An idea to replace Void Entropy - Cataclysm priest.

[JNovster]

Was just thinking about this as I was taking a shower today - hooray for shower thoughts.

Void entropy redesign: Empowered Shadows

- Devouring plague is now replaced by Void Entropy
- Void entropy does about the same damage and has a slightly longer duration than our two other dots, but now has a chance to grant a Shadow Orb. Mind Flay also has a chance to generate a Shadow Orb.
- Mind blast now consumes Shadow Orbs, dealing more damage based on the number of Orbs consumed, and Grants the Empowered Shadows buff
- Empowered Shadows increases your periodic damage by 5% per Shadow Orb consumed by Mind Blast, up to a maximum of 15% (perhaps modified by mastery).

I miss the old Cataclysm Shadow, and I think along with CoP and AS, Empowered Shadowswould provide a unique and varied play style for our last tier of talents.

As for other talents - Shadowy Insight could perhaps finish the cool down on mind blast and when cast mind blast acts as if you have 3 Orbs. Insanity could increase the chance of gaining an Orb from mind flay ticks. The other talents could play nice with this new talent as well.

Let me know what you guys think.

[ceall]

As much as I love the cata shadow, there'd be too much missing, like archangel, flay refreshing SWP, dots hitting hard in general. Also, I don't think a cata-like shadow would work nowadays.

I think VEnt could need a general rework as it is. Its damage should tick twice as hard as SWP, increase general Dot damage on affected targets by 50-100% as well as generate a shadow orb every or every second tick. This would make Vent viable for council fights.

[Deleted]

Void entropy shoud cost no orbs but have 2 charges with longish cooldown to prevent us from spamming it.

[Deleted]

I think that VEnt is a nice idea, but falls behind for several reasons:

- Mind Blast / Devouring Plague make up a huge portion of spriest damage.
- Auspicious Spirits and Clarity of Power increase the frequency of MB or Shadow Orb generation strongly.
- Void Entropy doesn't do either of these things, and not only doesn't increase your Orb/DP/MB frequency, but costs orbs.

Personally I think that if VEnt is to cost shadow orbs in its current incarnation, it really needs some way of increasing your orb generation, like % on tick, or perhaps having Mind Blast generating more (2?) shadow orbs on targets affected by void entropy. *shrug* It's got a lot of potential; it just needs a bit of work, not a rework.

[worcester]

Was just thinking about this as I was taking a shower today - hooray for shower thoughts.

As for other talents - Shadowy Insight could perhaps finish the cool down on mind blast and when cast mind blast acts as if you have 3 Orbs.

Let me know what you guys think.

Shadow Insight should just get the Echo of the Elements treatment and allow mind blast to stack up to 2.

As for Void Entropy, I have a completely different perspective that it should be a single target talent like CoP and be limited to 1 target. But unlike CoP, its a dot based single target talent. I realise when people think about dots they immediately think multi-target. All dots DPE is incredibly high and thus their DPS must take the hit to prevent large disparity in 1 target/multi-target situations.

I feel we need more single target damage options as this is by far the most important kind of damage in most fights. AS already is a great talent for multi-target and there is no reason we should have 2 spec defining talents designed around the odd council fight per tier.

[JNovster]

As much as I love the cata shadow, there'd be too much missing, like archangel, flay refreshing SWP, dots hitting hard in general. Also, I don't think a cata-like shadow would work nowadays.

Why do you not think it would work nowadays? The feel of the spec would be fine, any numbers issues could be balanced easily.

Shadow Insight should just get the Echo of the Elements treatment and allow mind blast to stack up to 2.

As for Void Entropy, I have a completely different perspective that it should be a single target talent like CoP and be limited to 1 target. But unlike CoP, its a dot based single target talent. I realise when people think about dots they immediately think multi-target. All dots DPE is incredibly high and thus their DPS must take the hit to prevent large disparity in 1 target/multi-target situations.

I feel we need more single target damage options as this is by far the most important kind of damage in most fights. AS already is a great talent for multi-target and there is no reason we should have 2 spec defining talents designed around the odd council fight per tier.

The echo of the elements idea is nice, but as for us having 2 single target specs: we are a multi target class, and have always excelled at multi target. Besides most fights have some sort of multi - target functionality, there is rarely ever a purely single target fight anymore. CoP helps us with the purely single target, however this redesign will give us two unique and fun play styles to choose from when going multi - target.

