Official Priest Q&A

Yay! No longer are we forced to the forums looking for a random blue posts to answer our questions! Now we have.. an official post Q&A. Woooo! You can find the official Priest Q&A here.

I’m going to be pulling out things here and there that are of interest. Blue quotes are from Ghostcrawler himself.

In the beginning, the Shadow spec was more of a leveling tree and not really viable for high-end content late game. In The Burning Crusade, it didn’t really keep up in damage compared to other classes in raiding but it did bring strong utility. Finally, in Wrath of the Lich King we increased its damage-dealing potential to make it near that of a primary damage-per-second (dps) caster — such as a mage — while also retaining some of its unique utility which made it cool during The Burning Crusade.

Now let’s go into the meat of the Q&A.

Q: Since a lot of the damage a Shadow priest does builds with damage-over-time (DoT) spells, are you concerned about them being well-rounded enough to do adequate damage in shorter PvE encounters, 5-player dungeons, or in the Arenas?

GC (Ghostcrawler) gives a long answer on this one. Mostly about how no class should be the same. Class diversity is often what we are told by Blizzard when asked “Why can’t we do this too?” Granted I agree with Blizzard on this one. We can’t all be the same. It would lose the fun. GC also brings up player skill. If you have a group of 4 mobs being pulled, throw your dots on mobs 3 & 4, while nuking mob 1 & 2. This is what is interesting:

Fourth, the issue that we think is most problematic is found in the Shadow talents. Many of them say basically “while your DoTs are ticking.” This means in situations where the DoTs can’t tick (say those very short PvE fights, or sometimes in PvP) you are doubly punished since now those talents aren’t pulling their weight. The Shadow tree could benefit from more talents that affect all damage and not just the DoTs.

What’s great is that our talents just may be changed to were we can get an overall boost to our damage and not just DoTs.

Q: Are the developers happy with the functionality of Dispersion and is it considered to be an adequately valuable final talent in the Shadow tree?

I think the key word here is “final” talent. Players have developed an expectation that the 51-point talent should be the best one in the tree; and for damage-dealing trees that means it’s expected these final talents do more damage than anything else the player has. That’s not really the way we design the trees though. Dispersion is a very valuable spell — nearly all Shadow priests take it. It’s one of the best “not going to die now” spells in the game. Early on there was a perception that it was a PvP-only spell since it didn’t buff damage, but really it gets a lot of use in PvE as well (and not just for the mana regeneration).

The cool down on Dispersion just went down in 3.2 as well to a 2 min cooldown. Like I said previously in the unofficial Q&A here I am perfectly happy with Dispersion.

Q: As many players report that Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch lack viability in PvP settings and Vampiric Embrace tends to generate too much threat in PvE settings, are there any plans you can share to improve the functionality of these spells?

I don’t agree that VT doesn’t have viability in PvP.. neither does GC. (Winner!) But I do remember VE being horrible in pulling threat in raid instances. Of course alot has changed since then and I haven’t heard anything about VE pulling aggro off of tanks for 80 raiding.

We can look at the Vampiric Embrace threat. That’s not feedback we hear often. Shadow priests pulling off of tanks doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem.

Q: How about increasing the range of Mind Flay?

The glyph improves the range at the cost of the snare, which seems like a reasonable trade-off. We have discussed bumping damage and range, or possibly just removing the snare loss. It was put in as PvP protection early on in Lich King, but at this point we don’t think it would be a problem if the glyph just bumped the range without the penalty. It’s probably too conservative a glyph.

Yay! For leveling and PvP anyway.

Q: Since Shadow priests focus solely on dealing Shadow damage, do you feel that they can potentially be crippled more easily than other casters who can focus on dealing considerable damage through multiple schools of magic?

It’s just a feature of the class. Paladins have a lot of the same issues. We have discussed giving Shadow priests a Frost spell to use solely in emergency situations like this, but its niche would be only for school lock-out periods. We don’t want Shadow priests to be doing multiple types of damage overall. Now making it easier for Shadow priests to drop Shadowform and switch to healing or even Holy damage is something that we’ve mentioned lately on the boards. We could reduce the mana cost or the like.

This is interesting. It is definitely something that I have thought of as crap. When I get school lock-outed I literally think “Awesome, I’m dead now. Great.” at least in PvP. Dropping our shadowy goodness is definitely an option, but it’s literally like slapping someone from the floor after they took your cane. Most, if not all, of our talents become useless.

Q: Shadow Word: Death was once a spell that priests used frequently in PvE, but has basically dropped off their bar. Are there any plans to improve this?

We think Shadow priests have enough spells to manage as part of their rotation, so we don’t want to necessarily go back to them using it on cooldown. One thing we considered was having the backlash not fire if used on a target within Execute range. Another fix we’d like to make would prevent the backlash from being affected by boosts that improve your damage, as is typical during boss encounters — your damage would be inflated without the risk of you one-shotting yourself.

I like this! I vote for the backlash not fire if used on a target within Execute range. I also enjoy the not one-shotting myself idea!

There was also talk about reducing the cool down on Shadowfiend. Reducing the cool down on Shadowfiend and Dispersion is Blizzard drowning us in mana. I’m ok with that. There could be worse deaths.

But the best news of all. We weren’t nerfed! Or rather, we aren’t going to be nerfed! *does the happy dance*

Related Posts

1. Shadow Priest Q&A ~ Ghostcrawler’s Forum Post
2. Shadow Priest Raiding Talent Spec
3. Shadow Priest Glyphs
4. Shadow Priest Mechanics