Hey I've been playing a raiding shadowpriest for a while now, having cleared up to domo in Mc and downing Hakkar in zg. So far I have found it to be a great and effective manner of dealing dps, I am often one of the top dpsers in the raid. I have top notch gear for my guilds current progression.
Well I find a shadow spec definately very viable in my current stage of raiding how does shadow fare in Bwl and more importantly Aq40. For instance, if my guild was fighting Chthun in the future is there a place for a well geared shadowpriest or is such a role pointless?
While I thoughly enjoy my spec now I worry about its future validty :P
Heres my spec, any improvements for its pve effetiveness are welcome.
And if your topping your DMM's during raids, you really should have a word with your Rogues, Hunters, Mages, Warlocks, Warriors, hell even your Shamans and Druids.
It's not said to be effective horde side but vaguely for applying debuffs. I'm told it's alright alliance side, but I'm not alliance. You get poor scaling from +damage on your main spells, no real benefit from crit, better than usual benefit from +hit assuming you're not capped.
I loved leveling shadow but shadow at sixty really didn't seem to increase my dps. Even with the talent deaggros and TA I still had problems with mind blast pulling aggro onto me. Your effectiveness may vary.
You're going to get the same answer here that you do everywhere else on somewhat rational forums:
Yes you can win fights with shadowpriests, but they're sure as hell not optimal.
There are very few (ok one) fights in AQ40 which are flat out dpsfests. The only real advantage to having a shadpriest over another dps is shadowweaving, and with the way fights work, either aggro or control reasons prevent people from outright spam nuking shadowbolts like you can vs. say Golemagg or Ragnaros.
Your target healer composition is going to be 14-15 healers on most fights, which means either a) you will be healing thus rendering your spec worthless, or b) you will be dpsing at lower effectiveness than a mage or lock or rogue or hunter.
So can you take shadowpriests and win? Yes. Is it effective? No.
In terms of dps I realise that melee should be outdpsing me soon... acess to epic weapons will guarantee that im sure. However I'm surprised that other casters later on would overtake me much in dps, I seem to be far above most casters in terms of dps, unless Bwl gear scales me horrificly low on me vs them.
In terms of gear scaling (mindflay suffers from a poor +dmg bonus) how does it interact with shadowweaving (15% more dmg) and shadowform (15%) does this mitgate or negate the poor scaling from +dmg at all?
Would you be able to elaborate on how shadowpriests can be effective in ouro and Cthun by anychance?
And basicly in your opinion, should I pack away my epic dps gear now and respec or is there a decent place for one of me in a 40 man raid lategame? (again I'm worried how I could possibly progress from the top to the bottom of the dps meter so to speak :< )
Oh I never mindblast in instances generally, while this gives a big boost to dps it generates massive aggro and its damage per mana point is far inferior to mindflay (and particually shadow/w/pain which gets 133% from dmg gear).
Have you guys experianced full epic and properly specced shadow priests in raids and measured thier effectiveness, like in Bwl and Aq40? I'd love to know how they did. ( A healer respeccing shadow is surely a differant thing as they don;t have acesss to good dps gear)
Shadow priests are inferior to mages/warlocks mainly due to:
- lack of durability through stuff like evocation and life tap
- dependance on a single school of damage
- lack of AoE effects
- lack of extremely short term burst dps
- inferior gear selection due to class sets being hybrid sets at best
- worse +damage returns and virtually no crit returns
In addition, you have the less tangible effect of class drama when one member of the class is allowed to play different, (subjectively more entertaining) role.
They have the advantages of:
- Shadow Weaving being a nice bonus if you have a large warlock crew, but this is often irrelevant due to locks being threat limited.
- versatility through being able to shift to healing if you are low on healers, though not on the fly (in any efficient matter)
In a perfect world where everyone turns up every night and no one is affected by class drama/envy, having your 15th healer be a damage geared shadow priest might not be a bad idea due to versatility. A shadow priest will never ruin your chances of doing an encounter. In the end though, it's not optimal, so you're usually better off letting your mages and warlocks get that uber damage gear, and relegating priests to picking up the crumbs.
As for your spec, it looks pretty much optimal for a dedicated PvE shadow approach. I would consider distributing the Mental Agility points into Imp Mind Blast or Silence, which will very slightly decrease your durability, but increase your versatility a bit.
You can't sustain the damage output needed to be useful in long PvE fights without Judgment of Wisdom. Sorry.
In shorter fights, or as an Alliance priest, you definitely can do some very good DPS and be useful to the raid if you get epic shadowmage gear. But good luck finding a guild that's happy to give you equal priority on stuff like Bracers of Arcane Accuracy, Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal, Neltharion's Tear, and so forth. If you aren't allowed to take them until after all the mages/locks, then you'll never be able to really contribute. Horde-side, that'd be a huge waste of resources, in my opinion.
Maybe one day horde will get eqivalent to BoW. Until then I'l pack my shadow gear in the bank I guess.
The problem isn't BoW, though BoW is quite nice. It's JoW. Because the judgment can proc on every tick of mind flay, it ends up effectively massively reducing the cost of your mind flays. There simply is no Horde equivalent, and it returns a tremendous amount of mana over a long fight.
The problem isn't BoW, though BoW is quite nice. It's JoW. Because the judgment can proc on every tick of mind flay, it ends up effectively massively reducing the cost of your mind flays. There simply is no Horde equivalent, and it returns a tremendous amount of mana over a long fight.
