The Devs Want OUR Feedback! | How to Fix SOD Shadow Priest

give us crit gear. our critical strike chance is piss poor low. so we aren't benefiting from the critical strikes rune. like pretty much at all imo
make mind flay also put vamp touch on target

Of course you would opt for it to go on the pants slot - pants gaming!! thx for the upload :)

Any chance for Cata spriest guides when prepatch hits?

They are too late to this imo. Most of the boys quit from the economy fiasco, shaman's ruining everything, ridiculous drop rates for gear in short phases. I can't believe they still don't have any viability for shadow priests. I'm not wasting my time in the game for another phase just to find out my only option is healing at 60.

They also need to change our AOE to also damage the target or be able to be cast on an ally. It's really lame in dungeons.

I want to see interaction between SWP crits resetting the cooldown of SWD. SWD should also get a buff for targets below 25% health.

Well thought . Thanks.

- make SW:Death baseline like Shadowfiend.
- move Twisted Faith to glove slot. also makes sw:d an execute OR buffs mind spike, should be both tbh.
- Mind Flay target takes 6-8% increased magical damage.

make mind blast instant cast with no cool down and do 20,000 damage is a start

Un nerf SW:Death and call it a day.

Remove or change mind spike, shamans just need one dot to have 100% crit and druids crit whatever and mages to. Sp tho need to build this shit up with mind spike and in pvp this is just stupid

theres no real reason to have any cd on the eyes curses if it would work like lock curses one per target, cursing multiple targets would be a very niche thing and doesn't really matter anyway

curse resists are just the lamest shit making a 3min cd mostly worthless

whatever they do with mindflay it needs a range increase, have the same rune remove the slow if pvp is a concern 😂

When VE overheals you for your max HP, it empowers your next mind flay to do that damage spread out over the 3 ticks (this damage will not trigger VE).

This would be useful to balance our utility since on fights we heal a lot from VE, we will have this empowered effect occur less often. On fights our VE doesn’t do much (not much raid damage going out), we get the benefit of empower more often.

Also it won’t be op in pvp since it’s hard to overheal if you’re being trained.

Doing 1k dps will have our VE heal us for 300hps with 2/2 IVE. It will take 10 seconds to heal overheal our a health pool of 3k hp. So, every 10s or so we could have a mind flay ticking for 1k per tick. Would still allow us to have MSpike as our main filler.

Mind Flay baseline range should be atleast 30 yards. Mind Spike should only stack twice, to increase the value of crit for shadows and Mind Flay should either buff Mind Spike or Mind Blast.

My suggestion would be:

- Increase range of Mind Flay
- Move Twisted Faith to gloves
- Cap Mind Spike at 2 stack
- Increase cast speed of the next mind Flay by 50 % after casting Mind Blast
- In addition I like the Idea of making Shadow Word: Death baseline.

Our Rotation could be Dot, Dot, Mind Spike 2x, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Spike 2x und reapply dots.

And I like Pants ideas to improve the headrunes.

Well i means theres always the mage solution, slap on a +50% crit damage rune like mages spellpower rune and call it a day?

But seriously allowing access to twisted faith and void plague at the same time would atleast be a good start. I would also really like to see some tuning to eye of the void, currently having to use that in raids has major dps implications due to not being able to snapshot shadow word pain, the wasted globals from reapplication of swp and ofc the irritating interaction of eye and fiend not being able to be active at the same time.

P.s - let mind flay be castable while moving so it can function as something to do while a melee is on your ass in pvp, while repositioned in raid, but keep its current range so its not just outrageously gross in pvp.

Yay improve shadow dps so shadow priest is more and more and more god super god tier at pvp than already is

we need crit scaling most of all, some form of ut at least - our dots critting will do nothing for us if we stay around 8% unbuffed

I like the idea if mindflay as a proc of some sort

Don't agree with putting away all of vampiric embraces healing - I think it should stay but scale inversely with some dmg talent - the more dps you choose, the less heal you are gonna do maybe

cant say i agree with pain and suffering comments. i run it on all my raids where we have 2 or more warlocks. it saves a bunch of mana over the course of the fight and globals which are better used keeping vp up

What do you mean fix?! I'm loving SP in phase 3, so much fun!

