Changes for Shadow Priests​

Unfortunately this patch has very little in changes for Shadow Priests. Below is the impactful updates, check out the full notes here.

• Sustained Potency has been updated – It now also pauses the duration of Dark Ascension or Voidform for up to 20 seconds while out of combat or affected by a loss of control effect. This is capped at 20 seconds per cast of each cooldown (i.e. going in and out of combat more than once does not refresh the pause duration).
• Entropic Rift now displays a low-noise version for your allies, instead of being completely invisible.

What this means​

Functionally nothing is really changing except Archon now can choose to take Sustained Potency even inside of Mythic+. The out of combat pause is very nice for dungeons, particularly in lower keys and it was already competitive to take anyways (particular for boss damage or really long pulls).

Dracthyr​

Starting this patch you can also make a Dracthyr Priest. From a combat perspective you get a single Mastery point from Awakened, which you can see how that stacks up in the charts. Other racials are listed below. To see these changes I did a video when it first came out and a revised one after it was changed.

• You can fight in Dracthyr form or Visage form as a Priest
• Wing Buffet
• Tail Swipe is EVOKER ONLY
• Glide (at a reduced speed compared to Evokers)
• Soar
• Awakened

Anniversary Event​

With this patch there is also an upcoming launch of the Anniversary event. This event includes lots of cosmetics as well as some new gear drops that I will go over in this post as it relates to Shadow Priest. I am not covering all aspects of this event, only the ones relevant for player power. To see more about this checkout the Wowhead guide.

Timewalking Dungeons?​

Currently there is a trinket, Mindtap Talisman that is from Dire Maul. This was available on the vendor on PTR but I am not sure specifically what the source of this could be. It is quite possible it is just a Timewalking dungeon drop during the event. If that is the case it would drop and be upgradable to 580 item level. I bring this up because even at 580 item level it is currently extremely powerful. Beating out many trinkets at Myth track item level, although not being BiS.

Blackrock Depths Raid​

This raid is returning with HERO track gear. This is a great opportunity for alts as well as a few key drops that might even be useful for your main. Through a Relic Coffer Key system you can also purchase up to 3 items from a vendor if you clear the raid enough and do not see the drops you want.

Notable Drops​

The following is listing ideal stat pieces that drop from the raid. There could be others that drop and are upgrades, here is just a short list to see what is available.

The Burst of Knowledge is extremely powerful and is likely to get nerfed/adjusted at some point. Early sims put this equal or better to most trinkets at Myth track item level, even though Burst of Knowledge is only Hero track level. This means it is strictly speaking a purchasable item that is Best-In-Slot.

Currently this trinket is extra powerful since it is not on the shared trinket cooldown, meaning we can stack this in execute and use it with Spymaster's Web as an example. I suspect this will be fixed, but even still this is a strong trinket that we simply just bind to Power Infusion.

• Trinket Combo Sims
• Trinket Single Sims

Cantrip Items​

In addition to normal gear drops there are also Cantrip items with extra effects. Below are the ones available to Shadow Priest with information on their power level for us.

DISCLAIMER​

This post is now outdated. We have posted updated guidance in IcyVeins and the Discord and the below information is mostly out of date. Keeping this only for historical purposes.

October 8th/9th Changes​

Voidweaver has received lots of buffs to its kit which when using the right talent build and optimized gear can end up being better than Archon in certain situations. When comparing the best builds Voidweaver is up to 1% ahead of Archon, meaning they are very close.

THINGS ARE STILL BEING TESTED

It takes us a long time to sim talent builds, especially with rotational changes. Having only gotten this on Friday night we are still working on things and the below information should be treated as EARLY information.

List of Changes​

• Mind Blast damage increased by 10%.
• Shadow Word: Death damage increased by 10%.
• Void Bolt damage increased by 10%.
• Shadowy Apparition damage increased by 10%.
• Voidweaver: Entropic Rift damage increased by 10%.
• Voidweaver: Void Blast damage increased by 20%.
• Voidweaver: Collapsing Void damage increased by 10%.
• Voidweaver: Voidwraith damage increased by 10%.
• Voidweaver: Inner Quietus now increases Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain damage by 25% (was 20%).

