Renew

This isn't true at all When we had Deidrie raiding with us a before the holidays he was pushing 1800 DPS and still needed quite a few items to finish off his gear. Assuming equal gear, the feral druid will out dps a protection warrior everytime. That being said, protection warriors do put out respectable damage, but a feral druid in most fights can out perform them.

It's all in the raid design, progression timeline and experience. As we now have every piece of gear, damage is mitigated much better (most cases a Paladin and Druid can duo heal every boss, hell the Druid might not even be needed).

Overheal is trivial, examining BT after you've farmed it forever is trivial, the next goal is to examine how classes fair in Sunwell's raid design.

Who says a Ret Paladin is needed to keep up JoW?

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Zifna

Hey now... The Elemental Shaman would be very happy! Put in a Shadowpriest and we can reliably keep Chain Lightning in our rotation, which increases our DPS by like 8%. This used to be a nonissue after 4/5 T6, but the haste changes alter that, remember!

EDIT: Haha, I see someone already made a similar point.

 

Renew

Spriests for damage caster groups are always nice because it allows them to destruction pot instead of mana pot. Especially since Mages and Elemental Shaman who stack haste with t6 gear can pump out some nice numbers.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

MichaelBerea

Thank you for this informative and interesting thread.

Update for Professions from Blue poster Vaneras:

WoW-Europe.com Forums -> 05/02 New cooking recipes for Patch 2.4

We have added two new cooking recipes for Patch 2.4: Charred Bear Kabobs and Juicy Bear Burgers. Both new recipes can be purchased from either Bale (Horde) or Malygen (Alliance) in Felwood. The recipes require 250 skill to learn, and use meat added to level 48-56 bears. This means it will no longer require fish to skill up your cooking to 300.

* Juicy Bear Burger: Requires Level 45. Use: Restores 1933 health over 27 sec. Must remain seated while eating. If you eat for 10 seconds will also increase your damage and healing from magical spells and effects by up to 14 for 15 min.

* Charred Bear Kabobs: Requires Level 45. Use: Restores 1933 health over27 sec. Must remain seated while eating. If you eat for 10 seconds will also increase your attack power by 24 for 15 min.

 

Daidalos

true. A ret pally is certainly not needed but when holy pallys were tasked with this in our guild and got busy healing it always seemed our up time on JoW was rather low. Maybe this was due to us not stacking healers or they were just bad at keeping track of it.

 

Darkmantle

High end warlocks already use mana pots on every cooldown for that extra grasp of dps by saving a GCD. However the thing to remember is, the total amount of mana a warlock needs over any decent fight length is far greater than can be provided from mana pots and so either lifetap/vampiric touch/judge wisdom will have to provide it.

 

• Chicken

I'd guess it's just lack of practice, and possibly lack of a good mod for tracking whether the Judgement is up. I have little trouble keeping up Judgements on practically every tier 6 fight, the only exception really are Anetheron and Azgalor because I'm typically on the add tanks there if I'm healing.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

dares

Turn Undead Incapacitate will break with Soul Link damage.

The spell is 1.95 second cast (with Tongues) with pushback (only 50% from Conc) and a 30 second cooldown.

You can simply Spell Lock the Turn cast itself and lock out the entire Holy tree.

Very minimal change; useless in most situations. You gain roughly 2 seconds from Turning a Felhunter given that a lockout is 4.2 seconds with Imp Conc and it won't be uncommon for the Turn cast to take around 2.5 seconds with pushback. Sticking it to the felhunter before spell lock cools down is the only real use (in addition to enabling 3-4 seconds of drinking sometimes), provided you're not hitting the Warlock.

Cool sometimes, but nothing more than a small bone in that form unless there's more to it.

 

Renew

... I hope you aren't serious. Do you know how squishy Warlocks are? Breaking Soul Link for a few seconds is HUGE. Why do you think the common strat in season 3 is to ride the Warlock and or their pet?

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Vain

He didn't say incapacitating the pet would temporarily remove Soul Link, he meant that the incoming Soul Link damage to the pet (because of the warlock taking other damage) would cause the pet's incapacitate to break.

