How would you redesign your favorite WoW class if you had full control over its creative direction for 9.0?

One of the topics I’ve mentioned more than a fair share of times on this site is that of redesigning Shadow Priests. Sometimes, people outright ask me how I’d change them. Other times, I take whatever small, tangentially related bit I can and use it as an excuse to describe my dream for Shadow Priests. It’s not that I dislike the class or anything — which, to any regulars, is probably a huge “duh” — but rather I like it so much that I want to see it be as fun and appreciated a spec as possible. And for me, that means Shadow Priests divorcing themselves from the other Priest specs entirely.

My dream for Shadow Priests is that they become their own class. Lore-wise, it’s getting harder and harder to fit Shadow into the Priest echelon, and often, it just gets ignored in favor of painting the class as Light-centric. When stories of Priests pop up, they almost always ignore the Shadow side of the spectrum. Even during Legion when Shadow had its best chances of standing out, the Priest mount quest chain ended with us being told how bad the Void was and that we had to attack the Void to purge our, um, owl-thing of its Void corruption. Frankly, it made no sense as Shadow — and that’s entirely because it was a quest designed for the Priest class as a whole, not for Shadow Priests.

But even outside of lore, having more than one spec allow Blizzard to provide a more diverse toolkit, as well as help players really define what flavor of Shadow Priest they want to be. Anyone who’s been playing for a while — or diving into Shadow on WoW Classic — knows that Shadow wasn’t always so Void-centric. It used to be a lot closer to a psionic attacker with no signs of tentacles or void energy to be found. Now, I don’t think Blizz would necessarily need to remove the Void aspect were they to create a spec built around psionic attacks — but they could easily make it more focused on the subtlety of using mental assaults rather than direct attacks like Void Bolt or Void Torrent. And on the other side of things, how cool would it be to have a Void-based spec where you could choose passive buffs/effects by picking which Old God you worshiped? Just thinking about it makes me wish we had Shadow as its own class, because there are so many ways to expand it into multiple specs.

I’ve talked enough now, though. If you could change your class in any and all ways you desired for the coming expansion, how would you change it? What would the perfect version of your class look like to you?