How big are these buffs?​

• Archon Single: +2.8%
• Voidweaver Single: +5.2%
• Archon Triple Idol AoE: +2.2%
• Archon Hybrid AoE: +2.2%
• Voidweaver AoE: +3.9%

Overview​

There are a few keys things to note:

• Unfurling Darkness is now strongly preferred for Voidweaver builds in non-dungeon environments. This supplements our DoT refreshing instead of relying on Mental Decay and also gives us an instant cast spell thats hits like a truck. This can still be used in dungeon environments depending on how much of your time is spent at lower target counts (5 or less).
• By default SimC will cause a certain percentage of ticks of Entropic Rift to miss, this is aimed at making it more realistic with boss and target movement. Chance is 5% on single target and up to 10% above 2 targets.
• Voidweaver will naturally struggle as you go into dungeons and start pulling massive packs together, anything more than 8 targets is rough. For this reason pushing keys will still prefer Archon most weeks, but any type of pug situation where you are pulling one pack a time will do great with Voidweaver, especially during Voidbound weeks.

When to pick Archon?​

• Consistent single target damage, not contingent on targets staying in place.
• Prefers the Void Eruption playstyle
• Mythic+ Dungeons where you are pushing high key levels where packs are living 60+ seconds long or you are consistently pulling packs together and around your cooldowns.

When to pick Voidweaver?​

• Top single target damage, particularly when bosses are not moving out of Entropic Rift. This is contingent on playing Unfurling Darkness. If you do not want to play with this talent than Archon will net more single target damage.
• Prefers the Dark Ascension playstyle
• Mythic+ Dungeons where you are pulling one pack at a time and not chain pulling massive pulls. Ideally stays at/under 8 targets as much as possible.
• Anytime you are fighting against absorb shields for Devour Matter (i.e. Voidbound affix, Queen Ansurek intermission, etc)

Rotation Changes​

The following is a list of changes done to the APL compared to before these changes. This is not a full list of how to play Voidweaver.

• Pool Mind Blast for 1 GCD with Mind Flay or 2 GCDs with Mind Spike before Void Torrent comes off cooldown with Voidweaver
• As Voidweaver you should cast Vampiric Touch to proc Unfurling Darkness when facing less than 6 targets and Dark Ascension is not active. This falls just above normal Mind Blast in the priority list.
• You should cast Vampiric Touch to spend Unfurling Darkness as a top priority action when the buff is available. This means as soon as you proc this you immediately spend it.
• Removed unlocked Devouring Plague use during Dark Ascension and instead unlocked it while Entropic Rift is active specifically. You still use Devouring Plague at high priority if it is about to expire or you are capping on Insanity.

Example Voidweaver Opener​

This is an example opener with the VW_VE_VW_DA_cthun_82852967308207_Spike_DR build.

1. Cast Halo pre-pull for 10 Insanity
2. Open with Vampiric Touch to proc Unfurling Darkness and apply our DoTs
3. Cast Vampiric Touch again to consume Unfurling Darkness
4. Mind Spike
5. Voidwraith
6. Dark Ascension
7. Power Infusion + Potion
8. Devouring Plague
9. Void Torrent
10. Void Blast
11. Void Blast
12. Devouring Plague

Full openers with a wider variety of talent builds will be posted to the guide soon.

WeakAuras​

With all of the changes there are a few WeakAuras to list to help with the rotational parts of playing Voidweaver Shadow Priest.

• Pooling Mind Blast Helper
• Unfurling Darkness
• These are all baked into Publik's WeakAura Set

Breakdowns​

The below charts include breakdowns in the various sim environments. Click each link to see the builds used. Note that this page will not be updated after the launch of the changes and you should check the guide for the most up to date builds at that point.

Single Target​

Single Target + Shadow Crash​

2 Target (Stacked)​

Composite Raid​

8 Target 1 Minute Burst​

DungeonRoute Overall Average (+15)​

I've posted quite a lot on these topics already but wanted to call out a few things that are still plaguing the spec.

There are a lot of bugs facing the spec currently, several of which are very impactful to playing the game. The full list is here with the big ones below:

• Halo is pulling mobs that are not currently in combat
• Voidheart is expiring early
• Voidwraith pet is taking full damage as if it was a player
• Darkening Horizon is not always extending correctly
• Mind Soothe is not castable
• Idol of C'Thun is completely broken

Season 1 Tier Set Bonus

Currently the tier set for Shadow Priests is about a 3% DPS gain going from equivalent gear without the set bonus to equipping the full 4 set. This is particularly due to the strength of Distorted Reality (especially early on with less stats) and the inherent synergy with Mind's Eye. Mind's Eye does gain about 5% with the set but this is not enough to offset the loss at current tuning.

In AoE situations the set bonus is about 4%, primarily due to preferring Mind's Eye for these builds. Overall this makes for a pretty underwhelming set bonus effect power wise, and particularly stings because the set bonus is pretty boring as it stands today.

