wow Power Infusion, Shadow Priests and its Massive Effect on Logs and Toxicity

[Starym 3,780]

 

Today we're taking a look at the Priest buff Power Infusion that was added/returned in Shadowlands, as it's been creating a lot of problems in the community. The spell is affecting the DPS rankings, players are fighting over who gets it, and all the while Shadow Priests get abuse if they dare use their own spell on themselves. Our own guide writer Publik will be discussing this peculiar situation that has arisen, both from a general view and a specific Shadow Priest one.

Introduction

Since Shadowlands has launched there has been lots of discussion and debate about if spells like Power Infusion are healthy for the game. In this post I want to go over a few points about the new (old) cooldown that has been given back to all Priests with Shadowlands, from the perspective of a Shadow Priest main player. This spell is not brand new with the expansion, and has been brought in and out of the Priest toolkit ever since the original game came out. With the current iteration of the spell, Priests can choose to give themselves Power Infusion or cast it on an ally instead to give them a haste buff for 20 seconds. This is different from the talent iteration we had on the spell in Legion, but very similar to how it worked in Vanilla/Classic WoW which let you cast it on other people.

The main difference though is that now Shadow Priest players are given the same choice, do you want to boost your damage, or give it to someone else? In Classic this option was only available for Priests that choose to go fully into the Discipline tree, and not for those that went Shadow. By giving this choice to all Priest players Blizzard has effectively given the spec a new utility/support spell, that doubles as a throughput cooldown if used on the Priest. This has caused quite a lot of turmoil and toxicity in the community surrounding this spell, as well as others enjoying having an extra utility spell to give away. Needless to say, this is a divisive spell for all Priests to have.

Parse Culture

Top parse for Fire Mage on Mythic Sludgefist - 6 total Power Infusions

Since the game is now very parse focused at almost all ends of play, many players are doing anything they can to get that juicy haste buff from their neighborhood Priest, regardless of specialization. This is all to try and eek out as much damage as possible to push their numbers, something a large chunk of the player base, including myself, enjoys doing. The trouble comes into play where a DPS player is asking or claiming that the Priest should cast it on someone else, based on claims that it is better for them or just that they want to have it. The end goal from this is a noble one, especially if giving someone else Power Infusion ends up being more raid dps as a whole, but determining this value is actually somewhat tricky and there is a lot of grey area to even determine who should get it. Even if you blow away all variables, like skill or gear, most specs in the game have a layer of RNG on their damage or different haste scaling baked into their specs that could greatly affect if casting Power Infusion on them is more damage than a Shadow Priest just giving it to themselves. Many have attempted to sim this, including myself, and there are almost no sims that will be able to do this problem justice, and definitely nothing that can speak definitively on who it is best for any scenario.

From my experience this has bubbled throughout the community, as folks demanding their Shadow Priest to give away the spell to others with false claims that it is ALWAYS better to give it away, which is categorically false. In fact, most often Shadow Priests will get the most value out of the spell by keeping it for themselves due to the high amount of haste scaling baked into their base toolkit. Not to say that there are no situations where it does make sense to give it away, but it is by no means all the time, especially depending on the use case of what you are trying to do.

My main issue with this comes from the tedious and sometimes toxic culture around players arguing who it's best to give it to. You’ll always have a few people clamoring or arguing about this in raids, something that leads to lots of frustration from any Shadow Priests perspective. Several players have approached me with horror stories from their raid leaders demanding they give it away all the time, without doing any research themselves as to why that would be true. They have turned an ability that is meant to be an offensive cooldown for the Shadow Priest into a toxic utility spell that must be given away. This is not fun for anyone in this situation.

In my opinion, as a Shadow Priest, giving away this spell should not be something I should feel obligated to ever do. I picked a DPS spec, not a support one. Arguing with my raid team over who is best to get it is hardly fun either, I just want to do damage! This would be no different if suddenly Blizzard allowed Fire Mages to give away their Combustion to others, some would find that to be a neat utility thing for the Mage, but I would argue most would find it arduous and suddenly very un-fun to play a Fire Mage. I don’t think the situation is any different here, as playing a Shadow Priest without Power Infusion just doesn’t make sense. While some might enjoy this from a support aspect, pigeonholing all Shadow Priest players into this box to make this decision just doesn’t work with a community so focused on parsing. The added effect is that Shadow Priests are currently balanced around having Power Infusion as a part of their toolkit, and without it you notice a large damage loss even though that damage is being given to someone else.

