It’s not “nerfed” it’s different. Your abilities might deal less flat damage, but you get more haste for staying in the form, which - when balanced ideally - then brings your power level back in line with other shadow priest builds.
The more haste you have, the faster your Damage over Time spells will do damage… Meaning you have to nerf to base amount of damage to balance… which affects the rest of the spec.
The faster your VT ticks, the more Mind Blast procs you get… meaning Mind Blast base damage will need to be nerfed.
etc.
Edit:
What you are doing is borrowing the power to be used later in a ever increasing state. The rest of the spec has to just accept the low powered version and not getting an ever increasing scaling of it.
You have to have entirely different abilities… or you need a counter balance… each will make Voidform pointless.
You can nerf this damage inside of the talent. Once again, read:
Let me put it in a more concrete way:
Madness of the Old Gods:
- Your void form grants stacking haste for its duration
- Your void form drains increasingly fast
- Mind Blast and Mind Sear deal 30% reduced damage. (You can expand the list of spells and play around with the number as you wish to have this be “balanced.”)
This way, you don’t have to touch the rest of the Shadow Priest builds at all to balance this.
I feel like I’ve been through this song and dance talking about other suggestions for specs, tbh. I just don’t think it’s a good argument to say that something COULD be balanced if they did a ton of numbers tuning and fundamentally redesigned the playstyle more toward something acceptable.
Because when you start making concessions like that, you end up in a territory where the game designer has to walk the thinnest line possible. The spec needs to play like legion’s priest - in your words a very punishing spec when things go wrong, but extremely rewarding when things go right. How do you make the rewarding experience rewarding enough that the risk of punishment is worth it? If you’re not getting any more damage than the easier half of the spec (which still shares much of the same gameplay style), then are you really catering to the player who wants that challenge/reward? Because the payoff isn’t going to feel worth it if the result is the same thing you would have had otherwise. So let’s say it’s significantly higher - well now you’ve pigeonholed a bunch of people who wouldn’t otherwise want to into playing this risky spec because that’s the best way to play. Player behavior has shown time and time again that this is the case. Even in Legion, StM wasn’t the only choice a priest could take - but everyone took it even if they failed with it.
Basically - the problem is bringing the StM playstyle back would be done to appease a specific type of player. But to make that playstyle balanced would require so much tuning down that it likely wouldn’t appeal to that type of player anymore. At that point - is it really worth designing?
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Lets run this experiment…
Shadows Mind Blast hits for 100
Legions Voidform hits for 10 outside of Voidform… then it scaled up to lets say 150 in Voidform
That means when you start out, you are weaker then the rest of the spec… only when you MAX out do you become on Par with the rest of the spec.
So you are literally gaining nothing and risking everything if you are 100% perfect in your execution.
That I don’t think is what the players would want.
If Beast Mastery Hunter is meta, do you drop whatever class you’re playing to play it because it’s easier to do the same damage? Some people like certain playstyles, even if it is more punishing.
I played Arcane Mage for all of Shadowlands Season 3. The spec was bad. It was harder than specs that were better than it. But I enjoyed it a lot so I played it, I mythic raided on it - even on Mythic Halondrus - because that is the spec I enjoyed.
I mean this is the real question. Would people like to play a build that is only as good as another build when played perfectly? I believe yes, if you enjoy a certain play style you will play it over easier options. But maybe that is not the case for a significant margin of players.
To figure out this question is why I originally made this post. It seems to me that we have come to somewhat of an understanding regarding what would need to be done for Legion spriest playstyle to exist. Given that, the question is “Is this still enjoyable enough for a non-insignificant number of players to play it?”
Given that I have only seen people who dislike Legion spriest here, the answer seems to be no, which is personally disappointing but it is what it is.
Go talk to the Ferals if you want that answer lol.
They have to manage their bleeding and its a lot of plate spinning… just to be on par as everyone else… Would feel even worse if lets say I made build in Feral that made it to i just spam my Instant attacking and Ferocious Bite and not bleeding at all and do the SAME damage as my feral bleeding brothers.
What you are suggesting here… is worse then that. Because the scaling of haste ever faster and faster ramps up that playstyle to a stupid degree that you are FORCED to nerf to base damage to pointlessness.
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I take it you were not present on these forums in the Shadowlands Beta? It was quite interesting lol. Lots of voices.
