Long ramp up damage with no burst or cd to compensate. Voidform is truly the most boring aspect of any class in this game and I can’t think of anything that makes it fun, not one.
It’s like they took the idea of WoD demo Warlocks playstyle, stripped it of its burst, cds, and utility and gave whatever that was left to Shadow Priests as spec fantasy.
Voidform needs to go.
Thank you, that’s exactly what i was thinking. It’s so boring you only get one button that you need to press on cd.
And i don’t understand why they gave us the basic idea of WoD Demo lock without the parts that made it fun and function-able.
There are a few people that hate voidform as a concept. I don’t. I just despise what its mechanics did to the class outside of the areas where the devs tuned it (raid fights). Shadow can never be fixed until someone in charge acknowledges that backloading class damage (which is what the insanity mechanic does) makes it terrible at the non-raid content. I don’t care if they still call it insanity, but requiring us to take 3 or more GCD’s to to get competitive damage output needs to go away before Shadow will ever be desirable in that other content. Or, they can tune the other classes to also require 10 seconds of prep time to do competitive damage. Imagine the forum outroar! lol
My proposed band-aid would be to have Insanity regenerate out side of combat, at the same rate you get while channeling mind flay. That way, breaks in trash packs don’t cause your damage output to fall off a cliff.
Forgot to add, the second part would be to bring back mind spike/mind blast as it was back in Cataclysm: On-demand, competitive single target damage, that is mana negative and strips the dots off of the target.
Shadow requires more than 3 gcds. Shadow doesn’t do it’s full damage until after its first voidform ends, when it get chorus stacks, and lingering Insanity stacks rolling
It’s like a full minute into a fight before you’re at full damage output. Then if you lose your stacks because of a mechanic or something, it’s another full voidform cycle before you get back to where you were
Also wanna add to this that 3 GCDs is absolutely nothing to be complaining about.
That’s typically what the other DPS specs need to ramp up. That’s where Shadow should be. As was previously pointed out, it really takes nearly a minute for Shadow to get there now. Also, that is a partial quote, see original for more context.
<— This guy does! I’ve always hated voidform. I wouldn’t mind it if there were other DPS specs for the class, like hunter or rogue, but having your only dps option a niche gimmicky mechanic is really frustrating.
I don’t. I love voidform. It’s the most interesting and amazing change that shadow ever got. It’s 100% class fantasy brought to the absolute highest level and was in my opinion the best part of Legion…
What I HATE is the constant changes to the class and the inability to allow Shadow to EVER shine as a dps class ever, period, end of story. If we’re not mediocre or garbage tier Blizzard doesn’t seem to be happy. And I get that our cleave potential is too strong to allow them to design interesting raids without shadow breaking the charts, but find a way to fix THAT instead of just nuking the spec from orbit every time.
Legion Voidform was great early on, and over time they kept taking out little pieces of what made it work, nerfing them, and moving them to talents. This did two things, it reduced the overall power of voidform and made it feel clunky, because instead of redesigning the form around the needed changes, they just gutted it isntead, and it made more and more of our talents mandatory to prop the spec up.
Stop trying to just tinker with voidform as is. Either redesign voidform from the ground up, or revert it back to Legion and decide what your pain points are without destroying the spec again.
I swear people who scream about how unique voidform is have never touched a Demo lock before.
let me clarify this. the reason blizz had to go in and nerf it is because it was doing broken dps. BROKEN DPS. when one button smash out dps every other class by miles something is wrong. From the get go Blizz has proven that there are no way to balance it. Again its not a lack of effort from there side its simply unbalance-able.
From a player perspective. we hate it because its not fun. I don’t mind the theme of the spec (old god/ void) the mechanic however gotta go. its the most toxic thing ever. I just did a m+0 on my priest that out gears the rest of the party by miles and did bottom dps. I don’t care if i can solo a mythic boss by myself it’s still extremely unsatisfying and utterly obnoxious.
by the time you have enough insanity to get into voidform pull is dead.
when you have enough for voidform you have to maintain it to at least 20 stack but by 10 stacks pull is dead. when pull is directly before boss you can’t pop it because you have to safe for boss.
You have to run Lingering Insanity, Legacy of Void, and Chorus of insanity. Your first voidform is nothing because its main function is to build lingering insanity and chorus stacks. Your second voidform is when you actually do decent damage.
now explain to me how this is fine, fun, and not toxic. there so much you can ride on the word unique.
I get the feeling you don’t actually main a shadow priest, because twice now in response to my posts you have said “Shadow is just smash void bolt” which couldn’t be less true if you tried.
The reason shadow got nerfed is because dot classes are incredibly hard to balance for cleave based fights. We’re not the only class that got hit either, but the issue is that shadow generates such a massive increase per target because of the way that our classes is designed that it makes it impossible to nerf the cleave dps without utterly trashing the rest of the class.
You seem to understand some of the issue, but rather than actually talking about the problems you just use buzz words like “broken” and “toxic” and you devalue the spec to one button spam, but then also acknowledge the incredibly leverage that proper insanity generation has.
Voidform is NOT a bad system. What it’s current state is however IS bad. And that’s mostly because a lot of the things you refer to, Chorus of Insanity and Lingering Insanity, used to be baseline parts of the shadow spec. During Legion Shadow priests had access to two things: Lingering Insanity was baseline on Shadowform, and Xal’atath had a golden trait called Mass Hysteria that gave us 2% dot damage for each stack of void form.
Chorus is the new Mass Hysteria, and Lingering Insanity was moved off voidform halfway in Legion and made a talent, which was one of the DUMBEST things they ever did. When you take two things that used to be baseline for the spec that made it work, and put it as “optionals” that players can pick, it becomes REALLY hard to make meaningful choices outside those, which have been tailored to the spec from the start.