Hero Talent Iteration

So far we have not seen much iteration on our Hero Talent trees, particularly for Archon. Archon looks exactly how it did when it was first released and not a single thing was ever changed or iterated on, including the actual numerical tuning of the tree. I don't want to repost feedback but this is extremely disappointing and it feels like this just wasn't a priority to work on.

While Voidweaver did get some iteration early on there are still quite a few challenges that tree has that would really help to see more iteration and changes with to make it feel better to play, particularly with the way the Entropic Rift spawns and follows targets.

Talent Tree Tree Iteration

Going into the expansion Shadow Priest has received little to no changes to the base spec. While we have gotten reworks quite often over the years none of these have really ever felt complete and this certainly adds to the frustration when comments made in previous dev cycles of revisiting things like Dark Ascension were never changed in the TWW beta cycle.

Furthermore Shadow Priests now have the most 2 point nodes in our tree, and our class tree has the most total points. This equates to 1894837640784 possible builds of our class tree which is obviously an insane number to reason about, but is kind of crazy considering some classes only have a fraction of a percent of that amount. This is not solely indicative of a problem, but does make Priests feel like our tree is not created equally when looking at other classes and specs in the game.

This is still causing ugly issues in places like the Shadow spec tree where you have to pick between more DPS or taking the loss to get crucial defensive or utility nodes. As far as I'm aware the design goals were to not have this be a choice but we still have a crowded top section of our talent tree which feels horrible.

Decided to wrap up some previous posts and feedback into a more concise entry to give current good, bad, and bugs for Voidweaver and Archon from a Shadow Priest perspective.

Good​

• Visually exciting
• Mini-bursts every 30s feel nice
• Cast while moving Void Torrent is fun to play with

Bad​

• Shadowy Insight procs can be frustrating as we pool Mind Blasts before our Void Torrent and waste these procs.
• Travel time to getting to the target can be frustrating, would feel much better if it just spawned under the target.
• Pooling Mind Blasts before Void Torrents can be awkward
• Slowly follows the target if its moving across the room too fast
• Feels like we need to play around Mind Melt a bit too much
• Lack of Void interactions on the tree, particularly Voidform. Instead we have several points that deal with Mindbender, SW:D, or dots
• Retargeting when original target dies feels really random
• Devour Matter can be good in niche cases, but feels bad that most of the time it does nothing

Gamebreaking Bugs​

• Void Blast sometimes breaks
• Voidwraith gets 1-shot by most environmental AoE effects
• Darkening Horizon doesnt always work correctly

State of Archon

Good​

• Off-healing can be quite powerful
• If you like Halo, it is cool to see the bursts
• Simple to play, if you like base shadow you will like Archon

Bad​

• Puts a weird amount of emphasis on MFI/MSI
• Does not make our cooldowns feel that powerful
• Can feel overwhemled trying to spend Surge procs before capping, particularly with VF
• Honestly quite boring relative to Voidweaver
• Halo itself is pretty weak baseline, especially since the echoes do not give Insanity

Gamebreaking Bugs​

• Mind Spike can munch free Surge of Insanity procs

In this post I wanted to highlight the known bugs for Shadow Priest on Beta. I have categorized these into a few categories to indicate severity. These have all been reported in game as well but I wanted to provide more visibility.

Impacting Gameplay​

The following all have significant impacts towards gameplay that actively impeded our ability to test things.

• Darkening Horizon is not always extending correctly
• Entropic Rift can fall off the map/fail to spawn if the target is not grounded
• Void Blast can remain forever if Entropic Rift fails to spawn/despawn
• Mind Vision is not castable
• Mind Soothe is not castable
• The free Surge of Insanity proc from Halo creations can munch procs with Mind Spike
• Voidwraith unhasted GCDs
• Insidious Ire is behaving erratically
• Mind Spike: Insanity is cancelled mid-cast if the buff expires
• Entropic Rift will sometimes retarget an enemy you are not in combat with

Unclear Behavior​

The following bugs are unclear interactions that may or may not be intended.

• Phantom Reach does not work with Psychic Link
• Deathspeaker does not count as "below 20%" for Depth of Shadows
• Collapsing Rift damage increase is not applied to Entropic Rift
• Voidheart is scaling all Shadow damage
• Tormented Spirits get the crit value on Shadowy Apparitions based on previous action

Minor​

The following bugs are relatively minor but still worth mentioning

• Idol of C'Thun will spawn on your current target instead of the one Void Torrent was cast on
• Casting Power Infusion on an Archon priest that already has Power Infusion consumes the buff
• Entropic Rift Incorrect Spawn Location on Mouseover
• You cannot apply Glyphs to Mindbender without first untalenting it
• Mind Flay cannot be Press and Hold casted

Spelldata Issues​

The following are mostly data clarity issues with spell functionality or tooltips.