It would also be interesting to modify the Despair Rune in a way that on top of the abililty that dots can now crit, the critical strike bonus is 100%, not just 50%. Or Twisted Faith is closer to the WOTLK Talent version, i.e. damage bonus + scaling with total Spirit as well. Instead of Spririt it could also be a scaling with total Intelligence.

Using more "health as a resource" spells (like shadow word: death) could be a sneaky way to increase pve dmg but still maintain risk in pvp
B) mind flay now deals 50% (or however) more damage, but damages you for the same amount

how about they nerf the INSANE spikes on the damage ranking so that classes are a bit closer to each other...

While I dont have as much input regarding runes, It would be nice to see void plagues duration increased if specced into improved shadow word pain. Also the shadow talent tree is rather dull and I wish they could potentially add some new talents. Cause after 40 not a lot happens in the talent tree and the rest of the points feels half wasted. This could be ``fixed´´ by either adding new interesting talents to shadow or moving up spiritual guidance in the holy so shadow could access it at 60 or moving up force of will in discipline so we can access that at 60.

very nice suggestions, one thing tho, when I think priest I'm seeing dots and mind flay, I hate that we have 1000 pets that we have to press at the start of the fight, the warrios are like 100k dps in the first 5 seconds meanwhile I'm there getting out the homunculi, eye, shadowfiend then 1 global for void plague than 1 for SWP that 1 for vampiric... the fight is over before I can start casting anything

mind flay needs a serious glow up. It’s my second favorite priest ability behind ve, but it just has no applications compared to the rest of the kit. It needs increased range as well as a use for its damage in road environment. Maybe it has a short cooldown, and while channeling it increases the speed at which your dots tick. Because in these short raid fights dots aren’t really doing much

Also I know this is a very classic thing, but living and dying by world buffs doesn’t feel good at all. In raid, such an overwhleming % of my dmg is coming from world buffs. Enchanting and potions provide more dmg bonus than any gear pieces. Would be nice if it was actually our build or our gear that was upping our damage, I feel very unmotivated to find gear upgrades when world buffs are all that rly matter

Also dispersion needs to be fixed. It´s funny how the tooltip does not correspond reality when getting dazed by mobs while in dispersion :D

Mind Flay needs a normal spell coefficient. 3s/3.5 = 85.71%, but for some crazy reason, it's only 41%. It should be scaling literally twice as well as it does now.

Add 3 shadow orbs like in MOP. Each Mind blast adds 1 Orb, Each orb increases damage (maybe crit) of Mind Flay. Increase Mind flay range.

Priest feels really good already. I'm usually top 5 in damage while providing really good utility and heals. We can't have it all...

I think some kind of damage debuff on a target with Mind Flay alongside turning it into a CD ability like Mind Blast/SW:D would be pretty cool. I like the idea of us being a heavy utility caster so I really wouldn't wanna see them add more runes to compete with homunculi or nerfing VE because unless our damage is competing with the absolute top casters, we'll be seen as griefing if we don't reduce our own DPS to benefit the group. I'd personally like to see Eye of The Void become a permanent pet summon of some sort where the curses have a shorter CD, I don't even bother using eye of the void since my group has several warlocks already and the damage increase is so minimal. Twisted Faith could possibly be combined with Pain and Suffering to give us a good option for PvE.

I like the idea of reducing the utility of vampiric embrace for more damage. There's no way Blizzard just buffs our damage without tradeoff, and rightfully so. If we were doing warrior dps while healing our party for 30% of that damage it would absolutely be broken. I personally don't like the idea of moving void plague/twisted faith to boots. I would rather they move it to legs to trade more damage for the utility of Homonculi.
Some of my suggestions:
-Increase all spell scaling by a good amount (it sucks), and remove spell pushback (it's an outdated, unnecessary mechanic)
-Increase the amount of crit% gained from intellect (to help scaling)
-Reduce spell hit cap (for next phase, no reason casters should need more than melee/ranged)
-Mind Flay 30 yard range (20 is far too restrictive, mind spike has 35 base), or allow it to be channeled while moving
-Mind Flay puts a short duration, stacking debuff on the target that is consumed by Mind Blast to deal additional damage
-Mind Spike debuff stacks to 2 instead of 3, but gives 40% crit each instead of 30% (to accommodate time in the rotation for Mind Flay)
-Despair also grants +15% crit chance for dots (shadow has zero crit synergy in the talent tree, it needs a lot more rune support to be viable)
-Pain and Suffering triggers a tick of SW:P when it refreshes the duration

