First I'd like to make a plea to Ghostcrawler to give us some indication on what they plan to do for shadow priests.

Next, I would like to make a few suggestions as to what they should do to fix them.

Dispersion - I know it's a dead horse, but that won't stop me.

Current
You disperse into pure Shadow energy, reducing all damage taken by 90%. You are unable to attack or cast spells, but you regenerate 6% mana every 1 sec for 6 sec. Dispersion can be cast while stunned, feared or silenced.
Instant, 3 min cooldown

New
You disperse into pure Shadow energy, reducing all damage taken by 90%. You are unable to attack or cast spells, but you regenerate 7% mana and 7% health every 1 sec for 6 sec. Dispersion can be cast while stunned, feared or silenced.
Instant, 3 min cooldown

Vampiric Touch - Change to instant cast

Vampiric Embrace - reduce cooldown by 5 seconds

Imp Shadowform - Fade now provides a 2/4 second immunity to movement imparing effects and
increases your movement speed by 10/20%(stacks with other effects of this type) Also - reduces physical damage taken by an additional 2/5%

Silence - Reduces CD by 5-10 seconds

Shadow Affinity - reduces your chance to be critically hit by 1/2/3% in addition to it's current effects.

Imp Psychic Scream - reduces CD by 4/8 seconds - gives the priest a chance to get two off before dying...

Imp. Shadow Word: Pain- increases damage done by 5/10% and reduces the chance it will be dispelled by 10/20%

Mind Melt - in addition to its current effect - grants your shadow spells a 3/6% chance to disorient your target for 2/4 seconds. on any damage (this includes DoTs)


Obviously taking ALL of these suggestions and implementing them would be OP, but taking some of them would be justifiable.

not all DoTs should be instant cast. I'd like to think if arenas returned to some normalcy then DoT classes would still have to cast something whislt running around pillars.

Mmmmm...

As I said... not all should be implemented... but some...

I'd rather see some new form of excape given to priests. All priests, not just shadow. Something like a mages blink would be nice and it would NOT share a cooldown with psychic scream.

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Q u o t e:

Vampiric Embrace - reduce cooldown by 5 seconds

Shadow Affinity - reduces your chance to be critically hit by 1/2/3% in addition to it's current effects.

Imp Psychic Scream - Gives your Psychic Scream a 50/100% chance to fear enemies in "horror" for the duration of Psychic Scream

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These are the changes I thought would be good and not be OP.

Vampiric Embrace feels like the priest's Faerie Fire.

Shadow Affinity in its current state is useless. Shadow priests don't have problems with threat anymore due to the changes in increased tank threat generation, VE nerf, and Shadowform. It either needs a secondary effect or a completely new effect.

And I like my version of imp PS better than just reducing the cooldown. It keeps the easily breakable Psychic Scream from breaking so easily. Don't have to wait so badly for the cooldown to end.

How about a new Hymn?

Hymn of Madness
Instant
2 Minute CD
20% of base mana

Causes all enemies within 20 yards of the priest to turn on their own and attack them for 8 seconds. During this time, they do half damage to their own. Once affected by Hymn of Madness, targets cannot be affected again for one minute.

It'd be handy... and would be pretty fun...

Might be a little OP tho...

Maybe it's better to make it a single target thing or something...

We aren't going to get our talents overhauled, our current problems seem to lie with the extreme burst potential right now. This is something that is common to most classes right now, so the problem doesn't lie with shadow priests specifically. I'm more than happy to have the development team concentrate on the biggest issues, one of them being the lock problems. Our class is much better off than they are in my opinion.

However it would be nice to hear some feedback on how resilience affects dot damage in shadowform, from what I've been hearing resilience hits our dot damage TWICE by reducing the bonus damage we get from our crit % against the target on top of the normal dot damage reduction provided by resilience. This sounds like an unintended change to me, and I'm surprised that there aren't more s. priests concerned about how this works. Maybe I'm just completely missing something, let me know if I am!

