Spriests are penalized for fair DPS.

#0 - June 10, 2009, 7:50 p.m.

Shadowform
32% of base mana
Instant cast
1.5 sec cooldown
Assume a Shadowform, increasing your Shadow damage by 15% However, you may not cast Holy spells while in this form. Grants the periodic damage from your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells the ability to critically hit for 100% increased damage.

(condensed for relevance)

It is in Blizzard and Ghostcrawler's design philosophy that pure DPS classes will all have similar DPS, with hybrids trailing, but all hybrids having similar DPS. The frequently-cited-but-never-confirmed number is 5%.

Do you notice anything when you read the tooltip above? Our damage is increased by 15% and we can not cast holy spells (i.e. our heals.) But with Blizzard's ideas, shadow priests, in Shadowform, should be doing the same damage as other hybrids.

Why do we need Shadowform to put us in line with other hybrids, with a heavy penalty still attached? Priests and arguably Moonkin druids are the only classes that are affected by this. (the mana cost associated with shapeshifting to and from cat form is moot- they use energy.)

edit: I've changed the title. It seems many of you are misunderstanding me; I did not mean to say shadow priests were not hybrids. Please direct your attention to Dusknoir's post:

Q u o t e:
no he's saying that it's stupid shadow priests need to take a huge penalty in order to have the same dps as other hybrids, or at least that's what i gathered from it.

edit: bolded my previous edit.

edit: underlined my previous edit.

edit: i hate you all, learn to read

Ghostcrawler

#21 - June 10, 2009, 9:31 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Why do we need Shadowform to put us in line with other hybrids, with a heavy penalty still attached? Priests and arguably Moonkin druids are the only classes that are affected by this. (the mana cost associated with shapeshifting to and from cat form is moot- they use energy.)

We want you to largely have to give your ability to heal in order to do decent dps. It would feel really cruddy for a player that's a healer to see you able to do a lot of healing in the same fight that you also contributed a lot to damage done. Many of the hybrid classes do contribute to healing even when they focus on dps, and that's fine as a source of differentiation. But generally we want you to have to choose between healing, tanking and dps. You need to pick a role before every fight. All of the hybrid classes have some ability to shift between roles within a fight, but it is kind of unusual when it happens (usually to prevent a near-wipe or something).

If you can change your role before a fight (even if that means having to respec and switch gear) then we consider you a hybrid class. (For purposes of this thread, let's not beat the dead horse of whether you think pures or hybrids should or do more dps and instead focus on the OP's original discussion of Shadowform.)