Shadow Priest Q & A

Alright. Shadow priests feel ignored. I get it. Hopefully answering this won't get used against us the way some shadow priests were using the fact that I answered some mage questions.

I'm also suspicious that mere answers will not be sufficient unless they include "so we will buff you," but we'll see. :)

Q u o t e:
Question 1: What does blizzard see as shadow priest roll in pvp or pve situations?

PVE: I dont pve much but from my understanding there are aoe monsters is this the niche you intended them to fill in pve? I once saw a blue saying that they didn't want anyone filling that niche!

You're a dps class that focuses on dots and "stealing energy" from opponents. I'll write a prettier version for the official Q&A. Shadow priests can do single target damage and now in LK can do AE damage as well.

Q u o t e:
PVP: As you all may know Priest are the only class with TWO healing trees. Did you want our dps tree to also have a strong healing component through Vampric Embrace? I often hear shadow priest refered to as the Pre-BC caster tank, are there any intentions of turning shadows priest back into this role anytime soon?

Yes on the VE part. "Caster tank" as a role is a little risky. It basically means that melee have to close the gap to finally do damage to you, yet once they do... they still have trouble hurting you. I know that makes you want to say "But melee are crushing us right now!" That might be a problem, but doesn't mean the right answer is to have non-fragile casters. You are probably tougher than mages, and still have decent escape mechanisms with Dispersion and fears.

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Question 2: Was mind flay always intended to be our "filler," damage spell instead of a nuke or was it ment to be a mainly pvp spell? If it wasn't are you intending to give us a nuke? I ask because to my understanding shadow priest scale very poorly with haste which brings me to my next question.

We don't really design every caster around nukes. That's kind of a mage deal where they emphasize one main spell. We want the other casters to feel differently, to have rotations. Mind Flay is part of that.

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Question 3: Does blizzard intend to make haste effect dots? As you all may know this would help with some scaling issues and I don't see why they couldn't do this, they already did it with crits!

It's something we're talking about. Haste is a problematic stat for a number of reasons. It isn't always good for example if you don't have enough room in your rotation to fit another spell. It isn't good if you're GCD capped. Now, it's okay -- in fact preferable -- that stats aren't equal for everyone. We like that not all casters would look at say a ring with haste, crit and spirit the same way.

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Question 4: Does blizzard think that dispel protection is a problem for dot heavy casters? If you do what are you planning to do to fix this? If you don't why not? I understand that vampiric touch has a penalty for being removed but I just don't feel like it is strong enough or even compares to it's much stronger version unstable affliction.

We think the whole dispel protection game needs to be overhauled. Buffs should be valued for their buffs, not for whether or not they can protect other buffs. We need to change this whole system to something more sane. Whether or not you have a dispel, and whether or not your target is vulnerable to it has just become way too important. You are right that the VT penalty is so low as to be silly, and that's something we would like to boost for 3.2.

Q u o t e:
Question 5: Alot of players feel as though replenishment should belong solely to shadow priest, we understand that you would like to "bring the player not the class," but honestly could you say that having a unique class/spec ability is such a bad thing?

Yes, it's a bad thing. It's good if you're a shadow priest wanting a raid slot. It's bad if you're the druid or warrior who can't come because the raid leader feels like they must bring the shadow priest in order to raid. We want the challenge to be the encounters, not the logistics of building the group.

Q u o t e:
Question 6: It takes shadow priest significantly longer to set up our damage than other classes. Would it be in your intentions to add an initial damage component to vampiric touch and make it instant cast to help alleviate some of the wait-time for damage?

I think there is something to the set-up-your-damage issue, but at the same time, dots also have a lot of benefits over direct damage spells. We would not want any spell that Shadow priests felt like they could just cast instead of doing their rotation, and if the instant-damage spell was weaker than the rotation, it would likely see only situational use (though maybe that's a fine niche).

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Questions 7:Are you planning on implementing a snare/root for shadow priest? Shadow Priest is currently the only caster that has no snare/root abilities. These types of abilities are essential when we are not able to tank damage and wear cloth.

We don't want to give every mechanic to every class if we can help it. Just above you asked if it was a bad thing to have some unique mechanics. Saying no isn't the same as saying everyone can have some mechanics. We intend for the Shadow CC to be things like Psychic Horror and Silence, and to a much lesser extent, Mind Control.

Q u o t e:
Question 8: Shadow priest are always triggering our global cooldown but have no way to make it shorter. Are you planning to implement maybe a talent to reduce our global cooldown?

