big curious question. Is Shadow’s mastery going to change now that we can avoid from having to use voidform at all?
I am very happy with these changes so far across all specs. Especially shadow. I can’t believe that now I can truly avoid void form. Yes, finally!
Looks like I missed quite a bit today. I’ll look at the tree more in depth and post my thoughts soon.
Dark Ascension seems to conflict pretty hard with Shadow’s mastery. Dark Ascension consumes all your Dark Evangelism stacks to get a 20% damage boost to non-dot spells like Mind Spike and Mind Blast.
But if you have even 10% mastery baseline, you’ll be getting a 20-30% damage boost from your mastery anyway, not just for non-dot spells like Mind blast, but also for your dots which are also doing damage.
Dark Ascension’s damage bonus seems to need to be at least tripled to feel like a cooldown.
Am I missing something?
My thoughts on the General Priest Tree Update from a Holy Priest perspective:
Top row:
Middlerow:
Bottom row:
Final thoughts:
There’s a lot more interesting options and a lot of the talents that would basically flood Holy with mana have been removed or tuned down. I end up having so many points left over at the end that I pretty much have to pick stuff up top.
My thoughts on the new Holy Priest tree:
Top row:
Middle row:
Bottom row:
Final thoughts:
The Holy Priest tree feels like a massive improvement over the last rendition. There’s a lot more interesting choices and playstyle options and you don’t feel like you’re walking into the expansion getting nerfed.
The question that lingers on my mind is what playstyle will be Holy’s go to for raid healing. You have potential with Prayer of Healing w/ Prayerful Litany, Revitalizing Prayers, and Prayer Circle synergizing like crazy with Prismatic Echos.
A “renew” heavy build seems mostly underdeveloped though. Issue #1 is Renew doesn’t scale off of Mastery. You have to stack Versatility to buff it up.
A single target healing build is going to lean more heavily on Lightweaver, Crisis Management, Light of the Naaru, and Harmonious.
At the end of the day you can really only funnel points into one particular playstyle. It’s also fairly hard to weave in damage abilities into a single target M+ focused build.
In regards to Holy Priests damage in M+… Holy Priests are kind of lacking in this department in the tree. You have a talent that buffs Holy Fire and another that let’s you cast 3 free Holy fires in a row.
To conclude… I do need to point out the obvious elephant in the room that Holy Word Salvation is a 100% raid mandatory pick. This really needs to be addressed because it incredibly limits your bottom tree point allocations.
I think you see exactly as it is reads / meant to be.
Personally, I like doing extra “burst” damage during my “damage cooldown” window. However, I don’t want to have SO much of my damage to exist ONLY in that window causing the rest of the time OUTSIDE that window to have to be lowered in order to have correct balance.
I would assume that when using Dark Ascension, it only granting your “Burst” spells (Mind Blast, Mind Spike and Shadow Word: Death used rotationally) that the rest of your spells wont need to be nerfed “balanced” as much in order to offset that window.
Basically, in Cata we got Mind Spike. It was meant to be used for QUICK fights to combo with Mind Blast to kill things fast. THAT is the way that imo Dark Ascension should be viewed at now. Its not to increase ALL your damage (Dots etc.) its to just give you a moment to amp up your QUICK kill spells. But done in a cleaver way using Dots as a trigger for Psychic Link as the Conduit to bridge the damage from your Dark Ascension Window to be applied to all targets with Dots on them is where it truly shines.
That’s How I see it anyway. Once I am able to get Beta I can see it first hand. But that’s how it looks on paper to me.
Think Twins of the Sun Priestess and how it allows you to use Power Infusion on a friendly target + yourself. Same thing with Guardian Spirit.
Any thoughts on going the Shadowmend → Masochism route for another school heal and the 10% DR?
Seems like the beta is still very buggy and not really worth doing damage tests between different builds. It’s not registering my psychic link damage at all when I mind spike. When I mind blast for 8,500, psychic link does 1,250.
man I want beta to test priest out completely!
I hate only being able to make builds assuming that the current talents will be adjusted to a stable state ;_;.
