I agree, but now that all the mind magic has been tied to old gods and corrupting madness, it’s very hard to separate the two.
To be honest I wouldn’t mind going back to purely a “Shadow” based spec, with no void or old god junk in it. I just don’t think Blizzard would ever do that. Of all 3 themes though (Shadow, Old God, Cosmic Void) I hate the old god theme the most, which is why I want away from it.
This isn’t a “random cosmic power”. It’s derived from the void lords. They are the embodiment of the void, just like Naaru are embodiment of light.
We’re literally in a raid tier dealing with fanatics who worship a void lord
Old gods are simply pieces of void lords flung out into space in the hopes they would corrupt a sleeping titan. Even the old gods are part of the void lords. It’s not a random power
my idea was to push main spec shadow focus and then have old gods pushed through oracle, while void stuff pushed through voidweaver.
archon being the holy version of the above.
So oracle – disc and shadow
voidweaver - holy and shadow (how will it work for holy? ) well simple, just dive into the flip them of the lore. Have the entropic rift flip as it grows and when it explodes it aoe heals everyone etc. my idea also included reworking void eruption/voidform into voidweaver, making it proc entropic rift. so for holy it cahnges to holy eruption / holyform
imagine voidtorrent fliping to holy torrent too. would be pretty cool.
archon – disc and holy
easy way to to let all the specs breath while not losing parts of its roots, while still letting us play with its more advance and specific itterations.
Well, technically speaking, Blizzard never said they can’t balance Voidform.
Players said they can’t balance Voidform.
Blizzard has never spoken to the difficulties of balancing Voidform, but they have directly addressed why they have been changing the ability. Go back and read what they said about shadow in the DF beta just before the expansion launched - the only reason they added Dark Ascension was because they thought it was important to let people play without Void Bolt. That was their sole consideration for what matters in shadow’s design, and that clearly remains the case because, lo and behold, Void Bolt is gone.
Blizzard focusing on removing Voidform doesn’t have to do with balancing the spec - it’s 100% due to the Legion rework kicking a very noisy wasp nest that didn’t have a solution. Warlocks and hunters had similarly major reworks to demonology and survival, but those players still had other DPS specs to play. Priests didn’t, and there’s still a ton of DPS only priest players that effectively lost their characters if they didn’t like that rework even though priest probably has the largest population of healers overall.
Ironically, they’ve agitated anyone that’s inclined to discuss the spec online since their refusal to pick a design and go for it has ended up burning everybody at this point.
On that topic, I remember early on in SL’s alpha/beta they made a change which was, technically, promising in regards to balancing VF. Not the Void Bolt castable during Mind Flay, that was always going to be bad, but putting all insanity generation on things on the GCD. That gave VF a hard cap on duration, the second insanity drain exceeded 100 insanity within a single global, you would drop out. You could have theoretically infinite haste and generate 100 insanity per GCD, but you could not go beyond that limit, you’d just go from full to 0 before you cast another spell. I built a spreadsheet to model it out at the time and even with outrageous stats it never got beyond like 30 seconds.
Technically, I think it could’ve worked balanced around that. It could’ve had less build up than what we dealt with in BfA, and been more of an immediate, impactful boost to get to the high haste levels that felt so good in Legion without being problematic about it. I still think there’s issues that would’ve needed working out (the pre-VF phase felt like garbage which was not ideal for solo play), but it felt more workable.
There’s plenty they could have done to just shadow to make it a more even gameplay experience, but the bigger issue is that every class except shadow had their damage on demand and shadow didn’t. Dying didn’t stop them from capitalizing on their cooldowns unless they died while bursting, but dying would completely reset shadow. Holding cooldowns for an intermission where you can’t hurt the boss wasn’t a problem for every class except shadow, but shadow lost their ramp during intermissions. Every other class got full value from Bloodlust, but shadow didn’t.
The issue with that design wasn’t that shadow had all those weaknesses - it was that no other class did and encounter design assumed those capabilities. Blizzard wasn’t willing to reassess their design principles at that time and was far more willing to erase shadow’s design rather than expanding the possible archetypes classes could express. Instead of making more tempo-based classes, everything became a builder/spender class with 15-20s burst windows available every 60/90/120s.
Blizzard is clearly willing to reassess their design philosophy for classes and encounters now, but they’ve long since discarded any interest they had in making shadow cool.
Now that they’ve redesigned the way health, enemy damage and healing are flowing it would actually be useful to have a shadow priest in dungeons and raids. The steady consistent healing would actually make an impact.
So obviously they removed all the SP healing potential .
They always seem to be designing all the classes for the next expansion except shadow priest who finally gets updated for current expansion.
If midnight shadow priest was what was going into TWW it would have been much better with really only void form being an issue. Finally fixed our interrupt so its not completely worthless. Finally gave us the needed fix for shadow crash delay and positioning. And now that other classes have had their mobility and survivability reduced we aren’t so glaringly the worst, though we are still the worst its a much smaller gap.
Now they are changing the game again and the priest as a whole is not fitting into the game changes again.
But seriously y’all that devourer demon hunter plays so similar to surrender to madness SP.
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