• Darkening Horizon Spell Data is Duplicated
• Shadowy Insight proc data is missing

After raid testing and some Mythic+ testing today I wanted to give my updated thoughts on Voidweaver and Archon from a Shadow Priest perspective.

Voidweaver​

Overall this spec feels pretty great, but there are a couple of things that if changed could make it play even better.

One of the most frustrating moments right now when playing Voidweaver is getting Shadowy Insight procs while banking up for your next Entropic Rift. Because of a change made to make Shadowy Insight no longer grant a temporary charge of Mind Blast, these procs can often be completely wasted. We are incentivized to bank of Mind Blasts right before Void Torrents but these procs happening right before can end up being very frustrating.

The other thing that is still a bit weird is the emphasis around Shadow Word: Death and Shadowfiend spells. Neither of these are particularly related to the Void but do end up in several places on the tree: Devour Matter, Depth of Shadows, and Voidwraith. Personally I do not see how these fit together in the build and end up making our points in the spec tree feel even more restrictive. Devour Matter is definitely the odd one out here, it is a pretty boring node that I often forget even exists.

The last big thing with Voidweaver that does not feel very satisfying is the size of the Rift and the expansion. Because of how little we end up casting Devouring Plague rotationally this expansion is very minor, especially compared to Discipline. Making this work with ticks of Devouring Plague or adjusting how much it grows per cast would go a long way to making this be more usable. With the current size of the rift and positioning of a pack in Mythic+ it could be awkwardly missing a lot of mobs. This is also notably worse off because the Rift does not currently retarget if the original target dies.

Archon​

Compared to Voidweaver, Archon is particularly uninspiring to play with. The playstyle is basically the baseline version of the spec we have in Dragonflight, you just now press Halo at the start of your cooldowns. It is possible this was the goal all along for Archon, but having a relatively small change to the spec for a whole Hero talent feel wise does not make it feel like a Hero Talent to me.

This is made even worse with the lack of distinct visual changes with Archon. Yes we spawn a few extra Halos and it radiates out and back to us, but for a spec themed around empowering our cooldowns this just misses the mark for me when our cooldowns are lacking any visual change. Even the Hero Talent icon itself looks amazing but feels really out of place considering the visuals and feel of the spec do not match.

Archon itself is likely suffering from an already existing problem the spec has with cooldowns that are not particularly exciting by themselves (particularly Dark Ascension).

The one thing that Archon has going for it that might even make us feel pulled to play it is the absolutely disgusting amount of off-healing we get from being centered around Halo. Not sure how this will be balanced but that is a strong positive.

General Shadow Priest​

While I already covered recent changes here I wanted to discuss a few other points that I would love to see discussion or changes towards.

We have not seen any spec tree changes so I do not want to copy things from my previous post but these issues are generally all still present and would welcome any changes here to help improve our spec tree.

Shadow Crash and Void Crash​

Adding in Void Crash as an alternative to Shadow Crash will be a welcomed change for some players, but also creates some anti-patterns with the current size of the spell. Because of the relatively small radius of Shadow and Void Crash (8 yards), having it be centered around a single enemy can easily make it difficult to target a full clump of adds. This can also be quite confusing for new players using the talent. Increasing this up to 10 or 12 yards (likely alongside Shadow Crash) would make it feel much better from a DoT management perspective.

Notable Bugs​

• Mind Soothe is currently not able to be cast at all. Just says "You can't use that here"

The recent changes on the Alpha are quite unexpected and overall have me feeling quite disappointed and sad that we lost certain interactions. Overall these changes create more problems than they end up solving in the first place and my inclination is to revert back to previous iterations. More details below, starting from the top of the changes.

Collapsing Void​

as well as to make Collapsing Void more relevant for encounters with lower health enemies

Overall this is actually a positive change, the length of the Rift was certainly opening the spec up to challenges in shorter lived content so it being balanced around smaller windows makes a lot of sense depending on tuning.

Devour Matter and Void Empowerment​

In addition, Devour Matter felt like an odd choice against Void Empowerment, so now it is a node that you are guaranteed to have.

In regards to Devour Matter I'm still unsure how exactly the Shadow Word: Death nodes fit with the Voidweaver theme, but point wise the choice node does make more sense to move it. Devour Matter itself still feels out of place on the tree.

