Shadowlands: Voidform/Insanity Staying

Nìkto-zuljin · April 20, 2020, 3:50am

This I like.

Pentt-malganis · April 20, 2020, 2:06pm

Id rather have SWD have a chance to Proc a free VB/MB automatically based on crit for SWD. Or reduces the CD of MB.

Arcoholic-arthas · April 20, 2020, 6:40pm

Umm…Arcane begs to differ. That is a neglected spec if I’ve ever seen one. Not as bad as feral tho…

Nìkto-zuljin · April 20, 2020, 7:03pm

Thanks to the people in here for more information regarding VF etc. I have a clearer understanding now. I still don’t want to just revert back to a WoD style system but I now agree things need to be changed.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 21, 2020, 1:07am

Yall need to go raid the official alpha priest feedback forum and like Trinko’s post. He fired his shot now we need to see it through please.
LETS’ GO!!!
#removevoidform

Aneurysm-nerzhul · April 21, 2020, 6:48am

Regarding Void Form being tweaked into a much forgiving iteration.
I edited my play style ideas here to include a version of Void Form that could work.

Shadowlands Class Update Feedback - Shadow Priest

So for those of you wanting to keep the insanity mechanic. How about this.

Take the Demon Hunter Demonic Mechanic where upon using Eye Beam, you go into a Demonic form for 5 seconds. What this does is limit you to a short but guaranteed duration.

So lets apply this concept to the Shadow Priest / Void Form.

Max level Talent
Void Form : Activated by casting Void Bolt (Cost 5 Shadow Orbs). Twists your Shadowform with the powers of the Void, increasing spell damage you deal by 20%. Granting an additional 0.5% Haste every 1 sec. Lasts 5 sec. Mind Blast increases the duration by 2 sec, Void bolt by 5 sec.

How this works:

Once you enter Void Form, you now have a very short window of time with an increase to your spell damage and more and more haste. You use Mind Blast to extend the duration as much as possible and once you get 5 Shadow Orbs, you can use Void Bolt for decent damage and extend the duration by an additional 5 sec.
So the skill cap to this is doing what you can to constantly get Shadow Orbs to Void Bolt and extend Void Form while having an increasing easier time to do this with Mind Blast cool down becoming shorter and short with the haste gains.

If badly played or poor gear or a mix of both. You should be able to have 2-3 Shadow Orbs at minimum once Void Form fades and then only require around 10 sec to get back in again. Or snipe some Shadow Word: Deaths and get right back in as soon as you got out. But doing this, you loose out on the stacking haste gain. So you want to try to stay in as long as possible but its not too much punishment if you fail to do so.

You will no longer need to ramp up as quickly/much as you can easily build Shadow Orbs with a mix of Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death & Auspicious Spirits (if talented).

tldr

Your Void Form has a constant duration based on your actions aka buttons you pressed. Not an ever increasing struggle to do more and more and more in less and less time madness.

Kaesebrezen-azshara · April 21, 2020, 7:16am

I’d think the Borrowed Power point needs a little bit more behind it.

While Chorus is the biggest part of it - there is a lot more to it currently:

Chorus gives you a crit average >50%. This massively affects the value of Asp. Spirits.
Whispers of the Damned, together with Chorus, will give huge amounts of Insanity. You will very likely get a crit MB outside of Voidform, that crit MB alone will net you 35 Insanity to your next Voidform.
The haste essences and azerite traits add 10+% to your baseline haste.
Lucid Dreams returns quite a bit of insanity, extending Voidform.
Lucid Major is practically the only real active button to signficiantly extend a single Voidform…

Chorus itself is bad. But all the other powers aren’t far behind it.

If seen a few people argue that shadow works right now and all it takes to make it work in Shadowlands is to make all the borrowed powers baseline… yeah, look at the list. It’s massive, and then there are the 3 talents that should be baseline, to make actually free up choices…

If you have to overload the baseline spec with such a huge list of additional effects to make it work, then there is a more fundamental problem. Making a long list of passive effects baseline doesn’t seem like a good solution at all.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 21, 2020, 2:07pm

that’s exactly what I been saying. its so short that once you enter it all you can do is stand still and bash void bolt to keep it otherwise you lose it and have to start all over.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 21, 2020, 2:08pm

I see what your saying. So what do you suggest?

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 21, 2020, 4:33pm

guys please check my suggestion and give me some feedback. I’m suggesting to combine both shadow orbs and Voidform.
COMBINING VOIDFORM + SHADOW ORBS
Thanks, I appreciate the all feedback.

Yvaelle-lightbringer · April 21, 2020, 6:13pm

If you have to overload the baseline spec with such a huge list of additional effects to make it work, then there is a more fundamental problem. Making a long list of passive effects baseline doesn’t seem like a good solution at all.

Also worth pointing out, that even if you do all of this - including baselining SW: Void, Lingering Insanity, and Auspicious Spirits - all you’ve actually accomplished is recreated BFA Shadow in Shadowlands.

