Shadow Talent and Spell changes

[Kaesebrezen]

Voidbolting during mindflay is nice thou

No, it's not. It only makes the rotation more annoying

GCD usage without the passive: VB - MB - MF - VB - MF - (MF contines to channel) - VB
GCD usage with the passive: VB - MB - MF - VB (MF continues to channel) - VB - MF - MF (you have to press MF here again after a single GCD) - VB (MF continues to channel)

There is nothing good about allowing VB to be used during a MF channel.

[Relapses]

No, it's not. It only makes the rotation more annoying

GCD usage without the passive: VB - MB - MF - VB - MF - (MF contines to channel) - VB
GCD usage with the passive: VB - MB - MF - VB (MF continues to channel) - VB - MF - MF (you have to press MF here again after a single GCD) - VB (MF continues to channel)

There is nothing good about allowing VB to be used during a MF channel.

Bro, you get like... 2 extra ticks of MF for the price of an even fuckier rotation! Dope.

[Echeyakee]

Yeah, VB needs to not trigger GCD during MF, then it would be decent. FFXIV style.

[Niwes]

Being able to cast abilities during Mind Flay or Mind Sear seems pretty fun, though, for real.

yeah, totally fun. and such a well thought concept. what could possibly go wrong ?

welcome to „we fix it in 9.1“

[Archpriest]

Thoughts:
The changes are... something. Im glad we are getting desperate prayer and shadow word: death back, but kinda meh on the lack of changes beyond that.

I love voidform, but I don't like that specific talents and traits are needed to make it feel good. I if nothing else, Lingering insanity should be baseline as it turns what feels like hitting a brick wall into a controlled wave. The most fun I personally had with this version of shadow was late Legion, mostly because of the interaction between mass hysteria and voidtorrent. It felt super rewarding getting a good void torrent off at the end of a voidform.
If I could choose I would make the spec more like that. I certainly prefer doing damage late voidform (Mass Hysteria) than doing damage after the voidform is over (Chorus).

But... how do we keep the rampup under control? The inherent problem with voidform so far, is that getting better gear also increases your rampup. The longer we get into an expansion, the longer we have to get into voidform to reach peak damage potential. And that has an effect on things like dungeons. 20 sec voidforms are likely to feel better in dungeons than 50 sec ones, if all you damage is happening at the end of it. The only way I see doing that is by detaching insanity generation from itemlevel which... Im not even sure how you would do. Mindblast and voidbolt not being affected by haste? That would feel terrible.

Another possibility is making mastery increase how fast voidform ramps up in damage, at the expense of increasing its drain rate. That would at least prevent voidform durations from getting out of hand, but seems difficult to balance. Still, I would be interested to see blizzard try that.


But what if we remove the ramp up? Well, then voidform needs to be alot more powerful than shadowform baseline. If you do 25% more damage in voidform than shadowform, then you want to maximize the uptime of it. But to encourage fighting the drain and actually try staying in voidform, you need to spend a significant amount of time in shadowform - after all if you can instantly enter a new voidform when you drop one, then what is the point in fighting the drain? In this design things like Legacy of the void and Dark Ascension don't really work, as they reduce the time between voidforms too much. The upside is that you would be at full power the moment you enter voidform.

So in short. Meh on the changes, and I hope more will come. I do really feel there are ways to make voidform feel great though.

[Darth-Piekus]

Did I just see it right? Is one of the Torghast spells called Power Word Snuggle?