Shadow word pain now affects all targets in 12 yards.
Remove misery and dark void.
So far blizzards solution to shadow word pain is adding ways to remove it instead of buffing the spell itself.
Currently shadow word pain isnt worth binding outside of extremely niche movement situations. Its what i would call a dead keybind, its useless 99% of the time but you kind of still need it, its in a terrible design space at the moment.
Comparing SW:P to sunfire as an example (which functions how i suggest) sunfire deals almost double SW:Ps damage. I dont think this would be a broken buff for the spell in any way and would improve the value of a nearly dead keybind.
it would also make aoe a bit more reliable and a little bit more interesting. Currently we live or die on shadow crash landing, this would lower our reliance on shadow crash a little.
I like your suggestion, but cannot agree, the removal of misery saves us so much time on gcds I don’t think Shadow Priest will function at all. It’s already considered very clunky and reliant on Shadow Crash to actually perform and you want to remove that?.
Example 3 targets, with your suggestion would take 4 gcds. SW:P on one and it spreads, then 3 VT to get all 3 dotted up rather then just 3 gcds of VT with misery that applies both dots.
We need to move forward in class and rotational design, make it more fluid, not step backwards.
My suggestion.
This change then would only require 2 GCDs and would DoT 8 Targests with no chance of missing.
So this will come down to what our goals are.
Your idea would make our aoe more simple, mine would probably make it more complex.
Yours would probably be faster in some ways, mine would be faster in others.
Your idea would effectively keep the status quo while changing how it works, my idea changes how it works by introducing sw:p to both the single target and aoe rotations.
your idea would basically remove multidotting from the gameplay (the way it currently is) while mine would keep it a VT issue only.
Both ideas have merit and yours would solve the problems you want solved but it would do nothing for the problems i have. One of the big issues for me is SW:P place in our kit, it currently doesnt belong and thats a bad place for the spell whose icon represents our spec. Maybe its just an emotional attachment to a core and iconic ability but i believe the SW:P button should be pressed. The old multidotting gameplay had to go because juggling 2 dots feels bad on 10 targets but never using your first shadow spell also feels pretty bad.
Making it aoe baseline gives us a form of constant easily applied aoe damage for all forms of content, brings back the ‘juggle 2 dots’ gameplay for single target while keeping only 1 dot for multi target.
It would also kickstart mass aoe damage right on the first GCD and remove some ramping. Sure its only SW:P and it holds us back on getting VT out but it would feel much better on higher target counts and fix some of the ramping issues the spec has outside of VT.
Honestly this is really more of a want request, we dont need SW:P at all and blizz could effectively delete it for the most part but id really like to see it brought back and be worth a keybind.