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"