I feel I may be in the minority here, but I much preferred the way spriest played in BFA.
Recently tried playing it again and it just doesn’t feel very…cool maybe is the term I’m looking for.
Building up insanity and then exploding with dark energy and tentacles felt so epic and powerful in BFA.
Really liked the gameplay back then. But I also am not a spriest main so open to being told I’m wrong.
I believe there’s a big chunk of players who enjoyed the Void priest play-style because everyone I talked to in game expressed the same feeling.
I have only seen people on this forum hating on void form, yet the same people are still complaining about the current iteration.
Hopefully we void priests can be rebirthed in the next expansion.
Honestly I think everyone who kept playing it at the time enjoyed it to some degree, myself included. Moving on from it was less a case of disliking the mechanics of playstyle, moreso the conclusion of a series of mishandlings by multiple developers that showed there wasn’t a clear plan or understanding of how to tune or expand upon the mechanic. The version of voidform shadow we had been left with after BFA was a lifeless husk and every change they had planned to make to it was for the worse, most notably the rank 2 addition of void bolt.
In hindsight you could argue that simplifying the mechanics for the developer’s benefit hasn’t exactly put us in any better of a position, but I also dread to think what things would have been like had the spec we had in alpha of Shadowlands gone live…
When I started playing it I couldn’t believe I hadn’t played it earlier. Instantly became my main.
One other thing I’m not keen on with the current iteration is the amount of light based talents I feel like I have to take from the regular priest tree.
This has always been a part of priest’s identity and something it struggles with being the class made up of two opposing forces instead of adjacent ones. Shadow priests are still priests though.
Also not to keep going on about it but it really cannot be understated just how bad the version of shadow that came to Shadowlands Alpha was. The push away from voidform may have for some people been about turning back the clock to before legion happened, but for a lot of others it was more about averting outright disaster.
Perhaps, but at least give us a glyph so we don’t have to use anything light-based.
I liked it as well idk why everyone hated it in bfa.
In pvp atlezst it felt more chill to play and most consistent dmg than this hardcast pain in the a…
BFA Shadow was the most fun I’ve ever had in this game, and I’ve been around a long long time.
It was such a smooth spec with no big CD windows to manage. Just do your rotation and don’t drop voidform, so simple and so satisfying.
The insanity drain added a “thrill” element to the spec that’s never been replicated. It’s really sad something so good got butchered and deleted. Current shadow is nowhere near an adequate replacement
All I know is I’m not having fun at all, but doing it anyways.
I really loved bfa shadow too. Similar feel to legion without being as cheesy as surrender to madness. The rotation felt insanely frenetic if you maintained a long void form stack and ramped up your haste, and the playstyle of not running out of insanity plus all that haste really meshed with the class fantasy to me. I’d love to see a return to that or something closer to it, I’m not personally a big fan of death speaker + da.
I thought BfA shadow felt like a less fun version of 7.1-7.3.5 shadow, but I’d happily play either one over what has come since.
Shadowlands Alpha did one thing rather well. It managed to somewhat unite those that loved Legion/BfA shadow with those that hated it. At least everyone seemed to agree that Shadowlands Alpha could not go forward as it was.
This is my experience as well. BFA Shadow feels anemic relative to Legion Shadow. Your Voidform stacks were effectively capped and your ramping damage that increased relative to those stacks was reduced. We didn’t go nearly as high with Voidform stacks until it was with ridiculous corrupted gear at the last patch, and even then we couldn’t get 99 stacks.
While our Voidforms were weaker in BFA, our base spells still didn’t feel effective because the damage removed from Voidform wasn’t distributed back into our base spells, it was instead distributed into Azerite Essences/Azerite Powers.
Pretty much this. There was absolutely no trust amongst the community that Blizzard could fix the problem in the time / amount of development effort allotted, so it was better to just bail to something else easier to understand.
I wouldn’t really consider current shadow a fix either.
Slightly better than shadowlands alpha perhaps, but this current spec nobody seems to be satisfied with. I have yet to meet anyone who loves this version of shadow.
To be clear shadowlands alpha was BFA voidform with no azerite traits, void bolt castable during mind flay, and somehow also devouring plague as a spender on top of it.
It had no redeemable qualities and was an absolute mess.
Oh I agree it was awful, I’m just not convinced current shadow isn’t awful as well. It still feels bad to play, just in different ways.
I think Blizzard was far too hasty in moving away from voidform. They did it in a panic and threw the current spec together haphazardly. Unfortunately it’s left us with a spec that feels as though it’s been limping along ever since.
Certainly, I just don’t think the collective trust was there.
You are and that is why priest has been changed back over the course of SL and now DF.
That said, I always said from the beginning that they should split shadow up into two specs. One void spec that can have everything from Legion and bfa, and one shadow spec that can have everything from MoP/WoD/DF.
Bfa spriest was pretty similar to legion with legacy of the void if I’m remembering right. I don’t think it’s realistic that we will ever get surrender to madness back. Letting us extend void form without limit becomes impossible to balance around and the whole horrible death part…
I just found that to be a much more satisfying play style compared to what we have now. Getting a really long void form on a bunch of trash or a boss felt really satisfying.
Priest needs a 4th spec for void so they can separate void entirely from shadow. 2 completely different play styles, that might be fun. I personally quit shadow because of the void crap in legion and DF.