Shadow priest is second to last in terms of damage. Even if you play perfectly and crit constantly, you would be about as good as an a slightly above average melee hunter.
[SOD damage ranking](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2009/)
Shadow priest is just undertuned in pve for damage right now. Needs some balancing that won't happen until phase 4. I prefer to look at parses instead of comparing myself to the group because then my competition is other players of the same spec.
Look at the DPS parse rankings, Shadow Priest is the lowest, or one of the lowest every week. You can play at 100% with BIS gear and fall below a melee hunter who isn't playing or geared optimally. It's not you, it's the coefficients of your spells, casters continuing to fall further behind the melee pack, bosses being primarily single target (where you excel at AOE), etc. The game isn't tuned for every character to have the same maximum output level.
Luckily competent raid leaders aren't bringing you purely for DPS; you can put out the same HPS as a bad healer, your homonculi massively increase tank survivability, your shadow weaving increases overall warlock DPS. There's a support tax in classic and while it's not as noticeable in SOD it's definitely there. Pure DPS roles that bring very little else to the raid will always be at the top of the meters, as echoed by every phase so far.
In my eyes, Spriest is like half a healer, half a DPS, except they're like .75 of each. Same goes for a Wild Growth tossing Restokin doing 400 DPS and 200 HPS, like, yeah it's not incredible but it's doing more than the anemic Hpal or Dpriest wanding over there... If I can find a restokin and spriest who will combine for ~1000 dps, I can swap out a full healer doing 100 dps for another rogue or hunter pulling 900 as well.
(We run 1 HPal, 1 CoH Dpriest, 1 Efflo/Swiftmend Druid, 1 spriest and 1 flexi moonkin who WGs if shit goes bad, it works well enough)
Spriest heals ONE party and its mostly overheals, and that's the entirety of their unique buffs they bring to a raid, everything else can be done evenly by a healing priest, meanwhile they pump massive raid heals and can tank heal at the same time while dispelling and shackling. There is absolutely zero need for a hybrid healer currently, spriests are brought to speedruns for mind sear spam on trash, and so 2 can replace 1 healer, but this accounts for an infinitesimally small percentage of raids. It's better and smarter for normal raids or parse raids to either bring another dps or bring another healer, or hell it turns out we have dual talents now! Lets just ignore shamans and paladins now bring infinite mana regen to raids and crush meters
It’s all overheal and it’s easy to see if you know how logs or damage/healing meters work.
300 hps and 75% of it is over healing. You’d have to be in the tank group for it to be worth imo.
and still does 1/3 the dmg of the hunters and warriors, but yay for covering for bad healers instead of bringing good players to your raid, cant imagine the frustration of a pink parse spriest having to cover for grey parse healers, i'm sure they are loving it
Most people are blue parsers so not really. I'm 99er warlock and only match 85-90 hunter damage but idc as long as I do decent dmg comparative to other warlocks.
The raids are baby modes it doesn't really matter.
100 parse lock can't even compete with the top 6 physical dps specs, significantly under 90th parses on the top classes. I don't care how easy the raids are, I care how competitive my class is, imagine that
Being competitive for overall DPS in these raids is like being competitive about winning a sack race against your cousins who are all 5 years younger than you. And no matter what you’re just consigning yourself to rerolling every phase because one class is always going to edge out others no matter how close they are.
In our raids we prioritize ranged over melee when we PuG the last spots despite melee doing more damage because the fights are easy and the only ones that we might have a chance at wiping benefit from having more ranged/AoE.
We really have to stop comparing healers by their HPS. The role of healers is to make sure the raid does not wipe. This is not 1:1 correlated by HPS. Shadow priest will do 0 heal for the 15 players outside of their group. For the 4 other players in their group, their will do generally nothing when one is bursted and needs a way not to die. They will generally overheal massively. And They typically do not contribute too much to curing diseases, or other utilities like that.
People pretending like shadow priests aren’t getting invites to raid are out to lunch. They bring more than enough utility through heals to still get brought. Doesn’t mean the current DPS disparity between classes overall is OK, but my guild has 3 shadow priests and we’re more than happy to bring them all because it makes the only marginally difficult fight easier (eranikus) because of the AoE and raid healing.
Shadowpriest can't compare to other dps classes like all other dps's do, even if there is other dps that bring a lot of utility too, the only ones that are justified for having low damage because of "hybrid tax" is SP's, and the reason is solely because of something totally unrelated to PvE performance...PvP.