I read about it in this forum post:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12454627673&sid=1

What does everyone else think? Do the other classes think this is a necessary penalty to our dots?

Hopefully they will fix that... seeing as though it is pretty unfair to get hit by resil more than once...

Yeah it would be nice to get some word on this issue, but regardless I want to remind GC and the other Blizzard employees that watch these forums that there are plenty of us out there who appreciate how hard you guys work to address all our little complaints from day to day. Just about every issue is responded to in some way or another, it really is astonishing how much they actually respond to. If people would just look for topics that have already been posted before venting their frustrations in a billion "my class sucks/blizzard hates us" posts, it would be that much easier for them to address issues.

I personally think merging these forums in this manner was an excellent idea, it has really broadened my understanding of how my class relates to other classes trying to fit in the damage dealing role. I hope one of the developers gets to see this reply. Keep up the good work guys!

Sleep, go to!

EDIT: It may be interesting to see dispersion giving additional movement speed while it's active instead of directly aiding to your survival. There can be many uses for something like this; getting behind that pillar in arena for heals or further away from melee without worrying about snares/roots are just a couple.

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Q u o t e:


Yes, as heated as the debate can be sometimes, I'm cautiously happy with them too.

With regard to Shadow PvP, as a few players have suggested, the question is always whether to buff or to nerf to bring everyone up to the same level. Players would always prefer buffs, and frankly so would we, but sometimes it can be orders of magnitude more work to do so (when you start talking about inflating mob health across the board for example). If incoming damage were lower, through whatever solution, would Shadow priests be able to do their job?

Dispersion is a new ability, and like many of the new abilities, it's going to take some test driving before we're entirely happy with it. The spell still comes up a lot in our design discussions. I'm not going to risk saying anything beyond that until we have something more concrete to offer. I am sorry to sound so guarded at times, but honeslty, players can get really upset if they feel they were promised something that for whatever reason we end up not delivering.

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Second!

To the original OP. You want to change dispersion so it'll regen HP as well. Once everyone gets resilience wouldn't this be OP? Basically we'll have 1.5x our HP. While doing damage and stuff.
Is our mitigation that bad (once resillence is capped) that we need 50% of our health back while having 90% reduction in damage?

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Q u o t e:


Yes, as heated as the debate can be sometimes, I'm cautiously happy with them too.

With regard to Shadow PvP, as a few players have suggested, the question is always whether to buff or to nerf to bring everyone up to the same level. Players would always prefer buffs, and frankly so would we, but sometimes it can be orders of magnitude more work to do so (when you start talking about inflating mob health across the board for example). If incoming damage were lower, through whatever solution, would Shadow priests be able to do their job?

Dispersion is a new ability, and like many of the new abilities, it's going to take some test driving before we're entirely happy with it. The spell still comes up a lot in our design discussions. I'm not going to risk saying anything beyond that until we have something more concrete to offer. I am sorry to sound so guarded at times, but honeslty, players can get really upset if they feel they were promised something that for whatever reason we end up not delivering.

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Hey GC, really pleased to see a comment about Shadow PvP, I check these boards every day >< and I'm so glad that at lease the development team has mentioned it, thus thought about it even just once! :D

There are many issues outside of just Dispersion being hard to place. I hope you guys go through the many other issues (Posted in several threads) besides this when/if you do a review, or have a talk about the spec in pvp. Heres to hoping we get a look in when locks do.

Thanks!~ <3

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Q u o t e:

...If incoming damage were lower, through whatever solution, would Shadow priests be able to do their job?

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Honestly, no, the problems stem far deeper than that unfortunately. Just because we live a little longer won't negate the fact that while we are alive, our damage is poor.

