Voidform only scales the damage of dots via haste, and haste affects pretty much our entire breakdown. The reason dots are so weak is because of borrowed power, i.e. Mass Hysteria and Spiteful Apparitions.
and…COI…which loops into AS
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and… the fact that they’re essentially permanent instead of something that is managed
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COI and mass hysteria are not permanent…mass hysteria hasn’t been in the game since legion- it just unfortunately has been replaced by COI to carry it’s legacy pain points into BFA.
AS alone is fine; feeding into itself isn’t fine
Voidform alone is fine…when it’s just haste and not SEVERAL powerful multipliers put on top
Voidform is the wind that blows, COI is the thunderstorm that stirs AS into a tornado. idk man wind is fine; nothing wrong with a nice breeze on a hot day
Voidform will be fine when it lasts 6 seconds, doesn’t scale haste and when the 3 voidbolts we cast deal roughly 33% of the damage from the instant void eruption.
This?
https://voidform-optimizer.com/
https://pastebin.com/7SCFxNs3
Arcane power is 15 second duration on a burst class (arcane)
Crusade is 25 seconds (ret) and that is a medium bursty style spec
Shadow is traditionally a slower & consistent dmg profile spec, to expect 6 second voidform doesn’t seem to feel right giving all that
That was devouring Plague I was describing for you Nyelle. That was exactly the type of burst shadow used to have which made us a bit of a blend between a mage and an afflock. That was what drew me to the spec and that’s the damage pattern I want to see return.
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ok…sorry I’m more old school wrath shadow; to me orb system felt forced and mega awkward and I just didn’t play shadow during that era for that reason. I kinda felt like they copied over a feral druid/rogue/warlock mechanic onto shadow because the wrath version was a bit…too simple and did need to evolve
A huge haste multiplier, wether it comes from VF or from LI, is not good.
Why?
Because it massively impacts the value of haste.
By design, DoTs and VF already make haste a really good stat. Now you have VF/LI which provide a huge multiplier on gear haste (some hideous suggestions go as far as 20% baseline haste for VF), and you get a stat weight for haste that is completely out of line.
Get a simcraft profile with no borrowed power, don’t take LI and Asp. Override Voidforms stack haste, and compare haste weights between the default 0.5% per stack, and whatever your increase is (e.g. 1.5%). Now look at the stat weights.
Just an example (~12% gear haste and crit, ~6k gear on int), the normalized weight looks like:
At 0.5% haste per stack: 1.28 (haste) > 1.23 (crit) > … rest
At 1.5% haste per stack: 1.52 (haste) > 1.21 (crit) > … rest
So no, the wannabe solution of giving VF more baseline haste, or stack per haste, has a massive problem of massively increasing the DPS value of each point of haste on gear.
As easy as the solution of “base haste” or “more haste per stack” sounds, it has a massive flaw.
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Haste also diminishes in value over an expansion since it has diminishing returns on the value it provides to Voidform.
I’m sorry, but balance as an argument to not have fun gameplay with stat weights as the basis, isn’t valid.
Testing with the simulator the feel was more like 1% not 1.5%
If anything this would expedite the process of haste hitting DR sooner in the expac and let crit shine sooner, and therefore verse shortly after that (assuming no changes to mastery)
Most geared out toons at this point are trying to avoid haste in BIG way because of that DR effect hit absolute max saturation. earlier in 8.2 crit was already shining as important. Several of us you’ll see swaps for focusing iris (haste) in favor of conflict in strife (verse) OR, I’ve spotted a few with a couple verse gems (although swapping the essence mentioned is more ideal) - anyway the point was we could have been pusing for more crit earlier this expac if the baseline spec gave voidform the haste it NEEDS. What is really interesting to think about is verse would actually have more value somewhere around mid expansion (very very napkin math in my head so it’s super approximate idea based on what i’m observing in 8.3 top end right now- HUGE GRAIN OF SALT ON VERSE)
Try the same experiment with 25 or 30% haste from gear with 20% haste in VF with 1% haste per stack; I imagine you’ll see a substantial shift there. And I would expect 25% from gear in the first tier of raiding (I hope) -let me know what you find I’m genuinely interested.
