Differentiating Void Eruption/Dark Ascension playstyles and giving each cooldown their own identity

Classes Priest
1

One of the most glaring issues that I am experiencing when using these two talents is that they both favor similar build paths/playstyles. Both cooldowns devalue the use of periodic damage spells, and when you have talent choices like Mind Sear, Mind Flay: Insanity, and Screams of the Void, all of these talents feel bad to use when both cooldowns choices incentivize NOT using channeled spells.

Dark Ascension does this in a boring and obvious way by simply increasing the damage of non-periodic spells by a flat amount. Void Form does this by putting a lot of its power in the introduction of Void Bolt and additional Mind Blasts. Even if Mind Flay/Sear was tuned in a way to be the optimal choice of spell usage during Void Form, the inherent design of the cooldown seems counterintuitive to that.

I would suggest changing Dark Ascension to almost be Void Eruption’s exact opposite, where instead of incentivizing the use of many direct-damage dealing spells in a small window of time, it now increases the potency of your periodic damage spells and encourages the use of channeled abilities like Mind Flay and Mind Sear. For example:

Dark Ascension
1 min CD
1.5 sec channel

Draw upon the darkness of your foes, dealing (70% of Spell Power) Shadow Damage over 1.5 seconds to all enemies within 10 yds of your target, healing for 20% of that damage done and gaining Dark Ascension for 10 seconds.

During Dark Ascension, your periodic damage dealing spells are 25% more potent, generate up to 100% additional Insanity, and increase the damage of your next non-instant Mind Blast by 4% for every second spent channeling Mind Flay, Mind Sear, and Void Torrent. This bonus is lost upon leaving combat.

I think this change would really open up more talents in the tree by avoiding the feeling of anti-synergy due to cooldown choice. This new Dark Ascension could also introduce a variety of supplemental talents; like ‘During Dark Ascension, you are able to move while channeling Mind Flay, Mind Sear, and Void Torrent.’ or "During Dark Ascension, channeling a single Mind Sear for more than 3 seconds causes your target to erupt with dark energy, dealing ### Shadow Damage to nearby enemies. "

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Voidform already empowers all of your dots with full mastery.

3

nerfing void form dmg from 20% to 10% is not the way to go tho… just make dark ascension different, more enticing.

i love my void form !, do not mess with it. We already got surrender to madness pvp talent pvp removed.

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4

DA gets to abuse crit talent twice as much as VF.

As for playstyle enticing… I dunno, blizz made themselves a problem to solve to not solve the other priest issues that we’ve been asking about first and were ignored.

5

The issue is that the way both Void Form and Dark Ascension is designed, they are both counterintuitive to using channeled spells, making talent choices like Mind Sear, Mind Flay: Insanity, Screams of the Void, and Idol of C’thun feel dead on arrival since these talents have absolutely no synergy with VF or DA. Both of these cooldowns heavily incentivize the use of talents that synergize with Mind Blast and Mind Spike- and even if the talents I mentioned previously were tuned in a way that made them the superior DPS option, using either VF or DA would feel, again, counterintuitive by the way they were designed.

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6

Nothing about using channeled spells for filler in Voidform is counterintuitive… we have been using channeled fillers in voidform for several years.

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Just make Voidform increase the tick rate of SW:P and VT by 30% while active.

2 Likes
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I really want Voidform removed all together. it may have been interesting in legion, but it has never been fun. my favorite shadow priest has always been the dotless version from WoD.

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Voidform right now doesn’t hurt anybody, get over it. It’s a dps cooldown, end of story.

And no shot I want a dotless playstyle when I signed up for a dot class.

That’s just straight trolling and is no answer at all to the problem at hand, since the same could be said of Dark Ascension.

4 Likes