Loading Time
Our damage is poor mostly due to the long "loading time" on spriest damage. We have good dps in PvE, but in PvP, we have to get 5 stacks of shadow weaving and 3 dots up on a target, just to do equivalent damage to other classes. This has always been the design intention of shadow, slow starters, but in the end they get brought up with the rest, which unfortunately has huge drawbacks in pvp. Stuff that might help, lower shadow weaving from 5 to 3, also take vampiric embrace off the GCD or make it a passive effect from offensive spells. Also, the 6 seconds during dispersion would be a good time to load up on these things if you allow casting during it.

Dot dependency
Along with the "loading time", the dots are far too susceptible to being removed. Couple that with Vampiric Touch having a cast time and Devouring plague having a hard cooldown, and its really hard to get any good amount of damage going before they are removed or wiped from the target, not to mention they are taxing on the mana pool to recast over and over. You might say just use mind blast and SW:Death, but we lose 10% damage on mind blast and 20% damage on mind flay by not having our SW:Pain up, and we lose a lot of our mana efficiency by not having our Vampiric Touch up, not to mention, a lot of our damage was balanced around our dots, so we really need to be using them. I have no solution for this matter other than some negative incentive for enemies to remove our dots or a new form of garbage debuff that was formerly filled by shadow weaving.


So, if damage were brought down to adequate levels across the board, and in doing so you give s.priests the ability to tank as they have done so in the past, addressing these two issues might allow a s.priest to do their job.

Most of my former games as shadow played out as follows:
-Enemy opens on me, first few hits bring me to 50-75% hp, I dispersion because I am usually stunned or silenced.
-Next, I wait 6 seconds while being unable to do anything (can't run, always snared), and then after it ends I fear them, pvp trinket + rocket boots and get away.
-This buys me 10-15 seconds to shift out and heal up. Usually my teammate can keep one busy and the other one opens on me again.
-After a few seconds of tanking (if I live) my fear C/D is up, I fear him after not being silenced / stunned, (undead = dead here), but at this point I am close to dead already so I fade and try to run away and heal up again, but usually by the time they get back to me I have to wait for too long before fear CD is up and I die.

In the best cases, my games ended with me doing between 0-3k dmg (1 sw:p), and living for ~40 seconds. Not sure how you can fix that to be honest (especially if you remove rocket boots), but you guys are the best at what you do so good luck!

Also note its not possible to play as shadow with a healer behind you because shadow has huge mana problems in pvp when comparing to warlocks who have infinite mana, s. priests will never carry a team unfortunately.

Hope that helps somehow.

I would really like to see Dispersion as a type of bubble effect not as a modified Pain Supression, since we are taking our own abilities out of use for the duration, I think it would be fair if it stopped us from being damaged at all for the duration. Mostly because when we use it all we can do is hope for someone else to come save us or run away from our target, and when we do have this active we can still be killed with it up.

By far biggest issue for a spriest in arena atm is we cant do damage while being attacked at all. Our dots haver nearly no protection, and its very very killer to us. Nearly every team has a paladin or priest, making our dots worthless, and they are basically the only things we can do if we have something attacking us.

This is really the fundamental issue, why have a spriest if we cant hurt anything? Just go spec disc/holy you'll heal and shield better and live longer.

As things get later on I'm sure survivability will be addressed, thats the easy thing to fix, heck just adding a dispersion glyph to let it heal would just about do it, however its always gonna come down to we cant do any damage compared to all the other damage dealing people in arenas.

I hate to see carbon copies of abilities and such, but really one of the only ways I can see fixing this is putting a penalty on dispelling vamp touch, it takes effort to cast like unstable affliction but say once its on if its dispelled it increases all damage dealt to the target by 50% for 3 seconds or something, this way its different than unstable affliction, but still provides a steep penalty to dispelling it. People could choose hmm do I stop these dots and risk my partner getting bursted down, or do I let the dots keep doing consistent damage. And would add a lot more options to the spriests in arenas as far as comps go I think.

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Q u o t e:


Honestly, no, the problems stem far deeper than that unfortunately. Just because we live a little longer won't negate the fact that while we are alive, our damage is poor.

