Shadow Tree in WotLKFollow

For the people who haven't been following the info leaked out of the alpha, I decided to make a summary of all the new talents and comment on them. Here is the wiki with the spells and talents we know of, and here is a build tool with the new talents.

Some of the talents and spells, instead of values, have client gibberish that we can't understand. If that is the case, it will have [unknown] instead of the value.

So, it looks like we're getting some changes in the shadow talent tree, with some of the deeper ones making it more PvP viable. That's right, PvP viable.

DISCLAIMER: This is purely my speculation based on the leaked info from the alpha. If I'm wrong anywhere, feel free to correct me.

Let's start at the bottom and work our way up:

Spirit Tap/Improved Spirit Tap: Spirit Tap only got better here, with only 3 ranks needed to max it out. In addition, Improved Spirit Tap gives you a [unknown]% chance to gain a mini Spirit Tap when you get a crit with Mind Blast or Shadow Word: Death

Shadow Focus: I'm no theorycrafter, so I can't tell if this is a buff or a nerf. Instead of the "Reduces chance to resist by 2/4/6/8/10%", it is now "Increases chance to hit by 1/2/3% and reduces mana cost of shadow spells by 2/4/6%" The amount of +spell hit on items in the expansion might make up for this, but it is far too early to tell at this point. However, it will definitely be at least semi-useful, as 6% cheaper mana cost is nothing to scoff at.

Shadow Weaving: It looks like Shadow Weaving was bumped back up to 3% per application, as opposed to the nerfed 2% we currently have.

Focused Mind: Not a major change, it simply adds on one of the new spells to it: Mind Sear, an AoE shadow spell (Oh yeah, we get an AoE now).

Shadow Resilience: This is our first true PvP buff in the tree: "Reduces all physical damage taken by 2/4%", as opposed to the old "Reduces the chance to be critically hit by spells by 2/4%"

Shadowform: A small buff (or major, depending on how much you pull aggro), Shadowform, in addition to the +15% Shadow Damage and -15% physical damage, now also reduces aggro by [unknown]%.

Shadow Power: This one gets a nice buff: In addition to increasing crit chance on Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death by 2/4/6/8/10% (down from 3/6/9/12/15%), it also increases the crit bonus of those two spells by 10/20/30/40/50%.

Everything below here is a brand new talent, on new tiers, with the exception of Improved Shadowform, Psychic Horror, and Dark Spirit, which are on the same tier as VT (which is unchanged, by the way) and Misery.

Improved Shadowform: This is a major change right here, as is make fade useful in PvP. That's right, you read that correctly. This causes Fade to have a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects only when used while in Shadowform, and also gives a 20/50% chance to avoid interruption caused by taking damage when casting any shadow spell while in Shadowform. This not only makes fade useful, but it also means that Improved Fade is no longer one of the worst talents in the game.

Dark Spirit: Increases Shadow Damage by up to 10/20/30% of your total Spirit. This means that were going to love IDS Priests! :D

Psychic Horror: Ths gives a 50/100% Chance when a target is affected by your Psychic Scream to also give it a horror effect for 4 seconds. This is going to be useful in Psychic Screaming Undead so they don't just WotF out of it. If I interpreted the tooltip correctly, then the target will gain 2 debuffs: The horrify effect that fades after 4 seconds, and the Psychic Scream fear effect, which fades after 8 seconds.

Growing Pains: Takes 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus healing and turns it into bonus damage. Also, Mind Flays have a [unknown]% chance to refresh the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain on the target. This talent's going to be excellent for PvE, as you will not need to refresh your Pains nearly as often, and the damage boost is always nice. It's unclear if this applies to the "healing" part of "increases magical damage and healing" items or not.

Dispersion: The 51-Point talent of the shadow tree, this is kind of like a priest's Cloak of Shadows. What happens is you Are unable to cast spells or attack (you can still move), but you take 90% less damage, and regenerate 6% of your health and mana every second for [unknown] seconds.

Well, that's it. Hope I didn't get too many things wrong in the opinion sections. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong anywhere!

-Fishy

Edited, May 24th 2008 3:29pm by IDrownFish

Well, they updated the Alpha and changed mny of the talents.

http://war-tools.darlinganime.com/index.php?i=priest now has the new talents, and I'm too lazy to do what I did above again. That was kind of useless anyways.

There's the link to the new talents.

100% interruptible mind flay /drool