It feels like mindbender reduces the cookdown of the shadow fiend from 3 min to 1 min, which sounds like it’ll be good for lower m+/ pugs where tanks do multiple smaller pulls.
Also, inescapable torment gives good cleave damage to deal with mobs with more upfront burst damage.
Is it as good as it sounds for a voidweaver? I’m almost thinking of dropping the interrupt and distorted reality from the standard voidweaver built to take these 2 talents.
(It may be my noob mode speaking, but I feel a 45sec interrupt is essentially as good as no interrupt at all. And also, distorted reality just does not seem to synergise with voidweaver talents)
Edit: oh nvm… I realise the way the talent trees are stacked, it’s almost impossible to take mind bender without sacrificing some big final row talents.
And I can’t take out silence to pump it into mind bender.
Oh wells… There’s really not much reason to take the mind bender talent then
You already edited your post, but the final answer to any question about shadow talents not being taken is because it doesn’t do enough damage because there are zero gameplay considerations to account for in the shadow talent tree.
Every shadow talent serves one purpose: increases damage by X/Y/Z%. If a talent increases damage by Y% and X>Y>Z, then talent only gets picked if talents that do X are all taken, and the talent that does Z only gets taken if all X and all Y are taken. This is broadly true of every spec, but almost every spec has some talents that alter gameplay in meaningful ways that may mean a talent that does less damage than others may still be taken if it provides some other advantage.
Shadow has no talents that present that type of consideration.
If you play world content, take whatever you enjoy.
In instanced PVE (M+ or raid) content I find Mindbender + Inescapable Torment to be pretty uncomfortable to play as Voidweaver. It is already quite a slow sequence to start our burst and Mindbender would be 1 more GCD to use, even if its damage was fine.
There were multiple seasons already where Mindbender was the meta talent path and people were more or less okay with it. Not particularly enjoyable but not terrible either.
Then IT got nerfed a lot in Dragonflight S3 because of our tier set at that time. It never got buffed again so it is pretty much useless AND annoying to use right now.
If you enjoy it in delves or while questing, go for it. If you want to try to optimize your build, Bender + IT has no place in it.