Metrosexuelf

I fail to see the point of lumping in shadow priests and holy priests in terms of calculating some arbitrary threshold for a given class in a raid. Resto Shaman are excellent healers, enhancement shaman bring excellent raid dps and boost melee dps, and elemental shaman bring excellent dps and boost caster dps. Every spec of shaman brings totems to their group. I'm sure most guilds run with four or five shaman in a raid is that an overly high representation of shaman?

Not only is this pointless e-peenery, again, it also makes no sense to gripe about priest 'over-representation' when the two specs have entirely different roles. Holy priests are generally fungible with any other healer. Claiming the number of holy priests in a raid should have an effect on the number of shadow priests in the raid or vice versa makes little sense.

 

• Playered

It will always be worth bringing one SP per raid regardless, doing 66-75% DPS of a pure DPSer is not that bad considering the benefits (dont give the bullshit about 2.8k DPSers which just happen to get 3 bloodlusts and an entirely pimped group), ISB changes or not that will never really change from any raid leaders mind.

 

a_girl

It will be more like 60% actually, possibly less. It isn't unreasonable to expect your pure DPS to put out between 1800-2000 DPS.

 

Oscarvil

You say in one sentence that 10% damage drop is 200-300 dps then the next you say max dps is 1500. 1500 * 0.1 = 150 does it not?

So in the extreme case the damage drop is less than 200dps. At least stick to your own numbers.

 

Metrosexuelf

I don't dispute that. The problem is that shadow priest dps is so low and scales so poorly that it really isn't fungible with any other DPS class out there. Assuming a guild has no more than two shadow priests on their roster (and some have more) then you are basically in a situation where both players are only going to play fifty percent of the time. The same cannot be said for other off-specs like enhance shaman, elemental shaman, and now even ret paladins and moonkins. All of those classes scale far better with higher tier itemization and can fall in the pool of 'general DPS' as opposed to pure niche/support spec. It is also humorously incongruous that shadow priests are probably the most 'involved' (I won't insult anyone's intelligence by saying complex or hard) classes to DPS with -- forcing the player to juggle two DoTs, a 5.5 second cooldown ability, a 3 second channeled ability, and a 12 second cooldown ability that can feedback to the player for up to 4.5k damage -- while most of the top DPS classes, trinkets aside, rarely use more than one or two buttons.

A further nerf to shadow priest dps, be it intentional or simply 'collateral damage' further widens the gap. Of course, many things can and will change between now and the next expansion but this doesn't bode very well if the overall goal is to create viability/homogeneity of damage output for all off-specs. Personally I would rather have my overall utility nerfed and be fungible damage-wise with an off-spec shaman, moonkin, ret paladin, etc. than be relegated to a part time player. That said, the double edged sword of character progression in WoW is such that while it would be disappointing not to continue with my current character into WotLK it is only a matter of (let's guess) ten to twelve days /played to 80 and a few five man runs to gear up a new main in gear comperable to the Tier 6.5 I will have after Sunwell.

 

Sando

I used to raid shadow, stopped after a while, but what is everyone's problem with shadow priests? Is it that VT and a single spriest is overpowered? Or is it that you basically should be taking 2-3 to every boss fight? The problem you have is that if 1 shadow priest is useful, then 2 or 3 are almost guaranteed to be useful as well. Why not tinker with VT, make it so only 1 VT can be up on the boss at the one time and that it only works for the person that casts it? Instantly you can only really take 1 shadow priest to an encounter unless there are more than 1 mob, but for all intents and purposes you've eliminated the 'want' for more than 1 shadow-priest.

So saying, with WOTLK on the cards in the not too distant future, i really hope any drastic change to the numbers of a class needed for a raid are left till then, otherwise 1/2 to 2/3 of shadow-priests are going to be out of a raid slot, leave it till WOTLK for a major shake-up in raid make-up.

 

a_girl

You're right, I apologize. But do not call them my numbers, I merely quoted them from another source. I simply did not think too much about it since I was more concerned with the actual nerf and less concerned with exact numbers. Also it will most likely be much more than a 10% drop in DPS, this is probably where people are getting the "or 200-300 DPS" from, though imho it would be more around 200 just doing quick math in my head.

Let's say ISB is up 85% of the time and my spells are benefitting from it 60% of the time, that's 51% of 20% (amount of damage increase gained via ISB) or around 10% loss of DPS if we cannot use ISB anymore. You adjust that to getting 70% of the benefit, and suddenly that number becomes a 12% loss or 180 DPS. That isn't entirely out of the question with the combination of the dot bug (which does not consume ISB charges) and dd spells. That's probably where people are getting the 200-300 from, though as I said I'd lean more towards around 200. Others have posted a bit exaggerated numbers but nonetheless still a potential devastating nerf. I doubt any DPS class would be happy to learn they're doing 200 less damage per second.

