Shadow Crash is a SPriest’s ONLY chance of doing any AOE damage. And it needs some serious love. I know I’m not saying anything new here, but these are my suggestions:
make it a 1 point talent, not 2: honestly, this will just give us another talent point at a tier we don’t really need it at. So while not having it be two separate talents to do one thing seems logical, this isn’t a significant fix.
make it a 1 point talent, and make a new talent for the second point that gives you an extra charge, or that lowers the cooldown whenever you cast Devouring Plague or Mind Blast or something: We need to be able to do it WAY more often. Like, way more often.
Increase the Radius: the radius is so small that we have to wait for the mobs to group up…at which time they have taken a bunch of damage from the AOE from classes that don’t suck at it…at which point DOTs are significantly less useful. The radius needs to be doubled so we can cast it immediately on pull so the DOTs have an actual impact.
Get rid of it entirely. Change how our cleave works so that instead of having to DOT up every target, our single target damage just radiates outward when we hit a mob we have dotted. OR…give us a 1 point talent that comes after Misery that just makes Misery apply the dots to all targets within 8 yds…no cooldown…no different spell that you dont use for anything else. Thats the best fix right there. So simple. Fixes everything. Dont make us sit there and try to dot up everything. Its NOT FUN.
It is so frustrating and unfun to play shadow priest right now. Every pull (except for bosses) is AOE and our AOE doesn’t just suck, its frustrating and unfun to even try to do AOE. We dont need to rule at AOE. But at least make our bad AOE easy to do…
I’ve wanted for a long time for them to use Mind Sear as a way to spread dots. My thinking was, what if each tick of Mind Sear spread 3 seconds of each DoT on the target (not including DP) to all targets hit. Then soft cap Psychic Link at 8 targets to keep from getting ridiculous value out of it.
At this point in time, now that we don’t have Mind Sear, I think that Mind Sear could be a talent that augments Mind Flay to radiate out to nearby targets at something small, like 5% damage, but also spreads the DoTs.
I still think Mind Spike should be baked into DA, changing Flay to Spike for the duration, in which case, Spike could also have the radiate component and spread 3 seconds of DoTs each time it does damage.
I just can’t get behind this hard cap of Psychic Link.
You might as well just get rid of it at that point because what’s the point? It’s no longer unique and might as well just push that damage to the dots themselves and remove Psychic Link entirely.
Then you also have to consider how that would even work as what targets will get the Psychic Link damage? You will be unable to control it so you can easily just be popping off but the targets you want to kill fast might not receive Psychic Link damage and targets that are low priority might take all the damage from PL.
The random unreliable nature that Psychic Link damage spread would become would just be awful to play with and literally be unable to control beyond 8 targets.
This goes back to what I suggest in that Psychic Link should simply share a choice with Mind Sear. That way you get to choose periodic focus AOE or Non-Periodic spread AOE style of gameplay. Not mix them both together. If left separate you can balance them without affecting the other which will give more weight to them baseline and cater to your chosen gameplay style with the rest of the talents you choose to pick.
I would not eliminate it, as we have to apply our dots to get the mastery rolling. There is no reason we can’t have a second charge for it. It would be such a giant rework to change how our Mastery works
I sometimes feel like Blizz should have gone a fundamentally different way with Halo and just put Halo on a 20s cooldown that applied dots to all targets hit, instead of Shadow Crash, and done something else with Shadow Crash instead of making it a dot applicator.
That would have greatly simplified things. It would eliminate entirely the concerns of targeting Shadow Crash (at an area, or at a target?), how fast it traveled, what its radius was, whether the targeted mob disappeared while Crash was traveling and made it fizzle out instead of dotting mobs, etc.
Of course, Archon would have had to be reworked. But dotting would be much easier.
Whispering Shadow Talent changed to also have the Target Options
No other changes to Shadow Crash
(New Talent) Corrupted Blood
Corrupted Blood (Passive) - 1-Point
– Periodic Damage from Vampiric Touch has a 25% chance to spread Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain to the nearest unaffected enemy within 5-yards.
– Target must be under the effects of both VT and SW:P to trigger from all sources
– Mind Blast has a 100% chance to trigger Corrupted Blood
– Devouring Plague periodic damage has a 50% chance to trigger Corrupted Blood
– Void Eruption will trigger Corrupted Blood from all enemies damaged by its initial damage
How it works:
Corrupted Blood will passively spread your Dots. The more targets effected, the more efficiently they spread over time. – If Shadow Crash is on CD, you could apply Vampiric Touch manually to 3 targets, then use Void Eruption effectively spreading to 3 more.
If there are 2-3 targets, you’d only need to cast VT once, then Mind Blast twice to guarantee the spread.
Proper rotation, will effectively keep a high uptime on your DoTs preventing you from having to reapply or change targets when new targets quickly enter combat.
For large groups, which you’d like to burst down quickly anyways in most cases - You could Shadow Crash > Void Eruption quickly applying your DoTs to the target cap of Psychic Link.
Will still require a little bit of Ramp, but will dramatically smooth out the current kit.