We wouldn't do it through a talent, but we might let haste do it. Remember, the global is there for a reason. Having too many abilities short-circuit it will ultimately have consequences.

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Question 9: : As you may know shadow priest have a fair amount of mobility issues, are you planning on adding a short immunity to snares after fade is used? ( Improved Fade ofcourse.)

No. We would be more likely to nerf snares. We don't want to have an arms race of snares, then snare immunity, then the snare that can't be made immune, and so on.

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Question 10: Are you planning to add Body and Soul to the shadow tree?

No.

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Question 11: The fear/blind DR has severely destroyed a lot of synergy shadowpriest and rogues shared, are you planning to revert this change next season?

No. The game needs more DR on crowd control, not less. Using your crowd control at the right time is awesome. Chaining different forms of CC together to keep an enemy from ever being able to move is a lot less fun.

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Question 12: Dispersion a lot of people feel the abilities strength does not merit it as a 51 point talent, are there any plans to move this to a lower tier in the shadow tree? Will there be any plans to remove the silence effect it applies in the future?

We don't want to remove the silence for the reason we've never wanted to remove it -- we want Dispersion as an escape mechanism, not an offensive cooldown. We might lower Dispersion's cooldown though. We want it to do it's job, not get marginalized in the tree.

Q u o t e:
Question 13: Was the disarm on Psychic horror intended to occur after the "horror," or during? Is there any intention of removing the travel time on Psychic Horror, If not will you add an animation?

What do you mean by animation? To the projectile or the target? The disarm was intended to occur during the horror.

Q u o t e:
Question 14: Psychic Scream is a very powerful spell for getting attackers off of you, but there are various ways to counter it. Would it be reasonable to add a penalty for removing this spell early, maybe a 2 second stun or a snare.

We do the dot / hot penalties because its a weakness of dots. We're not crazy about going down the road of making all CC have a kiss / curse element with its removal.

Q u o t e:
Question 15: Most damage over time spells just tick with no special effect with an exception to a few.
In order to help us damage better could we get more "effects" on our damage over time spells such as ticking hard initially and damage slowly wearing off.

This might be something we'd consider. I understand the concern.

Q u o t e:
Question 16: From my understanding there is a cooldown on Devouring Plague to keep us from putting it on multiple targets. Couldn't you just make Devouring Plague only usable on 1 target at a time and remove the cooldown?

Yes. I'm not sure many players would consider that a buff though.

Q u o t e:
Question 17: Mind Control although this is a fun spell it isn't very useful in pvp situations because it leaves your character immobile for however long and randomly breaks. Could mind control make the controlled target your pet but movable by using the same mechanic used to place a death and decay?

We might do something like that for pets in general. Mind Control however is a really powerful ability. Not only does it prevent the target from doing anything, it also lets you use their abilities against their allies. It's going to be hard for us to remove too many downsides from the effect.

Q u o t e:
Question 18: Are you planning on giving spriest a new 51 point talent?

No. We want the 51-pointers to be very attractive, but not necessarily the most powerful talent in the tree. A great number, if not a majority, of Shadow priests have Dispersion so it's hard to argue it isn't attractive. I understand some players want the 51 to be a big damage spell for damage-dealing specs, but that just isn't always what we think the tree needs. I'm not saying we are going to take the talent trees to 61 or 71 points soon, but if we did, just think of the expectation. Does the 71 pointer need to blow all of the previous talents out of the water? Do deeper talents need to become more powerful at the same time the character gets more of them? That leads to a lot of power inflation. We think talents probably account for too much of a character's power already.

I want to point out that developers would probably answer questions more often if there weren't so many responses of "LOL they said this spell is good when I think it's bad!" Save the trash talking for the Arena. Insulting the people who design the game might make you feel important but it won't do much for actually convincing us to make any changes. I'm totally cool if you disagree with us on, say the value of Dispersion. Where your argument fails is going to "You disagree with us, therefore you are dumb and don't understand WoW." That's weak. Be adults if you post here.

I'm sorry my comment about MC confused people. I have to think of everything in terms of PvP and PvE and I slipped into a PvE answer on a PvP question. It is very potent CC in 5-player dungeons. I don't think it's worthless in PvP, though I admit it's situational.

