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Shadow Form - MongoJerry - 08-23-2004
(Note: I originally posted this on the Blizzard Priest forums).
Over the last several days, I've been playing around with different combinations of talents to see how well they work and to see what the possibilities were to create different kinds of priests. I plan to write up my thoughts on priest talents in general soon, but today I played around with a high level shadow priest and noticed some severe problems with Shadowform that I want to bring to everyone's attention -- and particularly the attentions of the game developers.
I spent 31 points in the shadow tree, making sure to get the cool new skills like Vampiric Embrace, Silence, and of course Shadowform. The rest of my lvl 53 priestess's points were spent in the Discipline tree to improve her mana efficiency and of course max out Improved Holy Word: Shield. I rearranged my skill tabs, because a Shadowform priest emphasizes the use of different skills from the usual priest (which is a good thing, of course).
My belief when I started was that this kind of a priest would be a fantastic solo player and could also be useful in groups that already have another primary healer and also have the vision to try something new. Now that I've soloed a bit with my Shadowform priestess, I can definitely say there is a lot of solo potential to this kind of priest and it is definitely neat to play what is almost practically a new character class (kind of a mage/healer combination). But I ran into some serious problems with Shadowform.
In Shadowform, as everyone knows, you can't cast holy spells -- essentially every healing and debuffing spell. Luckily, you can still cast HW:Shield, a discipline spell, and you can get healed somewhat through Vampritic Embrace. So, it's not like one doesn't have *some* healing capabilities at one's disposal. In compensation for the less effective healing and nonexistant debuffing spells, you get some additional firepower and protection against physical attacks. That sounds like a decent balance. But there are two other restrictions not mentioned in the Shadowform skill description that break the usefullness of Shadowform.
One loses all buffs whenever one changes in or out of Shadowform Every time one switches forms, one loses Fortitude, Inner Fire, and any other buffs that one's potions or partymembers have given you. You can recast Fortitude and Inner Fire while in Shadowform, but that costs time and mana, and it's certainly aggravating to lose any other buffs like Arcane Intellect or Elixir of Shadow Power just because one switches form. This is a severely annoying feature but isn't a deal breaker. The next issue, though, definitely is.
One cannot use any items in Shadowform. This is a particularly incidious restriction. Some examples of how this restriction affects a Shadowform priest are:
- One cannot use mana potions in Shadowform.
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- One cannot use any potion buffs, like Elixir of Shadow Power, in Shadowform. One can drink a potion out of Shadowform, but when one goes back into Shadowform, any buffs are lost.
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- One cannot eat or drink in Shadowform. One can switch out of Shadowform to drink, but after spending the mana to recast Shadowform, Fortitude, and Inner Fire, one might as well have not drunk at all.
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- One cannot use mounts.
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- One cannot use any engineering items, including bombs, gnomish cloaking devices, gnomish battle chickens, or use any special features on one's equipment, like use a parachute cloak or use an item that gives you an emergency source of mana.<>
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In my testing, I saw a lot of potential for the Shadow Tree and Shadowform in particular. It seems like a Shadowform priest would be a fun and different offensive oriented build. However, I beg and plead with the game developers to remove the two restrictions listed above. They quite plainly break the build. The restriction that a Shadowform priest cannot use any of his or her holy spells is enough of a balance to compensate for the bonuses he or she gets in Shadowform. There is no reason to harm the Shadowform priest further.
Note: If these restrictions are removed, I would also suggest that the cast time to go in and out of Shadowform be longer. Right now, the short 1.5 second cast time would make it easy for a priest in a party to jump out of Shadowform, cast a bunch of healing spells, and then jump back into Shadowform. Raising the cast time to say, 5 seconds, would reduce the effectiveness of this exploit.
Shadow Form - Artega - 08-23-2004
How have reactions been? You wrote quite an eloquent post - hopefully your post will be able to help persuade the development team to fix those issues :)
Shadow Form - lemekim - 08-24-2004
I know it might seem a bit tacky to you, but I would post that in general forum instead of the priest forum; it seems things in general forum attract the attention of devs more.