You guys seems hellbent on not wanting VE as a healer.
I really feel like we can make good use out of it. We do need to invest into the class tree but having sw:death with death and madness could be enough of an investment for some cases.
For disc, it could be the way to finally heal with sw:death (or have they brought that baseline now?)
If you’re investing heavily into the right side of the tree, I feel it could be a good button during sfp window in dungeons 
So, uh, Greater Fade is gone? That kind of sucks…
Can we get Inner Focus or something back for kick/silence immunity?
It’s honestly also just incredibly weak. 50% compared to 85% on live, before you even get into how awkward it is to build a rotation out of shadow spells for disc and holy for its duration.
It should be useful to all three specializations or moved to the shadow tree. Plus…Dear Lord the hotkey/button bloat…
VE isn’t a smart heal, right, I seem to recall?
Doesn’t sound that exciting to overheal some player at 98% health on a very long CD with limited single target shadow damage only.
It’s a dumb smart heal. It will pick a damaged friendly player, it won’t differentiate beyond that.
TLDR: It overheals a LOT unless you’re blasting into healing absorbs.
It really shouldn’t be limited to just Shadow damage, that’s some old Vanilla design that’s just weighing it down.
If I had my way, I’d make it grant X% leech for the duration (something high, like 15-20%), and any overheal is then transferred to other damaged friendly characters. And take it off the GCD.
I agree. I see nothing wrong with how things are. Nothing actually comes off as “competing,” though some things obviously synergize better in certain ways. The only thing I feel like might throw people off is Mind Spike, but I’d imagine that has more to do with not understanding Surge of Darkness interaction, which wouldn’t be surprising, it hasn’t existed since WOD - 8+ years ago.
And while building around it in other ways could lead to traps, it does give the spec some dimension which should be seen as a good thing.
If there were enough nodes to build only the style you choose, sure, but there aren’t. Once you finish building “cata shadow” you have to grab some nonsensical points of VF shadow, and vice versa. Not to mention what happens if it turns out you’re supposed to take DA and VF at the same time.
I get people who despise VF shadow are staunchly trying to defend their little corner of the tree they’ve fought to see return for 6 years, but if people’s answer to “This doesn’t make sense” is “Don’t pick the parts you don’t like” then the whole thing’s gonna end up a disaster.
I think that’s where clever use of (Choice) Switch talents solves that issue.
And if you cant see the “correct” choice in those “Switch” talents for the build your putting together… well blizzard did say that you CAN build bad builds… or something along those lines.
I mean. I’m not saying it’s strong… but you can still double down on your atonement healing a bit as disc.
I feel I could make use of it in 2s or 3s . It def could have some love (with not limiting dmg to shadow only).
I feel it overlaps a bit with shadow cov in terms of utility for disc… and it might create a bit of a button bloat as well but I still like the idea. Wether it’s good or not will depenr on tuning and maybe not limiting the usage to shadow only
Which style are you having trouble building with this tree?
Almost 2k comments later, I suspect I’m giving feedback to the void (heuheu) but here are a few key thoughts that I have for Shadow/base class.
Core Talents:
Silence should be in the class tree. Priests being the only healer without a ‘kick’ is not going to fly. Keep reduced CD in shadow.
I miss the [Mind Blast Rank 2] talent that was in the class tree. Giving some absorption to MB was good passive bulk for Shadow and made Mind Blast make more sense for all 3 specs as a way to keep some level of support while contributing damage.
Shadow Mend cooldown might be a little high for my taste.
Angelic Feather and Body and Soul should really remain a choice node, but Body and Soul needs a buff/rework after the changes to PW:S.
Sheer Terror (increasing damage required to break Psychic Scream) should also make it a cower, or at least make that an option somewhere.
I’d honestly like to see a total rework of Vampiric Embrace, but at the very least, remove it from the GCD.
Apathy, I’d like to see the “critical strike” requirement removed, even if it was reduced to like a 65% snare, or 3 second duration, a snare has no place being RNG.
Crystalline Reflection should reflect more than 20%.
Spectral Guise, please.
Shadow:
Misery needs to stop trying to compete with other talents. I think it’s universally accepted that people enjoy having it, and it feels bad every time you need to consider talenting against it. (Kudos for finally making SW:P duration match VT. This has always driven me insane. [Heuheu).
Unless full non-DoT builds become viable, including a talent t o adjust Devouring Plague, I have some reservations on Mind Spike not requiring /being separate from Surge of Darkness. Perhaps we need to see the missing 3 talents before we know if this will be an issue in the future.
Mind Spike would be nice if the crit buff was 40-50% to guarantee a crit with 2 stacks so that it aligned better with Mind Melt, as you’re expected to cast Mind Blast after 2 Mind Spikes.
Mind Melt would benefit from having some type of Mind Blast cooldown reduction per Mind Spike as well, currently there is no throughput outside of movement to be gained by the instant Mind Blast.
Dark Ascension needs to lose the cast time and have no GCD or add a damage competent to it, these are problems we fixed in Shadow Lands, I’d rather not bring back another empty GCD to use a damage cooldown.
Piercing Shadows could use some love, it’s pretty bland.