Loading Time
Our damage is poor mostly due to the long "loading time" on spriest damage. We have good dps in PvE, but in PvP, we have to get 5 stacks of shadow weaving and 3 dots up on a target, just to do equivalent damage to other classes. This has always been the design intention of shadow, slow starters, but in the end they get brought up with the rest, which unfortunately has huge drawbacks in pvp. Stuff that might help, lower shadow weaving from 5 to 3, also take vampiric embrace off the GCD or make it a passive effect from offensive spells. Also, the 6 seconds during dispersion would be a good time to load up on these things if you allow casting during it.

Dot dependency
Along with the "loading time", the dots are far too susceptible to being removed. Couple that with Vampiric Touch having a cast time and Devouring plague having a hard cooldown, and its really hard to get any good amount of damage going before they are removed or wiped from the target, not to mention they are taxing on the mana pool to recast over and over. You might say just use mind blast and SW:Death, but we lose 10% damage on mind blast and 20% damage on mind flay by not having our SW:Pain up, and we lose a lot of our mana efficiency by not having our Vampiric Touch up, not to mention, a lot of our damage was balanced around our dots, so we really need to be using them. I have no solution for this matter other than some negative incentive for enemies to remove our dots or a new form of garbage debuff that was formerly filled by shadow weaving.


So, if damage were brought down to adequate levels across the board, and in doing so you give s.priests the ability to tank as they have done so in the past, addressing these two issues might allow a s.priest to do their job.

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This poster has it right. In PvP we have problems with both offense and defense.

In defense our lack of ways to escape damage or CC's or mana drains etc. is a big concern. While we have have decent armor (as long as Inner Fire isn't dispelled) and we have some extra physical mitigation via Shadowform (and against Warriors, PW:S, again unless it's dispelled) it's definitely not enough for us to have much of a chance to actually tank anyone that's on us. And given our lack of ways to escape (snares can be almost always immediately reapplied and our fear has a cooldown and is easily broken or avoided) from being focused on we have don't really have much going for us defensive wise. We have an expensive dispel magic we can use for some things (relying upon it as shadow isn't a great situation to be in given we lack the talents to make it even passably mana efficient) and we can mitigate some damage via PW:S (again, it's not something we can really spec into to see a noticeable increase in effectiveness) but we can't actually heal tank or anything.
Yes, we can shift out of Shadowform, but we tend to have nothing invested in healing talents and so much of our DPS (and mitigation) is dependent upon us being in Shadowform.

Lowering incoming damage would help us survive longer, but without escape mechanisms it's not enough to "get the job done". Especially if lowering damage comes solely from some sort of "All PvP damage is reduced by X%" type of hidden aura (like some other games have) because that would screw over our offensive capability where we already have issues and put more of a mana strain on us.


On the offense side of the things we're still in a pretty bad situation. So much of our DPS is linked to having DoTs up that if we can't reliably have them up our damage output can be fairly trivial. Sure, a MB/SW:D combo can still be a nice little bit of burst damage but they're both on cooldowns. There's Mind Flay of course, which is finally more than just a filler spell, but channeled spells have problems of their own in PvP. You pay the mana cost as soon as you start to channel the spell rather than at the end of the cast like with DD spells. So if the spell is interrupted or cancelled early for whatever reason you've still paid the full cost of the spell. If a DD spell is interrupted early you don't lose any mana. Also channeled spells give more sustained DPS to a target when a lot of PvP is about being able to burst. There's also the small "bug" where if the snare is broken with Mind Flay the whole spell is interrupted (most often seen with druids shifting there way out of it).
Now of course there are a couple of upsides to channeled spells. You do get to (usually) do at least some damage from the spell rather than none if your target runs back out of LoS before you can finish your DD cast. And channeled spells have a tendency to keep following the target even as they move out of LoS, through walls.