What makes matters worse is if you are trying to do research on your spec (Shadow Priest or not) and checking through logs of what top players are doing, chances are the top few spots for each boss are taken up by folks that received Power Infusion. This has repeatedly caused the WarcraftLogs developer to tweet out their frustrations when so many people keep asking for a “Power Infusion filter”, it is just extremely silly of a problem to add to the game.

Lots of people asking about Power Infusion. I'm still mulling over options for what to do but am aware that it's your number one issue.

— Kihra (@KihraOfTemerity) January 19, 2021

Going to just start doing shots every time somebody asks me about Power Infusion.

— Kihra (@KihraOfTemerity) February 11, 2021

Chances are, if you look at your log and someone else's that received one or more Power Infusions, it will make it very difficult to compare yourself to that log, as that player's rotations are going to be affected by the PI and any constructive comparison will be pretty useless, potentially causing a lot of confusion.
 

Twins of the Sun Priestess

To fully understand the role Power Infusion has on our spec, I need to mention the Twins of the Sun Priestess legendary, that myself and others have crafted as a “band-aid” to the Power Infusion problem. Early on, most PvE focused Shadow Priests no doubt felt compelled to make this legendary second, especially considering our legendary effects are frankly underwhelming. The effect essentially is a wager in terms of raid DPS:

Is giving someone else Power Infusion at the same time the Shadow Priest wants it more raid damage than if that Shadow Priest was wearing a DPS legendary? 

This question is somewhat challenging to answer, and is really only a question to begin with for Shadow because we do not have strong legendary options. Our closest legendary is typically within the margin of error of running twins and giving Power Infusion to a strong DPS that benefits from haste, making this an awkward place to be in. The hard part with this legendary is typically the person we are giving Power Infusion to does not want it exactly when it is best for the Shadow Priest, typically making one of the people compromise with timings. This sharing problem has effectively bottle necked our fun in the sense that since our legendary effects are underwhelming, we are forced into a raid dps legendary instead of an exciting personal dps legendary.
 

Not all Bad

While I have gone on about the negative parts of the spell, I do want to mention aspects of the spell that myself and others do enjoy. Giving away Power Infusion has caused me and lots of other players frustration, but it has also turned it into a utility spell in my toolkit, especially when paired with Twins of the Sun Priestess. I want to bring this up because making Power Infusion an external is not all bad, there are players that enjoy having it as a utility option and there are also specific situations when it can be nice to give it away. The trouble is this is all hinging on community perception and the balance with this is very delicate, and does not always feel rewarding as a Shadow Priest player to give away one of our cooldowns. All the bad things aside, there are moments where being able to cast Power Infusion on an ally has allowed myself, and more importantly my group, to progress over a hard phase of a boss or decimate a hard pack in Mythic+ more easily than we could otherwise. This is the challenging bit of the spell, because some of these moments are interesting, but oftentimes this is not the case. These moments can get twisted in the community and make people believe that just because it is better to give it away in a specific situation, that must mean it is always better, which is simply not the case.
 

So where do we go from here?

I think Power Infusion is a fun spell to press, I just don’t think having it cast on allies is a healthy thing for the game as a whole for Shadow Priests specifically. Maybe other healing Priest mains feel differently, but I think ultimately Power Infusion should not be castable on allies baseline for Shadow. This might be a weird thing to fix mid-expansion, especially with the Twins of the Sun Priestess and Power Unto Others conduits relying on this mechanic, but I think the game would be in a healthier place if this was not the case. The “Support” role in the game is quite interesting to me personally, I just don’t like that it has invaded my main spec through several different abilities rather than it being added somewhere else.

 

Publik:

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[Quepha 0]

You say Priests do not have strong legendary options, but to me it looks like Twins of the Sun Priestess is a very powerful legendary, and if Talbadar's Stratagem is considered competitive with this at all then it must also be fairly powerful. What is considered a spec with good legendaries and how big of a difference does their 'good' legendary realistically add?