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This is my point of view when it comes to that…
I was indeed not. I am significantly more interested in DF alpha and the new talent trees and significantly more invested in the game right now.
This statement is not the same scenario.
If I played Beast Mastery hunter, and there were talent options that made it an extremely hard-to-play spec that had significant chance of doing lower damage, but when everything goes right I do about as much damage as I would do anyway, then yes. I would play the easier one 100% of the time.
If I just… didn’t enjoy beast mastery hunter, I wouldn’t play it simply because it’s easier. But If I’m already playing the spec, that’s a totally different story.
My point is… we had a LOT of activity on these forums discussing Voidform.
I am trying to find the vid but…
A vid with Ian doing an interview with chat in the background started spamming REMOVE VOIDFORM over an over… it flooded the chat during a live Q&A.
Voidform is disliked by MANY.
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You can say this, but it’s not really evidence that a significant portion of the audience dislikes voidform. It’s evidence that some people that dislike it were paying attention to the interview and spamming their take.
You have no evidence to suggest that if voidform WAS removed, you wouldn’t see even more people in the chat spamming “BRING BACK VOIDFORM” to flood the chat.
Determining what players are engaging with is very difficult - and a random player simply can’t do it on their own.
If Burn/Conserve Arcane was competitive with Kyrian Burst, and significantly less prone to failure, I absolutely would still play Kyrian Burst Arcane mage. I enjoy it a lot more, and I have so much practice on it that my chance of failure is not that high.
The same applies to old voidform. It plays substantially differently - it feels a lot different too. If I am very good at it, then a good amount of the time I will be performing on it, even if I could just turn my brain off playing an easier build to do the same damage. To me, that is worth playing.
Best I can do with the limited data I can find.
But the data I tracked ever since BC has Priests as at least the top 3-4 in terms of popularity. It took a noise dive come Legion and bleeding ever since.
I mean one, I think you’re a very rare breed if this is true.
But two, even if that were true - would you have ever gotten enough practice to be good at Kyrian Burst Arcane if when you tried it you failed a few times and Burn/Conserve was much simpler and competitive? I’d say most people wouldn’t - they might try it, realize how risky it is, say they’ll try practicing it later, but end up sticking to burn/conserve the majority of the time.
Again, I just don’t think this data actually demonstrates what you’re saying. The only thing it does tell us is less players are playing priest. But has that considered how much less popular/more popular other classes are? Does it consider other spec reworks that happened outside the priest class? Is it possible that demon hunter’s inclusion actually moved players off spriest? Is it possible that the warlock changes are what caused it (after all, warlock is significantly more popular). etc, etc. We can point at that data that shows less people are playing priest, but the ‘why’ is VERY lost without a totally different kind of data to support it. Something we can’t see as players - because we don’t have perfect access to their API and we can’t track this population data through every change that happened.
The difference in this is that old voidform would be for people who already know they enjoy it. If I already knew I would love Kyrian Burst, I would still put in the practice into it even if Burn/Conserve was better. When I learned to play Kyrian Burst arcane mage wasn’t a good spec, and it has remained a subpar spec. At no point did I feel the urge to play something different, even when Fire and Frost mage were much better.
I moved to play a DH BECAUSE shadow was so bad.
I spoke with MANY people in legion in many groups and everyone was expressing how bad shadow was… expect in Raids.
I recall a time we got a 5th DPS for our +22 Court of stars and my buddie invited a Priest and I was like DUDE… WTH? lol. He said the guy was totally mythic Antorous geared out. So I was like fine we can try. We ended up doing just fine and the Priest pulled his weight. But that’s because he was stupidly over geared and we were just in Heroic Antorous gear and we still out DPSed him only slightly though. But every Shadow Priest we brought besides that guy always results in a horrible run with the priest dying and not doing enough DPS and not able to keep up with us. Oh and I asked the Priest about how he liked the class outside of raids and he said its awful.
But anyway… back on topic.
All I can show is a trend, the trend is going downhill after WoD. The reasons can only be assumptions, so all I can go off of is my personal experience and that of others I played with during Legion and only people that Did Raiding actually enjoyed or tolerated it.
But you stated I don’t know, or cant prove w/e. Point is, is you cant prove otherwise either. But I can bring up relevant data that shows how bad Shadow performed outside of Raiding. The fact that they had to add in Edge of Insanity talent alone is all you need to know to know how bad the spec is. It is not as contentious issue as you may think it is.