For the new choice node the duration extension now is effectively a choice against Collapsing Void size expansion and damage, which feels like a weird choice depending on where tuning comes into the picture. If the goal is to have shorter lived windows I don't think extending by only 3 seconds is really enough to notice much of an impact considering Void Blast has such a long cooldown.

Overall I think Darkening Horizon makes less sense in this version of Voidweaver, a small amount of extension just isn't enough to feel powerful and feels weak in comparison to Void Empowerment, especially if we are going to have smaller rifts more of them with this design.

Entropic Rift​

Entropic Rift duration reduced to 8 seconds (was 10 seconds). This change by itself seems okay along with the goal posted above, however it does have some knock on effects with other changes (see below). In addition this also means Shadow has an even harder time empowering the rift and expanding its size since we can only do this with Devouring Plague casts. More than ever it desperately needs to also work with Devouring Plague ticks in order to feel rewarding.

Entropic Rift is now summoned by Shadow Crash instead of Void Torrent. With Shadow Crash being a 20 second cooldown and the Rift only lasting 8 seconds baseline you will now be strongly incentivize to only cast Mind Blast during Rift windows, this can create gameplay that makes Voidweaver much less intuitive. Overall this feels more awkward than it did with being attached to Void Torrent. Having the Rift reset the cooldown of Mind Blast could solve this, but would likely be way too strong and I'm not sure of another way around this that feels healthy.

The spec in general doesn't feel right locking into Shadow Crash everywhere, especially single target. Void Torrent feels good to press almost everywhere so it did not have this problem. Reducing the ramp time of the Entropic Rift (don't have to wait for Void Torrent channel) is slightly improved, but the change from last week felt like a great solve to this in my opinion and I'm sad to see this change from Void Torrent and I personally preferred the older version instead of the Shadow Crash one.

This also creates a lot of problems with damage pattern inside of Mythic+ environments, similar to what was observed during Season 3 of Dragonflight where we pressed Shadow Crash for damage. Adding damage to Shadow Crash makes it really frustrating to play with as its our DoT application spell. If we are trying to get prepped for a pull and DoTing enemies Shadow Crash is now a full-blown damage spell (way more than it was in Season 3). This is also even more frustrating mid-way through a pull when you are faced with a choice of pressing Shadow Crash for damage on this pack vs. holding it for the next one to get your damage going. The spell doesn't create rewarding gameplay when its used for both DoT application and damage.

This change is basically opening up the can of worms of problems with Shadow Crash and personally I think its less fun than when the rift was attached to Void Torrent because of all of this.

Inner Quietus has been redesigned – Shadow Crash deals 400% additional damage to its primary target (was Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain damage increased by 20%).

This is similar to the points above, adding damage to Shadow Crash just doesn't feel good since we use it for DoT application today and not for damage reasons.

Shadow Crash​

Shadow Crash now centers on your target, rather than using a reticle to target a position on the ground.

This change overall is extremely polarizing. While this does make the spell easier to target in some cases, it also makes it significantly less useful in other cases. Often times we are able to pre-cast Shadow Crash to time it with mobs spawning (i.e. Sarkareth or 2nd boss Brackenhide), but this is no longer possible with this change. The travel time on the spell also now requiring a target is just solving the problem of it being difficult to target while creating a new problem of being less useful in certain situations.

Instead of making this change I would personally rather have the old version. If this new functionality is the direction the spec is going in I would strongly like to have a similar choice node in our spec tree to what Windwalker Monks have with Skytouch and Skyreach. Give us the ability to choose a cast-on-target Shadow Crash or a ground-target Shadow Crash so that we don't lose our existing functionality but gain the accessability advantages.

Tree Cohesion​

After these changes the tree feels more directionless and we have a lot of nodes working with unrelated abilities. While the Entropic Rift was changed to Shadow Crash, we still have a node that makes Void Torrent cast while moving, which is still a cool node but now feels way more random unless we revert that change. Personally would love for this to be more focused to make building around Voidweaver feel more distinct. Shadow Word: Death and Mindbender nodes in particular still feel out of place, equally so with Void Torrent/Shadow Crash conflicting.

Point Categorization:

• Void Torrent - 1
• Shadow Crash - 2
• Mind Blast - 4
• Devouring Plague- 2
• Shadow Word: Death - 2
• Shadowfiend/Mindbender - 2

The following feedback is from the perspective of a Shadow Priest.

Overall Archon starts to deliver on the fantasy of enhanced cooldowns, but does it in a way with Halo that does not quite fit together nicely as a Shadow Priest. The empowered cooldowns themselves also do not feel particularly different than normally, they just now last a bit longer and you press Halo beforehand. That being said the iteration we see now does look powerful, although I wish it had more than just an updated Halo visual to enhance the theme, particularly with our cooldowns or Surge of Insanity casts. The Halo visual change itself also feels a bit lackluster for Shadow in particular and not sure I prefer it over the current version.

