It’s not a matter of me not seeing your point, it’s a matter of every argument for the “make void form a talent” argument is always ridiculous and would be very clearly a nightmare to balance and look at the trouble they have balancing us as is. As I’ve stated many, many times; I’m fine with us having different talent builds, and different play styles, but either A: removing void form or b: limiting it into a talent isn’t going to work. They should be giving us all of the talents we have to have for void form (SW:V, LoTV, Lingering Insanity) and replace all of those with talents that will make Devouring Plague an alternative that people can use at least in burst raid fights and dungeons.
Then remove Void Form from the spec.
Look, im willing and im sure many of the remove voidform crowd are as well to let Void Form be a thing, but only if its OPTIONAL in some form. If that’s not going to be an option, then remove it entirely.
I cant be more clear then that if you want to make any compromise lol.
Blizzard will end up doing w/e they feel like doing but from how I feel about Void Form and many others feeling the same, we just don’t want to play shadow using this Void Form nonsense. End of story lol.
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Absolutely.
Narrator: They will.
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I’ll start by saying I have very little experience with shadow, but I have a few dozen hours logged on mine at around ilvl 440. Everyone is correct in their complaints around how bad it feels outside of voidform and its very apparent to even a new player like myself. However, I think shadow feels like the most dynamic class mechanically, and I’d be really sad if we go back to some system like warlock has. I love warlock thematically but it is so boring building and spending soul shards with no risk/reward to the mechanic. Same with DK runic power. Its just a game of seesaw that gets stale really quick.
Why not just smooth out the transition so we dont hit such high high’s and low low’s? Give a haste boost just for entering VF, but make the rate at which it climbs slower. On the way down, make lingering insanity baseline and slow down how quickly we lose the haste to last long enough for us to catch back up.
Its really exciting when you hit that button and go into turbo mode and throw everything you got as fast as you can. Combining the speed with careful calculation of how to get as many stacks as possible before leaving is what keeps the class so engaging for me. I dont think a c/d would have the same level of adrenaline.
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Zat you, James Earl Jones?
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See I just don’t understand the argument for “balancing it out” between in and out of void form. We had that everyone, it was called Shadowform. It was a passive damage buff while in it and you only left it when you needed to cast holy spells. It kept the flow between doing your damage and shifting out to doing priestly things like healing up, off healing a low group member etc.
It worked for over 10 years, there was no reason to change it.
What everyone seems to be asking for is both make Void Form impactful / meaningful but at the same time make it so it doesn’t feel like you are useless / worthless outside Void Form.
So you get either…
- Void Form is the kick butt DPS moment of the spec.
OR - Almost no difference between in and out of Void Form.
Pre-Legion Shadowform, you had it act as both being impactful (30% shadow dmg buff) and 15% physical damage reduction buff) and it lost its buffs in order to enable you to heal.
With old Shadowform, it fit both those criteria as it was impactful in Shadowform and it was balanced in that you became vulnerable when you needed to heal up.
The DPS rotation should be about using your spells in x way and manner, not juggling a form for the entire time your playing AND playing wack a mole.
With Void Form, you are introducing a juggling mechanic for the sake of an extra spinning plate that you have to manage and drudge through anytime that plate falls for the entirety of your playtime. Not just in a x sec window that most DPS CD are used no… the entire time you have to spin that plate and make it a boring wack a mole mini game.
I really don’t see that as a problematic system. I really think that in this case, simplicity is the clear winner.
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I agree with you that shadow offers compelling gameplay that’s unmatched in the game (or it’s history in the 12 years I’ve played) Sadly the state of alpha is the worse than 8.0 was; or a 440 character would be.
I’d recommend to you (and anyone else reading this thread) to give Ryeshot’s optimizer a spin and see what u think about his latest template. There’s a dedicated thread for that here: Sensible Shadow Feedback
His template has a different version of devouring plague and some additional tweaks to shadow and voidform baseline that do improve the spec greatly imo.
I highly suggest reading his articles as well.
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Except there is only one plate in the air in the first place. If you put VF on a c/d…what else is there left to do? Just…cast?
Shadows biggest pitfalls are centered around how terrible it feels out of VF and lack of aoe. If the benefits of VF built slower (to appease balance), and lasted longer outside of combat so we were not simply dead weight until we clicked our happy button, I dont feel like the weaknesses would be so apparent.
I have seen his app, and looking at his articles, it seems me and him are in perfect agreement actually.
