What I would do with shadow Priest

[wackaflacka]

A combination with mist spriest (shadow orbs and devouring plague) and Insanity!

- mana + insanity
- DP is back.
- Void form gone!
- Insanity works more like shadow orbs where the more you have the more powerful it makes your spells (that would be empowered by insanity like DP was with orbs.

- At full insanity you will have a couple of spells that you can use:

DP - works like in mist. High hit, empowers mind flay etc...
Some kind of CC.
A party wide buff maybe?

Shadow infuses the priest with dark energy and the more insanity you build up the more insane you get. You have these abilities like DP that gives massive reward for spending your insanity, but whilst at full insanity you have increased haste - shorter cast times, maybe moving with mind flay etc... but with a punishment such as drain life.

Dots should have value: could synergies with Mind flay.

Abilities like shadow word death baseline.

Thoughts?

[Biomega]

Not very good design, unfortunately. Penalties like life drains have historically tended to be either a) negligible because of external/self healing; or b) punishing to the point of making it unusable. As we've seen with corruption, it's very difficult to design meaningful downsides for people that they don't just ignore, metagame to the max, or simply refuse to use. WoW has a tendency towards extremes, and you can't really design a core class mechanic around extremes.

That being said, I don't disagree that Void Form is pretty shit, and that I'd personally rather have something else. I honestly enjoyed the WoD model of SP with Orbs and DP spam, even the DoT-less MSpike spam spec was fun for me; not to mention Cascade, which was absolutely phenomenal fun. I've played Shadow Priest since Vanilla, and never enjoyed it more than during WoD.

Void Form is simply too frantic to me. I don't think WoW's dated engine and core combat concept works too well with a quick, reaction-time based gameplay, and that's what Shadow feels like right now a lot of the time. The rapid-fire cycles of Void Form aren't very enjoyable for me as a concept, and I'd really like to see it replaced by... something. I'm not sure what, exactly, because I'm not a designer. Blizzard has the designers. It's their job to come up with cool new stuff. But they seem content to leave most classes' core mechanics intact for this expansion, so Void Form is what we're stuck with. I doubt I'll play my Priest in SL.

[wackaflacka]

It does not necessarily have to be life drain but something that makes you have to decide whether you want to stay in full insanity or use the insanity boosted abilities such as DP and find a balance in-between. This adds a build up like it used to be with shadow orbs and a play style in between with full insanity. it also incorporates "surrender to madness" ability into the play style and there could possibly be a taken which focuses the player into more of that if you one would like. This play-style in my opinion would be able to bring back what many like with shadow priest the DP play style but with something new to it.

[Ophenia]

I was thinking of something like that but I think Blizz is satisfied with current SP...
Use Insanity as your only resource, with some spells that drains insanity, others that build it, the more insanity you have the more damage you deal, but if you pass a certain threshold you go insane, at this point maybe you lose Insanity per second until 0 while dealing additional boosted damage. This way, you could either
- manage your insanity just below the threshold to keep the advantage of high bonus damage
- cross the threshold when you want, to gain a damage buff for a few seconds, followed by a "slow-down" afterward where you have to rebuild insanity again

Obviously, DP would be one of dat insanity spenders

[Quack27]

I posted these ideas sometime before or during the first part of BFA I think. Would have to re-evaluate some specifics, but it still fills the general idea making Shadow a builder-spender baseline, but adding max level talents to allow people to customize towards whichever historic Shadow Priest playstyle they liked.

*NEW* Mind Blast has two charges baseline.

*NEW* Shadow Word: Death baseline.

*NEW* Mind Spike baseline. Mind Spike blasts the target for Shadow damage, but extinguishes your Shadow damage-over-time effects from the target in the process.

*NEW* Vampiric Embrace restores mana to a nearby healer in addition to its current effects.

*NEW* Void Bolt baseline spell that consumes Insanity.

*MOVED* Misery moved to 15 level talent row.

*MOVED* Void Eruption removed from baseline and moved to 45 level talent row. Now is a cast that consumes Insanity to deal AoE damage.

*NEW* Reaper of Souls added to 45 level talent row.
Shadow Word: Death is now castable on targets below 35% health, and always generates Insanity as though it killed the target.

*MOVED* Auspicious Spirits moved to 45 level talent row.

*MOVED* Twist of Fate moved to 75 level talent row.

*MOVED* Mindbender moved to 75 level talent row.

*MOVED* Surrender to Madness moved to 90 level talent row. No longer has the random penalties for using it.

*MOVED* Dark Void moved to 90 level talent.

*MOVED* Void Form removed from baseline and moved to 100 level talent row. When you take this talent you enter Void Form by casting Void Bolt. Void Form then acts as it did in Legion.

