This is a really interesting and compelling point and definitely something that we discuss regularly. Really enjoyed this video and I'll share it with the team when we next talk about these kinds of things. Thanks!

the main thing that currently makes shadow unappealing to me is the gearing aspect and the fact that we scale with nothing but spell power... Its super disheartening to play a game centered around getting loot from bosses when I know that I could to just as much, or even MORE damage with shadow power greens from the auction house. The class just doesn't have anything to really look forward to - you going to have roughly the same DPS in week 1-2 than week 12 and the only thing that gives you upgrades are 7g elixirs that you farm hours and hours for -.-

Someone linked me this Video and i wanted to share some insight as a long time player and since i play Shadow Priest on high end Guild. I have to agree that utility means nothing when it can be replaced or is not needed. Here are some examples of our issues in current raid environment. Homonculi - we replace this ability already with rogue improved expose armor because it provides more armor reduction which results in more dps for our melee and is more easily managed and applied since homonculi cannot be controlled and die too easily, the other debuffs like attack power reduction and attack speed reduction are replaced by our tank. Shared pain - this is mediocre ability overall and is only used in very very few scenarios. Eye of the void - only head rune to be used since it gives better damage increasing curses than what warlocks currently have but the damage of the pet is quite low and bosses and mobs have chance to resist the curse which cannot be reapplied because it has 3 minute cooldown. Pain and suffering - Just bad design. does not provide anything meaningful for us, basically just re applies pain on mind blast cast which we can already just do ourselfs because we have room in the rotation. Despair - i like the idea that our dots and mind flay can crit but we don't use mind flay because it does less than half the damage of mind spike in that cast window, the other thing is we have so low crit chance that even void zone will in some cases be better. also Devouring plague cannot crit which i hope is an oversight to this rune. Our 2 chest runes, Void plague and Twisted faith, these shouldn't even share the same slot because we will only use void plague from now on unless the boss or mob is immune to diseases. I personally hope they change these slots and remove any immunities bosses have against Void plague or just change it to be magic debuff instead of disease. Only issue i have with Mind Sear and SW:D is that Mind Sear cannot target a friendly player so instead you have to target the enemy and it doesnt do damage to the target you are casting the ability on, SW:D damage feedback is too much in my personal opinion and it should be more like 25% instead of 50%. Other issues we have is that we don't really even need shadow weaving in raid because our warlocks are not playing Affliction because it does less damage than Destruction.

I literally said this the other night. Raid utility means nothing when fights last 1 minute and just become a zerg fest. I am in a guild of half decent parsers, and will always have a raid spot - but not being able to at least be somewhat competetive on the DPS meter as a damage dealer is insanely demotivating. If they don't fix or redo scaling on casters, we're in for a Season of Brown on the DPS meters from here on out. Warriors and by a lesser extent, other melee classes, will continue to scale out of this world. I hope this video gets some traction and puts into perspective the scaling issues for casters vs melee.

We aren't a pet class. It's not good design, let us do damage. Make melee stack their own armor pen. All we do is buff melee that already double our damage. It's a fucking joke.

hey Pants! Long time Mage main here and re-rolled Shadow for SoD to switch things up. I couldn’t agree more on this video and your take on the state of Spriest rn. I’m enjoying as an avid PvPer but stepping raids, doing my prep, full consumes, pre-bis gear and just not being able to compete on meters is frustrating. i know i signed up for a “utility” class but the potential for spriest is there i def think everyone can see that. What’s your opinion on gearing for us this phase? How accurate is Wowhead and Zockify. Seems like a lot of our BiS is staying green shadow items and then completely skipping tier items, etc.

whats the name of the weakaura / addon that beeps when people target you for pvp

- make SW:Death baseline - move Twisted Faith rune from chest to gloves to take sw:d’s place, have it also buff mind spike - mind flay targets take 6-8% increased magical damage

What unit frames are you using?

