For you, for some others, but certainly not for everyone.
There’s always one class on top of list and one at bottom, you seem to dislike not being at the top and thus conclude it is broken?
I don’t know if you’re intentionally being obtuse or not. Has nothing to do with being on top or bottom. Voidform only works in niche environments. Not sure how this is not getting through to you.
When something only functions in one extremely small subset of an ecosystem, it is bad design.
So it is not an issue… its how voidform is, its different… it isn’t build to be click 1 spell and do big dmg for X seconds. They’ve build it as a ramp style…
On overall, what you are simply saying is : I hate how it feels and work, so change it. The class is far from a failure, it simply changed into something that X players loves and Y players hates just like Survival, Demology, Outlaw, etc.
Please don’t put words in my mouth or tell me how I should feel about it. There is some disconnect with how you are interpreting it all.
Shadow priests have always been about ramp up time. Still, you’re missing the main weakness of voidform: it takes ramp up time and dials it up to 11. The more gear you have, the longer you will have to wait to see your true dps.
There is no value in game where increasing the ramp up time becomes an advantage.
It can’t be balanced. It’s either going to be overpowered or underpowered. Has nothing to do with me liking it or not. You have to realize its implications objectively and its relationship to the environment that it’s in.
Can you elaborate on ramping having ‘zero inherent value’?
As I understand it from a conceptual level, the entire point of ramping is to be slow to start, but once you’re “in it”, your DPS is greater than others for the duration of that peak. It’s essentially crests and troughs that (ideally) would even out to similar DPS.
If the amount of peaks needed to put out similar DPS isn’t there due to the length of fights, then you can theoretically tweak Voidform to either start closer towards its peak, or have shorter, but more frequent waves.
How does Voidform compare to a “standard” DPS if Insanity was infinite, but there were no haste stacks? I ask because if this theoretical DPS is already at-par with “standard” DPS, then any amount of bonuses (stacks) provided by Voidform would justify how long you spend in Voidform. If it’s not on-par, then is the argument that you need to stay in Voidform for too long in order for it to justify its DPS?
The pattern itself having value because of the location, flexibility, and frequency of the peaks and troughs. Not just the average number at the end.
There is value to being able to frontload your damage to kill something quickly.
There is value to having high sustain because you aren’t reliant on your cooldown timings lining up with the situation.
There is value to having control over your damage so you can allocate it effectively into relevant targets.
Ramp doesn’t really have that, you hit a peak at a point and that can coincide with a relevant target, but those who can frontload can time their burst to hit that relevant target, the ones with control can obviously hit that target anyway, and the sustainers can hit it too (For a bit less) but could also hit anything else relevant that had come prior for a lot more than you could too.
Even if your overall damage shakes out to be the same, your damage has the capacity to be relevant in far less situations, and even when it is then its horrifically inflexible because you had to be ramping in order to have that peak land at specifically that time.
I understand this perspective, creating a sort of ‘goldilocks state’ where ramp isn’t too long, and voidform isn’t too short. Thing is that goldilocks state has to be achieved across a variety of performance levels, content types, and gear levels. It’s a lot of micro, more than you’d need for any other conventional dps spec.
So the value of extending voidform is purely the increased uptime of the buff itself, and benefits that generates? Hypothetically speaking. You’d get an inflexible, but otherwise static sustained damage pattern, with very low initial ramp. That sort of thing has historically been valuable on fights where things don’t just line up to be burned by conventional cooldowns. Though I’d say at that point there are two major issues.
Fantasy wise, you’ve kind of lost the spirit of what voidform is trying to ‘sell’. The spec already felt hollow and stale in BFA when voidform provided ‘almost’ nothing per stack. If it didn’t have stacks at all, it’d have to have substantially more oomph, mechanically, viscerally, and thematically.
Being completely inflexible, because you have no peaks or troughs of any size at all, kinda sucks. So you’d need some minor cooldowns or ways to amp yourself up to kind of create a slightly higher plateau in exchange for a lower one. Shadow used to do this through its resource system, but since insanity is not a resource with a defined value it can’t really do that in its current paradigm.
