What Shadow Priests *should* be.
Starting off by getting the obvious stuff out of the way:
1. Everyone knows that opinions of what Shadow should be are highly divided among long-time Shadow mains, with the "bring back shadow orbs" group being by far the loudest faction, and for good reason. Shadow’s design since Legion is cool, but has been very inconsistent and a balancing nightmare across different types of content and as expansions develop.
2. Blizzard has shown that they're dedicated to maintaining the current voidform class design in Shadowlands and, balance concerns aside, this post is about how to rework shadow to more successfully realize this class fantasy and hopefully make it more reliant on internal mechanics rather than external ones.
Blizzard’s current design really fails to realize the struggle between controlling your insanity and giving in to it, as you never do give in - you just reset back to normal every time. I'd love to see Shadow really realize the control element here, so I think that Shadow should have three states that are entirely dictated by your current insanity level: shadow form, void form, and surrender to madness. As you harness more and more void energy, your power increases but your ability to maintain that power shrinks with time.
Shadow Form - unchanged from how it is now, but dots generate insanity with each tick rather than abilities generating insanity when cast. At 100 insanity, Void Eruption is triggered and you shift into void form with 100 insanity.
Void Form - Your abilities spend insanity and your dots generate insanity at ever-increasing rates. Void Torrent is now baseline again and returns you to shadow form, but also has its damage scale up with the duration of your void form, giving you a damage payoff for maintaining void form as long as possible. At 200 insanity, you surrender to madness.
Surrender to Madness - No longer a talent or activated ability, and more of a super void form. Surrender to Madness would essentially be Shadow’s “cooldown”, increasing your damage and haste until you reach 300 insanity and take 95% of your health in damage. Assuming you survive, you revert to shadow form and your insanity decays from 300 down to 0, rapidly at first and slowing as it diminishes. While your insanity decays, you gain Lingering Insanity, which functions like it does currently, but with the decay tied to your current insanity rather than time so that most of the value is lost in the moments after dropping void form with a brief “hangover” period. At zero insanity, the cycle starts over.
The idea here is to accomplish the following goals:
1- Give Shadow actual high points in its gameplay while maintaining the “no cooldowns” tempo style gameplay that make it unique among spellcasters, centered around an intermediate state, void form, and a major state, surrender to madness.
2 - Give Shadow abilities and gameplay patterns that can be balanced internally without being forced to rely on scaffolding that changes every expansion.
3 - Realize the control aspects of the class fantasy of harnessing maddening power and letting it go when it becomes too much to handle, rather than being in a cycle where you have no control at all.
So what do you think?
Inb4 “just give us shadow orbs back!”
TL;DR: Shadow Priests should have a sliding scale of forms, shadow form, void form, and surrender to madness, with a gameplay loop based around the player controlling power as long as possible without losing control rather than the current system of simply resetting to baseline.