First I want to say these recent changes to Shadow are amazing. DP feels strong as an insanity spender and the new procs are great. That being said, my primary concern is that DP is our only Insanity dump which means a lack of choice as to how we spend our resource. I believe this is could be a great opportunity to introduce more ways to spend our primary resource in a way that is thematic to the spec. The fantasy of “spending” insanity would fit well with a defensive insanity dump such as Dispersion, Shadowmend, or Power Word: Shield. Right now, Spriests are pressured into taking Body & Soul for movement bursts. My idea is to strip Dispersion of it’s CD and tie it to Insanity. Ideally it would be a mode you could go in to that drains your insanity and requires insanity to be in the form. This would offer the Spriest a reward of regeneration and/or movespeed on demand as long as they can manage their DoTs. It would come with the tradeoff of not being able to use DP.
Since it would be the only other way to spend insanity, it could even use its own talent row, giving us 3 unique iterations of our new insanity dump.
Body & Soul - Gone New Dispersion Baseline - Toggled. Reduces all damage by x%, regenerates y% mana, and increases movement speed but you cannot attack or cast spells. Costs z insanity per second
New talent row ideas
Astral Dispersion - Dispersion now increases your speed by an additional x% and the mana gained by an additional y%. (and is also more sparkly)
Circle of Blood - Replaces Dispersion. You collapse into a pool of blood and become untargetable and cannot attack. All healing received is increased and you leech health from nearby enemies.
Greater Power Word: Shield - Replaces Power Word: Shield. Conquer the whispers of the void, extinguishing x insanity for a massive shield that you can cast on yourself or an ally that also grants a burst of movespeed.
Improved Shadowmend - An idea I got from one of the guys in the thread below. Make Shadowmend a defensive insanity dump. It could remain a cast with a fixed insanity cost, OR Make it a toggle that requires insanity to keep up and make it a strong heal over time as long as you are in Shadowform or Voidform. It would depend on whether Spriest is getting Flash Heal in Shadowlands which would make the 1.5 second cast heal niche overcrowded.
-the goal here was to have thematically and mechanically different options that are all doing the same thing more or less.
-Body & Soul is no longer required for mobility.
-Another way to spend insanity.
That’s nice for AoE, but I think a means of dumping insanity for things like healing, regeneration or mobility could also be cool. That would grant us more of those things the better we are at managing our DoTs.
I’d say, leave the baseline Dispersion untouched, because if it would entail an insanity dump, it wouldn’t become as useful because you’d be sacrificing a lot of dps for defensives in one of the already few baseline tools that spriest got… It would mostly look like a nerf.
But yeah, I’d love if there was a different source of defensive powered by insanity. For instance a talent that would turn PW:S into a void shield, more strong, and feeding on insanity, because the current PW:S is nearly worthless for spriests. The only reason I ever use is for the speed boost from Body and Soul.
I somewhat disagree that tying Dispersion to insanity would feel like a nerf. Dispersion is already a trade off since you can’t attack whatsoever. The insanity cost replaces the cooldown, making Dispersion a toggle-able mode we can go into whenever we like. You can turtle at the perfect times to avoid large amounts of burst and you’d have bigger control over your health and mana bars. Overall I feel it’s a nice trade off if tuned correctly. DP damage, aoe, or utility / survivability.
As for PW:S I thought about a Shadow Word: Shield type ability but thought that would lead to too many purply spell effects. An amped Power Word: Shield talent tied to insanity would get the job done regardless of theme. Could lead to cool hybrid moments. I made sure to make that one of my talent ideas so we are thinking in the same direction for the most part
Oh… Sorry, I missed that part about the cooldown! Then yeah, I take back what I said. Lol.
To be fair, I think that the current PW:S light effect is kind of jarring when mixed with the spriest visuals… I’d take in a heartbeat a glyph to make it shadowy… They can make it more Void-blue though, so it wouldn’t clash with the purples.
Even a blood shield would fit the nyalotha purple/red theme. I agree the current iteration of PW: S is so dang weak and yet you are obligated to take B & S just to be able to move… makes you desire a more thematic approach to spriest mobility. That’s where I came up with the toggle-able Dispersion idea. For 2 expansions we dealt with decaying insanity in Voidform. Moving that decaying mechanic to our defenses would allow for something like toggle-able Dispersion, or a shield mechanic that actually helps us. The rate of decay, the amount of regeneration, the size of the shield, the movement speed, these are all things they can balance around.
I would think dispersion, if changed to a toggle, would potentially be very strong for pvp, where we could save some insanity and pop dispersion when we are about to get hit with chaos bolt or greater pyro. Maybe adding a 30 second cool down to it would balance it.
I think they should make shadow mend cost insanity instead where it heals of an amount, and instead of a debuff, it puts a hot instead. Flash heal is coming back baseline, I think. Shadow mend would be a stronger heal at a tradeoff for dps.
Lastly, I think voidbolt should be able to be used outside of voidform now, with an insanity cost, but no cost in voidform.
While I like your idea for dispersion, your design conflicts with your purpose. If you are insanity capped, and casting DP would overwrite, you can still dps but it wastes insanity. Dispersion doesn’t solve that, it prevents other dps.
Now, if dispersion made dots stronger (damage, crit, tick rate) at the cost of insanity, that’s interesting.