[nikolbolas]

Im pretty sure Void Entropy is going to be 100% re-worked before the end of this Xpac... (wishful thinking :P)

[Deleted]

I feel we need more single target damage options as this is by far the most important kind of damage in most fights. AS already is a great talent for multi-target and there is no reason we should have 2 spec defining talents designed around the odd council fight per tier.

Agreed. Seems like so many VEnt suggestions are to just turn it into AS but without the crit reliance. While they often fail at it, Blizzard do try to make the talents useful for different playstyles/situations. Those VEnt suggestions totally go against their talent design philosophy.

Either way, AS is pretty much the go-to specc now with CoP strong at certain jobs/fights, so 2/3 100 talents has been pretty good so far.

As for the Shadowy Insight suggestion, I'd love that. ToF is a fantastic talent, but it's pretty boring on non-add fights and is poor design to be the best talent for every fight.

[Replica]

Gut the talent in general, its useless.
Give us 1 that is a strict dot/flay dps upgrade, and return dark angel / sfiend CD reduction from crit flays and gg wp

idfk what so hard for them to figure out.

[Dierdre]

I'm sorry, all I read was:

Void entropy redesign:

shadow

archangel

Yes.

[Zungate]

Oh yeah,

if VEnt could be made into a major CD that would give us burst damage it might be worth picking.

[allianceTrade]

Cata shadow was awful. Everyone already complains about our pull dps, this would just make it even worse and give it a 30 second ramp up before we were even able to compete. No.

[davesignal]

There's actually a very simple way to make Void Entropy competitive: give it an Ignite mechanic (i.e. when you recast it, add all remaining damage to the new cast), and have it replace Devouring Plague.

As a spell, Void Entropy is great-- you spend three orbs to do 1350% of your spellpower as damage some poor sap, scaling with every stat but mastery. By comparison, Devouring Plague does a mere 400% of your spellpower, and it doesn't scale with haste. The problem with Void Entropy is, with it's 1 minute duration, you can't just keep dumping orbs into it to take advantage of that massive spellpower coefficient.

But what if you could? Imagine a world where, two minutes into the fight, you've got a gigantic Void Entropy stack ticking away on the target, from having cast it ~4 to 5 times on the poor bastard (haste and CDs permitting).

Wouldn't you actually feel like a DOT class? I know I would. It's the essence of a DOT class-- you start off a little slow, but over time you ramp up to absolutely crushing damage over time.

Edit: Or, if you want to create a paradigm where you use both Devouring Plague AND Void Entropy, give Void Entropy literal stacks like Agony (the Warlock DOT) has-- every time you recast Void Entropy, it gains a stack and does increased damage. When you get to the maximum number of stacks, say five stacks, you can switch over to Devouring Plague to refresh the duration and maintain the stack level.

The gist here is that you make Void Entropy a high damage single target talent, since as a 'council' talent it fails from the get-go. The new Paradigm would be, like: Clarity of Power (ST, burst-oriented), Void Entropy (ST, sustain-oriented), and Auspicious Spirits (Multi-target oriented).

[ceall]

There's actually a very simple way to make Void Entropy competitive: give it an Ignite mechanic (i.e. when you recast it, add all remaining damage to the new cast), and have it replace Devouring Plague.

As a spell, Void Entropy is great-- you spend three orbs to do 1350% of your spellpower as damage some poor sap, scaling with every stat but mastery. By comparison, Devouring Plague does a mere 400% of your spellpower, and it doesn't scale with haste. The problem with Void Entropy is, with it's 1 minute duration, you can't just keep dumping orbs into it to take advantage of that massive spellpower coefficient.

But what if you could? Imagine a world where, two minutes into the fight, you've got a gigantic Void Entropy stack ticking away on the target, from having cast it ~4 to 5 times on the poor bastard (haste and CDs permitting).

Wouldn't you actually feel like a DOT class? I know I would. It's the essence of a DOT class-- you start off a little slow, but over time you ramp up to absolutely crushing damage over time.

Edit: Or, if you want to create a paradigm where you use both Devouring Plague AND Void Entropy, give Void Entropy literal stacks like Agony (the Warlock DOT) has-- every time you recast Void Entropy, it gains a stack and does increased damage. When you get to the maximum number of stacks, say five stacks, you can switch over to Devouring Plague to refresh the duration and maintain the stack level.

The gist here is that you make Void Entropy a high damage single target talent, since as a 'council' talent it fails from the get-go. The new Paradigm would be, like: Clarity of Power (ST, burst-oriented), Void Entropy (ST, sustain-oriented), and Auspicious Spirits (Multi-target oriented).

