Shadow Priests unfinished?

#0 - June 10, 2010, 8:01 p.m.

Going by the tree on mmo-champ (different sites seem to have different versions of the trees for some reason), you can spec 8/0/67 and get 100% of the talents in the shadow tree and every "helpful for shadow DPS" talent in both disc and holy (because there are zero in holy) and *still* have a point left over. That's not just cherry picking DPS talents in shadow, either, it's EVERY SINGLE TALENT. And not only that, but a much higher percentage of these talents compared to other trees are 5 point talents, meaning that there is little actual unique talents within the tree itself. Looking around the other updated trees (and even many WotLK trees) there are tons of 2 and 3 point talents on the same level that you can select between compared to shadow.

There is one competitive "utility" build that can go 21/0/55 and get Power Word: Barrier, but you give up a lot of fun/utility talents in shadow to get it (and maintain your "required DPS" talents) and it will make you the only DPS hybrid in the game that will be regularly expected to cast a major heal spell that also requires ~13 talent points to access that spell. (If you talent that spell and *don't* regularly cast it it becomes a very significant wasted investment.) Nine of the talents required are of dubious use to a PvE DPS class. Yes I understand that not every talent is supposed to be +damage now, but how often do you cast Mass Dispel in PvE now? How many encounters does Unbreakable Will actually help on in the current game? Mana burn? How many encounters have spell interrupts (especially ones that don't have a precise boss cooldown or long boss cast time to react to and avoid)?

I could be completely wrong on this, but I honestly feel like the raid game has evolved to a point where we can predict about how many encounters mass dispel will be useful on, how many will have fears/stuns/silences, etc. That is, not a lot (if for no other reason than it would make all the boss fights the same and boring). Then compound that with Barrier's usefulness on its own and add on top of that if you want to only spec certain utility for certain fights, you're taking a huge opportunity cost of not having a healing spec at all.

So that brings us back to the 9/0/67 build (or 10/0/66 or whatever). It's just static. There is no "trade this cool talent for this cool talent" or "I can't live without A and B but I have to choose between one". It's "Get all of A-Z. You're done."

Ghostcrawler

#6 - June 10, 2010, 8:43 p.m.

Shadow priests should not be able to pick up every point in Shadow without giving up anything else attractive. That's not how we want talent trees to work. It just looks like that for the time being so that we can get the priest playable.

Ghostcrawler

#67 - June 11, 2010, 4:27 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Then if you rushed them out, how do you expect us to give any feedback when these aren't a more complete picture of what you are going for? See the problem there?

"Don't show us the trees until you're finished with them, but then give us plenty of time to offer feedback" is one of those damned if you do / don't situations. :)

Q u o t e:
They don't consider optional talents you want to pick bloat. It's just a choice (sometimes a hard one)

Right. If there are a lot of choices and you can't possibly get everything, then it's a good talent tree. We'd define bloat as say a tree in which the mid-tiers offer nothing interesting or effective such that you just have to pick up some almost at random to get down to talents you actually want. Really though "bloat" just gets so overused on the boards that you'd be a lot more effective in giving feedback describing specific talent choices that you feel aren't fair rather than the somewhat generic "make this 5 pointer 3 points so I can get more stuff" posts that I'm reading a lot of tonight.

As far as Shadow, I would anticipate a few more talent points in Shadow itself or else some more attractive talents in mid-Disc (it wouldn't take much to make Archangel work for instance), or both.