I've seen and heard different theories on the way +damage affects mindflay.

As we know, arcane missiles is also a channeled spell, and recieves 100% from +damage. However, mindflay has a slowing effect, and is a 3 second channel spell.

I've heard 81% from this source http://www.academiaarsarcana.de/spel...llpower_US.htm as well as a few others, but I have also heard 43% and 50%.

Has anyone tested how much it really recieves?

Cheers

Total guess here. But it's a 3 second spell right? so... 3/3.5 = 85.71%

Then take 5% off for slow effect = 80.71%

Oh, and last I heard Arcane Missles was getting more than 100%. Need to test it though but someone told me it was close to 150%. 5/3.5 would be 142.8% though.

If I understand spell damage mechanics correctly, Mindflay gets an 3 / 3.5 = 0.857 coefficient to spell damage bonuses due to casting time. Further multiplying that by .95 (due to the snare component) implies that Mindflay should receive an 0.857 * .95 = 0.814 coefficient to spell damage. Or, 81.4% of your total spell damage modifier.

Channeled spells are treated the same as cast spells, the damage is just divided equally amongst the "ticks" from what I understand.

So mindflay should receive 3.0/3.5 of your spelldamage.

The actual coefficient is pretty low. I think it's coefficient was something close to 0.45.

Unsure why it is so low compared to Frost Spells however.

Well, I can't think for the life of me why it would be different. 3/3.5 * 0.95 = 81.4% of your +dmg. Of course, there are 3 ticks of Mind Flay, so it would be 27.13|% per tick (you are taking this into account, I assume?).

Simply trying the spell with some +dmg gear will show that it's nowhere close to 80%, it's roughly half that.

The 43% and 50% figures come from assuming it recieves 50% of the usual spell damage effect, so 50% x 3/3.5 = 43%.

43% is certainly close to what you actually get, although I'm not completely clear why you only get 50% of usual, and whether that includes the snare affect or whether that has to be added on top.

I am positive it doesn't get 81.4%. Because the snare is pretty powerful (50%), I think it is around 50% spread over the 3 ticks.

What is good about MF is the increase to shadow damage increase buffs are applied after +damage gear.

If you have the Darkness talent, it would be 47.3%.

I believe it's 0.457, but I forget the rationale behind it. Something about taking (snare?) penalties on every single tick of the channel.

I originally understood that since there was only 3 ticks versus 5, the posted bonus was knocked down to 43%. But the page on wowwiki where I got that information appears to have changed.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Plus...d_Plus_healing

I believe it's 43% or something.
Nobody seems to know why it scales so poorly though, since no other channeled spell scales so low, even considering the fact that it has a snare.
Considering the fact that it's a channeled spell that cannot crit (unlike arcane missiles) the scaling generally seems way too low, and although the priest community on several occasions have asked for explanations to this, I believe there's never been a blue post explaining the scaling.
The benefit it get's from the shadow talents are fairly insane though, but once shadowpriests get better gear they start falling alot behind other classes. There's absolutely no doubt about shadowpriests being ridiculously good at damage dealing when in green/blue gear though.

I thought that mindflay recieved +damage bonus like a dot, and since it is only 3 ticks (need 5 or more to get full effect) it would recieve 3/5=0.6 of +damage gear, that means 20% at each tick but then you get the 5% snare penalty at each tick so in effect you get 45% of spelldamage divided over the 3 ticks.

Mindflay's poor scaling is a carryover from the days of open beta that nobody has ever bothered to fix. :(

I don't think they'd want to fix it -- while it would be nice for PvE, it would be horrendously overpowered in PvP.

The ~0.45 figure is correct.

The reasoning, I'd assume would be to balance the scaling with other casters.

In a mindblast/MF/MF cycle with SW:P ticking, a shadowpriest gets
2* 0.45 = 0.90 of his +dmg contributed from MF (6 seconds)
1* 0.43 = 0.43 of his +dmg contributed from mindblast (1.5 seconds)
and
8.2*1/18 = .45 of his +dmg contributed from SW:P (0.7 seconds -> 1.5 seconds for gcd every 18 seconds, so 8.3% of his time is spent refreshing it).
for a total of 1.78 of his +dmg applied every 8.2 seconds.

With the shadow multipliers, he gets 145% of that (1.1*1.15*1.15) ~145.5, so 2.59 every 8.2 seconds for an avg +dmg:dps conversion of .316.. Only mindblast can crit, and only at 50% bonus, so the contribution from a shadowpriest's crit is minimal (est. 8 crit for a 1% increase to cycle damage).

With VE active he sees a .095 * X conversion of +dmg:hps in the form of healing, where X is the number of damaged party members.

Even healing only himself (say in PvP), his return from +dmg is 0.414 per second (healing + damage).


A frost mage with WC, PI, Ice shards, imp. frostbolt, and 10% crit from gear/int (ignoring hit, though shadowmages get 10%, frosties get 6%, the return varies based on the target) gets:

.814 /2.5 = 0.326 +dmg: dps due to imp. frostbolt.

With crit, and pierciing ice, he gets 127% of that (1.06*1.20), so .41 per second (damage only).

The problem is that it doesn't seem to obey the rules laid down for all other spells. They could always rebalance it after fixing the bug or whatever.

Uh.. what? When I was shadow I never noticed any variance between mindflay ticks, besides what was caused by shadow weaving being applied by each spell.

Well, if you have shadowweaving, of course each time it would be different, because for each cast you're applying another level of shadowweaving. (up to a max of 5 of course)

I assure you there is no randomness to it at all.

I don't think it's a bug. Blue has stated that the +dmg coefficients for spells are not actually calculated values (like a lot of cast time estimates seem to imply). The coefficient for each spell is set based on what they considered "balanced" when they were adding the +dmg mechanic. The cast time/snare/aoe adjustments are just rules of thumb. Obviously there's some anomaly's (AM for a long time scaled very poorly, most AoEs, and especially channelled aoes are silly to even talk about "scaling") but it's gone on long enough, that I don't think they see it as a problem.

After all, even with the seemingly low coefficient, when a shadowpriest gets mindflay, it's base damage isn't all that impressive. It seems silly that it would scale 100% as well as something like fireball or fireblast (or even mindblast) which are high dps spells only for the sake of being high DPS. If you compare % improvements at diff't levels of +dmg gear, mindflay doesn't particularly stick out as scaling poorly relative to other instant casts.

That and the numbers work out so neatly when you look at different caster's cycles, that it makes me think think that one of their developers has a spreadsheet somewhere where he figured it out.

You know what...that actually makes a lot of sense...If I had less than 5 points in Shadow Weaving it would explain why it usually wasn't the same twice...

I can't remember if I even had it at that point, though.

Presumably, some designer started with the cast-time rule as a guideline and starting point. He then started tweaking individual spells as necessary. Some got changed and some didn't.

Undoubtedly, the list just exists as a lookup table somewhere in the game; there's no meaningful general formula.