Alk's Opinion on the ShadowPriest Nerf

[Alkhara Majere]

• "Shadow Weaving" (Shadow): Effect reduced by 1% per rank.
• "Shadow Word: Death": Cooldown increased to 12 sec.

Among others.

I had 3 new Shadow Priests all ask me this (more or less)-

I'm sure you have read the patch notes. What are your thoughts on how bad the nerf really will be? Are Shadow Priests still viable? Or is everyone on the official forums retarted?

Now, I'm pretty sure almost every subject the Official are retarded and full of whiners. They will cry wolf at the first sign of anything that isn't an outright buff to their class.

Actually, they aren't. They are just immature for the most part...moving on.

This is my response to these questions-



I have been playing a Shadow Priest since Closed Beta.

Now, on to TBC raiding-

I used SW: Death in a rotation, and I have very high spell damage (frozen shadoweave set along with good +dmg to go along with it). I knows how to maximize my damage in a raid, and I can put out dps comparable with any other caster.

When we fought (and killed) Gruul, my Guild Master (a mage) was in a group with an Elemental Shaman and a Moonkin (+3% hit, +8% crit) and had a Flask of Supreme Power. He was #1 dps in the fight with 292k damage (and he damn well better have been with all those buffs) I (the Shadowpriest) was in a group with healers to increase their mana regeneration. I put out 280k damage in the fight (i.e. I was a close second).

All the other caster dpsers, including the elemental shaman, moonkin, and the rest of the mages were in the 190-220k range. They are all pretty equivalently geared. (25-30% crit rates, 900 or more +dmg).

Now do you see the problem? I was second on dps (and would have been first had the Mage not had the flask) and yet I return health and mana to my group. Now, at first glance this isn't a bad thing. However Blizzard has standards which they expect the top dps to adhere to.

They expect rogues, mages and warlocks to be #1 in top fights, but not due to pure dps output -> they want them to use their threat reduction and mana management mechanics to gain advantage over the other high dps options, which are shadowpriests, moonkin, elemental shaman, dps warriors, feral druids, etc, which lack such advantages in return for greater group utility. (mana return, group buffs, battle rezes, soul stones, etc.).

The problem was that shadow priests could still match the top of line dpsers while having greater utility. This caused two problems: it meant that priests (beyond the 1 for spirit/fort) were better off rolling shadow rather than staying holy. It also meant that if a raid had enough shadow priests, it was more beneficial to the raid to replace rogues and mages (who bring little to no group advantages after 1 in the raid) with Shadow Priests and Warlocks, who benefit from each other and scale extremely well in long encounters.

The nerf to Shadow Priests (and indirectly to Warlocks) is Blizzards way of making sure that all classes are still desirable to bring to raids.

Yes, obviously they could have just buffed mages and rogues instead (and they did buff rogues), but that would mean rebalancing encounters on the basis of increased dps. Instead the bring the dps down a notch for certain classes, allowing the total raid dps to remain in line with what they expect.

That is all.

-Alkhara Majere, Shadow Priest