Not sure how other priests feel about the spell, but personally I’ve been playing a lot of Boon Spriest in SL. The spell feels largely like a better version of Vform, since both have a cast time, both make you hover/slide around above the ground, and both chunks out their own bolt(Ascended Blast and Void Bolt). Since the devs are acknowledging that our cds lack identity in DF, could it possibly be an idea to salvage what boon does, and incorporate it into Vform? As in up the dmg on Vbolt a bit, and have it replace Mind Flay for the duration(like Ascended Blast currently does), and have Eruption instead of bolt, become a shadow version of Ascended Nova, with a finish explosion based on number of casts when done.
I’m not a game designer and don’t know if something is too strong behind the scenes, but since we lost Surrender and Hungering Void, and Ancient Madness was made available for DA as well, this would also separate the two cooldowns identity. Vform(that by the way still only increases our dmg by 10% since it still replaces Sform) would then be fairly bursty, where DA that gives a much larger 25% dmg increase(and doesn’t replace Sform) retains a better sustained dmg profile… or something.
Just wanted to share my thoughts, feel free to voice yours.
I don’t like the mashing, but, keep in mind DF allows you to just hold the key to keep casting, so maybe. To me it felt odd to replace a channeled St spell with a mash aoe, however I am 100% in favour of VF replacing spells, and 100% on getting more than the 1 aoe hit out during the void phase.
Boon feels a bit like a Holy counterpart to VF.
VF increases damage by 3x mastery too, although, with good gear you can keep a substantial uptime on 3 dots outside it. DA doesn’t scale with mastery …?
DA doesn’t cause automatic mastery benefit like Vform does and don’t increase dot damage no(the non-periodic line of DA still only amounts to a 10% down from Vform, on dots only), but we’ll have full uptime on anything below 6 mobs anyway, with both Touch and Pain now both being 21s and Crash applying dots to 4(which should be 8, and then either remove or change Dark Void) targets for free on a 20’ish second cooldown, plus crash itself activating unfurling.(To which you just reminded me that I have yet to test if Crash is smart applying dots )
I was personally never a fan of needing DP to “complete” our mastery’s benefit, but currently DA adds a flat 15% more damage over Vform anyway, and receives our mastery’s benefit regardless, as long as we keep our dots up.
Right? Works like Vform, just with an added Nova effect.
That said, Vform considering everything fully dotted is indeed a cool mechanic
and I’d like to see DA get something similarly cool to it. As I mentioned in another post, Bake(a non diminishing) ancient madness into DA baseline, or just make Spike and Blast have a 100% crit chance while in DA(possibly add a Psychic Link’esq effect to it?), and then bake Monomania into Vform(not requiring Flay, but affects all dots currently up), so it ups the power of dots for the duration, but counts as a capped haste mechanic so it doesn’t scale out of hand.
Sadly vform still needs the dots, because of apparitions and mb cleave off vampiric touch, so it’s not a get out of dot jail free card, but it… Really should be if you ask me. If void bolt itself had a cleave maybe.
Crash could apply more dots with more mastery
Being able to continue eruptions/halo would be nice, the reason I called it a Holy version of VE is it could go in the class tree, really.