Not much to say about Void Eruption other than it might be a little out-classed now, but I’m also glad that it’s deep in the tree so it’s an option as I’m not a big fan of using it.
I’d love to see Mind Devourer swapped with Piercing Shadows, as it’s far more interesting and could be used more frequently in the 2nd gate.
I think it’s time to let the Surrender to Madness meme die, but at least it’s a node well out of the way. Maybe it won’t be so bad if they buff Void Form, but I can honestly say I’d rather it never become “meta”.
General Class Thoughts:
Thanks for listening.
I think that is fine as the “main” spec to pick that talent would be Shadow and with Mind Spike, we can get that Crit on Mind Blast every time. Still useful for healers, but I don’t think they should have 100% uptime on a slow like this.
I would prefer little to no animations.
This is why…
Imagine if you will, you are defending a base in a battleground and you are strategically hidden from view. 3 people come to take the base away from you, but they don’t see you. You might actually be able to dot 2 of them up and then start Mind Spiking the 3rd and spike after spike following right after with a Mind Blast and with no travel time animation you have just massively chunked down those 3 before they figured out what direction you are in as they didn’t see no spell trail.
Point is… After getting the purple fart cloud animation for Shadowform… I would tend to tread lightly when asking for animation updates lol. Sometimes if it isn’t broke… don’t fix it. lol
Mind blast has a 9-15 second cooldown. with a 3 second duration, it would never be 100% uptime. Unless you mean just 100% chance to trigger. Either way, while a single talent can create an opportunity to always proc it, I still don’t feel like snares make sense as RNG. It’s a soft-CC, having it 100% on a moment where you’re already getting instant casts and can freely move yourself is hardly a reason to keep it RNG.
As for Mind spike; I do agree to some extent. My hope is that Mind Spike doesn’t end up with a trail though. The old version was only on the target’s head (two spikes that came together). I would like an updated animation on the target being hit, because it IS important to know that you’re being hit and not taking invisible damage. People deserve to be able to react to something, but I definitely agree that adding a trail to it would be a nerf.
How do you feel about not having an AoE filler anymore? We asked for an AoE spender because we only had a filler, now we have a spender and no filler. Even with mysery, dark void and shadow crash, there is nothing to replace mind sear as a builder so the rotation seems slow!?
My only feedback with the new spriest talents is that I really hate the idea of mind spike removing dots, our kit revolves around our dots due to
Mastery
Ghosts
VI procs
insanity Gen
abilities generating dots
Especially in a dark ascension window its further exacerbated as you’re spamming blast and Spike and generating all this sanity but when you cast DP it’s being removed instantly via Spike. This doesn’t feel right losing your spender is never gonna feel good in terms of gameplay or just anyway, let alone the fact that you gain almost less damage in the window due to losing our dot damage tick AND losing our mastery buff on the target (approx. 10-15% damage per dot on the target equalling 30-45% increased damage via mastery)
This doesn’t feel correct at all and needs to be looked at ASAP.
Other thing in the talent trees I can deal with at this stage but spike is definitely the big outlier in terms on anti synergy. I’m not sure how to address this issue (maybe make Dark ascension gain full mastery effect? like voidform or just remove the dot extinguish part from the spell and nerf spike a bit to compensate?)
I’m not a designer so I’ll leave it up to the devs.
I’m not in love with not having a filler, personally. But it almost feels like a caster Demon Hunter or Monk in the sense that it’s a bit more cool-down and cleave oriented. I don’t think it’s BAD, just… It’ll take time to get used to. The big concern is that our AOE better be bursty if it’s going to compete with classes with sustained AOE.
Wait it trades dots? I’m a little confused - as written DA only says it consumes your evangelism stacks, not the Dots themselves. So you’re trading 10% of your DoT damage specifically for 20% non-dot damage in a short window. You’re not losing your mastery bonus for activating it as-is, right?
Granted I think you’d probably know a lot better than me as far as shadow’s concerned.
This is baseline now. SW:D just heals through atonement period, or so they say. It might still be healing in execute range. But SW:D damage has a delay, obviously, so you’re still getting backlash from it post-hoc. Meaning your atonement doesn’t heal back any of the SW:D damage you take, so it’s still not mega spammable for us in most situations. Death and Madness makes this a little better because the next SW:D can heal up some of the first SW:D if you delay it a second, and so on.
That said, it would never be worth taking VE over anyway, considering what you’d lose in the rest of the tree (as it stands). Actual numbers tuning hasn’t happened yet, so nobody can say for sure, but I mean… It’s a nerfed version that you have to take 2 talent points to get it working well, and there’s already a lot in the class tree we’d want to take.
The bigger problems though are VE isn’t off the GCD, so you lose a global for it, and it’s just not powerful enough to consider a real cooldown, despite being one. All we can proc it with is MG, MB, and SW:D. All of which have cooldowns, so you’re wasting a lot of that VE window not proccing it at all, and it doesn’t even smart heal the most injured player - it just heals a damaged player.
The single-target rotation for the Dark Ascension window seems to be up in the air. Some are saying that during the DA window, we just spam Mind Spike, get our stacks that buff Mind Blast to instant and 90% crit, and then cast Mind Blast. And repeat. This would extinguish our dots at the beginning of the DA window.