Shadow Buffs.. lol

[Shyzhi]

Couldn't S2M be tamed with, instead of dying, you got a... 30 sec stun/pacification? I personally think it's easy to work around the idea.

The whole thought of be dying if i mess up is whats makes it fun to me, being stunned or pacified for 30secs just makes me wish i was dead, they could make it so you cant gain insanity for the 3min debuff so if you fall out early you are fucked for the rest of it, but a good Spriest can get almost to the end so the "no generating" wont hit them as hard. It could make the talent more viable in 5man content / mythic + as who wants to ress there shadow priest after every boss?

[davesignal]

Mind Sear is weird like that, you'll at least get a tick out of it before you need to cancel it, which evens out in terms of insanity.

You should still be filling with sear. It activates Void Ray as well and benefits from it. More Insanity generation as well.

Yeah, Sear is definitely better but getting a handle on it is weird. It looks to be significantly more DPET-- with Void Ray-- than Mind Blast on three targets (at least in my gear), but just ~slightly~ worse insanity per execute time. I think I might end up just doing Sear and Void Bolt during Voidforms, which is odd.

[Segus1992]

If I were you, I'd refrain from calling people names just because they dislike something you like.

I'm sure you would, but you're luckily not me.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't appreciate it because I'm mostly PVPing hence, to me, there are no level 100 talents - the other two are such shit that they may not even exist and I won't notice.

I can totally get behind this - like I said, make something out of tge other two, don't ruin S2M because of shitty whiners and those who want a good PvP talent (the other two talents suck, kill one of those).

[Djriff]

Yeah, Sear is definitely better but getting a handle on it is weird. It looks to be significantly more DPET-- with Void Ray-- than Mind Blast on three targets (at least in my gear), but just ~slightly~ worse insanity per execute time. I think I might end up just doing Sear and Void Bolt during Voidforms, which is odd.

So just looking at pure numbers.
The cast time of Mind Sear is 5s / 1+haste. For me this is 3.81155664 seconds (31.18% Haste, no voidform)
Mind Sear generates 1.8 insanity per tick, per target hit and ticks 6 times over it's duration.

Mind Blast not in Voidform gives has a cool down of 9s / 1+haste (6.860801952) and a cast time equal to the GCD.

Mind Sear ticks every 0.6352944 seconds for me, while Mind Blast has a cast time of 1.143466992s

Now since the relation of Mind Blast Cast Time/Cooldown and Mindsear Cast Time/Tick Rate is the same for everyone here's some numbers.

At 2 targets, it's still worth it to cast Mind Blast
At 4+ targets you can safely drop it from your rotation as it's officially an IPS loss.
at 9+ targets you can stop casting VB for IPS and instead focus only on refreshing dots on your primary target (more if you can as that'll always be a DPS increase if targets live)

[Deja Thoris]

While I'm grateful for the buffs I just can't help thinking the people balancing this are incompetent.

Lets set aside the fact that that they were told in the alpha / beta cycle that STM and MH synergy would spiral out of control - In just 3 days they've gone from a situation where they were capping the gains of MH, preventing stack gain during void torrent and dispersion to one where they reverted two of the proposed nerfs and then actually buffed some other stuff.

It almost defies belief. Their knee jerk reactions would be hilarious if I wasn't invested in my character but I am so its really just troubling to me. Shadow was spotlighted early on in the development cycle and a complete redesign was touted along with much marketing fanfare around STM. The finished product in Legion has the same glaring weaknesses as the SP of WoD. No AoE (tweak mind sear all you fucking want devs), long ramp up time. But yay, now we get a talent that makes us ask for a res after every pull. woot.

[Zephirdd]

While I'm grateful for the buffs I just can't help thinking the people balancing this are incompetent.

Lets set aside the fact that that they were told in the alpha / beta cycle that STM and MH synergy would spiral out of control - In just 3 days they've gone from a situation where they were capping the gains of MH, preventing stack gain during void torrent and dispersion to one where they reverted two of the proposed nerfs and then actually buffed some other stuff.

