seconds all damage taken is increased by 25%, and all hostile creatures within 4 yards have that damage done to them as well
-- This can be very useful situationally. It can be used as one last swan song so if you pull aggro at least you do some damage, or if your fear is on cooldown but you have sw:P and VE up on multiple mobs, you can hope the extra damage will bring them down before you go out for the count. This could also be turned on before a group pull or AoE cast, then when your health gets low, the monsters are feared.
... etcetera... that's the general idea though, accentuate the Holy/Shadow divide as two sides of the same coin. Holy Priests repair creatures with mana, Shadow Priests repair/restore by unmaking one creature in order to repair another (kind of spiritual alchemy)... and Disc Priests... umm... never played Disc... but they do something else then. :^)
theRaptor Aug 24th 2008 12:44AM
The other problem with scaling is that spriests (and afflic locks) get little benfit from +crit, and hit the +hit cap easily. With gear being "streamlined" this means everyone will be in mage +crit, +spell, +hit gear, which would keep spriest damage low, even if they had the same coefficients.
It was really ridiculous that nearly the entire best in slot item for spriests was before T5. And most of the T5 upgrades were very minor.
Blizz either needs to give DoT's and flays/drains a benefit from +crit, or they need to give us a talent that turns +crit into +spell power.
theRaptor Aug 24th 2008 12:46AM
I meant best in slot upgrades before T6.
Thander Aug 24th 2008 2:19AM
I think Shadow priests worked the way Blizzard wanted to them to be in BC, almost too well. Blizzard decided to give other classes some of the same utility in raids and nerfed shadow accordingly. I'm sure they will be making some changes as a Blizzard dev recently posted they haven't even started looking at Shadow yet. It's disappointing that there won't be any must-have talents or abilities that completely change the way it's played, but hopefully the scaling will be fixed.
YòuOTSS Aug 24th 2008 7:56AM
Spriests need some serious work done if you ask me. I almost exclusively play my spriest now and it is very alarming to log on to World of Raids every day and see more news and assurance that druids, warriors, and death knights will be able to tank equally, while giving absolutely no word on how spriest is going to stay a step ahead in LK. The closest thing to news I got about spriests is the post that stated that they won't be the exclusive mana batteries anymore, with ret pallies stepping in.
It seems to me that in an effort to make all things (classes) equal, blizzard is completely screwing up in places such as this. Saying that we were OP in BC is a really ridiculous argument if you look back to pre-BC. Do you recall anyone raiding as shadow priest? Fixing spriests in BC with some good group skills to go with good DPS made the class worth having. If you ask me, as it stands, the balance is relatively even, although spriests do have spots saved in raids for regen.
Suppose a 25 man takes 4 shadow priests ( which i don't think is a valid assumption to begin with, because most raids I have mana batteried in, there have been 2, with an odd 3 maximum ), 4 healers, 2 tanks, then the rest are pretty much whoever wants to go, as long as it isn't 15 rogues or 15 locks, of course. Now cut down the 15 to account for druids, pallies, and shaman all having valid healing specs, and you're left with mage, rogue, warlock to fill 15 spots, with the occasional off-spec ( read dps ) of the aforementioned healing-capable classes. That's 5 of each class, not counting those listed, and even so, the usual DPS classes have more members going than spriests. Let me guess, you play the role of a disgruntled off-speccer who feels dejected by someone being more useful than yourself?
I agree with Eisengel in the regard that priests need to be taken more seriously as someone who uses darkness and destruction to heal. We are still priests after all. Right now it feels as though spriest is heading down a road that leads to it feeling like a toned down warlock with a few gimmicks to make us feel different. I say gimmicks due to the fact that even our quality skills, VE and VT, are toned down now so that other classes can compete with our utility.
Even those have needed reworked long before though if you ask me. Warlocks have plenty of skills that deal damage AND heal, and life tap, drain mana, etc. to regen, while shadow priests get left out. I have no sour grapes towards locks, and am not one of those QQing about OP, but it makes sense for priests to share in some of these types of skills. All because we have one skill that regens mana for a party, we have to be nerfed.
A spriest rotation goes something like : VT, VE ( situational ), SW:P, SW:D, Mind blast, flay until something else cools down or needs reapplied. SW:D is another situational because you obviously hurt yourself, requiring a healer to pay attention to you, and it can barely be used on some fights, such as karazhan's prince to name an example, or anything that has a lot of AOE damage output to the raid. This puts you on a 4 spell rotation. All the glitz and glamour of mana regen just got reduced to a relatively boring rinse and repeat cycle before your very eyes.
It is in my opinion that spriests need to be looked at a lot more than other classes by blizzard, because it has shifted from an amazing PvP class that couldn't raid pre-BC, to an amazing raid class during BC, while never reaching it's potential of being great in both at the same time. The closer LK gets, the happier I am that I have other level 70s in reserve in case my spriest gets as overlooked as it seems it may.
Shadowspec Aug 24th 2008 1:02PM
Spriests are helpful in raids, but not vital. I have been the only spriest in 25 mans, and that's hardly 'an OP offspec' taking away spots from pure DPS classes. The only instance spriests are almost 100% vital in is Kara, and that's for cc reasons. Do you know how much trouble I can have finding groups for heroic 5mans as an spriest? People don't want to take you when they can have an equally geared rogue who puts out more damage and can actually cc reliably.
Gigantor1960 Aug 25th 2008 12:08PM
As one who has a +1300 dmg Shadow Priest sitting in mothballs for nearly 6 months now I have to agree that it is a sad day indeed. I leveled to 70 Shadow and really consider it my favorite.
I switched to Holy full time 6 months ago http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Alleria&n=Hamacus as my guild needed healers at the time.
I have to say there is really nothing vital that we have raided in Kara or 25 man content to Hyjal thus far that requires, (bold letters), a Shadow Priest. : (
We currently have a glut of healers and there is talk of me letting me go back to Shadow if I'd like but honestly with the look of things to come I think I will stay Holy or raid on my 70 lock.
Case in point I blew by a better geared S Priest during a Kara badge run as an Affliction lock and was second on the damage meters, (Destro Lock 1st), and did not die once (So many tools in the toolbox). This while keeping COE/COS up to aid in group dps. I felt bad for the S Priest as I have been in his shoes trying to walk that fine line of dps and survivability. So unfair.
That being said as much as I love my Shadow Priesty unless Blizz decides to make it fun again and throw us a bone or two and allow our DPS to scale and give us some usefull talents my days of raiding shadow are done.