BFA Shadow isn’t a good state either - we would still be bad at world stuff, bad at Torghast, bad at Mythic+, and average in raids.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 21, 2020, 11:54pm

I went back and read in detail the class chnages for Shadow priest and I’m astonished that this is what we get when blizz themselves admitted that voidform is problematic. We basically got nerfed here’s how :
1)voidbolt rank 2 means we can’t stutter step so there goes our bare nearly nonexsisting mobility and 2sec of reacting to mechanics.

they gave us an absolutely gutted useless version of SW:D that is only viable if you talent into it and even if you do so it’s still trash. Oh, and its 1 charge on a 25sec CD

Am i the only one who is seeing this. how are the community not popping off (possibly cause they’re trying to figure out what class to reroll)

Yvaelle-lightbringer · April 22, 2020, 12:10am

Every Spriest review off Alpha is that it’s just as bad as the forums claim.

The only reason there isn’t wider spread anger is that we’re not into Open Beta yet, let alone live.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 22, 2020, 12:23am

I understand it’s just Blizz said at Blizzcon there will be no major class changes and I’m getting BFA flashbacks. however I recognize that with the pandemic things are slower so we just gonna have to wait for the next Alpha patch. I just wish they would say something about it rather then just leaving us hanging.

Xavaa-runetotem · April 22, 2020, 1:35am

I Main’d a spriest in The first half of Legion, I think void form was awesome. I didn’t start playing a spriest until cata with the orbs, and I thought it was cool as well.
Void form is now starting to show its problems more than ever, without having Artifacts or Azerite the spec feels awe full to play, and aesthetically, I feel more like a N’Zoth priest and not a Shadow priest. Devouring plague would feel so great to have back, along with not having to ramp up. Shadow weaving was awesome, helping out our Lock buddies or DK buddies to prop up their numbers as well as ours.

Linjea-shadowsong · April 22, 2020, 4:02am

There aren’t going to be any major changes. We’ve been through this before many times. What shadow looks like in alpha is basically what we’re going to get at launch. Void form isn’t going anywhere until at least the next expansion.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 22, 2020, 4:02am

Don’t say this Linjea you gonna break my heart.

Heylaa-proudmoore · April 22, 2020, 4:14am

are you guys familiar with WoD Demo lock mechanics I think it might be the key to both fixing void form and giving us back shadow orbs/Devouring plague playstyle. Check this out.

Question for Warlock mains

Oh yeah once Legion launched and we got Meta taken away and somehow they split Demo Meta into two, half for the SPriests and half for the Demon Hunters, all of us here in Warlock Land were alternating between sobs and cackles. Made not a LICK of sense.

I actually have a “main alt” Shadow Priest. I think the problems are the following:

The haste stacking increase makes it so that the mechanics force you to leave Voidform early because from a dev standpoint its necessary to tie the Resource Decay with the Haste increase. I think a solution here is to make Voidform a flat haste increase parallel to how Meta was a flat spellpower increase. That way from a dev standpoint, the Resource Decay can be flat like ours was.

Hell, maybe parallel to how Meta also buffed our armor, y’all can get increased movement speed.

I think lore-mechanics wise SPriests were cornered. Instead of tying Shadow Priests to Cult of Forgotten Shadow and having it be Shadow Ascendant Form or something, they decided to tie it to Void Old Gods and thus Insanity. Thus from the ground up it’s forcibly implied there’s a “~~kRaZy ~~~ burst” dyanmic going on. IMHO Shadowform/Voidform is a cool concept but should be rooted in the capacity to control the void, not go insane and sprout tentacles like some Lovecraftian amateur in over his head. Mind you yes the tentacles are cool BUT.

I think having spells change inbetween the two forms thus giving you a REASON to shift in and out of the shadows (thus from a lore perspective, using the void at your discretion, not “giving into it” like a noob) as we used to have would breathe new life into the spec. Keep stuff that is AOE AOE and keep stuff that is Single Target Single Target; say Mind Sear within Voidform/Shadowform would remain a channel yes but maybe instead opens a void portal until the target that makes tentacles pop up that does something depending on the dots you have on the targets.

This sounds legit and fun. what do you guys think?

EDIT: I went undercover and asked a couple of questions that lead to this in the Warlock forums. Can you tell how desperate I am?

Impsie-atiesh · April 22, 2020, 4:34am

Then all shadow priests honestly need to stop playing the spec entirely. As long as they keep playing Shadow, Blizz will continue to justify Voidform.

Hekatah-tortheldrin · April 22, 2020, 5:10am

The moment I tried out my Priest on Legion beta convinced me to do just that. nearly 1/3 of my wow gaming experience has been put on pause since.
Demon hunter was fun though in Legion. But I didn’t like the changes to both classes in BFA. Now they both look underwhelming again in SL Alpha. Hope one becomes fun to play again else another 2 years of BFA for me aka not playing.