But still, it would miss orb generation (compared to the other lvl 100 talents). If you had to re-cast it 4 times to reach 5 stacks, it'd be at least 2 minute ramp up for it to deal its maximum damage. It should rather gain a stack every 2 ticks and generate 1 orb every other tick.

What about making it a 90 sec CD, increasing ticking damage (dots, flay, sear) by say 50% (just an example) for 20 seconds. Or "your next 5 casts of Mindblast generate 3 orbs" with a 60 sec CD.

[Deleted]

Shadow Insight should just get the Echo of the Elements treatment and allow mind blast to stack up to 2.

This forever and ever and ever

[JNovster]

Cata shadow was awful. Everyone already complains about our pull dps, this would just make it even worse and give it a 30 second ramp up before we were even able to compete. No.

Why does pull DPS matter in the slightest? You just like seeing crazy high numbers like mages at the start? Well even with CoP or AS we dont pull those kinds of numbers at the start anyway.

All that matters is how we do over the entire duration of the fight. Personally I love seeing my DPS go up over the course of the fight, and surprising everyone when twist of fate kicks in and suddenly were competing for the top spot.

[Yvaelle]

My vision for Void Entropy would be something that makes Haste super valuable, which would distinguish it from CoP (Mastery) and Auspicious Spirits (Crit).

So for example, we could do something like "Each tick of Void Entropy reduces the cooldown Shadowfiend by 3 seconds (Mindbender by 1 second) and summoning Shadowfiend grants you 15 Shadow orbs over 15 seconds (Mindbender grants 5 Orbs over 15 seconds).

That would probably be enough to make Void Entropy prefer Haste, it would give us a way to generate orbs at the start of a fight (since Shadowfiend/Mindbender are often used on the pull anyways), and it would fix the Orb generation problem that Void Entropy causes. It would also make it a little more interesting for Single Target, since you would not only gain more Fiends/benders, but you would have these big Orb spikes when your pets are up - which would make the fights a little more interesting whether single target or multi-dot (you would want to save your pet for either burst phases, to spam stacking DP, or for new adds coming out to get void entropies up quickly).

That synergy with haste would also give us a semi-bursty talent combo, when combining Void Entropies pet synergy with Power Infusion haste cooldown.

I would also be interested in removing the refreshing mechanic on Void Entropy, but making the pet synergy stronger (ex. 6 second CD reduction per tick for Shadowfiend, 2 seconds for Mindbender, etc).

[Shahad]

I had the same thought as you about making VEnt be Cata's incarnation of Shadow, but at this point it would probably far too many individual changes for a single talent. The tooltip on the thing would be attrocious. In addition, I *think* the intent with the talent is to preserve the playstyle from MoP, which is something I can agree with.

I think the best way to make it viable without afftecting the playstyle is to make VEnt a stackable dot automatically applied by each of our dots, with no duration. So applying SW:P and VT would give two stacks, each stack dropping whenever a dot drops off. DP would potentially add a third. And Mind Sear could apply a stack on all targets it hits, but only up to 1 stack. Meaning if it has SW:P or VT on it, it wouldn't be getting an extra stack.

[zenkai]

I would love to see VE shoot out a big Kamehameha wave every time I cast it with 3 orbs

[davesignal]

But still, it would miss orb generation (compared to the other lvl 100 talents). If you had to re-cast it 4 times to reach 5 stacks, it'd be at least 2 minute ramp up for it to deal its maximum damage. It should rather gain a stack every 2 ticks and generate 1 orb every other tick.

What about making it a 90 sec CD, increasing ticking damage (dots, flay, sear) by say 50% (just an example) for 20 seconds. Or "your next 5 casts of Mindblast generate 3 orbs" with a 60 sec CD.

Yes, the point is it takes two minutes to reach maximum damage. It has a ramp up time. Ramp up time is the trade-off for the fact that it will be ticking away regardless of your movement, and that it would do so much damage that it doesn't really matter if you're casting Mind Flay: Insanity far fewer than COP or AS.

That's the entire point-- to make the focus of the spec maintaining DOTs, rather than hammering on Mind Flay, Mind Blast, or Disease Pyroblast like a goober.

There was a time, once, when the first step towards auditing a Shadow Priest's DPS was to see how well they were utilizing SW:P, VT, and DP-- the actual DP, not Disease Pyroblast. I'm not a huge proponent of 'WoW has been dumbed down!' style complaints, but DOTs have definitely been dumbed down and de-emphasized as the be-all, end-all of this spec.

DOTs used to require precise timing to maximize, and now you just mindlessly recast them inside of a huge window thanks to Pandemic. It's kind of terrible.