 

Renew

Ah. It's still nice, sometimes that few seconds is all you need to get a sip in.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

vorda

He said that if Turn Undead will be an incapacitate like repentance and gouge, it will break on any damage taken, including SL.

Incapacitate's dont dispell any buffs, you probably made a minor reading error

edit: I'm too slow.

 

• Snowy

You misunderstood his post. If the Felhunter is incapacitated, it wont turn off Soul Link; rather, any damage done to the warlock will break the incapacitate on the Felhunter.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Zhoreilh

The best WWS I've ever seen is... Xyruul/Antarin reaching 2K dps on Teron (/clap).

 

Alacrity

Shadowpriests are amazing and we run 2 always sometimes 3 on raids, along with circle of healing priests which can do some insane HPS.

http://www.exo-guild.com

 

Evalara

I must be behind on the theorycraft since in my experience mages are nearly useless outside of a shadowpriest group on a fight of any significant length. We had to do without one this week in Hyjal and I ended both Kaz'rogal and Azgalor wanding, having used potions, gems, evocation, and mage armor. Never mind being oom halfway through every single trash wave. Our shadowpriests also out-dps our hunters on nearly every fight. I don't see their raid spots in any kind of danger, ISB changes or no.

 

Cheeky

As anecdotal evidence, that probably means you need to work with your Hunters a bit. In end game gear a BM Hunter should bury a Shadow Priest in DPS.

Cheeky of Havoc

 

• Snowy

Without getting into epeen wars (can we please stop with that), it's been a real eye-opener to me that most casters dont need a shadowpriest from the posts here and the ideal caster group would have a moonkin over a shadowpriest. If that's really the optimum way to go, then I fully agree that bringing a shadowpriest is probably a sub-optimal use of a raid slot, given the poor dps they do relative to other classes in most fights. The absolute best I can do is on Teron, with 1500 DPS. Meanwhile our Teron last night had every single melee DPS over 2k I believe.

However, I think it's wise to keep in mind that this is all on farm content, and clearly stacking melee DPS is the way to increase RDPS on almost all fights -- even Illidan with a cleanly executed p2 can find melee DPS winning in DMs on that fight. But as for how this all plays out in Sunwell? Nobody can have any idea, since it totally depends on the fights and fight length.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Nhala

I think (forgive me if I misunderstood) that Xyruul was actually saying that priests are overrepresented in raids, because by bringing 2-3 spriests and 1-2 hpriests you end up with a max of 5 priests in the raid. I don't think he was trying to say they were underrepresented at all, but again, I may have read it wrong.

While it is certainly his choice to not bring more than one spriest and 0 hpriests, it still seems a bit foolhardy. If it works for you, all the power to you, but our casters always delight in having a shadow priest, and CoH holy priests (+1 Imp. DS bitch--the extra spell damage can add up!) are wonderful when there is a great deal of raid damage flying around.

Now, we are still in the process of finishing BT (Illidan to 57% /wince), and thus our players do not have the best gear available just yet, but at the gear level they ARE at (T5/T6), having shadow priests can make quite a difference for many of them.

 

Boneitis

I think the raid leaders who min/max their raid based upon patch notes are in the minority. Either they put too much stock in theorycraft or they are utterly blessed with a full raid of people who actually can perform to the level that theorycraft suggests they can.

Most people don't have this setup, we have the "wrong" people winning meters even though other classes are better dps on paper. I wouldn't worry about it. People on these threads get way to general with their observations about raid performance and it's usually only relevant to the top 0.1% of players anyway. The rest of us don't have the luxury of having 25 people who understand their class perfectly.

 

◊ Kalman

I need to elaborate on this lest other people misinterpret:

It isn't that T6 mana regen is significantly higher than T4 mana regen. It's not. It's that mana regen is incrementally more valuable as you get closer to the point of infinity. The classic example:

100 point mana pool, 20 mana per minute spent.

