Good suggestions below Feerdy
It was like this on the beta and we really wanted control over it because it would often waste itself (ex. right as you exit combat, it would go off and burn out before you pulled the next thing).
What might be an interesting alternative 110 talent though would be something like this:
Whispers Of Oblivion - Voidform automatically activates at 100 Insanity, you no longer have access to Void Bolt (or Void Eruption, the button is gone), but Mind Blast is instant, Shadow Word: Death also works on targets above 80% HP, and Mind Flay deals Quad Damage (and Insanity) in Void Form.
The frequent switching in/out was meant to address another problem from alpha/beta, where variously they experimented with longer but rarer voidforms, and also superfast but shorter voidforms - having them be more frequent but shorter was meant to make the loss of them feel less impactful when they procced during RP/at the death of a pull, etc.Decrease the amount of extra haste from void form stacks and increase the insanity generation from abilities, so we can stay in longer but not be completely broken.
A talent that changed this though would be cool
StM is like, literally one of the first two spells they announced for any class this expansion. So tragically, I'm not sure it will ever go away. Before they were willing to confirm the existence of playable Demon Hunters, they were already telling us their plans to coax all the shadowpriests into genociding themselves for mediocre DPS. Tragically, I don't think it's going anywhere.StM should not be a 10 minute raid cooldown. Instead, permanently buff Void form in another way rather than it's current buff to void form. Ideas?
With that said, If I Were A Dev...
Into The Void - Increases maximum Insanity by 100 (200 cap), reduces Insanity decay by 50%, and Void Bolt is usable outside of Voidform (above 100 Insanity, casting Void Bolt enters Voidform, no Void Eruption).
They had something like this but took it away, I don't think we'll ever get that - part of our class identity is seemingly that we're pretty shit for the first 30 seconds of any fight.Ability to instantly generate 100 insanity to enter void form on pulls.
I swear Sphere of Insanity was designed with a DoT spread in mind, but they apparently never gave it to us (apart from the legendary), If we had a DoT spread mechanic - Sphere of Insanity might have been a great idea for interesting AOE gameplay - but without it - it doesn't make sense. Like if they designed Marksmen hunters with the Marked Target mechanic, but then forgot to give them away to apply the Marked Target debuff.... that's what Sphere feels like - like we have a bunch of spells that refer to a debuff we can't apply.Buff Mind sear damage or give the ability to spread dots for trash, this would not make us OP, seriously 10k ticks?
I would be content if at least Void Eruption dealt increased damage based on the number of remaining Lingering Insanity stacks. Because yea, there may exist situations (for higher gear levels) where we would actually not want to enter Voidform because it may end up being a DPS loss to lose high insanity stacks (particularly for mass AOE with Mind Sear, or potentially even for mass multi-dot where the benefit of access to Void Bolt would be outweighed by the loss of haste to all our ticks). Right now it's a hypothetical problem, but I'd bet before the end of the expansion, Voidform being a DPS loss will be a real concern for Shadow.Lingering insanity should be baseline, getting to 30 stacks then re-entering void form just to lose it 5 seconds later is dumb.
I would like a talent that made it so Void Eruption applied VT+Pain to all targets in say, an 8 yard radius around your DoTted targets. We can think of something else to replace the legendary, but not only is my version a better version of the legendary, it's something that should be consistently available to Spriests - not reliant on a legendary to drop. It would also fix the Sphere problem.A mechanic to refresh dots on all targets, could be worked with mind sear or mind flay?