[Publik 7]

32 minutes ago, Quepha said:

You say Priests do not have strong legendary options, but to me it looks like Twins of the Sun Priestess is a very powerful legendary, and if Talbadar's Stratagem is considered competitive with this at all then it must also be fairly powerful. What is considered a spec with good legendaries and how big of a difference does their 'good' legendary realistically add?

This is a great question! To put it in perspective our best legendary (about equal to twins on certain situations) is about half as good as the best legendary for Balance Druids: https://bloodmallet.com/chart/druid/balance/legendaries/castingpatchwerk and likewise for elemental shamans: https://bloodmallet.com/chart/shaman/elemental/legendaries/castingpatchwerk

[SidonisAntares 288]

As far as I know, this is the only ability in the game that requires a legendary item to make it function like similar spells. Focus Magic for mages and Kindred Spirits for Kyrian Druids both work to buff yourself by increasing someone else's damage. I think the answer lies somewhere in making it similar to the Mage talent, such as granting haste to the buff receiver, and every x damage ability used by the player buff grants the buff caster y haste for z seconds.

Edited February 16, 2021 by SidonisAntares

[Skayan 52]

There is a simple solution, remove all damage meters from the game.

[Teufel 331]

Just bake the effect in some other spell for Shadow.

[Koxsos 38]

Member DK's hysteria being targetable?
These are all very flavourfull things that do not make it through this 'parse culture'.
It's like word of glory ret paladins having less dps, because they instapopped 400 - 600k hps to the raid in a clutch moment in BfA ending up one verdict short!
Oh noooo! My meter position!
There are still mechanics in this game that make that one GCD spent on dps not dying very worth it.
Just stop being a damn judgemental piece of trash off pure numbers.
You end up with people saying "stop being an egocentric *filtered* shadow priest, give ME the buff, it is I, who will use it the best!"
Put it on disco priests only again, give spriests something better.

[Nythoria 1]

Funny thing is there are only certain circumstances in which it is better for a priest to give away their PI to someone else than it is to use it on themselves.

• If there is a DMG AMP window... Fire Mages can do more DMG inside of a short DMG AMP window than a Spriest can... see Sludgefist.
• If your Priest is Holy Specced, then in almost all scenarios it is better to give to a MM Hunter or Unholy DK outside of the above circumstance.
• If your Priest is Disc Specced, inside of M+ AND has the Twins Leggo Equipped.

Outside of those scenarios it is always better for the priest to keep the PI and use it on themselves as either a DPS or Healing CD.

[Prophet001 547]

Spriest use it on yourself and tell these other nerds to get rekt and roll an spriest themselves if they want PI.

 

*shrug*

 

Imagine trying to lay claim to someone else's buff.

you got me bent

[Sarabandethemage 6]

I get that they may have wanted to make it a utility, but maybe they should have made it a self-only buff OR a "I give it away and I get the benefits too" buff.  People in this game are much too meter (or parse) focused.  That's not going to change.  (I remember some mage in  a group in one of the FIRST Group Finder dungeons I ran on my lock, back in WotLK, bugging me to use Curse of the Elements rather than Curse of Agony, which is what I usually used.  Then proceeded to link meter after pretty much EVERY FIGHT and yes, that included trash).  And this makes them greedy.  THAT or make it so when they are self-used, it gives a raid-wide buff also, but not when used on someone else, so that the self becomes the priority for the raid.

[lehadnk 0]

Quote

In my opinion, as a Shadow Priest, giving away this spell should not be something I should feel obligated to ever do. I picked a DPS spec, not a support one.

"So please remove another utility buff from the game cause the only thing I care about is fukken meters."
FFS, healers distribute Innvervate for 15 years, and no one brings stupid complaints about excluding WCL parses with two boomkins.

Edited February 18, 2021 by lehadnk

[Nibbles 0]

I don't care if this sounds silly but exactly this is one of the 3 reasons I even stopped playing. Yes, mechanics before logs, but logs are still a reward for your performance, and everybody looks at them. To assume anything else is just delusional, and to me it feels super frustrating to pretty much not have a chance to compete with the top logs without Power Infusion.