Shadow Priest Q&A ~ Ghostcrawler’s Forum Post

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.

(Blue Quotes are the responses made by Ghostcrawler)

The thread can be found here on the official WoW Forums.

I’m just going to be pulling out random things that I care about or feel I can actually talk about with a straight face. XD

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.

Obviously when compared to spells such as Unstable Affliction the Vampiric Touch penalty is barely noticed if not laughed at so this is good news. But let’s be honest, better things could be focused on.

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 bri

ng the shadow priest in order to raid. We want the challenge to be the encounters, not the logistics of building the group.

This I agree with. I would rather they buff replenishment than make it an SP onry spell. (Yes, onry. It’s a FF online reference.. better left for a different post.) It was great back in the day when as a SP we were pretty much guaranteed a raid spot. Was it just me that felt bad that the Fury War was pulled out because even though I showed up late I was given the spot for the sole reason of a mana battery? I hope not.

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).

Little sad about this one. Reminds me of raiding back at the 70 level and doing horrible damage to trash but keeping within the top 5 on bosses especially long bosses. Oh, how I loved long boss fights. I almost didn’t want to cast on trash because by the time my dots were finished it was a race to the clock to cast MB before it died. Of course I just ignored dots on trash after the first 2 pulls. Gotta love habit.

We aren’t instant damage dealers. However, I don’t see us having an instant spell that does damage and places a DoT on the target as something that would replace our entire rotation. Perhaps a 5-10 second cooldown? Like MB or SW:D would alleviate that fear?

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.

Yes? As in “Sounds like a plan!” Or “We could do that and we could make all Taurens purple if we wanted to, but no.” It would be considered a buff because I can’t think of how many times I’ve placed it on trash to just have it die 5 seconds later but I am left not able to use it again on a new target because of the horrible cool down.

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.

Zomg, it’s like we are having a conversation GC!

And unfortunately we’ve run out of blue posts in that thread. I didn’t talk about Dispersion for 2 reasons. One: I don’t raid at the 80 level yet so therefore I can’t base my answer on personal experience. Two: I like it! If I had that spell back in my level 70 raid days.. mmm I would of drooled every time I used it.