*NEW* 100 level talent Clarity of Power. Your Mind Spike, Mind Sear, and Shadow Word: Death deal 40% additional damage to targets not affected by your Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch. Also reduces the cooldown on Mind Blast by 3 sec and makes it instant cast.

*NEW* 100 level talent Devouring Plague. Consumes Insanity to deal Shadow damage and then additional damage over X sec. Heals the caster for 100% of damage done.


New talent tree would look like:

Fortress of the Mind--------Shadowy Insight--------Misery
Body and Soul--------------San'layn-----------------Intangibility
Void Eruption---------------Reaper of Souls---------Auspicious Spirits
Last Word-------------------Mind Bomb--------------Psychic Horror
Shadow Crash--------------Mindbender--------------Twist of Fate
Surrender to Madness------Void Torrent-------------Dark Void
Void Form-------------------Clarity of Power---------Devouring Plague

[Angrie]

*NEW* Reaper of Souls added to 45 level talent row.
Shadow Word: Death is now castable on targets below 35% health, and always generates Insanity as though it killed the target.

I'd like to see a talent that Shadow Word: Death consumes all dots on the target for a bigger execute (Warlock's Death Bolt). However drawback for not killing the target would be much larger self-inflicted damage and the CD being doubled. It's almost like they should call the talent... Surrender to Madness..........

[WhednesdayThursday]

So, in Preach's recent evaluation of the covenant abilities, they pointed out that Druid's Ravenous Frenzy is essentially a better Surrender to Madness than current Surrender to Madness. That comment, in addition to other things that have been mentioned, got me thinking of a possible Shadow Priest design reversal, which is similar to yours.

What if:
-Building toward 100 insanity increases your damage, triggering Void Form automatically at 100.
-Once you are in Void Form, you continue banking insanity into the new form of Shadow Orbs.
-Each Shadow Orb increases the chance of a Shadow lockout, instead of a stun, which also drops you from Void Form.
-Void Eruption would END Void Form instead of starting it, and have the same effect as now, doing more damage depending on Shadow Orbs.
-The "safe" cadence would be to Erupt at around two orbs to avoid the Shadow lock phase. If you keep it up after two, you run the risk of missing your opportunity to Erupt, and being forced to use Holy for a bit.
*Void Form would have Risk/Reward, but even then, the Shadow lockout triggered by failure would not take you out of the fight, and would actually encourage off-healing.
-Surrender to Madness would cause the orbs to have a chance to do near lethal damage, instead of Shadow locking you and dropping Void Form. To balance it, the tuning would need to require main tank levels of healing attention to maintain Void Form after a certain point, essentially guaranteeing death.

I think this would be fun because it would be a slightly "different" version of a builder/spender spec, but it would also maintain the themes that have been interesting since Legion. Also, I think the "draw back" of falling out of Void Form and having to heal would actually be another interesting side of the same coin that makes Disc appealing for many of us.

[Razion]

Changes:
- Duration of Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch reduced duration (like, down to 3s, really short DoTs) so you cast them more often while also being able to cast them while casting other spells. Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch give you your insanity, like a lot of it. Almost all of it.
- Mind Flay is now an ability you can cast on the move, no longer slows but Mind Blast now triggers one. Running lasers. Cool as hell. Mind Flay doesn't give insanity, but stops insanity drain. Insanity is constantly draining. You're trying to cause pain to make you insane. Thematic.
- Mind Blast consumes all your total Insanity. Blasting minds with your own insane mind. Emptying your mind of insanity, blasting theirs with all of it. Beautiful. Boom. High satisfaction on boom because of the high damage and slow at the same time.
- Mind Sear spreads Pain and Touch to nearby targets. Because spreading DoTs is a pain (heh heh). Leaves behind a Mind Sear effect that when Mind Blasted explodes for damage to everything around the primary Mind Sear target.
- Shadow Word: Death now usable on targets at or below 33% health, usuable on targets at or above 66% health. You now have it available for 2/3rds of fights instead of only 1/3rd of it. Gives a huge truck of insanity, like woah.

Reason for changes:
DoTs last forever, which means you aren't pressing them very often which isn't very fun. They worked this way because your normal spells have a cast time, so you needed time to cast them. But cast-time abilities had a cast time because otherwise you'd be running circles around everything and there wouldn't be any danger to anything. But we've already gotten around the pace problem with Fire Mages by allowing them to cast Fire Blast to trigger spec-specific interactions that play with cast-time abilities. So I think this kind of interplay needs to happen with Shadow Priest to bring in more action to the spec. That's why I'd suggest reducing DoT duration, making them easier to apply to lots of targets at once, and making the DoTs able to be cast during other core spells, while making them the primary contributors of the functional mechanics of the spec.