Keep in mind, Corrupted Blood only has a 5-yard range. So, it would still require proper clumping of mobs to effectively spread, but that doesn’t mean you can’t manually DoT stragglers or ranged mobs. – But, due to the spread overtime, you don’t feel like you’d need to hold Shadow Crash.
So Shadow Crash, can be used more freely, or reserved for better engagements.
This is why I suggest to soft cap it, not hard cap.
As it works now, it is hard capped at 8, and you can’t choose which 8 if you have more than that dotted up. A soft cap would hit all targets equally, but damage reduced above 8 targets so it doesn’t scale rediculously out of proportion.
I know most crowd control effects used in PvE these days are basically catered to AOE due to the Mythic Keystone dungeons since Legion. But in PvP single target CC is still useful be it from yourself or your ally.
So essentially all one would have to do is stand next to their CC friend and you doing you’re damage rotation on that target will break out his buddy.
Or the other way, if you make it smart so it won’t spread to targets under a CC effect then you will get odd times where you want to spread it but it simply won’t spread.
So what the result is once again a lack of control and you have to hope it acts accordingly to your will and not drive you insane when it doesn’t.
I don’t understand what you’re intending here. What damage? The dot damage? So what are you saying? The more targets you have dots on, the less damage they do upwards from >8 targets?
So for example…
You launch your AOE dot spreads spell on 16 targets, they each receive the dots but now essentially the dots deal 50% less damage?
So the game has to somehow know how many targets have your dots up at any given time and then scale the damage on every target dynamically up or down accordingly?
I guess they already do this scaling based on your current power like if you have Power Infusion or a trinket active etc. but that is based on your current power and then the calculation is the same for all your dot spells on 1 or many targets.
The idea that it knows to change the damage coefficient dynamically all the time seems impossible to me… has that been done before?
Because any square root scaling done that I know of is based on an ability that hits everything the same time… it’s not affected by other single target situations as it would have to with Priest if you are manually casting your dots on targets that exceed 8 or whatever square root scaling target limit put in place.
I dunno, I don’t think I would like that result if it would even be possible.
I think priest’s AOE dynamic is cool, but dotting things up is very annoying sometimes. I wish we could have instant cast vampiric embrace? It’s just horrible trying to ramp up when the tank is gathering mobs (e.g. first part of Ara-Kara).
I didn’t mean to misrepresent what you said, actually not entirely sure what caused me to get confused.
But appreciate the clarity.
Edit:
Okay I reread it.
I think I get what your saying now with a clear head.
So just to confirm… You get full value of Psychic Link damage already for the first initial 8 targets. Then anything beyond 8 they receive like what? 5% of the value? Or is it dynamically adjusted to coincide with the amount of targets affected beyond 8?
Psychic Link hits all targets affected by dots, it’s not hard capped at 8. I usually think of it as being hard capped because that’s how many targets get dots from Shadow Crash, though you could add a few more hard casting. We’re pseudo-hard capped by how long it takes to hard cast VT and how long we’d get value out of Psychic Link. Last I saw, the sweet spot if there’re enough targets is to hard cast VT on 2-3 targets on pull with Shadow Crash once they’re grouped.
But where I was getting at is that we’re looking for ways to more easily spread dots, and if we are given that ability, Psychic Link would scale too much if we’re able to dot up say, 16-20 targets instead of 10-11. The solution to that would be to do what is done with other non-capped AoE abilities and soft cap it so that damage above 8 targets is reduced. Still gaining more value from hitting more targets, but not linearly.
It’s really just a sidebar discussion to the point of, we need a better way of spreading dots.
Okay so I did interpret correctly what you were suggesting.
However the amount of damage done via Psychic Link beyond the 8 targets or whatever number limit that would stand as the fulcrum between receiving full and partial damage via Psychic Link is still unclear.
Should it be static or dynamic? Or you don’t really care or have an opinion on that detail?
I ask because for example…
I would hate for the full Psychic Link damage be lets say limited to 8 and then you add 1 more and that target only receives let’s say only 5% of the Psychic Link damage transfer. Doing that would basically call into question if it’s even worth using GCD’s to manually dot up targets since they won’t even really benefit from Psychic Link that much compared to the full Psychic Link damage the other targets receive. That would be an example of static scaling.
But if it were dynamic scaling then instead of 5% Psychic Link damage transfer, maybe the target after the initial 8 would receive 5% less and then if you add another target then they both would receive 10% less as so on.
So each target you add to your Psychic Link damage transfer beyond the 8 would collectively receive less damage from Psychic Link. Then once targets with your dots begin to die off, the dynamic scaling will update itself accordingly.
Going the dynamic scaling route would be a lot more acceptable to me as you are not dropping off a cliff in terms of Psychic Link damage transfer, instead, you are going down a gradual slope.
I like this idea a lot, but i think making MB the guaranteed spreader is loading too much onto it. I would suggest switch that to SW:D, as it does introduce more strategic thinking early in the fight, but streamsline for later, as you are able to snipe dots onto fresh mobs with good pulling from the tank. Although this would pigeonhole us into taking all the SW:D talents.
