Attention Shadow Priests! Upcoming Changes for Wrath of the Lich King

A lot of Blue attention here from Kalgan and Ghostcrawler so I’ll try to itemize it properly.

We need to fix two problems with Shadow priests. One is that their damage is too low, especially at epic level. The second is that stacking Vampiric Embrace from too many priests probably represents a balance problem. These changes will go live before Nov 13.

Vampiric Embrace — we need to nerf it, but we don’t want it to be terrible for priests in small groups or solo. So we are going to make it 5% healing to your group (not raid) but 25% healing to yourself. Assume the talents that affect it get it up to this level.

Vampiric Touch — we’re adding some of the damage adjustment to this spell, by doubling the coefficient (from 0.2 to 0.4).

Shadowform — we’re adding the rest of the adjustment here. Your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch do an additional percentage damage equal to your critical strike chance. Basically if your crit is 25%, your SW:P does 25% more damage. This has the side effect of making crit a little more useful for Shadow priests.

Since Affliction locks and other classes with many dots might ask, we think long term that a good thing to look at is making dots crit. We’re not sure yet if we’ll do this by just making them actually crit or adding more talents that do neat things with your crit rating, but it is definitely something we’re looking at. (src)

Shadow Priest DPS issues

The issue with VE, as a few other players have suggested, was that groups were going to stack shadow priests in order to have really good healing AND really good dps. You would have seen raids with a tank and 4 shadow priests in one of the groups. Remember, VE applies to the shadow priest’s damage. That makes it better than the death knight’s Blood Aura, which applies to individual dps. Blood Aura does not heal healers much for example.

As I said at Blizzcon, we nerfed the Shadow priest mana battery role and also let other specs provide that role. Since Shadow priests were virtually mandatory in BC, we thought it was only fair to seriously buff their dps. It has lagged behind, partially because they weren’t benefiting from all of the group crit buffs, though that’s not the only reason.

In our tests, these changes really turned them around, so we’re anxious to see how it works out in Arenas and raids. (src)

Much much more in this thread but it’s spread through a few posts. Basic breakdown is that Shadow Priests will have no problems finding spots in raids to fill utility and DPS roles and the numbers are being worked in the favor of buffing Shadow priests.