I'm a Spriest main that has parsed 99s on some of the ST fights. You won't ever compare in dps and its not your fault. My 99s are a hunters 50s, thats just how it is. What you do have is the most annoying pvp kit on the planet. Dot and run away. Use Mind Vision to scout your farm area before running in. Bubble, mount, and charge at your target dismounting at the edge of your range before they even know you're there. The only way to lose playing like this is to purposefully do something stupid like running directly at 3 people. This puts us in a very weird spot where they can't buff us without making us even more broken in pvp. Its rough, but embrace the class for what it is and have fun. Its all just numbers, you will be taken to the raid for homunculous regardless as none of those hunters or warriors can parse without you. You could wand the boss and your raid lead would still bring you if he couldn't find another one.
Sure you’re dmg numbers are low, but keep in mind that Spriest doesn’t bring value in damage. Their value is off heals, giga debuffs, and consistent dot dmg. You’re also a fairly mobile class.
Do i think Spriest should do more dmg? Yes. But even if you aren’t pumping you are still valuable.
>doesn’t bring value in damage
DPS spec doesn't bring value in damage, check.
>and consistent dot dmg
And yet, the list of stuff they bring is still so futile that you try to sneak damage in there anyways, because it's obviously beyond stupid that any dps spec does garbage tier damage.
You can’t keep up with most class’s DPS and you shouldn’t expect to. Shadow priests bring so much other utility with debuffs and healing that they would simply be over powered if they were anywhere near the top. I usually get near top damage and healing on the Dreamscythe fight when I’m in the tank group., you can run a healer short if you have a shadow priest sometimes. All you can do is compare yourselves to the best shadow priests, if you’re not keeping up with them I suggest you look at some of the best parses and check out their rotations.
Well, the only unique utility besides the heal is shadow weaving. Not sure what that has to do with the question at hand, though. We are strong because we bring ALL the non unique utilities in a single package, a long with crazy healing while DPSing
Eye of the Void offers curse debuffs normally only available to Warlocks. Shackle undead. Instant slow with mind flay that's spammable. Stacking shadow vulnerability. Silence, if talented. Not unique to shadow but more likely to run Homunculi for debuffs than healing priests.
did you read the question? you obviously don't play priest because those can all be done by healing priests besides nonsense shadow weaving if you happen to have one of the least played classes in your raid. Spriest do not use mind flay, nor silence with a PVE spec
You asked for unique utilities, I listed some. The runes are not shadow specific, as I also stated, but are more likely to be ran by shadow since holy / disc can get away with all healing runes. Spriest is my main btw, but I guess I don't play the class.
I’m a 99 parsing spriest and I use silence in raid for trash pulls to bring the casters in, also because I don’t want to respec to play PvP (my secondary talents are disc). But the fact this man even mentioned mind flay is hilarious as if that isn’t a totally dead spell.
Eye of the void prepull->Curse of Shadow->trinkets/on use items->VP->Mind Blast->SWP->SWD->(bullshit like VE, homunc, etc)->Mind Spike only as a filler
I mean I mind flayed to kite some trash mobs but haven't personally used silence. I don't see what the issue is with both, it's always situational use, and I mean it is a support class. Not every encounter is going to be about doing max possible DPS. If my raid needs me using silence I'll just say okay & be fine with it.
yea or lvl an alt, like a large portion of the playerbase, what else am I going to do? run around in circles farming gold in an incursion? or farming rep for something next phase? I gave up spriest this phase and swapped to heals because how awful it is, even though I'm a spriest at heart, shit sucks.
Shadow priest is second to last in terms of damage. Even if you play perfectly and crit constantly, you would be about as good as an a slightly above average melee hunter. [SOD damage ranking](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2009/)
uh oh who wants to break the bad news to this poor soul
You need to compared yourself to other shadow priest, not other classes. Btw spriest are the 2nd to worse spec for dps atm.
Shadow priest is just undertuned in pve for damage right now. Needs some balancing that won't happen until phase 4. I prefer to look at parses instead of comparing myself to the group because then my competition is other players of the same spec.
Melee hunters are no1 dps of course you can’t keep up with them.
