With the devs seemingly making the shift from burst damage across specs to consistent damage. and with priests getting their class apparently overhauled early in the development process (for once) what do you think this means for spriests?
Not holding my breath, but I don’t think bliz want to have to work with the voidform drain mechanic again. I think it’s interesting but I’d also need full trust in the Dev team they could pull it off.
They’re not doing any reworks this xpac. They’ve already made it clear this is another SL/BFA with dragons thrown in it. Class and spec design is still “fine” according to them.
They don’t want to do the design work that takes effort that they had to do in Legion, MoP (even WOD).
Now they’re just bringing back old crap they pruned from us and calling it innovation.
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After the lead up to BfA, I would not expect a major overhaul (I mean, there is a small optimistic, unrealistic part of me is hoping for one).
Regardless, my loathing of void form is such that if there is ANY way to play without taking it in DF, even if it is a net efficiency loss.
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I mean… Some specs feel like genuine evolutions from their SL iteration, others could very feasibly get there. Also shadow doesn’t even have anything old brought back, it’s just the whole SL talent + legendaries + conduits all at once.
Priest trees feel completely phoned in, and yeah if bliz have no plans to actually finish Shadow priest as a spec then it’s gonna be DoA.
hopefully not. nice attempt at something new and different. just didnt work. voidform was a MASSIVE fail. it didnt work in almost any content in the game. only on some raid encounters.
i get that its ok do not be great at everything, but its got to at least be viable and feel decent to be a good design. and voidform struggled even with world content.
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Have they? Because it’s certainly been the opposite over the past couple of expansions, and nothing in the new talent trees so far really shows a major philosophical shift from Blizz to me.
Void Form will definitely come back. The question is what it looks like, but I’m betting still a CD - I don’t think Blizzard will majorly rework that aspect of our kit, nice as it may be.
The talent trees are getting overhauled: not the class. Also, I haven’t seen any post about shifting away from burst damage.
Damage will naturally go down as we shed away all the layers of borrowed power systems from this expansion.
With Blizzard not having to focus on things like covenant trees, legendaries, conduits, etc… they can focus 100% of their effort into the talent trees.
From a design point that’s a major change because the talent trees have to be designed in the mindset they’re still going to be around 10 years from now.
It’s also less work overall.
That’s an optimistic take.
They couldn’t do something as basic as making 4 covenant abilities similarly tuned.
Boon of Ascension stayed unusable by shadow priest since Alpha feedback. Feedback was thrown into the trash bin as it usually happens in betas, and the ability went completely unchanged the entire xpac.
Warlock’s Impending Catastrophe was the strongest numbers covenant ability, they broke its knees with a 50% damage nerf, gave it a 10% damage buff in Castle Nathria, and never touched it again.
Comparatively, talent trees involve a massive variety of combinations to tune around.
Expect no change from the current SL tuning.
Months are going to pass with some specs doing 30-40% more damage than other specs in AoE.
And the talent trees are not going to change priest utility relative to the likes of shamans, rogues, mages, or warlocks. You’ll still only bring fort, mass dispel, and vamp embrace on a whopping 2 min cd.
The DF system is utterly convoluted and a total throwback to Classic nostalgia. Those massive talent trees with plenty of trap throughput branches were revamped for a reason. Now Blizzard’s response to the reversion of innovation after Legion is “hey guys, look, we gave you back the old stuff we took away in BFA and added like 3 new passives, but you can’t choose all of the new stuff we gave you if you want your old stuff back.”
This wasn’t simple - it was a fools’ errand from the start.
Making 4 different abilities in a way that they are useful to all specs in 3 different forms of content is a nightmare problem to solve.
At least for priest, all of the abilities saw play at some point during the expansion, especially on all specs.
Talents are much easier as a system because they’re self-contained to the spec. The bigger problem is the class trees.
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Its in the shadow tree but completely optional.
