Shadow Priest GuideMidnight Overview
Introduction
Shadow Priest is receiving a slew of changes in the Midnight expansion mainly aimed at reducing conflicting cooldowns and procs, as well as streamlining the rotation to make it more approachable to newer players. The focus of these changes are the removal of the choice between Dark Ascension and Void Eruption, the Surge of Insanity passive, and Void Bolt being replaced with the much more infrequently cast Void Volley.
There are also thematic changes, with Devouring Plague and Shadow Crash both getting reskinned to be more Old God centric, as well as a small talent rework to fix problems with Shadow needing to choose between damage and defensive / utility talents in its spec tree.
Here is what Blizzard had to say about their design direction.
Developers’ notes: The following changes are focused on simplifying some of the cooldown launch sequence as well as the frequent number of high priority procs in the rotation for Shadow. We are also updating the fantasy and visuals of their core spells to create a consistent theme of using the power of the Old Gods to haunt your enemies.
Throughout this article we will go over the changes in detail, what they mean for the spec moving forward, and how well they achieve Blizzard’s stated goals. Opinions on spec changes are always going to be subjective, and for a spec as divisive as Shadow even moreso. I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that while I personally agree with the design direction of Midnight as a whole, the changes to Shadow Priest specifically heavily miss the mark in terms of both their impact on gameplay feel, and their ability to achieve the intended goals outlined by Blizzard themselves for reasons we’ll cover in detail.
What’s going Away?
This is a long list impacting utility, quality of life, day to day gameplay, defensives, and rotation, and when you look at their desired goals a lot of changes come across as straight up confusing for several reasons. The loss of Shadow Word: Pain and the healing from Devouring Plague are especially strange and disappointing decisions as these are possibly two of the most iconic aspects of Shadow Priest going all the way back to early days of Vanilla. Shadow Word: Pain was and still is the first Shadow spell any priest ever learns. Shadow’s open world experience has been made significantly worse by these changes.
Surge of Insanity’s removal makes some sense as the proc looked quite overwhelming during the rotation, especially as Archon. However, it didn’t behave as a proc and instead served to break up periods where you would otherwise be channelling regular Mind Flay. I am in two minds because the change of pace this talent provided was a lot of fun, even if it made it look like a lot was going on for newer players.
What’s “New”?
Shadow has received two things in Midnight that are worth bringing attention to. One is a new AoE dot application tool to replace Shadow Crash. The flashy and responsive Tentacle Slam. Affectionately referred to as “Shadow Word; Thwap”, and the other is fantastic quality of life improvement to the iconic Shadowy Insight.
Tentacle Slam
Shadow Crash has consistently been criticised for its slow travel time, buggy targeting, and tendency to just straight up not do what it says it’s supposed to (DoT 6 undotted targets) so a replacement is something many players have been asking for. Tentacle Slam strikes not only the area around the target, but in a line from the player towards the target and DoTs a maximum of 6 enemies including the target of the spell. The spell is instant, the application of DoTs near immediate, and overall this feels like a significantly smoother experience than sending Shadow Crash into the ceiling or having tanks pull the mobs away from its impact location.
Shadowy Insight
Perhaps even more impactful is the change to Shadowy Insight. Changing from a proc which resets the cooldown of Mind Blast to one that simply allows the spell to be cast an extra time regardless of if the spell is on cooldown or not. This is an excellent change that, while small, smooths over situations where Shadowy Insight would proc as or after Mind Blast had come off cooldown. Personally this is the gold standard for how “Free” spell procs should be designed, and I would be delighted to see this style of proc become the standard moving forward.
Despite these welcome additions, they’re not really new spells as much as improvements on existing ones. Great changes, but they don’t add anything to offset the laundry list of things being taken away.
The Cooldown Launch Sequence
Blizzard allude to the cooldown launch sequence being one of the main things they aimed to tackle with their changes in Alpha. This is the number of 1, 2, and 3 minute cooldowns Shadow has available and has to spend time using before it can “Launch” into its core dps rotation. However when we look at what hasn’t been removed, we see that the opening sequence for both Archon and Voidweaver is near enough identical from Live to Alpha. The only thing that has been removed is Void Torrent for Archon. A Shadow Priest will still need to put Void Eruption, Shadowfiend / Mindbender, Power Infusion on cooldown, plus one of either Halo or Void Torrent to activate their hero talent. It’s hard to say anything other than that they have not achieved their goal here.
The Sorry State of Voidform
Damage
The biggest changes that affect Shadow’s rotational gameplay are ones that affect Void Eruption. Removing Void Bolt, removing the Mind Blast reset on cast, nerfing the Archon talent Perfected Form, and splitting the live server effect of Devouring Plague increasing the buff’s duration off into its own talent have greatly reduced its power and the impact it has on Shadow’s rotation. Without the extension talent, the total value of Void Eruption in Single Target can be summed up as two casts of Void Volley for a two minute cooldown That does not provide a damage buff. As Archon it can be improved to a 5% damage buff for 60~ seconds or a 10% damage buff for 20 seconds, and as Voidweaver 5% damage for 20 seconds or 0% damage buff for 60~ seconds. It leaves the cooldown feeling largely irrelevant despite being active roughly 50% of the time, having lost the vast majority of its power and spell interaction. Not to mention this ability somehow is not only on the GCD but also has a cast time despite now sitting alongside Shadowfiend as one of the weakest DPS cooldowns in the entire game. Personally I heavily dislike the design of extension based cooldowns, at least to the extent that Void Eruption has become, and think some of the spec’s CDs need consolidating to make them more impactful.
