Don’t get me wrong. I live VW. I used to play Void-Weaver on my Shadow Priest in Ranked PvP and did relatively well, with a reasonably good win rate.
But then I decided to switch to Archon, just out of curiosity. And man, for some reason, my performance improved significantly lol (and consequently, my win rate as well)
So I got curious. Most of the Shadow Priests I see in PvP are Void-Weavers. I don’t remember seeing an Archon (except at the start of the expansion/season)… So I’d like to ask: is Void-Weaver really that much better than Archon? Or am I just getting lucky with matchups as an Archon?
You are tankier, because you are constantly draining health from allies, and you get a mini-go every 30 seconds instead of every minute when all you really need to do with said go is dump all your insanity on Dplague and then follow it up with canceling the rift forcing it to collapse. While it can be disrupted I’ve been hit for upwards of 1mil non-crit collapses and 2mil crit collapses.
Since the nerf I don’t think it hits quite as hard but the collapse is still pretty good, especially since it follows 3-4 plagues hitting you.
Archon on the other hand, if I’m not mistake, tends to depend more on the halo giving you multiple MF:Insanity procs all of which can be interrupted and require you to plant for feet to get it off which means it’s set up is on a longer CD, 1 minute compared to 30 seconds, easier to disrupt and honestly at least I feel, doesn’t hit near as hard. You also don’t have the survivability Void Leech provides, Shadow Word Death doesn’t counter shields via losing Devour Matter, you have Shadowfiend, which is a longer CD, instead of Voidwraith.
It’s not always about the damage potential. It’s more about the actual amount of damage you can consistently pull off.
With the move while casting Void Torrent and move faster during the channel + combined with other movement speed increases. You are just simply more mobile along with the absorb breaking and extra pets to do stuff while you are moving or unable to do anything yourself etc.
You just have a lot more sense of freedom which is quite noticable as Shadow.
The rift does the most damage when collapsed, it’s damage while just floating out there really isn’t that big of a deal, not to mention manually collapsing it gives you control on when the damage hits so you can sync it up with your teammate damage window as well.
There’s any sort of macro I could add either to Void torrent or Mind Blast (in case of Disc) so I could press the key again to collapse? Like a cancelaura?
Mostly because if I know I’m getting tunneled you get both the rift collapse and the Catharsis damage all happening at once in a single button press and it can catch some people off guard, especially in RSS. Beyond that a simple cancelaura will do the job.
It isn’t the best but against melee mongoloids especially who ride you all game making it near impossible to cast having some extra insta-cast damage to go with your biggest burst can make more of a difference than people give credit for imo.
As far as I know, archon is is the bigger dps, but only if free casting. So if you’re with an aff lock you could probably run archon. Vw is faster and more often burst though.