In an alliance raid context, i'm finding it's very sensible to bring 1-2 shadow priests. this not so much heavily because of how feral-locked melee dps are. Generally you are only bringing 2 feral to a raid for 2 melee groups, a caster group, and a healer group of 4 that often has a caster or hunter filling the 5th slot (since they wouldn't have a feral in the healer group, and ranged hunters like to be in the melee groups so the melee can get trueshot buffs to parse higher easier) this leaves, generally room for 6 casters, which personally, i think makes sense if there are 2 mages (so they can buff fire and frost each) 3 warlocks/shadows (at least 1 shadow, to cover elements/shadows/reck, possibly prefer at least 2 shadow so you have more consistent homonculus debuffs on bosses) and a moonkin. (optionally, but the party aura, BR, innervate, and FF really swing the pendulum to them after all the other caster's support has run dry if over-stacked) and more importantly, that warlock can be a tank warlock, allowing one of the melee to play dps, which will probably increase their damage more than it will hinder the warlock's dps, while giving shadow healing to a warlock tank, allowing healers to flex more dps runes also. - or if you have only 2 mages total, or arcane healer can flex to be the 2nd full dps mage. so there isn't really any caster classes, that aren't being invited to a raid... (from what i can see on alliance) - who knows though, maybe meta raid comps later in the phase will cut the "caster group" entirely, in favor of 3 melee groups, and a 3 healer-2 caster group. (in which case, warlock tank and shadow priest with 3 healers would probably be best for that group)

Half buttons I press are not for dmg. Feels meh. I thought they would add vampiric touch with decent cast time. There is just no good runes contesting the simp ones (homunculi, eye of the void, nerfed swd), even newly added rune allowing dot crits is meh because of such low crit% values.

Whats up Pantsface! Great video and yes I agree with you. You made a solid point when you quoted aggrends tweet. I dont see SPR ever being #1 dps and #1 heals in SoD. I love spr like you - ALL DWARF WOTLK here. IRONFORGED FTW!

Those spy sounds at 3:35 had me looking all around in game

I wish mine seer would be like MD, target the tank and % of the threat goes to tank. It would make sp aoe unique and fit the utility class identity

Sarthe also mentioned with his ranking we would cap out at 1400 dps. Which is at least 40% more dps than right now + utility 😂

One thing I think That was problematic ever since p1 is how the chest rune holds both Void plague and Twisted faith. Twisted faith shouldve been a leg rune, allowing us to drop from the supportive nature of Homunculi to focus more on single target damage. You only need 1 homunculi user in your raid and since Prayer of mending does not stack, and also because eventually the raid is just too easy, other priest in your raid will opt for going homunculi. This is also true for case where you would have 2 shadow priest. Homunculi become pretty much useless to a shadow priest as soon as there is more than 1 user, The damage from isnt good enough to justify the rune without the debuff. How about swapping Twisted faith and Prayer of mending maybe? That would be an easy buff to Shadow priest damage and the chest runebeing the least important currently for priest healer would have a more interesting option while still having something on their leg that would be usable.

I have leveled 6 different shadow priests to max level since the OG vanilla , where at 10/11 yrs old i decided that dwarf shadow priest was by far the best race/class combo from all available class/race combos, by checking the oldschool wow website which had a spell breakdown for every racial/class spell u get their dmg mana cost level u get it etc. I am about to level my 7th in sod for this phase( i am a warrior main nowadays but warrior in sod is legit just classic warr again, so let the shadow priest addiction roll!) - PS. Already know ur an OG shadow priest because of miks scrolling battle text... we gotta do that dont we :P

We want some cata videos! 😊

They should just add multiple raid difficulties (and better itemized PvP gear so top tier raiders don’t dominate in PvP). Doesn’t necessarily have to be a separate mode like heroic. Do something like Ulduar hardnode where you interact with something in the raid to increase difficulty. These raids are such Zerg fests, balancing around them will never work and will further destroy PvP. Shadow priests just got a 10% dmg increase despite being the strongest class in PvP just because they can’t compete in st

Spriests are pog.

One thing that is really wrong about WCLogs is that all damage done by players benefiting from your buffs or debuffs should be YOUR damage on the logs, not theirs. Because if you're not there, that damage isn't either. And currently that reality does not appear on the dps logs. Also i really disagree with the philosophy that "SoD is for beer chugging gamer dads" when in fact it's really not; most of my guild is made of pretty young people, mostly under 35. Having easier content for level-up raids is fine, but at endgame there needs to be a mix of easy raids, and actual challenges. It's ok if not everyone succeeds at every content the minute they come into contact with it. Overcoming a challenge is the best feeling video games can provide and SoD needs more of it.