If Blizzard wants to limit the amount of mana returned, I hope they do it in a way that won't impact our DPS. They'll just have to nerf it again once we catch back up to where we are now. And that's just an annoying, vicious cycle.

 

xyruul

This is what I wanted to say, only better. Sorry about all the Teron/dps spam as a result.

 

Asmo

Where are you getting the idea that this is a bug? It has been this way since forever afaik and is exactly what the description of the talent says that it does: "Your Shadow Bolt critical strikes increase Shadow damage dealt to the target by 20% until 4 non-periodic damage sources are applied."

With the normal raid setup my guild uses, 3 warlocks and 2 shadowpriests, going by the ISB uptime analysis on the Simulationcraft page the numbers I came up with was a 1.1% dps nerf for a destruction lock and 8% for a shadow priest. Depending on the crit of the warlocks of course. I used the 200 critrating figures which I'm not sure exactly what other raidbuffs etc that is supposed to include, but should be ballpark figures at least.

Anyway I agree giving a rather heavy nerf to the dps specs that does the least amount of damage in the game (at t6 gear level) would be extremely strange. If it's VT manaregen that they're after then nerf that. The solution given earlier with making VT give a fixed amount of mana per spell sounds pretty smart and would let shadowpriests dps be able to scale properly. I see absolutely no reason a shadow priest should be outdamaged (and not by a small amount) by all the other healer "hybrid" dps specs like enhancement/elemental shamans, feral druids etc. But the real issue there really is the broken gear scaling of dot damage covered in the other thread.

Hopefully these aren't real patchnotes anyway though so we're getting worked up over nothing.

 

koaschten

Seems like the Char Copy got reset to 4 own chars and 0 pre-mades. Could become a busy weekend.

 

◊ Cadfael

Yep, at least EU copy service isn't swamped yet, works fine. That will change soon, I'd guesstimate.

 

Rockstar

Well, a suggestion for VT would be to make it both a self-buff as well as a targeted buff for others.

For example, you could look at your party/raid frames and direct your VT flow to wherever it was most needed. Yes, this does cut down on SP mp/5 by quite a degree, at top gear levels we're likely talking with an assumed 1300dps, a combined 1600mp/5 down to a targeted 650mp/5 via VT alone.

I'd rather make playing a shadowpriest more interesting and involving than nerfing the damage into the ground. This change would also have the added benefit of allowing the developers to ramp-up SP damage/scaling, assuming they manage to control (tone down?) the amount of mana regenerated for the shadowpriest himself, possibly by directly reducing the straight percentage/method of return.

 

◊ Penguin

So, you'd rather see big numbers personally, rather than boosting the efficiency of 4 other raid members? It's attitudes like this that kill any sort of interesting synergy Blizzard comes up with, like the MS warrior complaining about not doing as much damage as a Fury, despite giving the raid Blood Frenzy.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Zifna

I think the major problem with such things is their invisibility. That is, it's all very well and good to know that the boss is taking 4% more damage because of you, but how does that make the damage contribution due to your presence stack up? If there were a meter that took away 4% of the rogue's damage and added it to the warrior, and did the same with other hybrids' buffs, it'd make it a lot simpler to gauge the impact of the classes that buff others.

For many people this is too opaque and esoteric, while "Look, that guy did the most damage to the boss" is very easy to see and value.

 

Rockstar

Not especially. Indeed I'd say that your comparison was ham-fisted in that you compare a pure DPS spec with a support DPS spec, and suggest that my ideas for improving a hybrid DPS spec in order for it to be on par with other hybrid DPS specs (which currently outperform SPs significantly, despite providing raid buffs themselves) is a selfish attutude. You are comparing apples with oranges.

At the moment, I feel mana regeneration is out of hand, truly obscene when you consider the passive mp5 & super mana pot mp5 bringing up the rear. When your casters tell you they "cannot go out of mana", and you cannot go out of mana yourself assuming proper play - then perhaps a change should be made. Adding an interesting level of micro-management in order make mana management more difficult to circumvent (stacking 2-3 SPs in every raid) can only be a good thing.

