You said your not much of a PvPer. You should go PvP. It’s really fun in Classic. Much better then raiding.
I was only able to be shadow for Naxx just to keep the debuff on for the locks. Before that I was needed to heal. So I had to start my PvP career mid MC farming and never looked back.
What do you dislike about Flay specifically?
Flay ‘feels’ cool. It’s a visual spell, we shoot a beam out of us into our enemies minds.
Channels also ‘feel’ more powerful than instant and quickcast (1 GCD) spells.
Channels also feel more consistently rewarding than longcast (>1 GCD) spells. Something like Chaos Bolt feels like, “nothing, why can’t I move, boring, WOW”, whereas channels feel like, “i’m doing damage! stuff is happening!” the whole duration.
What I would agree is that Mind Flay doesn’t feel good in a Voidform model, because the entire power budget of the spec is spent on Voidform/Insanity/ramps. Even though all of those things affect mindflay’s damage, Mind Flay still only does like 10% of our damage: it costs 1/3rd of our GCDs to do less damage than Lethal Strikes.
In older models, Mind Flay’s damage felt more weighty, and therefore wasn’t held in the current disdain.
A much better version of what channeled spells could feel like - was Legion Void Torrent. That spell felt powerful, it did good damage, it had an effect on our spell priorities. Yet Torrent is essentially just a better version of Mind Flay.
Torrent played a very different role though.
Also I’d like to clarify I don’t hold mind flay with any disdain. It’s a filler spell, I treat it like a filler spell. With how shadow’s current rotation plays out, it has to be treated like a filler spell.
I’m just using it as an example of how a beam/channel can feel great still. I don’t think the mechanic is outdated as it seemed Amideus was suggesting.
I think mind Flay’s, prowess / attempting to bring back that prowess is outdated. The idea of a channeled filler spell is absolutely fine. And as you’ve said, channels can also feel powerful.
Just not mind flay.
Flay’s original intent was as a immobile damage over time effect. Back when classes didn’t have that same mobility, it could help you keep melee enemies off of you and delay mobs from getting to you. It was also unique for its interaction with haste and cast slows, being unaffected by curse of tongues or suppression. It now scales with haste, and the large amount of mobility and increased amount of spells reduces that slowing channel benefit. It’s also gotten harder and harder to properly use as a filler over time as shadow priests gained more abilities.
It’s a classic spell, but it doesn’t really do anything powerful or useful anymore.
You make an awesome callout and deserve all the 
s! I prefer my “filler” to be meaningful and based on this, Mind Flay isn’t… what “meaningful” means may be better discussed in a separate thread.
A melee spec adhering to “ABC” - or press a new button every GCD - might feel rewarding because you’re capturing an up-close, in-your-face action pace. When you’re sitting back assaulting your enemies’ minds, that doesn’t really seem to be the right essence to capture.
I played Enhancement Shaman for a long time, right up until they got the Builder-Spender system in Legion. Maelstrom as a resource just felt bad. Really, really bad. I feel Insanity is receiving the same feedback from prior Shadow Priests.
In the case of Maelstrom, Blizzard recognized it felt really bad and chose to remove it. In which, Blizzard notes they recognize that Enhancement Shaman was more of a short-cooldown playstyle that was engaging with a lot of abilities randomly coming off their cooldowns.
While I believe Enhancement Shaman getting a proc which lights up and says “PUSH ME, YA IDIOT!” feels really great and appropriate for that up-close, in-your-face action, the mystery and intrigue of a class like Shadow Priest comes from careful management of buffs and debuffs.
In that framework, a generator can work, but the generator should be focused around management of the debuffs and not on ability/action use rates. “ABC” should say “always have a cast timer running” - not “always be activating a new skill”. Something has missed the mark.
I wonder if this is a larger factor in the hate for Voidform - a gap in meeting the player’s expectations of “What should my class/spec feel like?”
Further, the payoff of a spender shouldn’t force a player to feel like they’re delaying gratification. Gratification should come from every ability use - every use should be meaningful.
Personally, based on the feedback here alone and not on judging any game time with the class, I would like to see the following talent option (reinforcing player agency) replacing Fortress of the Mind:
Edit: Also, it would be nice to see the current Fortress rolled into Shadowy Insight, and cause Mind Spike to replace Mind Flay.
I would guess that most players would still stick with Shadow Word: Void, but this would engage the audience frustrated with the current design and allow them to play their way.
Mind flay is literally already the most meaningful filler spell in the game in terms of % of overall damage.