(continued...didn't let me post everything)

Channeled spells do also suffer more than DD spells when it comes to spell pushback as well. If you take any pushback at all on channeled spell you will lose at least 1 tick of damage. For Mind Flay that's 33% of your Mind Flay DPS lost no matter how many points you have in Improved Shadowform. Take 2 hits and unless you have 2/2 Improved Shadowform you've lost 67% of your Mind Flay DPS. The spell goes from being fairly mana efficient in a PvE setting to being horribly inefficient in PvP when you've got people on you.

Also, in terms of offense, we're pretty much entirely restricted to one viable school of magic while in Shadowform (and again, it's not viable for us to be shifting in and out of Shadowform). If we get counterspelled in the Shadow tree we have no offensive options (while in Shadowform) other than wanding until it wears off. If we had the option of being able to cast Smite and Holy Fire while in Shadowform (I'd say Holy Nova too, but that also has a healing component) even though we're not talented for them it would at least give us something we can cast while counterspelled. Mages have 3 schools to choose from, Warlocks have 2, Druids have 2, Ele shammies now sort of have 2 (Lava Burst). Shockadins only have 1 it's true, but they're not usually considered a full DPS spec, just like Holy DPS Priests aren't usually considered proper DPS specs. (Ret Paladins and Prot Paladins at least have melee options available to them while counterspelled).
While giving us access to our heals while in Shadowform *might* be too strong (though it might help a bit with our defensive options. Maybe if they were self-only?) why not give us access to our Holy DPS spells while in Shadowform?

And as the post I'm quoting mentions we rely a lot upon getting up DoTs. This leads to a long build up time where we're doing no actual DPS but just consuming mana and GCDs. And, because we lack any real disincentive for anyone to remove our DoTs (and some classes can remove all of them with 1 GCD, albeit on cooldowns) they're usually removed as fast as we can put them up. And dispelling them is a lot cheaper than putting them up.

We're a lot like Affliction Warlocks in this regard and I'm sure they were very grateful when they got UA for it's anti-dispel mechanisms.

Some sort of disincentive to dispelling our DoTs is needed for our DPS to be meaningful in PvP.

One thing I don't think we really need (at least in PvP) is an actual DPS boost. I do still have some concerns with the relative PvE balance of some classes, but I think that our DPS in PvP if we're left alone to DPS someone is decent. It's *not* enough to burn down a healer that is just healing themselves without the use of CC's, but I have no real problem with that. I don't think a DPS class *should* be able to burn down a healer without using CC's (and I'm not talking about 100%->0% stunlock type of CC's by the way).

The problem is, the Shadow Priest has too few ways to CC that healer (or anyone else). We have our Fear (30 second cooldown untalented, 23 with both talents and PvP gloves) and our Silence (that doesn't have a counterspell effect) with a 45 second cooldown. That's the sum total of our CC (not even going to think about Divine Hymn....seriously). Both on long cooldowns. One of them easy to break, the other only really effects casters. What do we add to a PvP team? We bring DPS (if unfocused and if it's not cleansed), we bring offensive and defensive dispels (not to be underrated but they're not talented and aren't mana efficient at all. Disc Priests do both far better), a mana burn (which with the 3.0.8 changes is less effective against the classes it was viable to use it against before) and our 2 CC's.
Now I get that not all classes should have heaps of CC or unstoppable DPS. However I feel that we're lacking in both departments. We short of CC's and other utility spells and our DPS is too easy to mitigate. If we actually were viable healers while Shadow specced then sure, you could add in that to what we bring and we might actually be considered rather powerful. Especially if we could heal while doing DPS (with the nerfs to VE, which I knew were coming for PvE balance reasons and rightly so, VE doesn't really count).

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Q u o t e:
Dispersion is a new ability, and like many of the new abilities, it's going to take some test driving before we're entirely happy with it. The spell still comes up a lot in our design discussions. I'm not going to risk saying anything beyond that until we have something more concrete to offer. I am sorry to sound so guarded at times, but honeslty, players can get really upset if they feel they were promised something that for whatever reason we end up not delivering.

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So you throw a new Priest ability on live and wait to see how it affects gameplay, but any Warlock change needs testing first?