It almost defies belief. Their knee jerk reactions would be hilarious if I wasn't invested in my character but I am so its really just troubling to me. Shadow was spotlighted early on in the development cycle and a complete redesign was touted along with much marketing fanfare around STM. The finished product in Legion has the same glaring weaknesses as the SP of WoD. No AoE (tweak mind sear all you fucking want devs), long ramp up time. But yay, now we get a talent that makes us ask for a res after every pull. woot.

Is it really that hard to understand?

1. They wanted to nerf MH/VT/Dispersion and backtracked on that, as explained on the notes.
2. They wanted to buff Mind Sear but realized that 50% wasn't enough so they increased it to 80%
3. Buffing it to 80% would make it too strong relative to Mind Flay and Mind Spike, so they buffed those as well
4. Void Ray would be OP with those buffs, so they removed a stack of it

It's not rocket science. A change chains other changes in order to maintain a certain balance.

[ttylol]

What if S2M was a passive that just removed cooldown on SW:D? Keeps the execute niche/etc but makes it a lot easier to balance. Each cast could cost some life, if people want to keep the risk (indirectly tying it to VT HPS).

[Deja Thoris]

Is it really that hard to understand?

1. They wanted to nerf MH/VT/Dispersion and backtracked on that, as explained on the notes.
2. They wanted to buff Mind Sear but realized that 50% wasn't enough so they increased it to 80%
3. Buffing it to 80% would make it too strong relative to Mind Flay and Mind Spike, so they buffed those as well
4. Void Ray would be OP with those buffs, so they removed a stack of it

It's not rocket science. A change chains other changes in order to maintain a certain balance.

You missed the point entirely. They published changes that were basically a train wreck. They walked back on them in 3 days. If they were competent that wouldn't have happened in the first place. Was my post really that hard to understand? You also failed to mention the most important change which is the MH backpedal, thats the main reason damage skyrockets at high voidform stacks in STM.

[mudkipzz]

What an ignorant statement. Many people have mained shadow priest for this very spell. It is one of the most unique spells in the game that rewards good players who are able to maintain Voidform.

You're an idiot for maining a class for one spell

[Reposed]

What if S2M was a passive that just removed cooldown on SW? Keeps the execute niche/etc but makes it a lot easier to balance. Each cast could cost some life, if people want to keep the risk (indirectly tying it to VT HPS).

So, kinda like SPriests at the end of WotLK? That didn't last long.

[tiptopmemer]

Is it really that hard to understand?

1. They wanted to nerf MH/VT/Dispersion and backtracked on that, as explained on the notes.
2. They wanted to buff Mind Sear but realized that 50% wasn't enough so they increased it to 80%
3. Buffing it to 80% would make it too strong relative to Mind Flay and Mind Spike, so they buffed those as well
4. Void Ray would be OP with those buffs, so they removed a stack of it

It's not rocket science. A change chains other changes in order to maintain a certain balance.

You're right, but Deja isnt wrong.

While I'm grateful for the buffs I just can't help thinking the people balancing this are incompetent.

Lets set aside the fact that that they were told in the alpha / beta cycle that STM and MH synergy would spiral out of control - In just 3 days they've gone from a situation where they were capping the gains of MH, preventing stack gain during void torrent and dispersion to one where they reverted two of the proposed nerfs and then actually buffed some other stuff.

It almost defies belief. Their knee jerk reactions would be hilarious if I wasn't invested in my character but I am so its really just troubling to me. Shadow was spotlighted early on in the development cycle and a complete redesign was touted along with much marketing fanfare around STM. The finished product in Legion has the same glaring weaknesses as the SP of WoD. No AoE (tweak mind sear all you fucking want devs), long ramp up time. But yay, now we get a talent that makes us ask for a res after every pull. woot.

Going from nerfing S2M/MH by 15% to buffing mindflay/mindspike/mindsear is sheer incompetence.

It doesn't defy belief, blizz have not been able to put a solid spriest on paper since 3.0, that's roughly 8 years.

It is insane that all throughout the dev cycle they refused to look at spriest numbers, it was obvious where S2M/MH was going, they were too stupid to figure it out and have been knee jerk buffing/nerfing since then.

Then you have celestion who is the most under qualified idiot trying to call everything that happens 'class fantasy'.

