Midnight Season 1 OverviewShadow Priest Guide
Learn about the iconic abilities and talents that might still exist in your spell book but you likely won't be using in Season 1.
Collapsing Star - Devourer DH
Hogstrider - SV & BM Hunter
Melee Healing - MW Monk
Healing Rain - Resto Shaman
The Shadow Word: Death Problem
In simple terms, Shadow Word: Death does not do enough damage to justify pressing for DPS in almost any scenario. The only time when Shadow Word: Death is used is when the target has an absorb shield due to Voidweaver's Devour Matter talent, and even then only barely. Shadow Word: Death has been an iconic Shadow Priest spell for decades at this point, serving to accelerate gameplay and also just hit really hard. Now not only is it not part of the rotation, but Shadow is taking the new Shadowfiend talent purely for pathing reasons without using it at all. Shadow Word: Death is so weak even that it currently deals more damage to the priest than to the target.
Why Shadow Word: Death Struggles
Besides the obvious tuning issue, a number of things have happened throughout the years to Shadow Word: Death and its associated talents.
To offset the strength of Shadow's Amirdrassil tier set bonus, the Inescapable Torment talent was nerfed significantly.
That set bonus was then made into the Death's Torment talent, and weakened further.
In Midnight, the Death and Madness talent was moved from the class tree into the spec tree, and made a choice node alongside Deathspeaker.
In Midnight, Mindbender was also changed to trigger off Voidform instead of being its own ability. This increased its cooldown from 1 minute to 2 minutes and halved its uptime.
In Midnight, Surge of Insanity was added, increasing the strength and resource generation of Shadow's filler spell 100% of the time.
Shadow's pets were also changed, overall reducing their potential uptime and value of Inescapable Torment.
The result of this is Shadow Word: Death is extremely weak baseline, has weak supporting talents, has lost one of its most important baseline synergies in Death and Madness, and needs to be stronger to justify being used against a stronger Mind Flay.
How do we fix it?
The simplest thing is just buffing Shadow Word: Death enough that using it in execute is more DPS than Mind Flay, but it doesn't feel good. Shadow Word: Death should have some weight or impact behind it, and if it's going to be an ability that the spec tree dedicates multiple points to, then those points should also feel good. The bottom left part of the spec tree needs a thorough reimaginting before Shadow Word: Death will ever feel like a meaningful part of the spec's kit. That's a ways out from being feasible though.
For now, making Shadow Word: Death do enough damage to finish off regular open world mobs would be a start.
The Thought Harvester Problem
Thought Harvester is a hugely impactful quality of life talent that Shadow has had access to and used consistently in one form or another since Legion. Adding a second charge of Mind Blast improves the flow of Shadow's rotation, especially for Voidweaver, but is numerically not very strong. This makes it really hard to justify picking up, especially in Single Target as you have to path through Psychic Link, a 0% value node in that situation.
In comparison to the state of Shadow Word: Death, it's not as big of an issue, but it's still a perplexing state for the talent to be in and especially disappointing given how two charges of Mind Blast has been the established rotational flow for almost 10 years.
How do we fix it?
There's two main ways this could be fixed. The first is to make the talent baseline, as it's not particularly powerful. This would also have the added benefit of freeing up the top section of Shadow's Spec tree a little more.
The second is to add a connection from the Misery / Invoked Nightmare choice node directly to Thought Harvester, alongside attaching a small buff to Mind Blast just to make sure the talent is consistently competitive.
These aren't complicated problems, and as such they don't have particularly complicated solutions. These talents just feel like they've gotten lost throughout the Midnight pruning.
With Shadow Word: Death out of the rotation, are you glad you won't have to worry about the backlash damage? What other quality of life do you find difficult to nab in Midnight?