Just to nitpick, I'm not sure this is true, although I haven't tested it.
Last I checked, Mind Flay is considered a DoT through game mechanics, unlike Arcane Missiles. Blackout only has a chance to proc on the initial cast, so I assume the same would be true for JoW.
Still, ~24 mana saved on average per cast is a ~10% mana cost reduction on your typical nuking pattern (on encounters where JoW is feasible/worthwhile to keep up), so it does help alliance shadow priests, just not that much.
Didn't the priest revamp make certain holy/disc specs able to keep up with shadow in damage output? I remember seeing an epic geared priest doing smites for almost the same damage as mage frostbolts in some PVP video.
Maybe it was only effective in pvp, along with the other priest tools, but I remember some mages being upset about it. I'm not sure how inefficient it is, but that's another thing to look into. With a holy/disc spec that has the offensive talents, you still get most of the healing talents so you can be a pretty good healer most of the time.
Really iTunes? Free downloads while supplies last?
Quick calc:
Ungeared Mind Flay with talents ~630 damage for 205 mana
Ungeared Smite with talents ~500 damage for 280 mana
Then consider the massive loss of damage from a far worse SW:P and the loss of the main advantage of shadow priests: Shadow Weaving. You can't get +holy damage gear either.
I don't see disc/holy priests doing raid damage anytime soon. They have better return from +damage and +crit gear, but you'd need a lot.
The healing talents you could choose would be very decent, but far from optimal. Example
They're pretty horrible for PvP too, that video you saw was a joke. Let a endgame mage/warlock go trinket combo + flask + berserker and chain cast frostbolts without being hindered in a BG, and you'll see more impressive results.
i've been fiddling around with disc holy for a few months now, and its not giving the same amount of maintained damage as my shadow spec did. Thats including the fact i have effectively upgraded my gear as well.
Having a lot of critical gear would have an impact, but critical hits are better for drawing agro than a mind blast. And besides, all my damage comes from one spell: shadow word pain (DP is on cool down so no need to include it). And that is at its optimum when shadow specced, no disc/holy.
But in a raid, a priest is for healing, no matter what anyone else would have you believe
Arcane Missles is special, and anything you observe from it shouldn't be applied to anything else. I've heard people say that each mind flay tick can proc JoW, but in the several months that I was shadow with SCT showing JoW procs I never saw it happen.
In terms of gear scaling (mindflay suffers from a poor +dmg bonus) how does it interact with shadowweaving (15% more dmg) and shadowform (15%) does this mitgate or negate the poor scaling from +dmg at all?
With full darkness, shadoweaving and shadowform, mind flay gets 22% benefit/second, compared to 32% for frostbolt. They help, but mind flay initially only gets half of what it should, so it still scales worse. Also, the fact that crit does basically nothing for a shadow priest hurts scaling pretty badly. Shadow Focus mostly removes the need for +hit gear, at least.
In my experience, shadow weaving didn't add any raid dps when the warlocks were activly nuking. When I first started as shadow, our warlocks' damage actually went down, due to them dying more. After they got used to it all that happened was they didn't have to lifetap quite as much on most fights. It was useful when the warlocks were focusing on things other than dps, though (such as half of MC), as making corruption do 15% more damage doesn't cause any aggro issues by iteself.
VE was vaguely useful, but it occanionally caused aggro issues. If you have all of the -threat talents, it doubles how much threat you generate when it actually works (i.e. everyone in your group needs the healing). I eventually stopped using it because the only real advantage I had over mages was that I generated less threat.
Didn't the priest revamp make certain holy/disc specs able to keep up with shadow in damage output? I remember seeing an epic geared priest doing smites for almost the same damage as mage frostbolts in some PVP video.
That video was with flask + trinket + berserker + PI, and he was still only doing about what a mage would do with just the trinket. For PvP it's worth spending the two points in better smite damage, but for PvE the gear you'd have to wear to compete with mages on dps would result in you running out of mana about a minute into the fight. Max rank smite is 140 mana/second, compared to frostbolt's 104, and mages have far superior mana recovery.
From my experience raiding with shadow spec (holy/disco for a while now) JoW used to proc from the flay cast, but could also proc from an application of shadow weaving, ie each flay had 2 chances to proc JoW, no idea if it still works like this, but that leads to alot of regen.
There are two fights in AQ40 where shadowpriests can be useful. Ouro (depending on tactics) and C'thun, especially phase 2.
C'thun is easy as hell now though. I bet I could respec to Shadow for the next C'thun and no one would even notice. As long as people aren't dumb in Stage 1 (attention: rogues) Stage 2 is easycakes.
There are two fights in AQ40 where shadowpriests can be useful. Ouro (depending on tactics) and C'thun, especially phase 2.
C'thun is easy as hell now though. I bet I could respec to Shadow for the next C'thun and no one would even notice. As long as people aren't dumb in Stage 1 (attention: Moz) Stage 2 is easycakes.
Call CNN, a boss that you've effectively been killing for months is easy.
C'Thun is still a very hard encounter for the guilds that are reaching him now.
But I could have been Shadow through all of the learning encounters as well. C'thun has a few gimmicks to learn and that's all. There is little healing to do in Phase 1 and Phase 2 healing is all on the tanks and people coming out of the stomach. He was only hard because of the retards that don't realize that standing closer than 10 yards to me will get me killed.
And Moz was in the right spot yesterday, Khazal!!! Wodin, however, was not.
05/13/06, 11:42 PM
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