Surge of Insanity casts and Shadowy Apparitions don't feel super connected to the tree, but could be a big point to develop a visually different experience as an Archon.

The description for Archon says, "Archons can be blessed from higher beings to enter into an ascended state, becoming an ultimate version of themselves". The current version of the tree doesn't have enough changing with our cooldowns to actually make them feel like ultimate versions, both visually and playstyle wise. There are plenty of buffs to the cooldowns themselves but other than that it doesn't hit the theme well enough for me, especially compared to Voidweaver. Dark Ascension and Void Eruption are both a bit lacking in terms of identity, this could be a good time to revisiting this feedback.

All current bugs for Priests in The War Within are listed here.

Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.​

• Word of Supremacy for Archon would make you feel pushed toward the tree when trying to live high-key Mythic+ dungeons compared to Voidweaver

Any bugs blocking testing?​

• Animation of Halo does not seem to match when the damage happens, but the Holy version seems to match.
• As an Archon Priest, if someone else casts Power Infusion on you while yours is active, it will remove your existing Power Infusion buff completely.
• If you are mid-cast of Mind Spike and get a proc of Mind Spike: Insanity from a Halo creation it will consume the Surge of Insanity and not give you the increased damage. It should either buff the damage or not consume the proc (which is what Mind Flay: Insanity does). This also does not generate a Shadowy Apparition from this bug.

Hero Talents that Create Frustrating or Unsatisfying gameplay​

• Current iteration of Sustained Potency means that you can gain damage using a 2-minute "opener". Since the hidden buff does not reset on combat start with a boss (mostly looking at raid here, should not reset on dungeon bosses) you can use a 2 minute opener to cast two Halo's pre-pull to bank 6 seconds and then cast the third Halo during cooldowns to get 9s of extension on your opener cooldown. This is pretty degenerate and probably shouldn't be a mechanic.
• Halo being a casted spell adds to the bloat of the opener and feels unsatisfying. We have Shadowfiend or Mindbender + Casted Halo + Casted Dark Ascension/Void Eruption to start our cooldowns.
• Since Archon interacts with Surge of Insanity, it brings up issues with Mind Flay: Insanity and Mind Spike: Insanity that we brought up earlier.
  • Mind Spike: Insanity feels the same as Mind Spike and not visually different. Compared to Surge of Light being instant-cast these feel much worse.
  • Mind Flay: Insanity feels unsatisfying to press and longer to execute. Impossible to weave many of these into your burst window.
  • Makes Voidform builds, particularly with Mind's Eye feel very cluttered with having extra Surge of Insanity procs during cooldowns, especially with Mind Flay: Insanity. You are even sometimes encouraged to instantly cancel Mind Flay: Insanity just to not waste the Shadowy Apparition.
  • Giving mobility to these spells would help make Archon not only feel different to play, but also add movement into a tree that currently does not have anything
• The cooldown extension makes Ancient Madness feel less satisfying as it still fizzles out quickly and is still much less valuable with Void Eruption.
• Currently we use Divine Star to get Insanity pre-pull to start out with 25 when the pull starts. This makes the opener feel much better and because of the way Halo works with the Insanity decay and the fact that we now want it for damage this doesn't become an option anymore since the tree does not work with Divine Star.

Hero Talents where Functionality is Confusing, Unclear, or Difficult to Track​

• Halo's range currently is increased to 40 yards, but in reality its closer to 37 or so. Standing exactly 40 yards away from the target you will not get any hits of Halo. This same problem exists today on live/without Archon but at 27 yards instead of 30.
• Heightened Alteration working for Dispersion doesn't feel like its giving us much. More duration is not something that is very useful. Not really sure what this was intended to give the spec.
• Sustained Potency stacks outside of your cooldown (buff should not be hidden)
• Dark Ascension Perfected Form modifier is applying twice to Direct spell damage, and not to any periodic.
• Void Eruption Perfected Form is an additive effect instead of multiplicative with the existing modifier, this is confusing and slightly low-balling the damage increase
• Resonant Energy debuff stacking is confusing since the damage taken increase does not stack, just the slow
• The extra Halo's generated from Power Surge not giving Insanity is unclear if that is intended
• Power Surge has no buff to track when the future Halo's are happening

The following feedback is from the perspective of a Shadow Priest.

You can find all current bugs for Priests in The War Within here.

