WoW: Also in Dragonflight no vision how the shadow priest should look like

I’ve been playing shadow priests since WoW Classic – and I really enjoy it most of the time. However, since the last three or four expansions, this is no longer the case. The Shadow has been on a rather strange journey with many changes since Warlords of Draenor. Every extension has to be reinvented, so to speak. So far, neither the players nor the developers have been satisfied with any of these reinventions. Sometimes you try it with shadow balls, then with the focus on madness, other times the void shape comes to the fore and in WoW: Dragonflight you have thrown everything down again.

A meme I saw recently on the WoW Reddit forum sums it up perfectly: The priest’s shadow spec is like Woody in Toy Story being thrown out by Andy (Blizzard) because Woody is broken. The developers, like hardly any other spec in WoW, completely lack the vision of how the game should look like.

Waiting for possible improvement

Now the shadow spec meets the worst fate that one can expect for its class in WoW (buy now ): Dragonflight can imagine. After it became known that mostly finished with the classes in Dragonflight and is now dedicated to balancing the damage numbers, it was clear that previously broken specs would only be dealt with later in the expansion.

The shadow will take its existence as an absolute niche spec next to the ferocity druid. For both ways of playing, Blizzard doesn’t know exactly what to do with them. In order to be noticed in WoW group content at all, the gameplay simply has to be completely overpowered in terms of DpS numbers. Otherwise, they bring neither support skills nor good group damage.

AoE damage? Seemingly difficult to design with shadow magic

For Feral and Shadow, fights have to be very special so that they can come close to playing to their strengths. For the Shadow, these are multi-DoT fights where targets live long and are best kept far apart. Quickly causing area damage is not possible. Of course you can also multidott against mob groups or smack a small shadow projectile on the ground, but mostly you have to weigh up exactly how many targets it is worth occupying with DoTs and when you just alibi-wise hold thought explosion in the group to pretend as if dealing with damage.

Especially in the BfA in focus: shadowy appearances that arise when your DoTs are critically hit. If mobs lived long, the Shadow would deal decent AoE damage with them, which was necessary due to the lack of AoE spells.

Source: Blizzard TCG

The developers in Shadowlands wanted to deal with this problem Searing nightmare counter This gave the Shadow an AoE attack that consumes Insanity while also applying Shadow Word: Pain to targets. But it wouldn’t be Blizzard’s Shadow developers if the attack didn’t play incredibly awkwardly in conjunction with Mind Blast. You had to laboriously try to target the appropriate mind flay and hack the Searing Nightmare button to choke out maybe 3, maybe just 2 effects of the AoE spell.