DoT Extension
With the removal of Void Bolt, shadow’s ability to maintain DoTs on multiple targets has been neutered. So much so that it a damage loss to even attempt to maintain additional Vampiric Touch outside of those applied by Tentacle Slam. This effectively means Shadow is fully target capped at 6 targets after the first set of DoTs applied by Tentacle Slam fall off. This is a huge downgrade in terms of damage potential in Mythic+ where you’re only going to have DoTs on the whole pull for roughly 15 seconds.
The argument against giving Shadow greater mass DoTing capabilities has always been their ability to extend and maintain DoTs in sustained multi-target thanks to Void Bolt. Without it, even the new and improved Tentacle Slam isn’t helping Shadow to deal competitive AoE damage in larger pulls.
Feel
Beyond just strength, which can obviously be altered with tuning, the loss of Void Bolt has also effectively removed the rythm of the Voidform rotation that has been a mainstay of Shadow Priest gameplay for the better part of 10 years. Between losing DoT extension, the mobility of an instant cast, and the just the smooth loop of fitting 3 gcds of spells between each cast of Void Bolt I’m not sure there’s enough left in Shadow’s core gameplay to keep things interesting for those who enjoyed Void Eruption. Especially as Archon.
Voidweaver Soldiers on
The loss of Dark Ascension means Voidweaver now also plays Void Eruption. While Void Eruption has no real synergy with its direct damage and Mind Blast focused playstyle, it doesn’t have the anti-synergy it currently does on live either. This means that while Archon is losing out, Voidweaver kind of isn’t. Void Eruption isn’t as frequent as Dark Ascension was but it still ends up playing pretty similarly to live. Halo is not a big loss at all as the ability was only pressed to generate Insanity before pull. The issue of the spec having a large number of weak cooldowns to juggle remains, but Void Torrent, Void Blast, and Entropic Rift go a long way to making it feel interesting.
Talent Tree Ups and Downs
Shadow’s talent tree has also seen a small revamp as a result of the removal of many core abilities. In the midst of this are a few very welcome changes but many key issues remain.
Both Dispersion and Silence are finally baseline spells, as well as Vampiric Embrace meaning no awkward choices between damage or defensives / utility talents in the spec tree. Despite that, the top section of the tree is still heavily cramped with at least 8 of the 9 points being effectively mandatory.
Shadow has a whopping 9 talent points associated with increasing the direct / indirect strength of Shadowy Apparitions including Apex Talents, as well as an additional 2 more in the Archon Hero Tree. Having roughy 1/4 of your total talent points around buffing a single passive effect feels extremely bloated.
The problem of bloated talents continues in the class tree, with 6 different talent points affecting Fade.
There are a large number of talents that currently provide little to no value. Shadowfiend, Dark Thoughts, Mindbender, Maddening Touch, Instilled Doubt, the Deathspeaker choice node, and even Shadow Word: Death itself are so weak as to either not be worth taking in any situation or in the case of Shadow Word: Death not even worth pressing at all.
Apex Talents
Shadow’s Apex Talents focus on buffing Shadowy Apparitions, as well as increasing the frequency of the spec’s Capstone Idol procs by tying additional activations to casts of Tentacle Slam.
This is a tight knit set of talents that are thematically potent and successfully tie all the core parts of Shadow together. It should be clarified though that the Void Bolt effect described in the second talent is not Void Bolt in the mechanical sense, it generates no resources and provides no DoT extension. It is simply a damage proc with a familiar name.
There is one largely inconsequential concern with forcing Tentacle Slam into the role of a “Press on Cooldown” Single Target ability when its primary role is otherwise to be used situationally to apply and maintain DoTs to multiple targets. Despite that though, I’d say Shadow’s Apex talents are an overall win (And with the state of the rest of it we’ll take what we can get}.
Overall Thoughts
Overall, I come away from the Shadow Priest Midnight Alpha changes confused and deeply concerned. The stated goal of reducing the number of weak cooldowns Shadow needs to stack hasn’t been achieved at all. The emergent gameplay loop that has defined Shadow since Legion has been removed, leaving the spec effectively hard target-capped in AoE due to a lack of DoT extension. The talent tree feels bloated, packed with passives and abilities that barely justify the GCDs spent on them.
Shadow Word: Pain, an iconic spell vital for mobility, mob tagging, and a variety of PvP situations, has been cut, which feels like a huge loss. And although the new Apex Talents and Tentacle Slam are strong thematic additions, they don’t make up for how much has been stripped away, especially when so many unnecessary elements are still hanging around.
The focus moving forward should be working on Shadow’s cooldowns to create a powerful, streamlined package that sells the Void cultist fantasy that Blizzard are going for, as well as improving DoT maintainence now that Void Bolt has been removed. The spec needs a lot of work and iteration to get somewhere satisfying.
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