Saving Void Shift

[Yvaelle]

Who in their right mind would take this over the PoM one? A tank CD with a healing debuff that you would use *maybe* once per fight with the new "triage" system or a constant aoe heal.

Imagine a heavy tank healing fight where your tank is being nearly one-shot every 10-15 seconds (or 20, or 30). Saving Grace would be very powerful in its ability to respond quickly to that damage, and only maintain 1 stack of the -10% healing debuff on your other heals - with it dropping off each time inbetween.

Alternately and perhaps more accurate of modern fights - imagine a fight where random raid members take massive burst spikes every 10 or 20 or 30 seconds - but the fight also has passive raid damage. Saving Grace again allows a healer to instantly respond with a big healing spike to the burst damage, while diminishing their ability to respond to the AoE pressure damage - which can be assigned to a different healer (ie. resto druid).

So for example - typically Shamans are good burst spike healers due to their mastery - so in an Rshaman + Priest 10m guild - the Rshaman can do the burst spike heals, and the Priest can handle the raid pressure damage and/or tank heals. The next week the Shaman can't make it, so the Boomkin goes Resto for the week - now they have to do the same fight - but this time the Priest can take Saving Grace and focus on the burst spike healing, and the Rdruid can go HAM on the Raid HoTs

I like Saving Grace in theory - good talents are supposed to be situational advantages like this - that allow greater flexibility or alternate roles without radically different power advantages - and I think Saving Grace could fulfill that just fine

[Deleted]

Under such a situation, PW:S would be able to provide a similar role while costing less mana, doing no overhealing and generating free PoM through Words of Glory. For Discipline, Saving Grace thus needs a situation where PW:S coupled with Penance isn't sufficient for dealing with the damage, thus making the talent completely essential and requiring other healers to have a similar burst ability for situations where a Priest healer isn't available. Alternatively, it must be a better option over Clarity of Will and Power Word: Shield shielding which allows better pre-emptive healing.

I'm very sceptical about Saving Grace. It will either be too strong and pretty much mandatory or very weak and outclassed by the other talents in a PvE scenario because it is far too situational with noticeable downsides relative to the other options.

[Nurasu]

I like Saving Grace in theory - good talents are supposed to be situational advantages like this - that allow greater flexibility or alternate roles without radically different power advantages - and I think Saving Grace could fulfill that just fine

If they design encounters like that, I could see it. From what I have read, the encounters won't have the sudden burst damage we have today with the healing changes. If there aren't any, my point I guess is that if they're removing void shift because it's too similar to a talent that no one will use, our toolkit is being reduced overall and it's bad design. We will lose the ability to deal with emergency (raid member will die within the next GCD) situations, speaking from a discipline perspective (holy still has GS). I love pain suppression, but it has a severe limitation in that it does nothing if the target is already very low health.

[Yvaelle]

@Halyconic - good point about the overlap it has with Shield / Penance, it could be a talent where they design it to do something else entirely for Discipline - and leave Saving Grace for Holy?

I agree it's one of these talents they like designing where it's either too good and feels mandatory, or too weak and feels useless - the issue there is almost always a problem where the function of talents are too similar (ie. Insanity and Mindbender are both single target dps talents, with Insanity being the better of the two). Giving it some additional or alternate functionality that a Shield or Penance cannot perform would solve this problem better than merely adjusting the numbers until it does precisely between overpowered/underpowered (and then feels like it doesn't give you anything additional).

@Nyumetsu

Every expansion they say "we are going to make mana matter, and healers will need to carefully pick their heals based on the scenario, and raids won't take random burst damage that randomly kills people" - and then they never follow through on any of that. Not for the wrong reasons either, two of the strongest scenarios for choosing which heals to use for healers - is either when something is very high mana cost, or when someone is suddenly and unpredictably at imminent risk of death - so the first and last in that list of ideas are contrary to the middle idea.

It's possible to design encounters such that healers need to carefully choose their heals, and that raid members don't randomly get spiked to death, and that mana matters - but it's not fun to fuss over being OOM constantly, and it's hard to surprise healers without you know... making someones health drop randomly and suddenly.

I think they need to state a better goal for what healers should do - because the current one seems kind of antiquated actually - I'll think about what that could be though, not sure yet.

[Frolk]

As a tank, i love Void Shift, its a great spell, strange seeing it might be removed, hope it stays

[Kreuz Kontrol]

I say good riddance to it. It was nice early in the expansion when you could do things like Void Shift a Mindbender, but they removed that. Then, eventually, they removed it from Shadow PvP entirely. It'd be nice to get an ability that actually lends its self as an actual cooldown or something of the sort as opposed the "pseudo-survival" abilities like Leap of Faith and Void Shift. I mean they both have their uses, but their annoying in the sense that to be useful they rely on someone else -- either their health percentage, theirs/your location (Leap of Faith), etc..