Any bugs blocking testing?​

• Voidwraith
  • Does not work with Mindbender (see below section)
  • Does not trigger Idol of Y'Shaarj
  • Sometimes melee's instead of casting
  • Is not scaling with any of our Priest modifiers. This includes Twist of Fate, Mastery, Shadowform, Idol of Y'Shaarj, Voidheart, etc
  • Currently does work with Inescapable Torment, unsure which half of this is intended, but guessing it is supposed to work with our talents.
• Depth of Shadows
  • Proccing this puts Mindbender or Shadowfiend on cooldown
  • Does not trigger Idol of Y'Shaarj
• Devour Matter 300% increase is not applying
• After talenting into and out of No Escape, it is still active.

Hero Talents that Create Frustrating or Unsatisfying gameplay​

• Current Entropic Rift window feels very busy and borderline overwhelming and you are rushing to try and get Void Blasts and Devouring Plagues out and do not have room to do much else. This is directly linked to feeling like we cannot quite "cap" the rift size or extension consistently. If that was fixed this might also be better to play with. There is some charm in having to chase the rotation here.
  • Currently Shadow also feels like it has to ramp to get meaningful damage out of the talent, the Void Torrent channel into then spawning the rift and then reaching peak 15 seconds later is a very long time in environments when things do not live that long.
• Darkening Horizon feels very unachievable to get the full extension without Bloodlust, Power Infusion, and a lot of baseline haste while also getting lucky with procs. Not being able to max this except in rare cases is unsatisfying.
  • Reducing the cooldown of Void Blast, making it Instant Cast, working with other spells as well, and/or increasing how much extension you get per Void Blast would help
  • Changing it to a spammable spell like Discipline probably would not feel fun, as it would really hurt the value of non-filler spells during this window
• Collapsing Void Devouring Plague expansion feels extremely underwhelming or even non-existent, even after casting 5 Devouring Plagues the size of the rift is still smaller than 8 yards, which is less than Shadow Crash and by then it fizzles away.
  • Make it work with Devouring Plague ticks and/or significantly increase how much it is increased by per cast
  • Fantasy element and visually this is extremely underwhelming
• When a mob dies that was the original target of Entropic Rift, this can feel super unsatisfying, especially if it remains as a small size since it currently does not move or re-target.
  • Would be awesome if an enemy dies in the rift it also expands and "consumes" them
• Entropic Rift not pulling enemies in feels unsatisfying. For a spell that closely resembles a black hole, I wish it acted more like it. The slow from No Escape is in a similar space but not nearly what I expected. In PvE the applications for the slow are quite underwhelming.
• The choice node between No Escape and Dark Energy is unsatisfying. At the current size of the rift No Escape feels extremely underwhelming and likely will not have many use cases in PvE at the current size Shadow can get it to. In the current state it feels like Dark Energy will be preferred always.
  • Would love to see additions or changes to No Escape such as the black hole design mentioned above.
  • Adjusting the pacing/sizing that Shadow can get the rift to would certainly help No Escape.
• The choice node between Devour Matter and Void Empowerment does not feel satisfying. Devour Matter is an extremely niche ability in almost all types of content, where it will only provide a small amount of value even if the condition is met. On the other hand Void Empowerment is always useful and consistent and provides value every 30 seconds with Malediction.
  • If we had this choice node on live, in current examples where we do face enemies with shields (Tindral, Fyrakk, Iridikron) that is such a small portion of the fight, Void Empowerment would still be the better choice.
• Currently locks you into the bottom right side of our spec talent tree for this spec as Void Torrent, Malediction, and Idol of C'Thun all have such strong synergies. Could be frustrating when taking any Shadow Word: Death points in Voidweaver that also encourage spending points in the bottom left side of our spec tree.
• In certain cases Shadow might be incentivized to cancel Void Torrent early just to get the rift to spawn sooner. This might just come down to tuning of Void Torrent though. Spawning at the start of the cast would have even more problems depending on tuning of Void Torrent, end is better but that incentive is still there. This is also contributing to having a somewhat length burst/ramp time for our damage. Will take 3 seconds of Void Torrent + up to 15 seconds of the Rift before it collapses, which is a long time for damage especially in environments like Normal dungeons.