This is an issue with filler spells in general and how Blizz has designed specs now. For most specs, they’ve made filler a chore-like builder that deals almost no damage at all, with everything loaded into the spender. No one likes this design.
For Spriests, Mind Flay used to mean something. It did great damage, its mana cost was very low (when mana mattered), it snared, its original animation even looked badass. They called it the face melter for a reason. Even when it had a 20y range it was still a fun and meaningful ability.
Now it’s just… there. The only positive thing I can say about it is that its animation looks better than it did when it got updated in wotlk (still inferior to Classic/BC animation).
Mind Flay should deal actual damage and be meaningful. All caster filler should deal actual damage and should feel meaningful.
And all casters would then be required to cast on the move as a baseline.
If you haven’t noticed. Mind flay already hits significantly harder than other caster’s filler spells. And it hits TWICE as hard on SL alpha than BFA, because it has half the opportunity cost to casting it.
Mobility, or rather damage efficiency while moving, has become a core part of WoW gameplay since Blizzard stopped tuning casters higher than melee by default. In order to be able to feel good doing damage, and move, you need to have parts of your rotation you are willing to give up to do that moving.
A more realistic solution is to split mind flay’s role. Give it times when it can be a face melter under certain conditions, but also let it fulfil its current role as damage we dont mind losing.
Thanks - I’ll add some emphasis on my post to really try to drive home our agreement.
To me that’s just an argument for allowing someone to have resources up front, not for abolishing the concept altogether.
Haha, you make an excellent example of why the discussion on meaningful belongs in another thread. 
Well this shadowlands nonsense has caused me to stir from my long slumber. I am happy to see the majority of people are upset with void form staying for another expansion. Third times a charm in blizzard’s opinion i guess? As many of you pointed out, much like when legion ended, once shadow’s corruptions and azerite traits stop functioning, the spec is literal garbage. Below is a list of changes, some of which i have been suggesting since legion, that would actually make the spec function by itself. It contains PVE and PVP changes. Also, as much as we want void form gone, it pains me to say that there’s a really low chance blizzard removes it. So for those who like vf, you will see it still there, and actually improved. Lots of text inc.
Shadow priest
General:
Mastery - increases damage of your periodic damaging effects (including channels) by x%, also gives them a y% chance to tick an additional time for full damage
Mind blast rank 2 - increases crit chance of hard casted mind blast by 40%, increases it critical damage by 10%
Vampiric touch rank 2 - vt period damage effects restore x% mana to you and party members
Void bolt and void eruption have a shared cool down, both instant cast, can use either to enter void form, both do bonus damage when used to enter void form.
Void bolt extends dot duration on single target by 3-4 sec
Void eruption extends dot durations by 1 second on all targets hit within 8-10 yards of main target
Void form increases all damage done by 15-20% (in addition to shadowform damage increase), also increases haste by 25-30%. No more ramping stats or damage baseline during voidform.
Shadow word:death - two charges baseline, damage increases by 20% and generates 15 insanity on targets below 25% hp. Killing a target generates 30 insanity.
Shadow fiend - greatly increased insanity generated from its attacks; attacks also slow targets by 50% (stacks multiplicatively with mind flay) and apply shadow vulnerability, increasing shadow damage taken from ALL sources by 2% stacking 5 times. (Change applies to mind bender as well, insanity generation would be 1/3 of that of shadow fiend due to cool down difference, still more than current however).
Fade rank 2 - removes all roots and movement impairing effects, and makes you immune to them for 4 seconds
Inner focus - melee attacks against you cause you to take 5% decreased damage from all sources (stacks twice), and makes you immune to spell push back effects. Lasts 10 seconds, can only activate once every 30 seconds.
Talents
Mind bomb does not replace psychic scream
Psychic horror lasts 4.5 seconds, costs x amount of insanity, cool down reduced to 30 seconds
Talent - Improved silence - cool down reduced to 20 seconds, interrupts spell casting and locks out school for 5 sec, blanket silence lasts 3 sec.
Void torrent: deals something like 400% (a lot of dmg) spell damage over 3-4 sec, castable while moving, only useable at 100 insanity (70 with legacy) or in void form. Pauses insanity decay.
New talent -channel mastery: while channeling abilities, your damage over time effect durations tick down at half speed
New talent - reverberating shadows: mind sear ticks causes targets with damage over time effects to pulse for damage equivalent to the dot ticks in a 3 yard radius. Affects only up to 4-5 targets with dots on them.