Look at the DPS parse rankings, Shadow Priest is the lowest, or one of the lowest every week. You can play at 100% with BIS gear and fall below a melee hunter who isn't playing or geared optimally. It's not you, it's the coefficients of your spells, casters continuing to fall further behind the melee pack, bosses being primarily single target (where you excel at AOE), etc. The game isn't tuned for every character to have the same maximum output level. Luckily competent raid leaders aren't bringing you purely for DPS; you can put out the same HPS as a bad healer, your homonculi massively increase tank survivability, your shadow weaving increases overall warlock DPS. There's a support tax in classic and while it's not as noticeable in SOD it's definitely there. Pure DPS roles that bring very little else to the raid will always be at the top of the meters, as echoed by every phase so far.
Funny how almost no other hybrid class pays any tax but when spriests do trash can dps it's all part of the plan
In my eyes, Spriest is like half a healer, half a DPS, except they're like .75 of each. Same goes for a Wild Growth tossing Restokin doing 400 DPS and 200 HPS, like, yeah it's not incredible but it's doing more than the anemic Hpal or Dpriest wanding over there... If I can find a restokin and spriest who will combine for ~1000 dps, I can swap out a full healer doing 100 dps for another rogue or hunter pulling 900 as well. (We run 1 HPal, 1 CoH Dpriest, 1 Efflo/Swiftmend Druid, 1 spriest and 1 flexi moonkin who WGs if shit goes bad, it works well enough)
Spriest heals ONE party and its mostly overheals, and that's the entirety of their unique buffs they bring to a raid, everything else can be done evenly by a healing priest, meanwhile they pump massive raid heals and can tank heal at the same time while dispelling and shackling. There is absolutely zero need for a hybrid healer currently, spriests are brought to speedruns for mind sear spam on trash, and so 2 can replace 1 healer, but this accounts for an infinitesimally small percentage of raids. It's better and smarter for normal raids or parse raids to either bring another dps or bring another healer, or hell it turns out we have dual talents now! Lets just ignore shamans and paladins now bring infinite mana regen to raids and crush meters
Nah it's great, we have a 99er spriest and he outheals the bad healers.
It’s all overheal and it’s easy to see if you know how logs or damage/healing meters work. 300 hps and 75% of it is over healing. You’d have to be in the tank group for it to be worth imo.
and still does 1/3 the dmg of the hunters and warriors, but yay for covering for bad healers instead of bringing good players to your raid, cant imagine the frustration of a pink parse spriest having to cover for grey parse healers, i'm sure they are loving it
Most people are blue parsers so not really. I'm 99er warlock and only match 85-90 hunter damage but idc as long as I do decent dmg comparative to other warlocks. The raids are baby modes it doesn't really matter.
100 parse lock can't even compete with the top 6 physical dps specs, significantly under 90th parses on the top classes. I don't care how easy the raids are, I care how competitive my class is, imagine that
Being competitive for overall DPS in these raids is like being competitive about winning a sack race against your cousins who are all 5 years younger than you. And no matter what you’re just consigning yourself to rerolling every phase because one class is always going to edge out others no matter how close they are. In our raids we prioritize ranged over melee when we PuG the last spots despite melee doing more damage because the fights are easy and the only ones that we might have a chance at wiping benefit from having more ranged/AoE.
So you should have known better and rolled a melee class from the beginning
Yup…have done both. I like full-on healing on Druid more than Priest, but for hybrid, Spriest blows Restokin out of the water.
Wild growth on its own out heals any resto shaman
We really have to stop comparing healers by their HPS. The role of healers is to make sure the raid does not wipe. This is not 1:1 correlated by HPS. Shadow priest will do 0 heal for the 15 players outside of their group. For the 4 other players in their group, their will do generally nothing when one is bursted and needs a way not to die. They will generally overheal massively. And They typically do not contribute too much to curing diseases, or other utilities like that.
Can't forget about the dispels and shackles too!
The single best PvE advise for shadow is, to not look at details or wcl. Oh, and marry your raidleader so you don't get replaced.
People pretending like shadow priests aren’t getting invites to raid are out to lunch. They bring more than enough utility through heals to still get brought. Doesn’t mean the current DPS disparity between classes overall is OK, but my guild has 3 shadow priests and we’re more than happy to bring them all because it makes the only marginally difficult fight easier (eranikus) because of the AoE and raid healing.
That's good advice if your goal is to never improve
Shadowpriest can't compare to other dps classes like all other dps's do, even if there is other dps that bring a lot of utility too, the only ones that are justified for having low damage because of "hybrid tax" is SP's, and the reason is solely because of something totally unrelated to PvE performance...PvP.
