Are you serious blizzard? Like are you dead serious? You buff our SW:D with a bunch of powers, then it kills me twice. And then your miserable mechanic that kicks you out of torghast spawned and wasted the hour I put into 14 floors of twisting corridors. Im not sure why you think having an auto kick mechanic after so long is interesting or clever but all it is, is unnecessary and a waste of your players time. It would be nice if you had player experience in mind with things like this but instead you design garbage systems that punish people.
Did you think when you run out of lives the game would give you free loot: it’s made quite obv something bad will happen likly run ending that kinda what lives are in most games.
In fact Torg is rather nice in that regard if you get to the next floor before the tarra gets there you get a bonus life as he won’t spawn on the next floor till you die. You can repeat as many times as you want.
As for your own abiltys killing you well that’s on you. Don’t use abiltys that kill you or counter there effects so they don’t kill you. It’s no different than the mage 3x blood lust but kills you after effect you have to use iceblock before it ends or before you leave the floor and force end it or you die. Play around your skills do they don’t kill you that vary much a git good thing.
Them kicking you out is not wasting your time it’s adding value to the content. There would be little meaning to a system that has lives if they never matter. The lives are part of the challenge don’t like it turn down the diff (lower layer) or don’t take part in that content. It’s no different than hard mode being hard on a game is not a waste of your time it’s the point of the difficulty and the game.
Torghast sucks, and a lot of it sucks extra-hard for shadow priests. All the SW:D powers are trap options because there’s nothing to mitigate the reverb damage, and you can easily get no fun power options and be stuck going through the same rotations for the whole layer.
If you’re Necrolord, the random unholy nova power is almost a trap option because it can cause dying maw rats to pull the whole floor onto you. Either be prepared to manually kill every single maw rat in a good location, or simply skip the power and save yourself the headache.
Volatile Phantasm (Fade makes an exploding mirror image) is a god-tier damage and defensive power because Fragments of Obscurity (Fade cooldown reduced) is incredibly common and can get the cooldown reduced to 10 seconds for you to spam it.
Horrific dictionary (5% int for every Word spell you cast) is strong when you get it up to 4 stacks (pain death fort shield), but when you get to floor 3 or 6 and find a broker, you can switch to holy and disc spec really quick to cast PW Radiance, PW Barrier, HW Sanctify, HW Serenity, and pop a talent in HW Salvation to turn it up to a total of 9 stacks.
An early Dark technique (Psychic Scream/Mind Bomb deals damage every second) means a psychic scream + hp build is really strong as you can buy a ton of time in a tough boss fight while dealing damage, or simply obliterate a big group of enemies if you get surrounded. Strongly recommend you swap talents to Mind Bomb for the reduced cooldown for this one.
Overall, I still wish Blizzard would just delete Torghast from the game, but I hope this knowledge helps you as a SPriest.
It is the only media that punishes you for failing.
“You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game” - Dara O’Briain
Priests get a pile of powers that buff their HP, though. You have the standard HP% powers available to everyone, plus two separate powers that buff how much stamina you get from Power Word: Fortitude. And the rest of your powers even incentivize taking those, since many of your powers are capped by or based on a percentage of your max HP.
Hp isn’t really worth without dark technique. The PWS build requires too many moving parts for too little benefit and if you don’t have a way to convert hp into damage then picking lots of hp powers means your run will take ages. Even with lots of hp, spamming SWD combined with enemy damage will tear through the most massive hp pools.
I was talking more about Catharstick and Scales of Trauma, the latter of which is explicitly capped by your max HP (and the former sorta is, since it relies on taking damage, which you need to not die from). I haven’t run Torghast on my priest that much, but it’s my understanding that comboing one or both of those into Cruelty Censer is a major power combo for all 3 priest specs, since it can easily lead to absolutely massive hits on bosses that remove the vast majority of the fight time (and thus, danger). Also, last I checked, Volatile Phantasm scales directly with stamina as well.
That might help you get through a run but I wouldn’t be too happy about being stuck with a build like that. You have to wait for enemies to deal damage to you to get stored damage rolling, mawrats become a huge annoyance because you don’t want to waste stored damage on them. You need a bunch of specific powers to build off that, and you’ll never get to a point where you’re steamrolling because you necessarily have to be taking damage to deal damage.