I think the problem is more that shadow generates far far too much insanity, especially with talents involved, to a point where you cannot spend it fast enough and not overlap devouring plagues on one target. Right now voidform as a 90 second cooldown has very little value because all the extra insanity it generates doesn’t go anywhere.
There’s a lot of different ways to solve this, but they all amount to DP uptime overall going down.
What are all the baseline insanity generators? (not including talents)
Mind Blast
Mind Flay?
Void Bolt
SW:P?
VT?
Also, I think all the utility spells insanity generation needs to me removed if they haven’t already. What do you think?
Also, imo I think the insanity generation needs to be balanced so you should max out at around 50 insanity every 6 sec to avoid overlapping DP (Single target mind you). I think its a non issue using talents in AOE to apply more DP’s to multiple targets.
What do you think? Is that a direction that makes sense? Or do you think we should instead find a way to “overlap” DP’s that doesn’t result in loss dmg?
What if when overlapping DP, the previous DP “remaining” ticking dmg gets “popped” and done instantly on top of the NEW DP application?
I’m working on the same principle that made WoD feel good.
The less abilities that generate a spec’s required resources (Not counting fillers), the better it feels when spells don’t generate that resource, or generate comparatively less.
I think DP needs to be in the 65-75% uptime range in pure single target, and the voidform being active bumps that up to 100% because of the increased generation from void bolt.
I really would love if Mind flay still generated insanity, what if Mind blast and Mindfaly were the only insanity generators. how will that affect insanity generation in relation to DP uptime?
That’s what I want.
I think Void Bolt either needs to go, or lumped in to only be usable somehow with LOTV and S2M. My idea was to have those 2 talents use Voidform. But the base toolkit gets Dark Archangel which acts just like Voidform but without the access to Void Bolt. In that case, LOTV and S2M would replace DA with VF imo.
Did you see the post in the official feedback thread that mentioned making Dark Thoughts the new mastery?
I was thinking that was a good idea in that it can scale with mastery and act mainly as a method to increase resource generation.
If applied to Mind Flay / Sear with a dotted target (currently) and then add a base % amount in DP so that its increased once you have Mind Flay on a target with all 3 dots on it but also it has a chance to proc with just a DP on a target. That way once you build up enough insanity to use DP, you are rewarded with more chance to get more procs of MB to build more insanity into more DP etc. It starts a nice flow.
Then also lumping Dark Thoughts onto our Shadowfiend to make him interact more with the spec.
I don’t see why void bolt is a problem. The point of voidform is to increase your damage for its duration by increasing your resource gen through an extra button.
If DP had a lower uptime in single target, then it would serve that role perfectly.
I saw it, I think it’s possibly out of reach but I liked it in concept.
Not sure this works with mindbender existing, especially with how obscenely powerful it already is.
Fair point on the Void Bolt adding extra insanity during DPS CD window.
How so?
Dark Thoughts already exists “passively”. Now you remove our current mastery and make mastery add to the Dark Thoughts passive.
To me, that sounds pretty simple.
Also, I read what you said about increasing Mind Flay to 4.5 sec duration to work with globals etc in order to “fit” in the procs of Dark Thought instant cast MB while flaying.
Question though… Why should we force our-self to “turret” and lose mobility on an instant cast ability? I thought that was the MAIN issue when Void Bolt acted this way? Why cant we just leave the Mind Flay duration the way it is and remove the Dark Thoughts “casting while channeling” altogether. That seems very clunky. We should just stop MF and use instant cast MB while moving… “stutter stepping” should we not?
Because of the low CD on Mind Bender?
Fair point.
What if the proc chance was lower on bender compared to fiend? Still clunky but that’s all I got atm.
My other idea is have this added via a legendary or tier set bonus. That might be a nice and fun shake up but not impact the core state of the spec.
Because I think casting while channeling is an interesting concept, it was flawed in VB2 because of the claustrophobic nature of the rotation created by void bolt. The changes to the base rotation created a lot more space, and freed it up much more to fit an interaction like this in. The mobility comment with VB was one concern of many, and remember now we have DP to fill that role, albeit a little less often.
Also worth noting that extending mind flay and mind sear to 4.5 seconds baseline each, and keeping their DPET (Damage per execute time) the same as they are on live, has absolutely zero negative effects at all.
Bliz already chose one way to augment shadowfiend through a legendary in the firelands 2set. I would also have rather they chose the DS 4set in some way too, but I’m not particularly sure how to shoehorn it into the spec baseline from this point. Shadowfiend and bender currently hit 12-13 times each (With haste on beta), is that 12-13 mind blast procs? how are we doing this?
I just think its clunky. I rather have more mobility as we don’t have blink or demonic circle/gateway etc.
So agree to disagree on this front. Because, if you don’t have a proc then you are fishing for one and as soon as you have one, your using it while mind flaying. Basically our only movement as you say is during a DP cast now? That doesn’t seem like its enough tbh.
Lets say they have a base proc chance of 5% each hit (and maybe have Fiend be double proc chance baseline so bender = 5% and fiend =10% etc.). Affected by mastery, the number will scale up from there. Tweak numbers as needed.
To be clear, I am NOT saying it should be 100% chance to proc on each hit. But just a low % proc chance that is increased with mastery just like DP and Mind Flay on a dotted target.