The State of Shadow Priest in 10.2
Being blunt, Shadow is not in a good place going into 10.2. The spec received massive utility and damage nerfs at the beginning of the patch and I, like everyone else, was expecting some form of compensation or change in design direction to follow. As the weeks have gone by this hasn’t materialised and with only a few weeks left it’s fair to say it isn’t coming in time for 10.2. With that in mind let’s go over the changes that have happened throughout the 10.2 patch cycle and their impact on the spec in both Raids and Mythic+. If you’re looking for a short answer to the question of “Is Shadow Priest good in 10.2?” then no, it is not.
Utility changes
Power Infusion
Perhaps the most controversial and confusing change to Shadow Priest in 10.2 is the reduction in the value of Power Infusion from 25% to 20% and the reduction in duration from 20 seconds to 15 seconds. While it’s clear Power Infusion was causing problems as an external cooldown, the fact that changes have impacted the Shadow Priest as well is both confusing and disappointing. The duration reduction of 20 to 15 seconds especially so as it now doesn’t match the duration of either of Shadow’s major cooldowns. Haste is fun, Shadow has relied on and enjoyed having high haste for over a decade at this point and Priest getting nerfed as collateral for other specs causing problems does not feel good.
Alongside direct nerfs to Power Infusion, the specs that benefit the most from it have received reworks and rebalancing in order to reduce their peak burst damage and the value they gain from external cooldowns. So not only is Shadow getting less value from its own Power Infusion but the additional damage Shadow brings in the form of buffing another player has also been reduced. This results in roughly a 7000 dps decrease in raids at current ilvl.
Shadow Priest is currently only relevant on live in Single Target and Multi Target raid encounters because of the value added to another DPS through Power Infusion, despite the fact that Blizzard have said multiple times that Shadow is not intended to be tuned around Power Infusion and that it should be seen as part of the spec’s utility.
Mass Dispel
Mass Dispel has received a significant nerf in 10.2, going from a 45 second baseline cooldown that can be talented down to 25 to a whopping 2 minute cooldown, an increase of nearly five times. This has also come without any compensatory buffs to the number of targets affected or any other utility changes elsewhere. Mass Dispel is now more comparable to something like Revival in terms of frequency and reliability during encounters except it still only hits 5 friendly targets.
As bad as this is for PvE (It’s very bad) it’s even worse for PvP where Mass Dispel has been a core piece of the Priest utility kit since TBC for all specs. Shadow is already hard locked on PvP talents and will struggle to ever be able to take the recently added Improved Mass Dispel to get the cooldown down to 60 seconds.
Spec Changes
In 10.2 the frequency and strength of Surge of Insanity empowered spells has been adjusted. The reason given for this was to reduce the clutter in Shadow’s rotation and make space for the interaction provided by the 10.2 tier set. Instead of every Devouring Plague cast providing a stack of Surge of Insanity every cast, it now provides one every other. This effectively halves the number of empowered filler casts you get and the compensatory buff of 10-30% to fillers don’t even come close to making up for it. This alongside the aforementioned nerfs to Power Infusion mean that the Shadow Priest itself is going into 10.2 doing roughly 6% less damage than it was in 10.1 before we even move on to set bonuses or consider the damage Power Infusion provides to anyone else.
Talents
Shadow in 10.1 has a decent amount of talent and build diversity, however in 10.2 that will no longer be the case. Void Eruption was already beginning to fall behind / face competition from Dark Ascension due to the constant nerfs to the apparition focused talents in the centre of the tree, however without the 10.1 set bonus Void Eruption has now fallen too far behind to be considered a viable option. This means no more DoT extension from Void Bolt, less movement GCDs and less Shadowy Apparitions. Instead you will be playing Mindbender and Idol of Y’Shaarj alongside the typical Idol of C’Thun path in all content.
The Impact of Tier
I’ll be clear and say there is one arguably positive thing to say about Shadow Priest in 10.2. If you enjoy the Mindbender playstyle then the new 2 piece set bonus Priest Shadow 10.2 Class Set 2pc is actually quite fun on Single Target with the additional Mindbender uptime and Insanity generation, however it is a far cry in power level from where it was when I gave my initial impressions a few weeks ago. Since then it has been nerfed from 50%, to 35%, to 20%, and now to 15% which affects both damage and Inescapable Torment. The chunky feel it had is gone along with the majority of the extension value. Even more unfortunately however if you’re not a fan of Mindbender centric gameplay then you’re out of luck, the tier set incentivises talent builds focused around it so heavily that there really is no escaping it next season. The 2 piece bonus also provides little direct AoE benefit because a lot of the value comes from additional Mindbender melee swings that do not scale with targets.
The 4 piece however is both weak and, to me, not fun. Priest Shadow 10.2 Class Set 4pc increases the power of Shadow Crash and Shadow Word: Pain in an attempt to shoehorn them into the Single Target rotation. With current tuning the 4 set bonus provides roughly 2% increased damage on Single Target and realistically even less in AoE. Due to the pathing constraints involved with getting Mindbender it also has the potential to make Shadow Crash part of the Single Target rotation, removing any difference between the spec’s talents in raids and dungeons. It’s also cumbersome to use given that Shadow Crash holds an enormous amount of value in Shadow’s multi target rotation as the only reliable way to apply DoTs so missing or delaying it to get value from the set just isn’t an option. This to me is one of the worst designs for a set bonus we have seen in recent years and while it recognises a problem that Shadow no longer casts Shadow Word: Pain anymore, aims to solve it in a way that has zero redeeming qualities. Tuning this effect to deal enough damage to justify functioning as a set bonus would mean an instant cast spell dealing at least 600k direct damage.