I meant DoTs are basically permanent, as part of the reason they are so weak
my impression is our dots were nerfed into the ground because of COI interaction with AS and they nerfed dots to counter that. It was the only way to keep our multi-dot spread cleave under control. They nerfed COI too but not by much it was still the dominant trait by far; but…err it shouldn’t even exist. Not only did COI exist…but we stacked 3 of them (until very very recently a few of us dropped one but the game is so far gone due to corruption it’s almost barely worth mentioning)
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The wrath version had a very beefy mindblast as the burst cd. That was when spells were still balanced around cooldown and cast time. Shadow had the damage of a 3 sec cast on a 1.5s cast time but it had a cooldown to balance that out. Your dots also hit a lot harder because they were not beholden to voidform.
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I’m actually okay with baseline haste in Voidform, I pitched one of those designs awhile back (15% Shadowform, 30% Voidform). My issue is the ramping haste.
If haste becomes completely out of sorts with the other stats, that also makes itemization easier, not harder. Suddenly Haste/X is a good item, versus during Legion, BFA, and probably Shadowlands, where we need to find Crit/Haste items. There will still be an optimal X in Haste/X, but when only haste matters, itemization actually gets easier.
Granted, that’s not how itemization should work in design theory. But they have never succeeded to execute on the ideal - that all secondary stats are situationally valuable at the same time. We rarely even see times when the ‘primary’ stat is actually the primary stat - and neither of these problems are unique to Shadow.
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voidform will never work with insanity. it has to become a CD.
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Does it have to become a cooldown for Shadowlands? That would require fleshing out a rotation not based around Voidform. Something the devs appear unable to do.
At this point the question isn’t what will make it work (because that’s pretty subjective and there are those who claim it will never work), the question is what small changes can make it better.
SOME ramp is going to be required; I don’t think blizzard is going to be OK with a spec always at 98-99% of it’s power all the time. I just think there’s a better balance to that then we’ve seen the past two expansions.
Also the stacking haste is what is motivating about the gameplay; it’s part of what ropes you in and feeds the adrenaline in the gameplay loop and improves the response of the spec as you fight the drain increasing.
SOME base haste for VF would also help curve/pull back on some of the ramp baseline and we could see even further reduction with COI going away.
So, I’ve been puzzling over how to retain what you like about the ramping haste mechanic of Voidform, while trying to fix the current design nightmare.
I think I have a solution, and it hearkens back to my original pitch from Legion Alpha. At the time I pitched a 2 resource model for Shadow: Willpower & Insanity. Willpower was a ramping haste mechanic, and Insanity was a heat mechanic.
Insanity was the active resource, the gameplay and skill revolved around using our spells efficiently without overcapping Insanity. Willpower was our ramping haste mechanic, it made us more interesting the longer we stayed in combat: justified by the spec having no damage cooldowns, and some other limitations.
Anyway, I think I actually had the solution right from the start - before we even knew about Voidform, and what Insanity was. The solution I think might be simple - disentangle the haste ramp from the Voidform gameplay.
Willpower - passive resource - Every DOT & Channel tick increases your Haste by 1%, stacking up to 100%. Willpower buff lasts 60 seconds.
Is it this simple? No Voidform ramping haste, no lingering insanity, no chorus of insanity, no ghost crit feedback loop. Instead, while it takes awhile to ramp up at the start of combat - and Shadow would remain subpar for short fights - it has much more consistent experience in sustained combat.
Once fully ramped up, all Voidforms would be long/amazing Voidforms, due to the high haste. Getting between Voidforms, after the first, is very quick.
While world questing is initially slow, the 60 second duration makes chain-pulling very fast eventually: and encourages big/dangerous pulls to multidot, to ramp faster.
Mythic+ and Horrific Vision / Torghast systems benefit here too - slow if out of combat for too long, or dead - but amazing if chain pulling.
It’s all the fun of high haste Voidforms, but now it works in all content. I think? The 100% haste cap might need to be lowered, in my original design that was premised on the other limitations, which are no longer present (ex. it was possible to lose your Willpower if you made mistakes).
Still, I think the idea of sitting at very high haste while chain pulling world mobs, or running visions or torghast, or chain pulling M+, etc - is compelling. This actually probably flips the current problem Shadow has. For M+ we’d parse very high for overall damage on clean runs - while on raid bosses we’d still have our ramp on the pull.
Edit: In this case, I am advocating to delete both Power Infusion and Devouring Plague, as they become unnecessary. Voidform also would no longer provide ramping haste, haste ramping would occur through Willpower alone.