I feel like most talents have a different feel for skill cap like you said, but most of the high skill cap ones(with exception of StM) are worse than their competitors.
Maybe there's something we didn't figure out though. Take
Shadow Word: Void for instance: it's designed to give you a huge burst of insanity on demand; maybe it'll be superior to ToF on fights where you need to burst the boss in a phase BEFORE his execute phase? the current cookie cutter built(ToF/RoS/StM) is designed to make the priest a godlike executioner. However, talents like
Legacy of the Void, SD:V and
Void Lord are designed to throw you in and out of Voidform very fast. Then you have the artifact trait
Sphere of Insanity which benefits heavily from having a high voidform uptime(not necessarily the voidform duration in itself).
On the other hand,
Mass Hysteria is an insane artifact trait which makes the ToF/RoS/StM build so so much better. Hopefully they tweak some of these talents a bit, while I'm loving the playstyle it feels really bad to see a talent and think "I'll never ever equip this talent no matter what".
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Would you waste a
Tome of the Clear Mind in order to play "optimally" for a sub 1min fight though? Although I'm interested in the math behind the 20% VT damage vs Mind Blast possible procs vs AS procs on such a short fight.