im very grateful that the devs are actively working on a solution - it sucks that half the time when I bring this up people try to snuff out the conversation on the basis that spriest is good for pvp and therefore deserves to be punished. Part of the issue is that we have no burst-cleave without swapping runes off from crucial single target runes. Bursting trash with swp tab feels terrible, and killing bosses without despair and swd feels terrible - so swapping 2 runes 2x between bosses is mandatory - maybe converting some of these into passive talent books would help - alternatively void zone and mind sear can stay reserved for large scale sustained AOE niche situations if the mind flay reworks allow us to do some amount of cleave or relevant single target on trash packs

I just cannot agree with you more .. I mean. .I heal party hurrayy.. but .. I do no dmg.. in the end .. all raids in SOD are about DPS.. as lategame is pure zerg boss..

So a few comments from the "average dad guild" although none of us have kids and we're in our mid 20s. We still stack shadow priests when pugging because btw the average player will still take a ton of needless damage and die. Shadow priests help because even in these easy raids they offset bad healers and bad Dps quite a bit. The damage is "low" relative to wcl parsing standards but you didn't even consider showing what the actual damage differential is for shadow compared to other classes. Wcl has really messed up people's perceptions because although a class like warrior can do more damage than a shadow priest there's a ton of caveats I just do not need to worry about if I pug a shadow. They don't need to be in a feral group, they don't need hummunc, they don't need to move (generally) and they fucking heal. If the difference for all of that, is an inconsequential 300dps then why do I care as a casual trying to clear the raid?

I just have two random ideas for shadow priests, not really about your video topic. 1. Make mindflay relevant. Its iconic, let us melt faces. After mind blast crit, increase the range of mind flay by 10 or whatever yards to be equivalent to other spells and also be increased cast speed 100% to 1.5 seconds. Another option is give it the drain life dot treatment that warlocks have. Throw a 3 second mindflay dot after mind blast crits. Can also add a debuff after completing 3 ticks of mindflay as another option. 2. Spirit tap talent. Make inner fire give spell power and spirit conversion to SP or even crit idk. Basically a spirit tap proc during fights that gives us a power boost not just mana regen. Spirit tap becomes useless for encounters and only good for trash or leveling. Blackout is also a useless talent for encounters typically. Make one of these talents have more value through a rune or book. Send this suggestion to aggrend my fellow shadow priest enjoyer

From a non shadow priest point of view : They should change the vampiric embrace to heal 5 persons in the RAID who have the lowest HP The hps you bring is fantastic, but there is too much overhealing wasted by that They should give you the control of your Homonculus pets ffs, wtf is that, like a pet attack pet follow Void form man, this should be a thing in SOD since you have no burst button, it would be so much fun

With the mindset of SoD players always crying for brain dead easy contents I’d rather not bother playing it and just wait for Cata. This is clearly not gonna ever be a version of the game that satisfies players who enjoy prog. ST prenerf was an anomaly and I don’t think they’ll ever repeat such a thing in the future of SoD.

Dev got no grasp of the reason people roll DPS. you here have a class with 2 healing spec and 1 dps spec and you're making the dps a support rather than fleshing one of the 2 healing spec into that. Disc wouldve been the perfect spec to provide support while doing some damage and not being a DPS spec. Druid Got that with the wrath spec. Where is our smite Spec? shadow shouldnt be replacing it.

I agree, im a top 10 SP atm in sod, i love playing it but the dmg is just tooo low in pve content. I dont really understand how its this op in pvp but so bad compared in pve.

We really going to talk about raid utility when fights are 1 min or less? We really going to ignore the fact that shamans are over performing against every class by a milestone in the game because the people who designed SOD are very bias to only classes they play? Shadow priests are absolute dog water on the meters because our gear itemization in greens have better stat weights then tier pieces. Then you look at shamans its almost like they took into account what exactly they needed and accommodated that class perfectly.

isnt priest kinda a support class tho? im not surprised their in this situation and it feels weird priests are so upset their raid dps is so low. Kinda just the brainrot that damage meters and the ego/bragging rights its given to players have caused

ive done 2 runs of sunken temple so far and i was the highest damage dealer in both of them i dont trust or believe other peoples notions about how strong or weak classes are. i think what matters most is the person behind the keyboard who is playing the class. and i strive to be the best at any spec i play in wow no matter what. i will always find a way to do more damage