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@AggrendWoW @realharmen @tg16193429 @tlew360 There's a lot of feelings being shared on the forums about shadow priest right now

The main tenant of gathering feedback is that you aren't really looking for ideas, you are actually looking to see how people feel about certain things and often times the ideas suggested tell you a lot about the underlying feeling that led to that suggestion. That isn't to say some ideas aren't worth acting on. We do that all the time actually and one of the benefits of our team's agility is that we can pivot more easily than larger teams can when a good idea or key feedback is dropped on us. In general though is is less about "tell me what to implement" and more about "tell me how you feel" and try to target our changes on addressing the feeling. That's not always obvious (and we don't always hit the mark perfectly) but that's how we *try* to approach the feedback we get. As for "features no one asked for" that's a weird thing because sometimes, giving things that people don't ask for leads to a great experience. The level-banded approach of SoD wasn't really anything anyone asked for (at least not on a large scale), but especially early on it really worked well because it was novel and different and surprising. Of course I think we will look back on it and recognize how we could have done it better, but that's a good example of sometimes trying wild stuff can work out and be exciting... or at the very least teach you good lessons to make the future better. As for voting, that is something we are leery of. I've commented on this before but it's really a problem of scale and also the sort of connected world we live in. The example I use is what do we do if we put up a vote and a major content creator or large community decides to ask all of their followers/community members to pick the option they think players would actually like *the least* just to mess with it for lulz? There are many contemporary real world examples of this occurring and its always messy, and that kind of thing spooks us a bit when it comes to implementing voting.

@AggrendWoW any updates to Thunderfury sword? Is it going to be same stats and just buff it or we changing stats like hand of rag? Hoping to know soon so guilds can start planning who gets bindings in MC.

@AggrendWoW Please consider modifying VE and VT to NOT be tied to the shadow priests damage. That does 2 things 1) makes balancing output of VE and VT easier 2) allow shadow priest to become a real dps class without having a broken amount of utility youtube.com/watch?v=gOtz5X…

@AggrendWoW @JessieR84813629 @nohitjerome "the content hasn't been hard enough yet (key word: yet)" Bring it on!

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.

We locked the SoD class folks in a room and they did some cooking. Really looking forward to getting some of these adjustments and fixes into your hands. To manage expectations, we are going to try and get Hunter, Mage, and Warlock changes into your hands with this week's PTR build (arriving in the next day or so, barring some sort of unforeseen issue like we had last week), with some additional adjustments to other classes coming a bit later in the week likely via hotfixes to PTR. When we get the current slate of adjustments out, then we'll look to turn on world buffs on PTR. To further manage expectations, we don't expect the damage numbers to be in their final state for really any class yet. We are trying to focus on gameplay first and then we'll pull the levers on the numbers after things settle a bit. The WCL graph will probably never be perfectly flat in SoD, and we are okay with that, but we'll focus on addressing outliers next. Please try and keep this in mind and remember that we'll be at tuning the numbers for a good bit after we lock down the lion's share of the mechanical changes. I'll close out this long post by saying thank you for your feedback. While we can't/won't implement every individual idea people throw at us, the benefit of the feedback though is that it helps distill the underlying pain points you may have which in turn helps us try to focus our adjustments on the reasons for the feedback. That's the most valuable part of this and I think we are going to end up in an exciting place going into level 60 content (which is also going to be super cool!). Oh also, you might want to keep an eye on the Warcraft youtube channel this week :)

@AggrendWoW Love the shadow priest changes, as they help with rotation clunkiness. What are your thoughts on changing Mind Flay base range to 30 yards and Spriest scaling? Shadow needs additional scaling to avoid falling further behind other classes as more tiers are released at level 60

Build is being updated on SoD PTR now. While you wait, have some update notes: us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/wow-c…