“New” talent - Surge of darkness - final tier talent; your vampiric touch damage over time effects have a 15-20% chance to proc surge of darkness, stacks up to 2 times, allowing void bolt or void eruption to be used outside of void form. These spells deal 10% increased damage per damage over time effect on the target ( from the priest only). Casting these spells costs insanity (equivalent to what they would generate normally in vf). ie. this will be the non-void form playstyle talent.
New/updated Dark Ascension - base insanity drain during void form is reduced by 50%, affected by haste (as in more hasted will further reduce insanity drain)
Shadow crash: all targets hit have shadow word pain applied
Remove dark void talent
Remove stm
Remove lingering insanity
Remove proposed void bolt rank 2
Add Mass Hysteria - void form damage aura reduced to 10%, all periodic damage effects and haste are increased by 2% per second within voidform. Here is your ramping damage for void form players
New Vampiric embrace - toggles on/off, when on, all direct/channeled damage you deal heals you for 20% of damage dealt, and allies for 10% of damage dealt. Drains x insanity per second while on.
Sanlayn - increases healing done by vampiric embrace to your allies by 30%, insanity drain increased.
New talent - Chorus of insanity - each point of insanity you have increases your crit chance by x%
Shadowy insight stays same (ie. swp ticks have 15% chance for instant mind blast) , additional new effect, instant mind blast does not incur a mind blast cool down.
Fortress of the mind: all mind and void spells have their damage increases by x%. Insanity gen increases by y. If used with surge of darkness, insanity cost of procs are increased proportionally.
Shadow word void: 2 charges, decrease cast time and cool down from original mind blast.
Pvp talent - Thought harvester: increases mana restored to the priest by x%, Fear from dispel effect no longer dr’s.
Pvp talent - void shell: when power word shield is broken, the breaker takes damage equivalent to the size of the absorb.
Remove greater fade
Pvp talent - spectral guise, same as it was in MoP, also increases your move speed by 50%
Pvp talent - masochism: attacks against you generate insanity
Void origins removed
Driven to madness removed
Glyphs:
Glyph of old shadow form because duh
Glyph of old (legion) void bolt because i like the way the old void bolt looks better than the wispy nonsense we have now.
Balancing aside, these changes would let you have almost 3 different playstyles -
That is absolutely not true. Mobs that lived less than a second or two were problematic (they are for most classes that have any sort of ramp), but you could be tactical and do effective damage on everything else before the Legion changes.
Amideus’s statement is confusing. Are you trying to say you cant do much damage in 24 sec? or you go oom at 60 sec?
Regarding 24 sec damage… SW:P is max 24 sec tick damage from talents if i recall. So that is the perfect window to take full advantage of your damage without going oom.
Regarding 60 sec damage… Is this a mana issue comment? Sure if you go crazy and MB on CD (while pulling a crap load of Threat btw) you can go oom around that time. But your DPS will be pretty high as well if you haven’t died from face tanking cause you can’t shed threat lol.
If your killing targets regularly, timing a MB to finish off the enemy does massive with spirit tap to prolong longevity.
Besides those 2 “questionable” statements. Shadow Priest has been able to do massive burst ever since we got SW:D in BC. It only got better each expansion until… oh that’s right Legion with Void Priest lol. Gee, imagine that.
If you were unable to then that’s a YOU issue and not the spec.
Fights that last less than 24 seconds prevent SWP from being used to the full benefit, significantly eating into your damage because part of that overall damage is the SWP. Pound for pound for total damage done is best if you can get the full damage from SWP. The shorter the fight is in that window, the less damage you will deal. Which is an odd thing for you not to recognize since you are the one so enamored with WoD spriests. The entire point of Mind Spike was to give us viability in fights were dots would not deal full damage.
And yes, fights over 60 seconds are a mana issue. And it’s also pretty clear that you don’t play on Classic atm? Or just not with an optimal guild? I haven’t pulled threat off a tank in group content since BRD at level 55. You’re just wrong about your statement that spriests “always” had good burst damage. Even with SW:D it wasn’t good or reliable burst. It was still slow and sustained. You could get a short and quick burst on a single target when SW:D wasn’t on cd, but this was almost exclusively beneficial when questing or in pvp fights.
And it’s not a me issue. It’s how the spec has worked. For the entirety of the spec. At this point you seem to just be making up arguments to be contrarian.
Yup, correct sir. However, my question was my mistake in that I read it too quick and it came off as “fights that last as short as 24 sec”. Thus my confusion within my question which is why I pointed out the 24 sec SW:P tick.