WoW is a big ticket item for blizzard... and they don't hire qualified people? its really quite pathetic

[Jaigar]

So, I'm currently level my spriest to 110 (107 currently), and good God Mind Spike is the absolute worst leveling skill.

First its just clunky. It doesn't feel good at all to use. 2/3 of the damage is backloaded, meaning you need to mindblast to get anything from it. Then ontop of that, if you kill the target before detonating them, they just disappear. Its frustrating to try to pull 3-4 mobs together, DoT, then try to mind spike only to have the stacks vanish and no nothing.

The skill needs a rework. There's potential for different playstyles in Spriest like there was in WoD, but its really off balance ATM, and mastery adding 0 damage to mind spike just feels bad.

[MasterHamster]

I'll pick my priest back up as soon as they figure out how to let Shadow actually appear on the AoE damage charts, currently rotting at 100 after being created in BC, it's quite sad.

Oh and remove StM, it's bad for the spec/class as a whole to have such a talent. Actually the whole lvl 100 talent row is godawful for Shadow

[Segus1992]

I'll pick my priest back up as soon as they figure out how to let Shadow actually appear on the AoE damage charts, currently rotting at 100 after being created in BC, it's quite sad.

Oh and remove StM, it's bad for the spec/class as a whole to have such a talent. Actually the whole lvl 100 talent row is godawful for Shadow

The only thing they need to do with S2M is to make the "die when it ends" part go away if you leave combat before it happens. I dearly hope they don't remove it entirely because of some shitty whiners.

Buff the other talents though, they're ass.

[Deleted]

You're an idiot for maining a class for one spell

It is not the spell but the playstyle it gives.
Voidform/Insanity is probably one of the best mechanics in years and surrender to madness only multiplies the fun aspect about it. Trying to fight that insanity bar.
Playstyle should be the number 1 priority when picking a main anyway besides the very 1% world first guilds.

[Dawnrage]

S2M is super fun, no doubt. I only hate it because it's very nature makes it a pain to balance, and that means that it's either overpowered or underpowered, which is a shame really. In a perfect world with no DPS meters and classes can do w/e, S2M spriest is probably my favorite spec of all time playing WoW.

7.2 is going to make spriest boring I bet, but such is the life of balance.

[Reyzzz]

Umm an actual aoe not a buff to the worst one in the game, and more insanity generation. Cant wait til they get rid of StM altogether, lets hope sooner than later.

Buff to mind spike is a buff to AOE.

[Alexieel]

Maybe change S2M to something like Combustion,
Change its duration to 30sec, nerf the increased insanity generation to 100% (should be enough to sustain 30sec more then usual) and keep the 10min cd.
But every for every stack if VF you get, you reduce the remaining cooldown of S2M by 2sec.

Wouldnt make S2M perma active during the last 2mins, wouldnt be able to reach the MH cap easily, and would still be encourage to stay as long in VF as possible - but not only during the last, but you want to really maximize every single one for the CDreduction.
Would also scale pretty good with gear, since with better gear you get longer VForms, and that results in less CD and in stronger 30sec because of the exponential damageincrease until 100stacks.
Numbers could ofcourse be changed

[Deleted]

S2M cooldown should be way lower and also reduced by using x ability so i totally agree with Alex.
Also being a dead weight upon exiting it should be changed to something like doing 20-30% less damage for 10-20 seconds debuff.

Haven't played much with S2M as i'm one of those players that does not like to die in pve

[Segus1992]

Maybe change S2M to something like Combustion,
Change its duration to 30sec, nerf the increased insanity generation to 100% (should be enough to sustain 30sec more then usual) and keep the 10min cd.
But every for every stack if VF you get, you reduce the remaining cooldown of S2M by 2sec.

Wouldnt make S2M perma active during the last 2mins, wouldnt be able to reach the MH cap easily, and would still be encourage to stay as long in VF as possible - but not only during the last, but you want to really maximize every single one for the CDreduction.
Would also scale pretty good with gear, since with better gear you get longer VForms, and that results in less CD and in stronger 30sec because of the exponential damageincrease until 100stacks.
Numbers could ofcourse be changed

Yay, turning one of the most special abilities in the game into a generic (and OP) CD. Woo generalization!