Get rid of one of the two lvl 100 shadow talents. Add a devouring plague talent. Cost 85(?) Sanity and applies a mega dot, something like forbidden obsidian claw damage, that also heals the priest. Does not enter voidform.
Please
8 Likes
I could get behind that or something like the devouring plague with orb. Every mind blast gives one orb and each orb will is worth a certain amount of insanity when used with devouring plague. Something like 1 orb gives you 10 insanity 2 orbs gives you 20 etc, so allowing you to extend your void form plus do more damage with a heal component. You can make choices on when you want to hit it depending on what you need for the fight
Reintroducing orbs would require a lot more development resources (I think). just adding a spell (devouring plague), that cost a resource the priest is already using (insanity), might be easy. I am no programmer or whatever but that doesnt feel like a heavy change. This would allow you to do consistent damage, if you went with using insanity on void form, or bursty dot damage if you used it on plague. Now that I think more into it, it would probably have to cost 100 insanity to make it not to insane damage. Since they (blizzard) are hellbent on keeping surrender to madness, keep it, and keep, legacy of the void, replace dark ascension with my idea of devouring plague and call it a day. The big whigs can tune the numbers accordingly.
2 Likes
So I like the idea, unfortunately so much power is invested in the slow ramps of Voidform & Insanity that it likely wouldn’t work.
Not that you couldn’t buff Devouring Plague to do sufficient damage to make it similar, but let’s see:
Napkin Math:
- A Spriest deals 50k DPS single target
- 80%+ of our DPS comes from Voidform mechanics & ramps
- Devouring Plague has a duration of 6 seconds
- Generating 85 Insanity without Voidform mechanics takes about 10 seconds
- Devouring Plague has an ideal uptime of 60% (6 seconds every 10)
= Devouring Plague would need to do 80% of 50k = 40k DPS overall
= Devouring Plague would need to do 66.6K DPS while active (only 60% uptime)
= Factoring in crit and haste gear, each tick would need to hit for like 60,000 damage
That’s actually not as crazy as I thought it would be, I guess part of that is because it’s still assuming 60% uptime.
It also basically guts our mobility
2 Likes
Sounds great for pvp 
Also, I think the 80% number is pretty high for voidforms damage contribution
i strongly disagree with simply giving us Devouring plague as a talent. this will just make it so you build insanity and then spend it on devour plague. it would be so boring and brain dead.
If they bring back devouring plague there need to be a full rework of the spec into a builder-spender.
I’m not disagreeing with bringing back devouring plague just bringing it simply as a talent without addressing the other major issues in the spec.
1 Like
The current way Shadow is balanced includes all the long ramps that Voidform and Insanity entail.
This means we sit in Voidform for ~80% of a fight, gaining a myriad of buffs:
- 10% damage (Voidform subtract Shadowform)
- up over 100% haste
- up over 75% crit
- access to Voidbolt, often our highest damage contribution spell
- nearly 100% of Shadowy Apparitions, including the effect of Auspicious Spirits, and Spiteful Apparitions, occur due to the haste+crit of voidform above
- DOT refresh GCDs are freed up due to Voidbolt refreshes
- Mind Blast’s cooldown is decreased, meaning a good portion of its damage contribution is due to this CD reduction
- Whispers of the Damned scaling relies upon that CD reduction and the massive crit we get due to COI
Not entering Voidform to instead cast a Devouring Plague means DP would need to do all of the above damage, by itself, combined, just to come out equal in single target damage to continuing to use Voidform.
Further, since our Insanity generation in this model does not scale as well to multiple targets (most of it comes from Mind Blast), the proposed Devouring Plague talent would actually perform worse on multiple targets than Voidform.
I said 80%+ because if anything, 80% is a conservative estimate.
Edit: Oh and that’s not even counting the opportunity cost of using whatever other talents are on that talent tier.
Long story short, it sounds like a simple fix, but unfortunately there is no simple fix to the Voidform/Insanity system, it’s fundamentally flawed. Replacing it is the only sane option.
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That’s not necessarily how the math works out, it’s complicated. Very complicated. I’ve been messing around with a spreadsheet the past few days, toying with ideas about what Shadow could be, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about it.
We’d need to establish a baseline DPS that we do without entering VF, then we take that and compare to what we do in VF. If you wanna get mathy, you take the base DPS, multiply it by the time spent in VF and then subtract that from the total damage done during VF. That’d get us exactly how much DPS VF provided, ignoring LI and CoI. I have no idea what that number actually is, but it’s a lot.
Taking it further, you then have to take into account the damage per insanity. VF drains, over the course of a single VF, about 400-500 Insanity. That varies a lot, but I’m not going to get into hard math. So if you wanted DP as described in the OP to be competitive with VF, it just has to contribute about 20% of the damage gained by one entire VF (again, ignoring LI and CoI).
And that still might not be accurate, since on top of that entering VF also ramps up your Insanity generation just by giving access to VB.
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I bet we could do the full math, and it’d come out at 80% with a 5% margin of error.
DP’s damage would have to be enormous, it would be the highest DPET spell in the game by far. The entire spec would revolve around it. Everything else we do is irrelevant except as it would improve DP.
Side note: That sounds familiar…
2 Likes
These are very good points. I just want shadow to be fun to play again. 
This is the issue with quick fixes, especially when people are kind of blinkered by the “Anything is better than voidform” mentality.
Fact is, it’s not going to be a quick fix if you want it done well,
3 Likes
There would need to be two talents. Devouring Plague for single target and then an equivalent of AOE.
The best solution but least likely at this point is to drop the whole Voidform/Insanity mechanic and revert back to Shadow Orbs.
That said even a bandaid to get around Voidform would be nice at this point!
2 Likes
you mean the covenant system? cause that’s what they are for the spec a bandied just like the artifact was and the azerite/curroption gear also.
As for shadow orbs being brought back. Blizz would never do that. it just won’t happen/ I would donate three of my left foot toes for science if they did but they won’t so…
1 Like
The simplest bandaid is to make voidform a talent. Base void eruption would be an insanity spender. Voidform no longer grants increased spell damage and removes shadow form. People can still ramp if they want to, everyone else gets increased spell damage all the time from shadow form.
Of course, the non-vf playstyle would be incredibly boring without a few additional insanity spenders to spice up the rotation, but it would be essentially the same as the devouring plague days.