With 0 regen, that's 5 minutes.
With 5 regen, that's 6.66 minutes.
With 10 regen, it's 10 minutes.
With 15 regen, it's 20 minutes.
And 20 regen is the point of infinity.

The problem with spriest DPS scaling is that to avoid the point of infinity, or even getting *near* one, you have to be very cautious, since regen scales like resists and avoidance - each point is more effective than the last.

The best fixing suggestion is heel's, which is decoupling spriest regen from being strictly dependent on spriest damage - either a fixed "Each time you deal shadow damage, you and all group members regen N mana", which rewards haste slightly, but is generally a finite mana regen bonus, or to make spriest *damage* spells scale their cost depending on their output so that the effective regen to the priest is fixed, while effective regen to the group is damage dependent. The former is probably a better solution for a number of reasons.

 

Muphrid

And this, ladies and gents, is why VT is so hard to balance. Blizzard violated a very basic tenet of proportionality with it. Mana gained by VT cannot increase as long as mana used by players remains fixed.

 

a_girl

This is a rather long thread, so I apologize if other Shadow Priests have spoken up with similar concerns to myself.

The nerf to Improved Shadow Bolt from a spriest perspective is that it was done for either 1 of 2 reasons; to reign in the amount of mana returned via Vampiric Touch, or because it simply slipped the mind of Blizzard what a large impact losing Improved Shadow Bolt would pose for Shadow Priests.

While on the surface it might not seem like too big a deal and some guilds will not react negatively to the theoretical change, such leaders are probably only looking at what the talent says, not what it actually does. It looks like we're losing damage to Mind Blast and SWD, when in fact it is more than that. There has existed for awhile a hmm... bug if you will, that allows ISB to increase the damage of Mind Flay and possibly any dot if ISB lands during the cast of either. When this happens it does not consume any charges of ISB. So if you're looking at an average of 80-85% uptime of ISB in any given situation, a Shadow Priest will receive a substantial boost in DPS from this Warlock talent alone. A substantial boost to heh, sub-par DPS.

Looking at a straight up DPS race, WWS will prove the average Shadow Priest has one of the (if not the) lowest raw damage outputs of the hybrid specs. Now think about us not having ISB, given the above information and you will see why this change makes absolutely no sense. You could argue Blizzard was trying to reign in the mana output of VT, but they could have done by simply lowering the percentage of mana it returns. Of course if they do that, then you're left with a sub-par DPS class returning mediocre mana. It's overall quite baffling.

I didn't crunch the numbers myself, but I have read other threads by those who worked out the rumored change would result in a net drop of approximately 10% damage to the average Shadow Priest, or around 200-300 DPS. A pretty large number given that on the extreme end of things, Shadow Priests deal at max 1500 DPS during Teron Gorefiend.

I do think that Shadow Priests are over represented in most guilds because we're used as a crutch, but this is not the case for every guild. Some of us pull our own and are not just used and abused for mana but our ability to at least be competitive in some encounters. It is kind of a slap in the face that those of us who don't suck are being punished because some guilds abuse our mana capabilities.

In short, if a change to ISB as is rumored were to ever happen and raid leaders started seeing the drop in spriest DPS (and at the same time mana returned), it will be interesting to see how the majority respond. I wouldn't be surprised if guilds start to think twice about the usefulness of more than 1-2 Shadow Priests come Sunwell. So I guess it would accomplish a thinning out the herd, but I don't think it will add any more difficulty to Sunwell. All a change such as this would accomplish is making a lot of Shadow Priests very, very unhappy. As discussed above, we're basically being punished because Blizzard implemented a faulty mechanic.

Hopefully this is all just a big joke by someone and there is no validity to these patch notes..

 

Edgewalker

Why are we continually having an e-peen fight in a 2.4 info thread?
DPS Boss Races are irrelevant except for farmed content, and the pros and cons of every class have been discussed hundreds of times already.
Cika is it?
Nobody cares.

 

Koosha

I'm going to have to agree. There is no point to still be discussing max raid DPS in this thread.