These talent trees by far are the most exciting ones ive tinkered with… i’ve spent hours talking about it to my buds. wish i could test! D:<
So, curious. Are they still going to allow holy Priest to battle rez themselves once angel form ends in Arena lol. That would be awesome x].
Anyone in the beta that can test if Divine Word triggers a GCD?
Playing dark ascension the way you intend to is currently a sizeable damage loss.
Are we really worried about numbers at this stage?
I figure its about finding the right gameplay flow. Then numbers come in after the fact.
So after reading and watching and my own theory crafting on what would be “fun” to play Shadow as, I took the new current talent tree for Shadow and rearranged it a bit and removed/added things that I don’t think really mattered / made much of an impact.
Shadow Priest 10.0 Tree - Altered Variant
Shadow Priest 10.0 Tree - Altered Variant (Readable)
Vampiric Embrace - Swapped with Silence.
Sanguine Teachings - Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague heals you and your group or raid for 25% of the damage dealt.
Living Shadow (Changed it activation trigger)
Mind Blast has a 20% chance to cause your shadow to animate after a moment. For 10 sec, whenever you cast a spell, your shadow will cast a similar spell.
Unstable Darkness (Changed name from Ancient Madness to more align with both Dark Ascension & Void Eruption Themes)
Dark Ascension
[Voidform]
increases your critical strike chance by 15/30% for 15 sec, reducing by 2% every sec.
Dark Ascension: Death (Replaced Surrender to Madness)
While under the effects of Dark Ascension, your Shadow Word: Deaths cooldown is reduced by 50% and does 100% additional damage to targets afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch & Devouring Plague.
OR Alternate Version
Notes…
Shadow Orbs (Potential Idea for how this can work)
Your Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Flay have 5% chance to generate a Shadow Orb each time they deal damage. Max 3.
Your Mind Blast and Mind Spike consume all Shadow Orbs and deal [15% of mastery] more damage per Shadow Orb consumed.
Harnessed Shadows (Potential Idea for how this can work)
During Dark Ascension or Voidform, Your Mind Blast and Mind Spike deal damage as though they consumed 3 Shadow Orbs.
Dark Ascension
Dark Archangel (Dark Evangelism) - Instantly restores 5% of your total mana and increases the damage done by your Mind Flay, Mind Spike, Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death by 4% for each stack. Lasts for 18sec. 90 sec cooldown.
Notes…
Another Version of the NEW Shadow Talent Tree…
This makes adjustment to the Voidform Playstyle
Shadow Priest 10.0 Tree - Altered Variant - 02
Shadow Priest 10.0 Tree - Altered Variant - 02 (Readable)
This version changes the way Voidform interacts with Hungering Void.
(Removed) Void Bolt
(New) Irrationality
Each application of Mind Spike on your target increases the critical strike chance of Mind Spike by 5%. Stacks up to 3 times.
Casting Mind Blast reduces the cast time on Mind Spike by 20% for 3 sec.
(Changed) Hungering Void
While under the effects of Voidform, Your Mind Blast and Mind Spike can cleave up to 3 targets and applies Void Vulnerability, increasing the damage of your Mind Spells by 10% stacking up to 3 for 10 sec.
Casting Mind Spike while in Voidform no longer extinguishes your dots.
From what it appears, Devouring Plague and its insanity cost compared to the damage it deals is very funky. Seems like with the way the rest of the new talent tree is panning out, Devouring Plague seems like a button you don’t really want to press that often. So then the question becomes… If I am insanity capped, what do I do when I want to Mind Spike things down? That becomes an awkward dance around resource and dot management.
Remove Insanity entirely…
Make all abilities cost nothing or cost mana. With the Shadow Orb talents, THOSE can be made to act like Cata orbs in that they amp up Mind Blast, Mind Spike and Devouring Plagues damage. Each spell would consume all Shadow Orbs for amplified damage.
This would then feel good as you can focus on no dot burst window and then go back to dot window and weave back and forth without feeling like you are doing something wrong with capped insanity. Oh, This can work with Mind Sear as well in that Mind Sear consumed all orbs to do giga damage… Or consumes 1 orb per tick of damage.
Outside of Consuming Shadow Orbs… all abilities cost mana (or the ones that should cost mana) and we get mana back via Masochism from Shadow Word: Death feedback, popping Dark Ascension, Dispersion, Vampiric Touch mana battery buff again.