As far as current tuning the combined value of the set in Single Target is roughly 9-10% which is towards the low end of tier sets in this patch. In a realistic dungeon scenario however it’s nearer to 5%. Shadow Priests don’t use Shadow Crash in a way that plays well with what the bonus is trying to achieve as Shadow Crash will almost always be thrown at targets without DoTs and therefore gain no mastery value. Mindbender based builds already suffer in ways that make the 2 piece less effective than is likely intended. The repeated bludgeoning nerfs to Shadow’s set bonus may have at some point been necessary to curb its Single Target effectiveness but now its under tuned in Raids and bordering on negligible in Mythic+.
While the tier 31 set bonus is bad, what might be even more problematic is the removal of the previous one. Shadow’s 10.1 Set Bonus revolved around buffing Shadowy Apparitions which resulted in many nerfs to Shadowy Apparitions and apparition focused talents throughout the talent tree, as well as multiple nerfs to Psychic Link to attempt to bring Shadow’s AoE damage and scaling back into line. However now that tier set has been removed, the talents that were nerfed because of it (and also form the core of Shadow’s AoE damage profile) are drastically under performing. It seems to be a common and somewhat unique problem that talents and spells are nerfed because of set bonus interactions and then never reverted or accounted for later down the line with Inescapable Torment having been nerfed in 10.1 in anticipation of a set bonus that never even went live . We’ve even seen a pre-emptive nerf to Shadow Crash in 10.2 to account for the new 4 set bonus which has since also been nerfed as well, begging the question if the initial nerf was justified to begin with…
Returning to PvP for the second time as this set bonus relies heavily on Inescapable Torment then it’s likely not to see much use in PvP and I expect players will go for optimal stats instead.
Survivability
Despite initial expectations, Shadow is not actually that tanky in raids according to current data with some of the highest death percentages in Aberrus, despite this the spec has received numerous nerfs to self healing as well as the priest-wide change to Angel’s Mercy and going into 10.2 will be taking even more damage from the barrage of rotational Shadow Word: Deaths necessary to maintain your DPS. Casting Shadow Word: Death on cooldown works out to roughly 1% of your max hp per second while in combat, it’s not a lot but it’s more than anyone else is taking from their own rotation and it completely counteracts the spec’s self healing, making it hard to justify calling it survivability.
Raid Performance
This all leads to the rather predictable fact that Shadow is not good in the upcoming raid. Large damage nerfs, a comparatively bad set bonus and a more movement sensitive playstyle all on a spec that wasn’t performing that well in the previous raid anyway is really saddening to see. Shadow’s old niche of spread cleave and multi-target encounters is also performing poorly due to the spec losing its old set bonus and the massive nerfs we saw to all aspects of its AoE damage pattern throughout 10.1. I do not expect to see Shadow Priest in The Race to World First other than the small potential of a need for Mass Dispel and if nothing changes then Shadow Priest is comfortably one of the worst dps classes in the game to bring to raids.
Mythic+ Performance
For as bad as Shadow looks to be in raids in 10.2 it is worse in Mythic+ as every change that negatively impacts Shadow in raids also impacts dungeons. Moving away from Void Eruption and towards a Mindbender focused playstyle does the spec no favours as Void Bolt was a vital tool for DoT extension and being able to do damage to packs larger than 8 mobs. Shadow Crash also does not play well with both the new 4 set bonus and the design of the majority of Season 3 dungeons as packs consistently contain small mobs that make applying DoTs to meaningful targets with Shadow Crash unreliable. These types of packs also drastically reduce the value of Inescapable Torment which is target capped at 5. Even ignoring this issue of smaller less important mobs getting in the way, being target capped at 5 and 8 respectively is a massive problem once you start combining packs in Mythic+.
From a utility perspective it doesn’t get any better. I can understand Blizzard wanting to move away from Mass Dispel being a consistent answer to mechanics in dungeons, however the fact that the spec received absolutely nothing in return for such a heavy nerf is baffling given how low the spec is on other meaningful dungeon utility. We’ve had seasons where Mass Dispel was not highly regarded as a form of dungeon utility and in those seasons Shadow has consistently been side-lined for specs with better mob control and group damage buffs.
Altogether this leads to, in my opinion, a tedious, miserable, and disappointing Mythic+ gameplay experience that also has some of the lowest AoE / Cleave damage in the entire game.
Conclusion
I have no nice words to say about the changes that have been made to Shadow Priest in 10.2. Buffs and nerfs are usually not something to comment on but when we’re seeing repeated nerfs to things that are already under performing as well as nerfs to utility of almost 500% then it’s hard to ignore. The only explanation I can think of for the state of Shadow in 10.2 is that we’ve only seen the first iteration of the first step of some grand multi-step plan. However if this was the case we’d expect some communication by now as to what that plan was. The spec is worse in all aspects than it was in 10.1 and in Mythic+ specifically we’re seeing a fall from grace that brings back memories of WoD Demonology Warlock.
There’s obviously some element of bring the player not the class involved with anything like this and if you’re dead set on Shadow Priest there will be players making it work. However the spec is in need of something big because currently with the lack of response to feedback it’s hard to think Blizzard are saying anything other than “We would rather you didn’t play Shadow Priest.”