We don't think Bloodlust and Replenishment are comparable. Raids were called in Karazhan for lack of a Shadow Priest. Mana is just too valuable even with content on farm. Bloodlust is fun, but rarely means the difference between success and failure unless you're really on the cutting edge of fights you can handle. Even then, one spec brought Replenishment while 3 have always brought Bloodlust. Even today, you need multiple sources of Replenishment for a 25-player raid, while more than one Bloodlust is wasted.

We'll consider a Devouring Plague a no-cooldown, limit-one implementation. I'm pretty sure it's only set up that way because it used to be a racial and those were supposed to be infrequent.

I also suspect Psychic Horror has a travel time because it was most likely cloned from Death Coil. We'll look into changing it.

We have at least one other exciting Shadow PvP change, but I'm not at liberty to discuss it yet. It's not Dispersion (which we still think is fine).

On all of these points, the designers had already discussed them and made changes accordingly based on the threads that occurred on this and other forums. We just hadn't communicated the changes yet. Releasing information in a forum thread like this is risky for reasons such as:

1) It gets buried.
2) Our forums in languages other than English get the info second-hand, while we like to release big news simultaneously.
3) Players sometimes respond like jerks, forcing us to spend effort on moderation that we otherwise wouldn't have to spend.
4) Players complain that we answered the wrong thread or the wrong questions, when really all we're doing is trying to find a suitable thread in which to address the issue.
5) Other classes feel neglected or ignored.
6) It confuses the whole policy on fishing for blues.

Q u o t e:
Anyways I'm a bit bummed from the looks of things Priest is at the bottom of the list when it comes to official Q&As, of course that is liable to change, but either way I am hoping some more PvE oriented question can be addressed. Hybrids in general must be difficult to talk about as they have so many rolls.

Someone had to be last, sadly. I would blame Neth. (No, not really.) But knowing the Q&A was so far away made me want to offer something earlier.

Hybrids are hard to talk about. However, we plan on continuing the Q&A and possibly even turning it around faster, so even if we couldn't hit your topic this time, perhaps we can next time.

We also don't want to undermine the QAs or encourage players to try and run around them by posting QAs here. The QAs we are working on are designed to try to give players what they're looking for in that regard so that there is less of it in the forums. If the QAs aren't accomplishing that yet, we'll keep trying to improve them until they do.

Q u o t e:
That being thanks for coming back and explaining a bit. I for one would love to hear the direction Blizzard has for Shadow Priests as far as being "Energy Drainers" when in fact it doesn't seem we are at all or that is the main focus of the spec at all.

I meant "energy draining" in the sense that you are generating health and mana as you do damage. It's more of a kit thing, which is why I put it in quotes. Warriors do damage by hitting you with metal. Shadow priests do damage by sucking the life out of their opponents with Shadow magic, and making themselves stronger for doing it.

Q u o t e:
Yes, he obviously didnt quite understand that you get zero abilities with MC in PVP. It may mean that it is not intentional. I for the love of god hope so, being that really mc is just so you can control someoen else and look at each other awkwardly for 10 secs waiting to see if the other player is going to waste his trinket or not.

I understand how the ability works and it is disappointing that in three pages of answers, this is the one the community chose to zero in on. Well played.

If I had not been trying to answer so many questions quickly, I would have typed more clearly. I would have said: We have had a lot of balance problems with Mind Control over the years in PvE. Players will take control of a creature and suddenly gain abilities which are quite powerful, especially when used against targets for which they weren't designed (the other mobs). To counter this we have had to make many creatures immune or otherwise limit the spell. (We've had some of the same balance issues with Spell Steal). Therefore, we don't think we have a lot of room to buff MC in PvP without making it too good in PvE. You may not like that answer if you are focused on PvP, but I can promise you many PvE players get upset when PvP balance ends up nerfing their class. We have to care about both sides of the game.

To those players focused on PvE, I'm sorry if you don't find the need to crowd control much in 5-player dungeons. In BC content like say Shadow Labs or classic content like LBRS, Mind Control was amazing to the point of trivializing some of the large pulls.

To those players who said the question was on PvP so it was inappropriate to talk about PvE: tough. We have to balance with both sides of the game in mind. It was a narrow question focused on how to issue movement commands to the target IIRC, and I figured more players would be interested in a broader answer on if we considered the spell sufficient at doing its job.

I will try to proofread my writing more in the future with an eye towards clarity, but of course I just took several paragraphs to answer a relatively simple question that I could have spent answering other questions. That's the trade off. Think about that next time before you launch a half-dozen "gotcha!" threads. :)