You do realize the fact that demo is still well enjoyed and Demon Hunter exists as a healthy class many enjoy goes to show that such a thing is not only healthy but can actually result in more fleshed out and better designed classes/specs right?
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I understand that sentiment. It certainly feels bad to see something you had be taken away and given to someone else. I guess I would still say that nothing is being taken that you are advocating for keeping. It would still exist within your class, even if it isn’t in your preferred form. I would like to think though that we wouldn’t want to kind of give into the mindset of “if it can’t be the way I want, no one should get it.” Again, I think we can get a great shadow spec by removing void form, but I do believe that it can be enjoyed in a different way by many.
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I do, which I why I made the disclaimer that I’m not not speaking to the potential outcomes or quality of the designs. It could be a really great design that a lot of people love, but it wouldn’t be what I loved. I may even enjoy what they make, but wouldn’t mean I’m not still frustrated with how it came about.
This is 100% feels, and it feels terrible.
I get that. Yea I would personally 100% love to just see it in its original form while still having the option without it, but I think we all know it isn’t possible. So I enjoyed that style enough that I’d rather have it in a different form than not at all.
There’s always legion classic to get something in it’s original form back so that we can move on in retail 
I’d actually say DoTs were a key aspect of VF era Shadow. Mechanically, Voidform benefitted enormously from DoTs, as the off-global insanity generation from Apparitions played a huge role in why VFs lasted as long as they did, and their damage scaled infinitely with haste, whereas every spell you actually cast plateaus hard past the hasted GCD cap. Visually, the army of ghosts you spawned and the barrage of numbers popping up on your screen was very satisfying. Just seeing a flood of black, blue, and purple flowing in every direction was a real good moment.
Remove the DoTs and while you could emulate some of those effects with design changes (ex. lowering insanity drain to compensate for lower insanity generation between GCDs), but I don’t think those sorts of changes would hit the same kind of vibes.
Idk if I’m just not getting it. How the 2 couldn’t get it’s own spec. I mean there’s overlap in abilities across every spec in the classes. Doesn’t mean that voidweaver and classical shadow would lose the core of the feel of shadow. They could play similarly but one would get more of a damage boost while the other would have more of a support feel. Add in some unique spells to round them out. I honestly haven’t done a deep dive on how it would come about, but like others have said. I feel it would work. Maybe I’m just nostalgic of the way it was that made me fall in love with shadow in TBC that ive mained since. But there’s definitely a divide in shadow, enough to warrant 2 different specs. In my humble opinion.
Tried playing my shadow priest for the first time in ages this week. Something seems way off. I’ll try to explain the best I can. The first issue is having to choose between mind flay and mind spike. Is there a reason we can’t have both spells? Too many keybinds?
But more importantly, our talents limit us to one or two abilities when it comes to bonuses. For example, our “big” damage cooldown dark ascension only applies to non periodic damage. That literally limits its bonus to only mind blast unless you choose mind spike, but then you are losing mind flay. Why doesn’t this “big” damage talent also give a bonus to mind flay and void torrent?
Another example of this is the insidious ire talent. Why is the bonus only given to mind blast and void torrent?
Having to know periodic from non periodic spells is not as cut and dry as one would think. And even if it were, the bonuses from all these talents is just as confusing.
I guess the point I’m making is, all these talents having strange limits on what can be used with them makes shadow a pain to play. It’s hard to know what benefits from the bonus you are getting at any given moment because all the bonuses are limited to one or two specific spells. It’s confusing as hell and I pretty much just gave up on playing it for pvp because I don’t see this being fixed in the expansion.
I’d love to post this on the development forum but can’t cause I’m not on the test center for it.
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It’s a very one-sided divide, or at least it feels like it to me.
People that enjoyed voidform seem to have more or less accepted that it’s gone and Void Bolt is still here (tier set dependent) as a reminder of what was. Then some black/blue particles show up and people start losing their minds about how shadow priest shouldn’t be void priest. I gotta say, I envy the tenacity. Voidform priest has been gone for as long as it was here and people are still trying to remove it from shadow four years after it was removed.
We have nothing resembling voidform shadow priest right now in terms of gameplay. The question of what shadow is has been answered, and it’s, more or less, a modernized WoD style shadow. I liked WoD shadow. I liked every version of shadow from vanilla up until Shadowlands, but I’m not sure that I’ll ever understand why so many people get so riled up by some particles being black/blue instead of black/purple even enjoying previous versions of shadow as I did.
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I meant a divide in the community specifically. And Honestly I think blizzard missed an opportunity in general with hero talents and tying them between the different specs instead of giving them individually, pathways to choose, like paragon classes in DnD. And I get there would be a ton more work for balancing and such, but would give them more lattitude with how to flesh out class fantasy. But would also help with the balancing issues of creating hero talents that work with completely different specs. Like a disc priest that’s a void weaver? Like what? I mean we still have Archon coming so hopefully it leans more into the more support style shadow of old and both camps will be cool with what we have.
Initially when they first reintroduced Mind Spike, it was similar to how it was during Cata-WoD run in that it was a spell in addition to Mind Flay and it ripped your Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch off the target.