I’m iffy on agreeing to this without seeing some numbers. I’m imagining that the only case where it wouldn’t be relevant would be on extremely short fights on the scale of a world mob. Stuff like elite trash packs, which naturally takes less time than a boss fight, I feel is a long enough timeframe (Assuming relevant gear parity across the group) that DPS would still be equal or at least close compared to linear DPS.
With Shadowlands specifically, I feel this will be better resolved by virtue of how gear is static. The amount of RNG for gear acquisition is extremely low compared to BFA, and I feel that tuning all classes in Shadowlands will be an easier time if they shift too far one way or another.
I would think that it would be two-fold: The Why am I trying to answer a hypothetical question?
Is this relevant at all? Literally just stealing links from a thread in Reddit.
It would seem like based on these, Shadow Priest is at or slightly above the middle of the pack in Raids and M+? I’m just assuming that I know what I’m looking at. Judging by this subforum, you’d think that Shadow Priest is at the bottom for everything ever. Can’t tell you how they fared from 8.0 - 8.2, I’m sure it’s on one of those links.
To me, not having an advantage is a disadvantage, when everyone else has some sort of advantage. Bosses are not a static thing, they have periods in which damage is relevant, periods in which it is not, adds come and go, phases wax and wane, some bosses even go completely immune or take increased damage for periods of time, and its the damage on these relevant targets or during these relevant periods specifically that ramp struggles to find any inherent value.
DPS, once again, is not the issue. It’s the inflexibility of how, when and how much, damage you can do during a given relevant time period.
Again, numbers are generally not a concern. Also worth noting shadow is good at things purely by the virtue of being a shadow priest and having the tools it has historically always had (Multi dot). But voidform is not a reason for this, because of its inherent association with ramp, if we were a sustain based multi dot spec, or a burst based multi dot spec, we would still be good at these types of things, and more besides.
Shadow’s overall dps during Nyalotha is and was fine during progress, however it’s ability to do relevant damage to relevant targets at relevant points in fights was seriously lacking, which meant outside of 2 multi dot bosses it was a very weak spec, even if its overall damage was good.
I was clarifying for my own sake, in order to be sure I was on the right track. The hypothetically actually referred to my response (Though I see a sneaky full stop wormed its way in the wrong place). Is this how you intended ‘no stacks’ to be interpreted?
That a toxic community issue that has build up over the many years of WoW. People will want the top of the top mostly now and ditch anyone low on the list. Which you know, will always have a few class / spec at the bottom.
Saying it cant do progression is open ignorance, it sure can do it. If you want to blame something on that, don’t blame the class / spec, blame the community behind it…
You keep thinking it fails everywhere, yet it doesn’t. It can do all the content well enough, why do you need to create a problem when there is none?
Well that is what you are saying… Logic has been used, 1+1=2. Which again you seem to say that you don’t like how it feels.
I hate to break it to you, but you are expecting a dialogue with a well documented troll. Your time is spent better elsewhere than arguing with a perpetual contrarian.
I figured as much. There is a lot of deflection and forced logic that tries to downplay the situation with a lot of general blanket statements in an attempt to get a rise. Not worth my time.
I loved how we could threaten melee with our disarms. Do you remember disarms? They stopped melee from beating your face in for a few seconds. It was a long time ago. I miss them.
Yup. Also, 3x mind spike into instant cast Mind Blast that crit and paralyzed them in place for 4 sec to set up another burst to dead if they didn’t die by then.
That’s it, along with DP, my friend and I used to refer to spriest damage as “constant burst”.
That is what I miss about it, all our damaging abilities felt so impactful. You had alright pressure with dots, nothing that outshone affliction (the OG dot class). Then you had it all supplemented by really good direct damaging spells, and it was all useable in PVP too. The instant casts were invaluable against the insane mobility melee has (don’t want to get too much into that).
Right now it’s like, death by a thousand tickles. The only thing we can do is stack haste so we can tickle faster and faster, which kinda starts to hurt after a while.
Yeah, well, Blizzard decided that it was a bad game experience to be locked out of most of your abilities and not be able to do anything.
That is, if you were a melee class. Interrupts and silences, however? Yeah, those apparently are not a bad game experience.