[Layun]

I liked it, used it several times in LFR or Flex mostly (because I don't heal anything else), but I think I might have found use for it in nhc as well. Can't really tell since I didn't have the chance to heal those yet
I used it to safe tanks that pulled to much so they have a second life before the other healers can get a grip. Sad to see it go.

[Mazeari]

It's a fun spell, it's a good spell. But honestly I'm not going to miss it.

[Ezekiah]

Void Shift -> HS is one of the most amazing combinations you can perform as a spriest or healer in a raid. It's equivalent to a ret LoH, except a non-crit leaves you at 55%, so you can't be quite as liberal. Certainly there are rets who do great damage and are 14/14H that never use LoH.

They are not good. I would not recruit them. You are not good if you have never used this spell. You are not worth recruiting by any guild in the top 50. I suppose that's probably just fine for all of you. What I see here is a bunch of players who are ashamed of their own incompetence feeling joy at the removal of utility they know they should be using but aren't good enough to do so. Probably never had a use for lifegrip either, eh? I mean, if you have competent players, it should never be needed, right?

It should stay, and that awful excuse of a level 100 talent should be ditched.

[appro]

Void Shift -> HS is one of the most amazing combinations you can perform as a spriest or healer in a raid. It's equivalent to a ret LoH, except a non-crit leaves you at 55%, so you can't be quite as liberal. Certainly there are rets who do great damage and are 14/14H that never use LoH.

They are not good. I would not recruit them. You are not good if you have never used this spell. You are not worth recruiting by any guild in the top 50. I suppose that's probably just fine for all of you. What I see here is a bunch of players who are ashamed of their own incompetence feeling joy at the removal of utility they know they should be using but aren't good enough to do so. Probably never had a use for lifegrip either, eh? I mean, if you have competent players, it should never be needed, right?

It should stay, and that awful excuse of a level 100 talent should be ditched.

*shots fired*
In seriousness, thank you for saying what needed to be said m'lady *tips fedora*

When it comes to Void Shift I think the #FunFactor of void shift is often overlooked and forgotten, particularly with those whom don't use it frequently. I recently switched to disc because its so op and sometimes I can sense that a tank is about to drop low in hp so I will stop casting for a bit and watch just in case the tank gets low then I will swoop in with a void shift to save the day. Also the change appearances void shift glyph always give the tank a bit of a shock lol I can't believe they're removing it!

We should start a petition to save the void shift!

[Deleted]

These responses are funny. I'm 14/14H in a 25man group that contains three other Priests, two of which are healers with very good Monk/Warrior tanks. I've never Void Shifted anyone mid combat because I've never needed to. But of course, it absolutely must mean I'm terrible according to the pro's in this thread.

You can keep your bragging about 25m 14H in your pants because it means very little to me I'm afraid. I also happen to have the same progress on said difficulty and I guarantee you: we carry some shitters. Maybe you are one of them, who knows.

Let me explain it to you in simple English, maybe you will understand that better.

First of all Void Shift can be a personal survivability CD. In the first weeks you were able to use Void Shift on NPCs, pets and totems. Ridiculously OP. I abused it on Gara'Jal for example. It was quickly nerfed/fixed though but a bleeding edge raiding probably abused every minute of it.

In progress (I assume you know what that is) people die, people fail, and you wipe. Among the people who fail and die are Death Knights a class you may have seen in your raids.

Death Knights almost always spec into Purgatory which when its procs causes a debuff called Perdition. You can find the spellID to add it in your grid. If you see this, you can immediately do an ~800k heal on this DK. It is 1 GCD, just like a Hand of Sacrifice is 1 GCD and that is a CD from a Paladin (not necessarily a healer Paladin). A protection or retribution Paladin who argues he should be using Hand of Sacrifice because "he is not a healer" is one I would instantly kick out of my raid team and guild.

Do you still follow this?

Yeah? Good, cause then you also see an opportunity there. One you as well as your raid team missed for 1,5+ years.

Void Shift is an amazing utility which is usually not good but sometimes it is. Its quite a lot like Leap of Faith in that regard: a lot of priests won't use it and Shadow Priests will claim "it is a DPS loss" and "not my job" I would kick out slackers like yourself, egomaniacs who lack the inability to function in a team.

Have a good one.

And Drye doesn't do Hymn of Hope either because "DPS loss".

[Cerbz]

Blah blah bullshit

Keep "bragging" about 14/14H? I'm not sure you know what that word means. I don't play with DK tanks because my guild isn't bad, so that shit doesn't matter.

Void shift is for healers, I'm a DPS. Get fucked.

Please stop responding to my posts because you've never responded with anything insightful or useful.

[Drye]

If I remember correctly Drye said on FinalBoss that he doesn't even have it binded. So go PM him with some useful tips on how to play his class, I bet he really needs them.