The problem with voidform is that they have never sat down and bothered to redesign it properly from the ground up. They just took out pieces of what made voidform work from Legion launch, and put them in separate pieces so they can tune those pieces and balance them individually.
There IS a problem with voidform1 being your build form, and voidform2 being your damage form. There is a problem with M+ performance for Shadow. But that’s ALWAYS been the issue for shadow. You can have voidform be interesting and fixed without throwing it away for “shadow orbs” which was the lamest thing shadow ever had, and the least interesting class resource since holy power.
At least we can identify the issues with voidform and fix it without trashing the form. They just actually have to do that instead of constantly holding on to the original spec in several pieces.
I don’t see why, as 5 man content becomes and more and more a part of WoW’s end game that shadow should remain bad at it by design.
Shadow has never succeeded because of Voidform, it has only succeeded in spite of it.
Don’t bother with him. He’s one of those who likes voidform and everyone else who disagree with him is wrong. He just told me on another post that ramp up is a hallmark of shadow and it needs to stay in the game. For some reason He thinks our DoTs ramp up. (it was a legion buff)
I never said that it should continue to be one, only that it always has been one. The problem is more so that dot classes are just hard to balance effectively for a wide range of content, because the dots are either too strong leading to multi-target fights with any significant duration being broken, or too weak to feel effective or worth using.
At some point there has to be a tradeoff in power and potential to keep the core of the class around. But it doesn’t need to be as dismal as it is right now. I was absolutely livid in Legion having to be at the mercy of a random legendary drop (Twin’s) to be worth bringing to M+.
Finding solutions to these issues is a good start. But I feel that too much of the conversation is focused entirely on where our class fits on a number scale compared to others, and less about the mechanics of the class and how it works.
Hi there. Misrepresenting my viewpoints again just because you don’t like shadowform and I do? I see you’re talking down to people on the forums again. Please refrain from that, it’s not conducive to a civil and meaningful discussion.
People find security in systems they remember working, while I don’t consider shadow orbs particularly interesting. I did feel like I could trust the developers to understand what they needed, and build on them effectively. Which they did, BRF is one of my favourite raid tiers because of how shadow played on every boss in it.
Voidform has been, not to mince words, an untenable roller coaster !*?$ show from start to finish. I do not blame anyone here for feeling there’s no viable solution within reach. Especially since we have to assume BFA’s neutered Voidform is Blizzard’s solution to Legion’s problems.
Worth noting WoD and MoP orbs would equally be really, really bad at Mythic Plus (Don’t get me started on mastery build COP in scaled challenge mode gear). But at least there wouldn’t be a core premise holding back potential design directions to fix that.
I’d rather keep the broken system that holds together more engaging gameplay and class identity than move to a boring system that also just still sucks for certain content.
There’s a lot of really obvious things players have been asking for a while. That haven’t been done. Even as far back as Legion we wanted Legacy baseline. We wanted something that wasn’t StM in the final tier. More talent options, and the ones that were mandatory either changed, made baseline, or other talents buffed.
So far there has been no effort to do that. I don’t want to see the biggest fulfillment for the class identity tossed aside just because people want boring but top meters. We could absolutely get boring and top meters without losing Voidform if it comes to that.
Personally, I find voidform to be one of the least engaging iterations of shadow. As much as the highs and lows of haste were initially an interesting aspect, the rotation never deviated from the same 3 buttons in the same order and for the same reasons.
Even when I was supposed to be feeling powerful, what I was doing to achieve that was no different, the one exception to this was the NH set bonus, ironic as it was to break the monotony of your rotation with a short but even more monotonous one…
I’m sorry that you feel that way, but I again will disagree. Shadow plays off a priority system and that system has changed and been different over the period of time that Voidform has been around.
In Legion talents and rotation would change with legendaries. If you had the belt, you had procs to manage, without the belt you used a different talent and your rotation changed to utilize the priority system with SW:Void.
But there’s another question to ask here. How many buttons are you expecting to hit in your normal rotations anyway? Having three abilities to rotate around while maximizing uptime and dealing with mechanics is pretty standard for most of the classes.
Was Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay that engaging? Because that’s what it was before Voidform.
Errrr, what.
People played SI with belt for like a month in early EN, and then realised it was incorrect and played AS until NH. When you had the option to play SanLayn with high mastery over AS with crit, neither of which had any rotational impact.
Shadow Word: Void was never seriously taken in Legion, people ran it as the precursor to the 1 minute cycle in the very very end of NH. That experimentation is how we managed to find that build with the ToS set bonus so quickly, then everything was set in stone throughout ToS and Antorus. BFA Shadow Word: Void is the legendary belt, which again has no impact on shadow’s rotational priorities outside of making the whole thing fit together.
At no point did the rotation priority differ from “Bolt on cd, don’t cap blast charges, fill”
It’s less the number of buttons, and more the way they interact with eachother, or rather don’t. I’ve never been much of a fan of abilities that are little more than “Hit on cooldown” and since the only interaction we have is with voidform, and that doesn’t give anything back except make your rotation faster, the whole thing just lacks something to tie the loop back up. I’m doing all of this so I can what? Keep doing it but faster?
But that’s always been how Shadow played. You had Used your dots “on cooldown” by reapplying them once the duration was over, you used Mindblast on cooldown, and then you used Mindflay in the space between. That’s how shadow has been since the beginning of time, a series of buttons you hit “on cooldown” and then fill with Mind Flay. I’d say if your issue is with that, then it’s the entire class that’s always going to feel awkward for you.
Is there another class that the rotation or mechanics do work in a way you like that you could give more examples for? Because right now all I can think is that you just don’t like playing shadow and no amount of changes would fix that realistically.