Because the number of cooldowns is the issue. Not the number of buttons?
I don’t want to end up doing piddly damage outside of my cooldowns because I have three cooldowns that I would otherwise stack together where most of my damage is. Nothing is tuned yet on Beta, obviously, DP is doing 40%+ of people’s overall damage because every other button hits like voidform still existed.
Shadow now has voidform, why do we need PI. If you wanna keep the haste from PI to make the cooldown feel more visceral I could 100% see changing the damage increase on VF to haste
Lets say each DPS CD equates to 20% of our overall damage.
Then…
I would rather play at 80% most of the time and 100% some times. (1 DPS CD).
VS
40% most of the time and 100% some times (3 DPS CD).
Very crude way but I think it illustrates the point. Just because you have DPS CD’s does not mean your at 100% damage potential most of the time and then 100+% during CD stacking. In the end, all damage potential needs to equate to 100% for each class/spec. So if you have more DPS CD’s (Hill) then you have lower consistent damage (valley) which will feel bad when you don’t have CD’s up and that is the main problem which is why old Voidform was so problematic.
Thats the point of a burst do you not play Dps at all? void form is a flat 20% for 15 sec and haste affects our dots tick speed so more ticks while its on thats why we need Pi why do you think eveyone does more dps when lust is up not cuz it gives us damage% its makes ut hit faster. Example :in stead of doing 100 damage per tick every 2.5 sec when you lust it will tick every 1.8 sec. so you get more ticks over a 18 sec duration. why would anyone want to get rid of a free lust on a 2 min cd? and theres a legendary that of you cast it on ur friend you get the buff too having Pi is what shadow needs
TLDR: Shadow has always been the sustain dps, we had cooldowns, but we weren’t dependant on them. With 3 cooldowns stacked up we’re more likely to be dependant. That sucks, so I’d suggest dropping one of them to make that less likely to happen.
Blizzard will balance specs around their potential dps with CDs accounted for.
Look at fire mages, they’re a perfect example. They can stack major CDs and burst for insane amounts. Their damage outside of those CDs is pathetic. They might as well afk because without CDs they’re almost worthless
The more your damage is loaded behind CDs, the less effective you’ll be without them, and it feels terrible.
Plus shadow has historically been a sustained damage, or rot spec. It’s never really been about burst, that’s usually a warlock and mage thing
It’s never been about burst, but we’ve always and still should be able to do burst damage to some extent. Just instead of having that crazy cooldowns burst we have some of the best, if not the best, sustain damage in the game without cds up.
shadows damage will be fine out side of burst at least we dont have to talent into them like druids and shams. we have a 6 sec dot thats doing like x3 the damage of a dot that lasts 18 sec thats why they gave us DP and we have some nice aoe now so we will not be lacking in dps just a nice little bump for when you need to kill stuff. its not a big deal anyways its 1min and a half for our 20% damage some classes have it way worse
They are not in the number tuning/balancing phase yet.
The more DPS CD’s you add on to a spec, the more all the overall damage will be lowered (for balance).
This is an inescapable truth that will happen. That’s why we want as little DPS CD’s as possible to keep our damage relative consistent most of the time. But having a small little “burst” or “bump” in damage with a DPS CD then that’s fine. Just not that many and I think 3 or more is too many. 2 is pushing it and we cant really escape VF atm and I think we need to keep fiend as its both unique and very useful for situations where you want to prevent a restealth, cause spell pushback on a mage when your polymorphed, chase a sprinting druid to keep in combat since we cant catch up and/or slowed via snares etc. you get the idea.
In addition, you can have tier set bonus and legendarily or baseline interaction with fiend as whenever he attacks you get x thing. Similar to Tier 13 4 set bonus.
PI being exclusively group utility would be a win for shadow, in my opinion. We wouldn’t be tuned around using it on ourselves, so it’d net us additional utility. With PI not lining up with VF, it might feel a bit wasteful using unsynced PI’s on myself vs. stacking it with someone else’s cooldown. I’m also a fan of high sustained damage and we feel a bit cooldown heavy. I personally don’t like shadowfiend at all, but I do see the merit in trading PI instead.
I do like the idea of bonus haste (flat amount) instead of damage for void form, though I don’t know if that’d be better or worse.
shadows going to be fine the way its fixed. every dps class has a point they need to wait for dps cds its going to be fair we get burst on demand like everyone else not a whole minute later when were at 40 stacks of voidform ramp up killed shadow the moment legion prepatch hit
It will definitely work much better with the current proposed changes.
But I think we need to keep thinking about it critically and smooth out the rough edges. I think having PI as a 3rd baseline DPS CD is a rough edge that needs to be smoothed out in either removing it from shadow, regulating it to a talent or making it a 100% support ability i.e. we cant use it on ourselves.
im totally happy with not having PI and just having our spells hit a little harder to smoothen things out. id rather get some more utility CDs anyways.
I agree. I heavily dislike burst windows, and I’d prefer shadow be as much of a sustain/rot spec as possible.
It could be a talent which would give us options for certain fights and situations, but I think it should be removed as a baseline ability.
Having voidform and shadowfiend is already pushing it because we’re going to get covenant abilities, and trinkets on top of these things. I really don’t want to end up like mages
If it means damage could be redistributed into our dots, I’d be fine with either PI to be weaker and on a 90s CD to line up with Voidform, or if even more damage can just go right into our dots I’d be fine with the tradeoff of removing PI entirely.
I’m ready for our dots to be strong again on their own.