Perhaps not enough time for DF. But something to consider moving forward.
I mean… I do agree, but my point is that Shadow’s mastery currently relying entirely on dots to function… and then this talent, doesn’t make sense and no amount of tuning changes that.
Obvious solution is to allow mastery at full benefit during DA and take that off voidform, since voidform has it to account for Shadow’s lack of dot spread, which isn’t the case anymore in DF.
Yea that works as well.
But I thought one of the issues with Voidform was that SO much power was built into it that it made being out of it feel like crap.
So I figured it would be fine to have this give and take where our dots are at FULL power outside DA and then our NOT dot effects get amped up during it.
I really feel that would help the hill/valley feelings of power while still allowing us to BURST on demand for both Single Target and Multi target with the SW:P and VT / Physic link effect.
Honestly, only when you pile all the other interactions it has / had on top. DA has none of those.
DA is already trading dots being active for higher direct damage burst, that’s probably enough of a trade off. The damage buff of DA is 20%, you’ve gotta remember that shadow has a 30-50% damage buff from having 3 dots on its target in the first place thanks to shadow weaving.
Honestly mastery just kinda in general plays at odds to a lot of the new (old) ideas in the tree.
Fair enough.
I don’t mind either from what I can see thus far.
I suppose once I get my hands on it and tuning is more dialed in is where I can make a more concrete opinion on it.
Yeah, I’m trying to avoid discussing tuning, you can remove all the numbers from everything I’m talking about and just read the effects and it still feels kinda odd.
I’ll do a write up soon I think.
My only major issue (outside of the complete chaos of talents to to make cohesive/no direction) is that it feels like Voidform is getting the cold shoulder. Visually, it’s the best thing we’ve got. I feel like they are putting it on the backburn now. So many changes have been made to it and it is growing weaker each iteration. It’s now a shadow of what it use to be in it’s glory and uptime lol. (R.I.P Legacy of the Void PVE) Anyway, the addition of Voidform may have had it’s issues but it did give us new visuals and a ascension of power/theme of spec. I hope it doesn’t continue to get the S2M treatment where it virtually becomes unused. I enjoyed Legion’s visual overhaul for the spec and Voidform being around fast casting/maintaining the form and some mobility but… some of these changes hurt, 9 second void bolt cd? 15 second duration of Voidform? Still a 2 min cd? I get it’s been tough tuning it since Legion but it’s starting to feel like ‘borrowed power’ at the beginning of an expansion where it’s been stripped down as a whole. The whole idea of transforming into a more sinister Shadowform was/is very cool. Now I do like some of the talent tree changes, but I really hope Voidform isn’t becoming the afterthought. I second it just becoming its own class at this point. Don’t let Voidpriest die.
Now I do welcome the playstyle without Voidform, we basically get more than one way to play the spec, I get it. Everyone gets their choice to roll with or without it. Also I did enjoy the MoP playstyle and it seems we are getting that back but… we were essentially sitting turrets trying to get those MF: Insanity casts off. Which looks nice and gave us a short burst period but hurts when you have to move. I guess only time will tell what happens in the coming iterations of DF Beta. More mobility please! 
One thing to note… Mind Spike… so are we going back to WoD CoP rotation maybe? Cause it seems like we are going to be only using dots (in ST) for the short CD burst window of MF:I after we cast DP like we did in WoD.
And I think there is some confusion/conflict with Psychic Link. It says Mind Spike/Mind Blast damage causes VT targets to receive 15% of the damage as cleave but Mind Spike still extinguishes dots??? I need to see how this is all going to work out. Again two different playstyles is dope, I just hope its done with class identity/theme in mind. Which at this point it seems we are all over the place looking at those bottom talents lol it is very chaotic at the 20 point mark. Lots of choices when reaching the cap points. What’s the actual direction? What vision do they have for the spec? Serious question. Looks like we will be playing piano spec for real now. The spec tree is a lot of buttons.
The Class Tree however, very nice changes. Not much to say about it or finding anything detrimental. Maybe moving Tithe/Hallucinations to it, again minor.