"Again it’s relatively simple, let us make the weakest state not too weak, and the strongest state not too strong. Going into Shadowform from Voidform should give you a damage increase, but not enough of a damage increase make damage in Shadowform feel like nothing. "
Thats exactly what I am proposing.
highly suggest posting directly on that thread; as that is centered around more specific ideas that don’t exist on live or alpha for that matter. Centralizing feedback about those concepts and what is resonating with people is helpful imo.
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I’m confused.
Who is saying put VF on a CD? I might have stated that, that it could be an option, but its not something I like anyway but that it is an option.
I just want an option to opt out or opt in via a talent.
I don’t think VF works in all scenarios / situations and even the pro void form crowd seem to agree.
What seems to be the issue is that everyone seems to think that Balancing 2 different options like a VF active management and Shadow Form passive is too difficult to manage.
I would argue that once you fix the state of Void Form ramping/scaling issues and make it so its a fixed ceiling / cap of power in the form of fixed duration / scaling then the “balancing” part is no longer an issue.
But what the response to that is saying "just don’t use “Void Form” and to that I say that if its on your bars, blizz will hold the rest of the spec back in some manner because you always have that option, so I say make a talent to split both styles of play so that the rest of the spec can play as intended and not be held captive by something that you don’t want to use.
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I agree, the reliance on borrowed power is a terrible excuse. espessially sense we were promised a rework early BFA and they did say it would be pushed back to shadowlands. giving us a bad spell, and calling it devouring plague is not what we want. Considering this forum is save void form, then they need to work on fixing void form. Id seriously love to see everyone just @watcherdev or @warcraftdevs and remind them of the promised rework they said about shadow on twitter. Im all for positivity on the forums, because everyone loves this spec, but i am not ok with being blatantly lied to and forgotten about.
Ah well sure, perhaps if our level 100 talent was options between Shadow Form, Void Form, and ??? Form, that would be fine of course. By then though I feel like you are coming very close to different specs all together but I’m not against it.
The main thing I am worried about with all this commotion is people wanting to dumb down a mechanically complex class. The c/d thing is just a common suggestion but maybe not one that you made. I was not around for shadow orbs but if its anything like soul shards I dont want it. I like the risk reward playstyle, I just feel the punishment is far too harsh will how weak we are outside of VF.
I only played a lock a bit towards the end of BC for fun and just enough to get Affliction Mage tower done in Legion.
I dont know if the shard usage you speak of works like in Legion, but that is not how shadow worked in MoP / WoD.
see link for some vids that go into detail how Orbs worked.
I would recommend Preach’s vid on how orbs interacted with this vid:
Shadow Priest Basic Guide WoD
And in practice in a raid setting here:
Shadow Priest Basic Gameplay Guide WoD
And in PvP here:
SHADOW PVP MOVIE - ANBONI 1 | WOD 6.2.3
Those are good examples on how it worked and the PvP one is entertaining imo.
As far as Max level talents, I put this together here on my thoughts on how to make the differing playstyles work. Though I have evolved my thinking a bit since I wrote this.
And still not a single blue post on the priest forums…blizzard doesn’t even read these ):
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Good thing this thread is for the community and not Blizzard, then.
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What if our final talent row had an option to make mind blast generate shadow orbs. Your next cast if DP or Void Eruption in shadowform would consume up to 3 orbs. DP would have it’s damage increased by a large amount per orb consumed. Void Eruption would grant you 5 stacks of voidform per orb consume (at 3 orbs you would enter VF with 15 stacks of buff and 15 stacks or insanity drain.
Combined this with some talent that grants your shadowform a near-permanent flat haste buff whenever you use dp. The buff would disappear whenever you enter voidform.
Additionally, give swv baseline and put a mind spike with built in instant cast proc on tier 1. Pro-vf and anti-vf should both be satisfied.
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This sounds really interesting and I kind of like where you’re going with it. Questions though.
- Will the VF stacks be capped at 15 or would they still be able to go higher?
- Will the stacks just drop immediately after VF ends?
- Will VF still function in the same way as it does now where you’re trying to extend it as long as possible?
- If VFs are long enough would squeezing in DP work well?
- While I know shadow has always had ramp, curious how much there would be with a design like this.
This is pretty interesting to think about though.
The idea would be that you gain voidform at 15 stacks and it continues to build as usual. You would have a shorter voidform because your insanity degen woukd be high. So if regular voidforms last 25-30 seconds, yours would last 10-15 seconds. The haste stacks would drop immediately when exiting voidform and you would be unable to pick legacy of the void. DP would be the better option single target, but you could enter a nice short voidform for aoe situations.
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