Priest: Death and Madness / Painbreaker Psalm

When using the legendary Painbreaker Psalm with Death and Madness, Shadow Word: Death does not reset if either of the instant dot damage effects from Painbreaker Psalm land the killing blow.

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I’m getting exactly the same issue. It’s really bothersome because if it worked properly it would speed up some of the general farming I’m trying to do. Now it just slows it down.

Couple of other bugs I found:

  1. It doesn’t correctly benefit from mastery until your dots do damage to the target. IE, if you apply dots via Misery or Damnation and then immediately SW: Death, it’ll do less damage than if you waited until they start ticking. Kind of annoying if you want to do some quick burst.
  2. It will do the full 8 seconds of damage even if there’s 0.1 seconds left on the dots. This might be a bug but this one is of course in our benefit.
  3. Finally is the bug I mentioned in the topic that I’ll elaborate on. When you hit the target, the combat log says shadow word death hits first, followed by two other “Painbreaker Psalm” effects, one for each of your dots. If either of these is what deals the final blow to the target, Death and Madness won’t proc (SW: Death won’t reset, you won’t get the 40 insanity). Some people I talk to speculate this may be because under the hood, the instant dot damage is happening first and killing the target, so SW: Death might not be hitting and the Death and Madness debuff never gets applied. I’ve gotten use to it, but it’s damn near gamebreaking.
2 Likes

I’m having the same issue, death and madness failing to reset the shadow word death makes me remove this legendary when I’m fighting low health enemies because it becomes such a problem

It’s less noticeable in mythics if you hit things right as they go into execute, as it deals full damage but doesn’t kill them instantly. But yeah, would love to see a hotfix for this. And hopefully a buff too, because it’s still pretty underwhelming compared to some other options.

I noticed the Torghast Anima Power by the same name, Painbreaker Psalm, just rolls the damage from SW:P directly into the SW:D damage (The Anima power consumes 100% of the SW:P duration). That iteration works really nicely most of the time, but I still occasionally fail to get a Death and Madness reset because of my Runecarved Painbreaker Psalm getting the last little bit.

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Yeah, this is a huge issue. I’m re-reading the text of the legendary, and it definitely implies that the Shadow Word: Death spell is the spell doing the damage. Hopefully this is a bug

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Yeah it’s a pain. I get that they probably wanted to separate it so the added damage doesn’t count toward backlash, but that damage causing SW: Death not to reset makes it constantly screw up chaining executes. The point is to kill the target, not to feel bad when you accidentally kill it. lol

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Aside from the backlash occasionally almost oneshotting the priest.

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That’s absolutely true. However the increased SW:D backlash from the Anima Power version of Painbreaker Psalm plays nicely into Catharstick if you have a healer and they know to keep you topped up. I am really getting the feeling they put the legendary in alongside the anima power to have us test it out. The anima power works properly from a Death and Madness standpoint, but the legendary version works better from a not killing yourself in Mythics/Torghast/whatever sense. I wish they were able to flag the Painbreaker Psalm damage as capable of proc’ing Death and Madness.

A simple solution would be to make the legendary have you not take backlash damage, as the legendary seems to want you to use SW: Death outside of execute occasionally anyway. (or reduce it by like 90% for the utility of damaging yourself to break CC)

It’d also be nice if the legendary extended the execute window to 35% or so, but I mostly just want to see this bug get fixed. Annoying when it happens in a pull and you have to wait for a 16s cooldown AND don’t get the 40 insanity.

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Hell, it wont even let me craft the item on a chest piece - so I guess its really bugged out!

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Yeah, this bug is insanely annoying. It’s less noticeable in group content, but in solo content, it’s totally broken. Half of my SW:Ds get ruined by it in Torghast. Pretty bummed that I spent gold I barely have forging this legendary, and even more bummed that it still hasn’t been fixed. Poo.

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I look at the hotfixes every day in anticipation just to be disappointed again.

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Yeah I’m right there in that boat with you. I love the idea of this legendary but I think I might just abandon ship for the tentacle gloves soon if this isn’t fixed

Looks like they changed the Anima Power version of Painbreaker Psalm. Now they both interact badly with Death and Madness. That and now the Anima Cell version of PainBreaker Psalm no longer benefits from the <20% health damage multiplier.

Since the January 4 Hotfixes half the time when I kill something in Torghast with Shadow Word: Death while using Painbreaker Psalm and the Death and Madness talent the cool down doesn’t get reset, getting extremely frustrating, this used to be my favorite combo of powers and now it’s just annoying, please just change it back and let us kill ourselves if we are stupid.

4 Likes

Is this still an issue? I don’t want to craft it and waste a week’s worth of Soul Ash if that’s the case.