If void plague moves to boots I’m unsubbing

I’d be interested in turning mind flay into a DoT like warlock tank’s life drain so that we can easily insert it into our rotation :)

They should give them the boomkin treatment decrease damage from instant cast abilities and increase hard cast abilities so they don't become to overpowered in pvp while doing better in pve 😅

They should change a rune to add a chance on damage from Mind Spike to make Mindflay channel really fast. Like an Arcane Barrage type of thing. Then Mind flay gets used as a proc quick burst of damage

Another idea would be to have mind blast crits add a stacking debuf to the target that buffs mind flay damage. Two-three rotations into a massive flay / death then repeat would be a nice addition to the rotation.

Have MF increase dot haste and dot crit while channeling MF

A solution to increase shadow DPS while not making them significantly stronger in PVP would be to make mind blast and mind spike castable while channeling mindflay or mindsear.
This as an addon to the pain and suffering rune could make that feel like a more attractive option.

Are u planning on playing Cataclysm?

1. Change runeslots: Twisted Faith with Homunculi
2. Make SWD baseline and do more dmg on targets below 25% (dmg received by the priest unaffected)
3. As you mentioned in the video, add rune increasing flat dmg by X% but reduce healing of VE. This would have to be on feet slot because having this and dispersion in pvp would be too op. So someone who picks this has huge defensive tradeoff.

just coming back here to say: They saw all this amazing feedback priest players gave and gcame back with the most lukewarm 10% buff in all of existance lol

What about a rune that increases all shadow damage by 50%, and makes VE raid wide but reducing its healing to only 3-5%? This would help in pve dps but wouldn't change pvp because most would want the full 30% damage to healing in pvp so they wouldn't use that rune in pvp.

Make mind flay a channeled ability that you can cast other spells when active similar to warlock drain life with the ruin

Pain and suffering could refresh and immediately cause a tic of SWP

Adding a rune that increases mindflay range, decreases slow effect and makes it do the same amount of damage but removes channel and lasts 6 seconds. Add a cooldown to mindflay and make it the same as mindblast, and add it to the mindblast talents to reduce cooldown, keeping it the same as mindblast. Rotation could be to use it before or after every mind blast.

Also the rune that lets dots crit (I forget the name) needs to add dot crit chance. Maybe 10%?

another question I recently have:

since our dots crit now, is it truly SP over any other stat, or does crit become better eventually. I have pretty much BiS gear now. but warcraftlogs seems to indicate that a high spellpower chest wouls be better than the 3 piece set. I have both now (atalai chest and the set chest) but I find it wierd how 1% crit AND the 3 pieve set bonus should be worse than just 9 more spell power

is there any sim out there that you work with for these kind of questions, or any gearing guide maybe?

for me the main problem is that the mind blast is so underwhelming... to do max damage I have to have SWP on the target (with twisted faith), cast 3 mind spikes to grant the crit, and all this to do what...? less than 2000 dmg? (on a 5.5 sec cd) Then, you see a mage literally spamming frostfire bolt, with 40% crit base, and they all hit for like 2500-3000 min....and crits will leave a dot that deals way more damage than all my dots together...it's ridiculous. And people will say, well the mage is a pure dps class, it's normal that they do more dmg...SP is a utility class...well, not anymoer! mages can do everything! they can buff, heal, ress, blink, create food and water, dispel curses (iirc), move around with portals...like..bro...THEY are the utility king AND top caster dps

So here is why classic shadow abd many other such builds like boomkin suck ass:
Our basic toolkit is very much incomplete. When we get to choose between a single target and a multi target active rune ability, a warrior for example already has the basic sibnle target AND multi target ability.
Does anyone ask the warriors: Do you want heroic strike or cleave as your rage dump? No.

Shadowpriest should have gotten at least mindspike and mindsear as baseline or rather core abilities in a fashion of the book for shadow fiend from Scarlet Monastery.

Then and ONLY then can this sorry state be fixed.

Warriors get runes that change how existing abilities from their core toolkit work. Gladiator stance, devastate, bloodsurge, precise timing, etc. Those are great.
Runes should for the most part change interactions with existing core abilities, allow you to empower a certain aspect or focus on a niche, not add quasi mandatory core abilities that a specc becomes practically unplayable without.

Thats my 5 pence.