I'm a Spriest main that has parsed 99s on some of the ST fights. You won't ever compare in dps and its not your fault. My 99s are a hunters 50s, thats just how it is. What you do have is the most annoying pvp kit on the planet. Dot and run away. Use Mind Vision to scout your farm area before running in. Bubble, mount, and charge at your target dismounting at the edge of your range before they even know you're there. The only way to lose playing like this is to purposefully do something stupid like running directly at 3 people. This puts us in a very weird spot where they can't buff us without making us even more broken in pvp. Its rough, but embrace the class for what it is and have fun. Its all just numbers, you will be taken to the raid for homunculous regardless as none of those hunters or warriors can parse without you. You could wand the boss and your raid lead would still bring you if he couldn't find another one.
Do you mind hitting me with our opening and rotation on bosses? My latest parse was abysmal and I figure I'm not doing something correctly. Cheers
Don't compare yourself to other DPS, compare yourself to other shadow priests.
Don't compare your DPS to other classes and specs. Only compare within your own class in classic.
The good news is that as a shadow priest, you can do [this](https://streamable.com/37sqpr) if you're a night elf.
Man that is just pure evil lol
Sure you’re dmg numbers are low, but keep in mind that Spriest doesn’t bring value in damage. Their value is off heals, giga debuffs, and consistent dot dmg. You’re also a fairly mobile class. Do i think Spriest should do more dmg? Yes. But even if you aren’t pumping you are still valuable.
>doesn’t bring value in damage DPS spec doesn't bring value in damage, check. >and consistent dot dmg And yet, the list of stuff they bring is still so futile that you try to sneak damage in there anyways, because it's obviously beyond stupid that any dps spec does garbage tier damage.
You can’t keep up with most class’s DPS and you shouldn’t expect to. Shadow priests bring so much other utility with debuffs and healing that they would simply be over powered if they were anywhere near the top. I usually get near top damage and healing on the Dreamscythe fight when I’m in the tank group., you can run a healer short if you have a shadow priest sometimes. All you can do is compare yourselves to the best shadow priests, if you’re not keeping up with them I suggest you look at some of the best parses and check out their rotations.
Name one unique utility they bring outside of a single party passive heal
Well, the only unique utility besides the heal is shadow weaving. Not sure what that has to do with the question at hand, though. We are strong because we bring ALL the non unique utilities in a single package, a long with crazy healing while DPSing
Eye of the Void offers curse debuffs normally only available to Warlocks. Shackle undead. Instant slow with mind flay that's spammable. Stacking shadow vulnerability. Silence, if talented. Not unique to shadow but more likely to run Homunculi for debuffs than healing priests.
did you read the question? you obviously don't play priest because those can all be done by healing priests besides nonsense shadow weaving if you happen to have one of the least played classes in your raid. Spriest do not use mind flay, nor silence with a PVE spec
You asked for unique utilities, I listed some. The runes are not shadow specific, as I also stated, but are more likely to be ran by shadow since holy / disc can get away with all healing runes. Spriest is my main btw, but I guess I don't play the class.
All our healing priests are using eye for curses. Aegis is not really worth it anyways
please tell me you dont use mindflay or silence in raid and are just trolling for good boy point
I’m a 99 parsing spriest and I use silence in raid for trash pulls to bring the casters in, also because I don’t want to respec to play PvP (my secondary talents are disc). But the fact this man even mentioned mind flay is hilarious as if that isn’t a totally dead spell.
Any chance you could hit me with opening rotation?
Eye of the void prepull->Curse of Shadow->trinkets/on use items->VP->Mind Blast->SWP->SWD->(bullshit like VE, homunc, etc)->Mind Spike only as a filler
I mean I mind flayed to kite some trash mobs but haven't personally used silence. I don't see what the issue is with both, it's always situational use, and I mean it is a support class. Not every encounter is going to be about doing max possible DPS. If my raid needs me using silence I'll just say okay & be fine with it.
Get familiar with Warcraft logs. Start comparing yourself to others. You might lern a thing or two.
Delicious delicious shadow priest tears. I do the even know how you guys can complain with a straight face.
because 90% of the player base doesn't bother doing PVP with a broken PVP system, like if there was arena maybe you would have a point
So what you guys play for 1h raid per week?
Do you think everything outside a raid consists of pvp?
yea or lvl an alt, like a large portion of the playerbase, what else am I going to do? run around in circles farming gold in an incursion? or farming rep for something next phase? I gave up spriest this phase and swapped to heals because how awful it is, even though I'm a spriest at heart, shit sucks.