Hello Mandrius!
Though it’s not me posting this message, I am Ellipsis – Ice Bear of the HowToPriest Shadow Team. I’m usually on the EU and US beta forums, but because this post has gained significant traction arguable controversy I’ve enlisted a friend to help me bring another opinion to the table, my own.
What you’ve said is very true, there have been some significant improvements to the overarching character goals of the shadow priest. Players are no longer forced into long and punishing rotations to deal damage, nor is the brunt of their potential damage locked behind excessively high ramp. These are very good things, and understandably people such as yourself, I won’t comment on “utility” such as fortitude because to many it doesn’t look to be more than fluff, though it’s nice to see Blizzard are backpedalling a little on that one.
If you hated Voidform in Legion, then the changes made in BFA look to be a step in the right direction. I’d also agree that making Voidform a cooldown isn’t the way to go, and very much hope that’s not where we are headed. I do think though, and this is where we begin to disagree, that shadow is not fine where it is for a few reasons.
First, I’d say through Shadow losing its knife edge punishment, it’s also lost a significant portion of its pacing. Pacing that myself and many others have stated since the beginning of Alpha was important to prevent what is a very simple rotation (Bolt > Blast > Flay priority) from becoming dull in single target focused content. One other thing to bring up here are secondaries and their place going into BFA. Secondary stats are not only going to be significantly reduced in number throughout the entire expansion but are also going to be much harder (Maybe even impossible) to stack or target for with the primary scaling and personal loot changes. What stats players have in prepatch are possibly close to double what they will ever achieve in BFA.
The simplicity of the rotation is not a problem alone. A simple rotation can be compelling and enjoyable, and as the only dps spec priests have, something with 10-12+ rotational abilities seems excessive. The issues come in when the player themselves tries to “play around” or deviate from that very fixed rotation. In other resource-based specs, you have abilities that generate and abilities that cost resources. The abilities that generate are for the most part always available, and those that spend can be pooled up or floated a bit to provide some choice about when they are used, Shadow lacks this, and it’s what the pace throughout Legion attempting to mask.
The second major issue some long-term shadows, including myself, are coming across with the paced stripped away is the lack of ability to make enjoyable decisions. Void eruption might be trying to act like a “burst aoe” you can hold for an opportune moment but doing so causes you to waste a lot of resources and leaves you unable to use Void Bolt or any of the ‘interesting’ part of your rotation. The same can be said once in Voidform too, you’re constantly spending resources through the ever-increasing drain and given no choices as a player when or even how you want to be spending them to deal damage. This might be an abstract comment, but you could say you are not playing Voidform, Voidform is in fact playing you.
‘Resource management’ is a phrase that comes up a lot (Though not this discussion, oddly enough). At its root it simply means having a bar go up and down and having that do something. Shadow accomplishes that fine, but I’d argue for resource management to be compelling it has be a bit more than that. Without tools to spend insanity, Shadow’s core goal becomes to generate as much as possible, but it also accomplishes this by pressing the buttons that deal the most damage at any given moment. Imagine you’ve been tasked with selecting the ball with the largest number out of many but after a few rounds you realise that the largest number is always the only blue one, do you still need to think about the first thing if the second is always true anyway? This is how I feel about shadow’s ‘resource management’, the bar and resource could be hidden off screen and aside from being able to enter Voidform or not it wouldn’t inform my button presses.