Also, you can set up burst windows by timing your dots to all hit at the same time as your Mind Blast. In addition, following that up with a silence/fear on casters or fear on melee and time it again with another burst window. Now I did this several times but also note its not a 1 button GCD burst, yea we cant do that. But it is “bursty” in chunks that you can pull off quite often in Classic.
Apply those same tricks in BC with the addition of SW:D and yea your bursts goes up. Again still not anything to compare vs mage and the like but to mention that we has no form of burst is misleading. It just takes a bit of timing/lining up.
Unfortunately no. Life events happened / got in the way back in Oct and I had to stop due to time constraints. So everything I am stating is mostly from my Vanilla experience, not Classic. But it still doesn’t detract that Mind Blast has a massive built in threat generator, that was my point. Basically the tank has to work extra hard to keep threat for not much gain (usually at least).
Actually its funny, I remember trading threat with a priest friend of mine back in the day where we were clearing out the elites in AV while all the lemmings were fighting in the middle in order for us to make pushes much faster and ninja bunkers and graveyards. We were trying to out DPS each other and ping ponging the elites back and forth with Mind Blast / Fade combo.
Then much later towards the end in Vanilla the alliance finally were winning AV constantly and we thought we have a fun competition to see who could get the most kills and least deaths and doing so we actually pushed them back nonstop and people were chatting about how surprised they were that we were winning. It was us 2 priests and our Destro warlock friend, we each had over 100 KB’s with the lock the most but most deaths and I had like 2 deaths and other priest 0 deaths but we about same in kills with him a little more.
Thinking of that moment is why I know we can have burst, It’s a bit stacked in our favor as we were fighting eachother by trying to kill snipe eachothers work but it was fun lol. The only reason the Warlock got more was because of instant Shadow Burn. That’s why once we got SW:D, it was a game changer and gave way more burst potential.
Anyway, back at it.
I’m not talking about Burst in PvE. Also, I guess i should rephrase it to “spike”. We can get moments to “spike” damage quite often. But yes, we don’t have any abilities that’s just press and they do massive damage with no setup like POM Pyro style etc. That might be why we got the Mind “Spike” ability in Cata to with with our spikey potential damage.
I wrote this because what Muqqi said is correct, you were always able to pull off things like that. If you cant, then yes that’s a YOU issue.
Edit:
One thing I do want to make clear though is that if you can manage your mana to a point where you wont go oom while casting as much as you can, Spriest DPS is quite high and competitive, the issue though always comes down to going oom. That was why DPS was low for Spriest in Classic. But this is why PvP was good, because you can drink whenever you get a few sec to drop combat, or pick up leafs in BG’s.
“Also, you can set up burst windows by timing your dots to all hit at the same time as your Mind Blast. In addition, following that up with a silence/fear on casters or fear on melee and time it again with another burst window.”
Here’s that PVP only focused mindset that completely misses the mark and muddies the waters of the conversation. Nothing I said earlier had anything to do with PVP nor was there any reason to think that it did. You can set up just as many burst windows now the same way using silence and horror with VE. You just don’t like it very much.
I’m the least threat capped person in the raids. The tanks actually have to work much harder to deal with the warriors than me. Mages also are pulling a lot of higher threat. Because while Mind Blast does have increased threat generation on it, it’s only double on that one ability. So if I hit for 900-1100 damage every 7 seconds at double threat, that’s 1800-2200 threat generation without reduction. I have a full 45% threat reduction from talents. So the extra threat is almost entirely mitigated, bringing it does to around 1200 max threat. While mages are going to be generating that much threat or more from every single spell cast. The myth of shadow priest theat comes from Vampiric Embrace. With 45% reduced threat, just doing damage, you’re going to be quickly outclassed by better dps now that everyone knows what they are doing. But VE still generates a massive amount of threat because it’s .5 threat per healing on each target. So if you’re healing around 400-500 on 5 people, and at least half of that is effective healing, your threat will skyrocket.
But my entire post was about pve. So your initial response was kinda pointless. My original statement was about fights less than 24 seconds and more than 60 in classic. It was clearly framed as a pve only statement in response to a statement also framed for pve.
Absolutely true. And easily proven. Go play a shadow priest on classic and you’ll understand. Shadow did NOT have an effective way to deal pve damage to enemies that died faster than your dot duration until MoP with the addition of Mind Spike changes and buffs. That was the entire purpose of those changes. They even made a dev blog about this.