Shadow Priest Design Philosophy - Season of Discovery

wowhead.com:

With so many changes coming to Season of Discovery Phase 4, the community has been discussing class balance and tuning extensively. Today we received some insight into the Shadow Priest specialization, courtesy of WoW Classic Senior Game Producer, Josh Greenfield:

Note: this was part of a larger conversation on Class Balancing and Utility, which had led some players to question whether Priest utility was necessarily perceived as being useful in Season of Discovery.

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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.