Hero Talents where Functionality is Confusing, Unclear, or Difficult to Track​

• Cooldown of Voidwraith is confusing since when taking Mindbender the cooldown is not lowered at all and remains fixed at 2 minutes, making Mindbender a completely dead talent.
• Depth of Shadows (451308) has an internal cooldown of 1 second. This can be confusing for players because at higher haste levels and a Death and Madness reset you can cast Shadow Word: Death back to back and the second cast would be unable to proc the effect.
• Proc rate of Depth of Shadows and the health threshold is currently unknown and not shown on the spell.
• Inner Quietus does not increase the direct damage of Shadow Word: Pain. This is particular is confusing with Catharsis.
• Voidwraith's talent tooltip indicates that it deals "up to 50% additional damage, dealing more damage to higher health enemies" but the actual spell deals a flat 135% of spellpower and then if the mob is above 50% health it deals 100% increased damage. This is inconsistent with the talent tooltip and not sure what is intended.
• There is nothing baseline in-game to track how many times you have extended Entropic Rift (and if you have any left) with Darkening Horizon without using some kind of WeakAura. (x/5)
• There is nothing baseline in-game to track how many times you have expanded Entropic Rift with Collapsing Void without using some kind of WeakAura. (x/8)
• Void Blast's tooltip shows a low number for Shadow
• Visual of Entropic Rift can be hard to see in certain environments on the ground, and because it does not re-target after the original dies this is important to know where to drag mobs into, especially for your Tank in PvE environments. The rift not re-targeting after the original dies is also unintuitive.

Entropic Rift Windows

[quote="Publik-thrall, post:2, topic:1833178"] Current Entropic Rift window feels very busy and borderline overwhelming and you are rushing to try and get Void Blasts and Devouring Plagues out and do not have room to do much else. This is directly linked to feeling like we cannot quite “cap” the rift size or extension consistently. If that was fixed this might also be better to play with. There is some charm in having to chase the rotation here. [/quote]

After spending a bit more time with Voidweaver I wanted to clarify this comment a bit since I was pretty vague in this statement.

The Entropic Rift window specifically for Shadow Priests has a varying degree of pure gameplay feel based on other talents that we are picking. Particularly if you are playing a build with Void Eruption and especially worse if you also have Inescapable Torment. With Void Eruption you inevitably have to sacrifice some casts of spells like Void Bolt to prioritize Entropic Rift casts in a way that makes it feel busy.

There's enough rotational pressure from Void Blasts, Devouring Plague (and Shadow Word: Death if you have Inescapable Torment) to make the windows feel rewarding that adding the additional rotational pressure of Void Bolt detracts from the experience and makes it feel significantly less rewarding.

For a Hero Talent tree that has Void in the name Void Eruption does not have great synergies with these spells. Void Eruption as a cooldown is primarily focused around Void Bolt, which doesn't have any direct synergies with Voidweaver. We only rarely will reach maximum extension of the rift duration from very lucky procs, and by doing so we are de-prioritizing Void Bolts.

For other builds that do not use Void Eruption the Rift itself brings a much welcomed pacing into the build that feels like you are working towards something. That something is still a bit uninspiring at the current size of the rift, but that was covered in a different section. Expanding the rift size in general feels lackluster as a Shadow Priest (much better as Discipline).

I think there should be some kind of sweet spot the build lives where expanding the rifts size should feel exciting and rewarding, and the extension of the rift duration should be easy to get a few casts, and reward players that are more skillful with the full extension. For Shadow Priests the rift expansion is extremely underwhelming and it feels like we can almost never get the full duration extension off, even while playing perfectly.

Opener Concerns and Setup Time

Another point I didn't get to focus on earlier was the opener itself into the Entropic Rift. As a goal we are encouraged to have our DoTs active before pressing Void Torrent, but with how we start off pulls currently we are heavily incentivized to just cast Void Torrent for one tick and then cancel to spawn the rift just to get into the start of our opener. Casting Void Torrent just into Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain on the opener just isn't worth full channeling, and sitting there building up to 45/50/55 Insanity for Devouring Plague (depending on talents) is quite a long wait for our cooldown cycle.

This is certainly part of tuning overall, but is something we are noticing with the opener and setup of a Voidweaver Shadow Priest that is a bit awkward to play with currently.

Pathing and Build Diversity

The other big thing related to this is how the tree is currently pressuring you to not only pickup Void Torrent, Malediction, and Idol of C'Thun in the bottom section, but talents like Depth of Shadows or Voidwraith also pull you towards Mindbender, Inescapable Torment, and Idol of Y'Shaarj (assuming bugs are worked out/intended to work with these). Mastermind is also an extremely valuable point with any build due to the strength of Void Blast.

Encouraging and locking into the bottom right section is totally expected with the core of Entropic Rift, but it just gets a bit much when we are also heavily encouraged to path on the complete opposite side of the tree, not to mention thematically the Shadow Word: Death and Pet-focused spells don't exactly fit the Void theme as well as other nodes.

Welcome to Book of Shadows!