I mentioned changing how VT works partly due to SP scaling being so poor in general. A state of affairs which has remained for a while now, certainly reducing SPs output quite significantly behind other hybrid dps specs which bring raid and group buffs also. They benefit from few offensive stats, which unfortunately allows raiders playing the spec to experience a very sluggish, almost glacial form of advancement. Many guilds have SPs moving from late t4/early t-5 to tier-6 levels of gear with only a 300dps increase, which is altogether underwhelming. I'd also state that both Misery and Shadow Weaving require one Shadowpriest, any more than one and those talents (which almost every SP has), are unfortunately wasted other than when you have the casters split DPS.

It's admirable you feel players should fall over themselves to be willing to make personal sacrifices for the raid, however perhaps many would consider it a misplaced concern in this case when I am merely talking about mechanics which seem to cause Blizzard to neglect updating reasonable class scaling. If by changing those mechanics, while providing less ridiculous yet still useful amounts of mana, (my post mentioned one way to do this by reducing the amount of mana returned from VT itself) it enables Blizzard to evaluate scaling/make the class more interesting to play and advance with - something mentioned in many posts by priests and warlocks thus far in this thread - this could be considered only a good thing.

 

Illundai

Well, the EU Char Copy just exploded heh.

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Amonette

The US one is just giving the "Service is too busy" error.

 

Riallatar

Expect EU patch notes in a few hours?

 

tedv

I'm actually of the opinion that shadow priest scaling is fine. Sure the damage sucks, but the mana regeneration is enormous. Other classes gain lots of damage from upgrades while priests get a little damage and a little more mana regen. If you want to be competitive with an Enhancement shaman, that's not going to happen because our mana regen and debuffs give slightly more benefit than their party buffs.

The problem is that mana users don't have enough mana sinks to use the extra mana! So priests are in a situation now where they are penalized for their mana regen via poor spell damage coefficients, but the surplus mana provides no real benefit except that healers can downrank a little less. Rather than trying to fix the Vampiric Touch / spell coefficient balancing problem, it might be easier to give other mana classes more mana sinks. As it stands right now, mages don't even bother casting Fireblast because Fireball is better DPS. More high DPS, low DPM spells will address this problem, and I'm not talking about Arcane Blast. That's medium DPS, low DPM. It should also make cast cycles for mages and warlocks more interesting.

 

Lakirby

Got my protadin and shadow priest copied over this morning. Should be interesting. It's more any shadow priest changes that I'm interested in seeing, I'd hate to think that my newly-levelled alt was about to become useless in any sort of raiding scenario.

 

Amonette

Has anyone here managed to get the US character copy to work?

 

• Playered

One must wonder if perhaps group synergy has become over-strong in TBC, hence why there is alot of class competition between who brings more to the raid.

Not only does this limit the usage of ones which provide little benefit, but it also results in class scaling being very hard to manage (ie early SP/Loc dominance) due to the very large amount of additional enhancements which get tacked on at the end.

If a class like SP's only gave 50MP5 (like a Shaman totem) to their group, gave a 2% bonus spell damage buff, and a 3% shadow damage buff, but provided DPS more along the lines if 90-95% that of a pure DPS class - would they be nearly as popular enough to justify bringing even 1? let alone 2-3 which a fair few people seem to.

 

Pentamorfi

Why would Blizzard want to reduce synergies? They're one of the raid elements that were widely accepted by the player base as a good thing - in fact, the reason you'd accept some specs in raids is the synergy and raid buffs they'd provide. They buffed retri paladins, moonkins, elemental/enhancement shamans just so they too would get a spot in the 25man raids, I don't understand why they'd suddenly destroy the locks/spriests combo. It's not like they're that overpowered in arenas any more either.

 

Asmo

Couldn't disagree more When it took me close to 6months of raiding before I could loot my first item from a 25man raid that was a dps upgrade and when the current best in the game items are tiny dps increases to the pre raid/karazhan gear that certainly isn't fine by me at least. Character progression is the reason I enjoy playing MMORPGS, when I see next to nothing change with my dps over the course of a year that is a serious detriment to my enjoyment of the game.

If they really intend a shadow priests damage to be absolute bottom tier worse than everyone else (which I don't agree with) then that should be true at all gear levels, rocking the damage meters when you start raiding Gruul and at endgame levels lag far behind anyone else is broken.

 

dakalro

Want mana sinks? Locks are a 800mp5 mana sink with the 5% reduced mana cost talent. The only way we won't be able to use the mana regen would be 2 spriests doing good dps + fully regen buffed (no way to run oom here but will still lose mana, add mana pots and no more mana loss while the dps is ... yummy).