I myself don’t care for it so I was planning to avoid use it and shadowform like the plague. Which i think will be fine in pvp. Even in pve not using it would be fine I think but it’ll probably definitely help dmg. It’ll.depend on how you play and build your priest in DF.
I think you need to look at things in a different context.
With Shadowlands they had to design 4 different covenants w/ 3 different trees and somehow tune every single one of them to every spec ingame. Then you add in Conduits and that’s an extra 10+ things you need to make.
Then you had legendaries. Each class had 15-20 of them in total. Not all of them were useful, but somebody had to make them from scratch.
So all the development time ends up getting invested into a system that disappears in Dragonflight. Same problem we had in Legion and BFA.
Now we have a talent system that should be the future going forward and it’s far less convoluted than the talent system we had during WOTLK.
Blizzard already addressing class concerns in the alpha is a major step forward imho. They haven’t even released all the talent trees.
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Not taking voidform looks like about a 20% overall damage loss with current trees at least, more if burst damage holds significant relevance or having your dots active on every target is less doable (M+ / PvP). It’s not an option, you either take it or your damage sucks.
The tree isn’t designed around you not picking powerful things and having comparable options, it’s designed around some points being like that, and others being massive power spikes you acquire without a second thought as you’re levelling. Voidform, Hungering Void / S2M (Though you never take S2M it’s on the same node), and AM, are such a package of those power spikes.
Frankly if you want to play without Voidform as a cd, you can do that now by just never taking it out of your spellbook. It’d be just about as viable, IE: not.
If you want blizzard to make voidform less core to the spec and instead offer compelling choices that forego it, that’s feedback you should give and absolutely could be pretty cool if they do it right. However, anyone planning with current information to just “not take voidform” is shooting themselves in the foot.
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They have to address class concerns in the alpha, since the game is releasing in December. We’re literally in 5 months of class beta testing whereas class feedback from the other xpacs had 7-9 months to have class feedback acted on. This isn’t some breakthrough. They are rushing the expansion out for December sales and you’ll just pray and cross your fingers some class work is done by then.
It’s not even 5 months of testing for classes because usually 1-1.5 months away from release they lock the release candidate, so you’re looking at 4 months to sort the classes out. Look at the alpha forums, the class feedback is bare bones; most threads don’t even exceed 10 posts, and at best it’s 3-4 posters doing the bulk of the feedback.
How is this feedback and the actions taken to address it going to be remotely representative of the desires of the general populace playing each class?
It’s essentially class design by streamer/community rep vote.
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Legion void form was the best void form. What was so great about the Legion version, was that not only was it an engaging mechanic, but it had the theme/lore to match it perfectly
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For me, Legion voidform was overtly frenetic and unejoyable. It completely changed the playstyle of my favourite class since vanilla. As for theme, it attempted to unify what had been a diverse theme with different origins for shadow powers into a whole meta source, which was, in my opinion, just lazy and derivative.
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I hate void form and the current entire flow of Shadow Priest, and the fact that haste is such a required stat, but also makes gameplay substantially worse the more you have of it.
I spend more time looking at my action bar than at my character my enemies, and the actual gameplay. Sure this is partly a UI problem, but it’s not a problem I have on say, Affliction at all. I can breathe when I play Affliction. I used to be able to breathe when I played Shadow Priest.
Nobody should also be having to download weakuras or addons to manage this either. I’d like to hope that Dragonflight UI changes assist with this.
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Play on a smaller monitor then you can have everything in eye view. It’s not a pretty solution but it works.
What even is this suggestion? This is something I’d expect to hear from Blizzard.
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We’ll have to see once the expansion comes out. Numbers change and if VE was that imperative to the spec I would expect them to force us to get it like with VI currently. Different builds exist and will exist and in pvp especially dmg isn’t everything. I stand by saying that someone not taking VE is a valid, viable option. That doesn’t mean (nor imply) doing so is the best option.
I play this game for fun so I’m fine with a dmg loss that could go towards something that; I myself - deem more useful for my character.