To knew players (Post Legion revamp) they couldn’t make heads or tails of Mind Spike and very quickly thought that because it had no cooldown or resource cost that it should be a filler… but with Mind Flay already acting as a filler it instantly was labeled as worthless since Mind Flay didn’t rip off your dots and Mind Spike did.
What people failed to understand was the purpose of Mind Spikes existence in its initial incarnation and what it was solving.
The best example I can think of in multiple fights in both Firelands and Dragon Soul (at least 10 man) really highlights the power of Mind Spike.
In Firelands you needed to Mind Spike burst the person that got face raged by rage face dog in first boss before the person died as you needed to do quick damage to get the dog to stop attacking the person. Damage that you would not get out fast enough with your dots.
Then once again the spider adds that spawn in the spider fight. Then again dealing with the bird adds in the bird fight. Then also the fire elemental adds in the Ragnaros fight.
In Dragon Soul you needed to rip off the Spine of Deathwings plates 3 times and only during a small window where you needed to burst hard and with the Dragon Soul 4 set you can have your Shadow Fiend grant you 3 Shadow Orbs each time he attacked which at the time your Mind Blast and Mind Spike consumed all Shadow Orbs to deal increases damage, stacking for each orb consumed with a maximum of 3 Shadow Orbs. This allowed Shadow to burst very hard when you time it right so every cast of either Mind Spike and Mind Blast consumed 3 Shadow Orbs every time. Also your Mind Spike granted your next Mind Blast +30% critical strike chance, stacking 3 times. In addition, having access to Dark Archangel (origin of Dark Ascension) granting 20% additional damage to your Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Mind Spike and Shadow Word: Death increased your burst damage potential. Finally, you could also double tap your Shadow Word: Death at low health which all combined created a nasty burst of damage in a very short amount of time.
So bringing it back to Dragonflight, during beta because of how Dark Ascension did NOT enhance the damage of Mind Flay and ONLY enhanced the damage of Non-Periodic damage, Mind Spike quickly was thrown into the “filler” category instead of being what it was meant to be used as a “burst moment” spell since Dark Ascension was only 60 second cooldown vs 90 seconds back in Cata and lasted 20-25 seconds vs 15 seconds back in Cata that trying to justify a talent point for a spell that you only use sometimes due to it ripping dots off to balance out its damage ran counter to the rest of the spec with its focus on dots being used to trigger procs and activate other talent synergies just made Mind Spike very questionable.
So people complained and then they reduced the damage Mind Spike dealt and made it so it no longer removes dots and as such it just a casted spell that competes with your channel filler.
But in S1 of Dragonflight when used with Surge of Darkness in having instant cast Mind Spike procs do increases damage, it quickly found to be useful to use as a damage on the go moment which increased our mobility because we can actually do something impactful while moving and not feeling rooted so much.
So in S2 they simply combined Mind Spike and Mind Flay to be an either or choice which leads us to current day iteration and the current problem of why does Mind Spike exist and since it does a bit more damage than Mind Flay since you have to spent a talent point on it, people feel forced to take it and thus the friction between Mind Flay and Mind Spike has been born.
It’s a relic of a Shadowlands Legendary where they added Void Torrent to the spell list affected as it was only Mind Blast for a bit. It was one of the better legendaries offered for Shadow in Shadowlands which quickly found its way in the talent tree due to lack of vision and ideas on blizzards part and it still remains today.
Conclusion:
The current talent tree for Shadow is a mixture of a lot of things with half baked ideas that hopefully will get addressed in TWW expansion.
the way they are handling hero talents just doesn’t work with priest at all.
Idk. I guess one more expansion to see anything really change.
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Archon actually looks sick, and it sounds powerful in terms of nubmers/gameplay for Holy priest.
Voidweaver also looks sick, and seems to work great for Shadow priest.
idk much about discipline
This is all from a PvE perspective.
Tier set looks pretty cool…
for pvp side.
Voidweaver overall is the only win I can give thematic and concept wise.
Gameplay wise can be easily fix IMO.
My biggest issue is throwing away our voidtorrent just to get the spec to function. I would much rather have them redeisgn VoidEruption and Dark ascension.
Remove them from the tree and put in into void
Redesign the abilities.
Boom complain pretty much gone.
Archon for shadow PVP just potato. The theme is also potato. It just only screams holy to me.
Oracle, this spec doesn’t exist at all to me at the moment.
I
The slow is really, really strong, and the amount of damage it boosts mind spike by is kinda crazy.
i know they are soo gooooooood.
Which one will be the PVP one? ;_;
Dude, we are eating so good in the set department since Dragonflight.
The person in charge of priest sets design has a place earned in heaven
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Yes I was kind of picking that up as well.
So I want to test it out before I rule it out.
I mean, the clothes are meh…
But the Naaru light effects are what sells it. Especially the Shadow purple variant.
slow in pvp is barely felt due to all the instant gapclosers melee have and the lack of mobility priest have.
i don’t use mindspike at all on my shadowpriest.
I hate mindspike
And I hate the Voidform.
I only use Darkascension to just proc void volley with the help of driven to madness since melee is always on me.
If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t touch it… but I have no choice.
Reading perfect Form talent in this spec gets me sad.
I’ll only use this spec on holy pretty much lol.
I mean the slow hits everything in a 40 yard range and lasts + reapplies for 20 seconds, it’s really useful in PvP generally. Less so 1v1s.