Of Shadow Priests and Arena
June 25, 2007
Before the Burning Crusade, Shadow Priests were considered many times as the PvP spec. While rarely used in raiding encounters, Shadow Priests dominated battlegrounds and thus came about the phrase “Face Melting.” Through Vampric Embrace (a spell that restores health based on your damage to the target), the ability to heal yourself, and an AOE fear, SP’s had it easy.
With the release of the Burning Crusade Blizzard started to nerf fear. There were now a multitude of ways to counter the spell: the obvious trinkets and Will Of The Forsaken, but also now warriors could stance dance to become immune, and rogues could Cloak Of Shadows to avoid all spells casted against the rogue. BC also introduced an increase in damage in comparison to health — people would now drop faster, and while this scales for every class we need to take the caster class into consideration. Rogues and Warriors could throw their victim’s health bar even lower in their stuns. To compensate for this huge increase in damage — not only done by melee but also caster classes — Blizzard introduced resilience, which decreases your enemy’s chance of a critical strike.
So let’s explore the other caster classes in comparison to the Shadow Priest. The mage class can perform quite well in arenas due to their high burst damage. If their target’s resilience isn’t put to par, they can easily nuke their victim down in a matter of seconds. As an ice mage, which I consider to be the PvP spec of the class, Magi get to explore the luxuries of frost novaing their target, slowing their target, a bubble, and ice blocking if their health gets too low and to brush off all their dots. What’s more is that Magi have an AOE which can work against stealthed targets. That’s total of five defenses against melee classes.
The Warlock. Yes, they too had their fear nerfed, but nonetheless are still considered — as of patch 2.1.2 — over powered. Depending on spec, Warlocks have an AOE fear and a single target fear, along with death coil and pets that can stun, interupt, or sedduce. Their major defense ontop of all of these abilities would be their stamina, which can often hit upwards of 13-14k HP.
Let’s move on to the Shadow Priest. Assuming you’ve spec’d improved bubble, improved fort, and improved psychic scream, you now have +1000 health, a bubble much like the Mage’s, and a 26 second fear cool down. Shadow Priests also have the option to put talents into Blackout — a 3 second stun –, but sadly this ability at times can be completely random and I’ve only found it useful if the target was stunned at a distance. Overall, compared to the other classes, the Shadow Priest lacks a lot of CC from melee, and a serious lack of survivability against other caster classes. What I find myself mostly doing whenever a Warrior or Rogue is on me is popping bubble — which usually dies rather quickly — fear — which usually is broken within the first two seconds of the cast — and walk around hamstringed or crip poisoned tanking the damage. With arenas now out, and surviving being the name of the game, a Shadow Priest even in decent gear just can’t cut it in 3v3′s and 5v5′s. In fact, the only reason Shadow Priests are useful in 2v2′s is because they complement the Warlock class so much.
The Priest forums have been outraged over out current status in arenas. A few of the better suggestions I’ve found through the forums:
- Buff SW:D to have a chance on stun – Due to its recent nerf to double the CD because of it being spammed in raiding environments, the PvP aspect of this spell was hurt a lot. Therefore, a chance on stun that wouldn’t affect mobs in raids but in targets in PvP.
- Change Psychic Scream to a horror effect – Horrors aren’t as easily broken, and being PS is on a 26 second cool down it only seems right.
All that said and done, I highly doubt anything will be thrown at the Shadow Priest other than another nerf. We still bring a lot of utility to the raid, and we can still match other pure DPS classes in DPS ontop of health and mana return, so it’s likely that somewhere in the making of 2.2 someone will think of nerfing our damage somehow again.
(.. and that concludes my QQ post of the month.)