I don't even know what the icon looks like

[Zolvolt]

Shadow priests saying Void shift is useless makes me sad when all the ret pallies in the world are expected to use Lay on Hands, SaC, BoP, HoF. I've seen some clutch Void shifts from shadow priests in pve content, those are my favorite kinds of shadow priests. Shadow priests have always since the dawn of time filled the role of a dps that brings some sort of utility to the raid, and still to this day do shadow priests complain about having utilit spells that they refuse to use. =/

Just some examples:
VE *when it was castable on your target* *stopped when it became a self buff* *complained again when it became a cooldown*
Hymn of Hope *healers don't need mana*
Divine Hymn *shadow priests used to have a raid cd like druid tranqs pre-HoTW*
90 talents *the fact that some shadow priests don't use DS on heroic garrosh still boggles my mind, cuz haloing the adds is really useful*
Void Shift *reasons*

Its no wonder I can't get shadow priests to Prayer of mending them selves before a fight begins just to help healing *for free*

Edits: Shadow priests make me upset with all their complaining.

[Mormolyce]

Does kind of bother me that a lot of abilities that were new in MoP are first on the chopping block, probably because they don't have the "pedigree" older abilities do. Even though the older abilities are often more bland.

Kind of wish they'd leave this one, I've always liked it in concept even if I rarely used it.

Then you fall under the "terrible player" category.

Not really, it's not like it's mandatory, there are other options to heal people on low HP.

[emni]

If you really think you "need" Void Shift... then I'll just leave this here: http://wod.wowhead.com/spell=152116

It's not that we can't do without it, but it is (was) an interesting mechanic which offered for occasional smart game play. That said, I admit I used it only a handful of times myself in both CMs and hc raids, but when I did I always felt pretty good about it. Saving Grace sounds interesting but doesn't fill the same niche, I feel.

[Aere]

Void shift is for healers, I'm a DPS. Get fucked.

Really? so if you played a class with raid defensives, or any sort of utility you'd say "its for healers, i'm a dps. get fucked"?
REALLY
I don't even....

[Deleted]

Keep "bragging" about 14/14H? I'm not sure you know what that word means. I don't play with DK tanks because my guild isn't bad, so that shit doesn't matter.

Gz with your second kill my friend. Your guild doesn't appear to use a DK. Their grips are quite useful on Garrosh (AoE grip on adds and Death Grip for extra vengeance or MC), and they do more effective damage than a Shadow. But wait, DKs don't do grips because they are DPS. You don't waste a global on utility, you leave that to healers. Right?

Void shift is for healers, I'm a DPS. Get fucked.

Oh please stop that attitude, you're not amazing. If you are Drye and playing in a top guild or semi top guild you need all the DPS you can muster and instead of using a GCD you just wipe. You're not playing on that level, stop pretending.

Bottom line is Void Shift was bugged at the start of the expansion and you abused that if you played back then or, well, you missed out. I have played with amazing players in WoW, DPS who did external CDs without being asked because of their awareness (one of our current Retribution Pala for example indeed). Void Shift is such a tool and the DPS loss is the reaction time of you deciding to use it + moving your mouse to the raid frame + GCD with perhaps a cancelaura. It should be 1-2 seconds DPS loss. That isn't huge. What we are instead discussing is someone refusing to take responsibility. You get away with it because Void Shift is rather new and isn't regarded as a reliable tool like HoS for example is. For others, Void Shift was a tool which was occasionally used (especially during progression in my case). Together with our off healing being gone its another utility removed. I can only pray we get more damage in return.

[Calamari]

@Cerbz
If you are prone to get mad over someones critique and swearing then you should first take a break, and chill out before replying.

Is Void Shift situationaly powerful? Yes, lola pointed out a great synergy with DK Purgatory for example. Would Lay on Hands save the day in exactly the same situations as Void Shift? Yup. Does Lay on Hands have the same cooldown too? Yup. Does Lay on Hands leave the paladin prone to die right after saving someone? Nope.

I just don't understand why we receive nearly the exact same spell as Paladins, but with a kick to the nuts duct-taped to it. Also healing for much much is really not that interesting utility, as it can be done by many other instant cast healing spells. If Void Shift granted a very short immunity bubble for example, now that would utility.

[Gilian]

I'm not going to miss it at all tbh. It's not a personal heal because it's at the expense of someone else's health. It's supposed to be used as an emergency lay on hands type ability but healing priests have enough tools for emergencies and most shadowpriests don't use it properly. I can count the number of times I've saved someone on two hands and only one hand of people who actually noticed it. Short of Immerseus it's a woefully underused talent and if things are that spikey on your tank you have other more pressing issues to address first.

It's still very good in PvP. And I also think it's a fun spell. Why are they removing it anyway? Too strong? (edit: nvm, it's overpowered)