Repost for visibility
Some thoughts regarding current trees in shadow side.
Mind spike-1
Vampiric insight -1
Coalescing shadows -1
Mind melt -1
Puppet master -1
Harnessed shadow-1
Psychic link-2
Whispers of the damned-2
Mastermind-2
Insidious ire-2
Mind devourer -2
That’s far too many talents for 1 spell, 16 out of 30. Blizz has a habit of doing this. It happened in shadowlands with conduits or legendaries. Were they would completely nuke a talent or spells effectiveness and then bring it up to par/buff it thru conduits.
The capstones also need work. The 3 talents before the capstone lunacy & idol of yogg, all interact with mindblast but these capstones don’t have a strong emphasis on that. The shadowflame prism capstone and it’s prior talents have synergy.
Lunacy- awful and boring talent
Idol of yogg- takes way too long to spawn and when it does it’s damage is awful.
Idol cthun - see no way this competes with nzoth. 15secs way too long. Useless in pvp. Hard to say now, but if shadow overflows with insanity without this talent, it becomes even worse. Void tendrils look cool and visually fit the theme. It was nice in legion. I think this would be better as 1 point investment, easily accessible to shadow. Maybe have it do something more interesting.
I’m also torn between having dark ascension and voidform. What’s the intent or goal here? Do you want us picking both? There’s a ton to juggle between da, vf, pi,mb,ms,mindgames, all the “stacks” buffs. Assuming you take voidform. If you don’t take voidform you also render several pvp talents completely dead. Maybe having DA and VF be a choice node and then branch out the talent tree options to reflect that playstyle.
Surrender to madness - the real madness is not letting this talent die a long time ago. Something I would’ve liked to seen with voidform in bfa/shadowlands was a contagion talent that locks have as a pvp talent. You could make this as a choice node, hungering void for single target or this rot aoe. This would’ve been great in pvp. as you pop VF and the enemy team begins to rot from dots. Death by a 1000 cuts. Some of us old enough to remember when dots did damage and rotted enemies. I know monomania is similar to that, but it’s on the far left of the tree and you rarely cast mindflay or mind sear in pvp.
Also do pve players like the shadowflame prism playstyle? mind sear getting buffed, apparitions, shadow crash applying vt & swp, psychic link, swd aoe via pain dots, is this play style still necessary??? Seems like a lot of redundancy. I’ve never been a fan of pets for spriests since they were introduced a long time ago. I have a lock for that. Maybe it’s just me.
Mind trauma- adjust this. This talent became useless once you changed MF cast time.
Lastly I don’t think void torrent has a place anymore, no reason why I would take it over shadowcrash. This spell best use was in legion when it paused insanity for a play style that no longer exists. Probably best to just remove it.