MeinMMO-Demon Cortyn is once again enjoying the Shadow Priest in World of Warcraft. The new patch has done everything right.
Those who know me and my articles a little bit already know that I have been passionately playing a Shadow Priest for many years. A passion that sometimes makes it difficult for me. Because no matter how bad Shadow Priests have been in the current meta or how little fun I have with talent changes – I stick with her.
You can see the trailer for the current patch here:
In fact, I wasn’t very fond of the last seasons. The class talents are cool on paper and look visually appealing, but the tier sets led to a situation where you were essentially “forced” into certain talent options or had to live with doing significantly less damage than others.
While I am certainly a fan of “play what you enjoy and not what brings the most performance,” when you’re meandering at the bottom of the damage meter in dungeons and raids, you don’t feel like a useful member of the group.
Therefore, in the last seasons, I often had to bite the bullet and at least in raids and dungeons, I chose a talent distribution that brought me very little joy.
Shadow Bolt – the eternal scourge of Shadows
Now Blizzard has significantly revamped the Shadow Priest with Patch 11.2 Spirits of K’aresh. Some talents have been removed, others are entirely new or their effects have been changed.
The biggest change is that the spell “Shadow Bolt” now has a cooldown of only 15 seconds and has 2 charges.
If you don’t know Shadow Priests: Shadow Bolt is the only way to spread the two dots (“Damage over Time” effects) of the Shadows (Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch) to multiple targets at once.
Without Shadow Bolt, you have to manually dot each enemy. That’s not just boring gameplay, but you can also expect to contribute little in such a fight.
Therefore, Shadow Bolt has always been incredibly important and has led to annoying questions: Do I use Shadow Bolt again, even though I know the fight will be over in a few seconds, or do I risk doing very little damage for the rest of the fight? Do I have Shadow Bolt ready for the next pull or am I forced to manually dot everything now?
With Shadow Bolt now having 2 charges and a reduced cooldown, this hardly happens anymore. You still can’t thoughtlessly use both charges, but there is essentially no situation where I don’t have one charge in reserve to at least start the next fight well. It also hardly matters that the bolt only applies dots to 6 instead of 8 targets.
No choice with only one answer
But that’s not the only change. Blizzard has even done me the favor of removing the annoying choice between “Mind Flay” and “Mind Spike” by simply taking Mind Spike out of the game. Previously, Mind Spike was usually the mathematically better choice, but it looked less interesting visually. There is hardly anything more fun than “melting faces” – something Shadow Priests have been doing since Classic, and giving up this spell always felt bad.
Also, the various totems – the final talents in the Shadow tree – are now significantly more interesting. Especially the totem of N’Zoth is cool. Every own spell now places enemies with stacks of “Disturbing Visions,” causing increasingly more damage and also accompanied by N’Zoth’s notorious, creepy laugh and his iconic eye.
However, the new Shadow Priest has even more to offer visually. An improvement to Void Eruption – the spell you got from Xal’atath – now ensures that after Void Eruption, you can fire a barrage of Void Bolts at a target. This looks strong and feels good when used.
Not as good as in Legion – but at least close
After a long, long time, I finally have the impression that someone has revamped the Shadow Priest and wondered: “What actually makes being a Shadow Priest? What makes it cool and interesting?” And then that person brought exactly that into the game.
No, I still don’t believe that Blizzard has found the holy grail of gameplay for the Shadow Priest. We are still a long way from the euphoric heights of Legion. But at least my Priest no longer feels annoying and tiresome after a long time, but like a class I want to enjoy playing in raids and dungeons again.
Does performance in dungeons and raids match up? No idea. But it just feels good again.
We can only hope that the new tier set doesn’t force me into a new talent distribution “forcing” that I don’t want after a few weeks.
But at least at the moment I don’t see the danger – and I’m hurling Shadow Bolts through the game world without regretting every time that I may have set the cooldown wrong and will be completely useless for the next pull for 15 seconds.
It’s almost a bit sad that other parts of the patch are not received as well and are disappointing the fans.
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