Este sitio hace uso intenso de JavaScript.
Por favor habilita JavaScript en tu navegador.
Tema Clásico
Tema Thottbot
Shadow Priest Design Philosophy - Season of Discovery
Clásico
Publicado
26/06/2024 a las 15:57
por
Wowhead
With so many changes coming to Season of Discovery Phase 4, the community has been discussing class balance and tuning extensively. Today we received some insight into the Shadow Priest specialization, courtesy of WoW Classic Senior Game Producer,
Josh Greenfield
:
Note
: this was part of a larger conversation on
Class Balancing and Utility
, which had led some players to question whether Priest utility was necessarily perceived as being useful in Season of Discovery.
AggrendWoW
Perceived is a key word here. To some people, the extra healing (and soon to be mana) from VT/VE isn't needed because they are in solid, efficient guilds and because for their groups the content hasn't been hard enough yet (key word: yet) to "need" the utility. That is their perception of the situation based on their lived experiences. However, that's not true for every group. Many groups do welcome that utility. Personally, I've never been in a raid group yet in SoD that didn't welcome a shadow priest (and I've run with very serious groups and very casual groups). Either because it shored up a debuff weakness or because of the supplemental healing, or both.
I understand that some folks want to leave the utility aspect of Shadow Priest behind and the team is keenly aware of that desire, but at this time that "swiss army knife" utility of the class is what they consider to be the core feature of shadow and that design isn't likely to change soon.
What we can do, and have tried to start to address in recent PTR builds, is shore up the playstyle and make it a smoother rotation with a more interesting playstyle, which I don't think we've done a great job at addressing until recently in SoD. That's where we are likely to continue invest our energy for Shadow Priest. That doesn't mean you'll do terrible damage, it just means that getting shadow to the top of the damage charts isn't the team's priority.
We think that Shadow Priest is a great add to basically any group from a speedrun group all the way down to the most casual of "dad" guilds and that aspect of the class has been mostly successful so far, but definitely not perfect.
World of Warcraft Classic content creator
Momo
probed further, asking:
Momo
Does this mean that the possibility of adding runes to have as an option to do either more DPS/scale better or bring utility is out of the question?
AggrendWoW
Put simply, yes. That is very unlikely to happen.
That is a great idea on paper and it was discussed by the team, but they quickly arrived at the conclusion that that solution was utterly incompatible with how performance is measured by modern WoW players and tools.
Here's a scenario: You have a hypothetical shoulder rune that says "Your Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch deal 90% less healing and return 90% less mana but you deal 30% more shadow damage". Great, you can opt out of utility for damage. So for Player A who is in a high performing guild where the utility isn't needed they say "great, I'm going to take that rune and do mega damage". Well, the shadow priest player (Player B) who is a good player but runs with a less skilled group is asked to keep using their utility to help the group.
So Player A parsed 90s before the introduction of this rune, and they still parse 90s, as it can be assumed that everyone who wants to perform at maximum output will also run this rune and the high water mark will rise as a result. Player B in the less skilled group that parsed a bit lower due to longer kill times, so let's say 80s; well he now parses 60s. Because the logging site only measures about raw throughput, the game has changed dramatically for Player B and he is doing the same thing he did before, helping the group out, but he is now being measured against the "selfish" players who opted into the new playstyle that eschews group utility entirely.
The logging site isn't likely going to make a segment for "team player priests". There's only going to be "DPS Priest". Heck, it took years to finally see Power Infusion separated out in logs so I don't think that they will spend much time thinking about this for a seasonal game mode. The Classic Team need to think about it though and luckily we don't even have to guess at how it will go, we already know because we've been living it in SoD already.
Using real world examples from SoD, we had Exorcism on the same slot as Rebuke for paladins. On some fights, my guild would ask the ret paladins to swap to rebuke to interrupt (kelris, mekkatorque, etc.) and they definitely felt pretty bad/resentful at having to do that because it tanked their damage. Hunters have the same thing right now with Trueshot Aura. We decoupled Exorcism from that slot in part to solve that problem, and we have a change coming to TSA that will serve the same purpose/goal. For the remainder of SoD we want to move away from the "take a personal hit to help the group" model, bit by bit, because we've come to accept that players don't care for that model in SoD.
So I think it would be a tall ask and pretty confusingly inconsistent for us to deliberately push priests in that direction now. All that solution would do is breed resentment in the players who were happily playing the video game, and doing it well using the tools they had to work with when measured against others playing their class.
That said, I think there's a world where we can just have both. Make Priests do better damage and have their cool utility niche. If you look at PTR numbers right now Priests look pretty solid. Now, part of that is due to a bug with occult poison, so I'm not going to gaslight you and say it'll stay that way when that is fixed and everyone is fully stacked in gear and world buffs, but I think priests are in a much better spot now on PTR than they are in Phase 3. So that's what we'll keep working towards for priests, finding a better equilibrium between bringing that cool utility and doing some respectable damage.
It sounds like, while Shadow Priests may not get everything they want right now, they are definitely on Blizzard's mind. What changes would you like to see in Season of Discovery for Shadow Priests? Let us know in the comments below!
Obtiene Wowhead
Premium
USD $2
Un mes
Disfruta de una experiencia libre de publicidad, desbloquea características premium y dale tu soporte al sitio!
Mostrar 0 comentarios
Ocultar 0 comentarios
Inicia sesión para publicar un comentario
Comentarios en Inglés (25)
Escribir un Comentario
No has iniciado sesión. Por favor
entra a tu cuenta
o
registra una cuenta
para añadir tu comentario.
Publicación anterior
Publicación siguiente