#2 - March 31, 2016, 4:09 a.m.
Hey Shadow Priests. Let's talk a bit about utility.
Shadow in Legion currently has a
ridiculous amount of utility, way more than any other spec. I talked about that in the previous thread, here:
Re: Utility
Shadow is in a very odd situation when it comes to utility, especially in PvP. The amount of potential utility they offer is astronomical. It’s a staggeringly long list: Body and Soul, Dispel Magic, Dominate Mind, Mass Dispel, Mind Bomb, Power Word: Shield, Psychic Horror, Psychic Scream, Purify Disease, Shackle Undead, Shadow Mend, Silence, Vampiric Embrace… probably something else I’ve forgotten offhand. But at the same time, despite the crazy number of utility spells at their fingertips, it’s actually quite hard for them to actually use many of them. Since their rotation is based on continuously generating Insanity as fast as possible, any time lost to utility is punishing, especially in Voidform, where you’re actually losing Insanity while casting other things. And then on top of that, many of the spells cost huge chunks of Insanity as well. We’re not happy with that situation, and are considering other potential options. They could probably stand to lose at least a couple spells off that list, but we’re also considering bringing back Mana as an additional resource that would just be used for limiting your usage of the many utility spells, with costs proportional to their impact.
The above list also forgot to include [*] the 3rd and 6th rows of PvP talents. As an update on this, we've decided to buff Mind Control baseline (effectively re-adding it to PvP on top of Mind Bomb / Psychic Voice), and remove Psychic Horror instead. That
still leaves them with way more utility than anyone else, of course.
Then we have the problem of whether they can
actually use all that utility. Currently, you mostly can't, because of the Insanity costs, and how much that negatively impacts your offenses. We've decided to give Shadow (and Elemental and Enhancement) back the small mana bar like Balance currently has. Similar to other mana-using hybrid DPS, mana will be used for utility abilities, which should free you up to be able to use them much more than you can in the current build. (EDIT: To clarify, the switch to mana will hopefully make the NEXT build, not today's build.)
Keep the feedback on this coming, thanks!
* EDIT: I had originally said 'Fade w/ Artifact' here as well. There was, at one point in development, an artifact trait that added damage reduction to Fade, similar to the old glyph, but it has since been changed. Sorry for the mistake.
