Many people wonder why Mind Flay got brought down to 57% scaling.

The base DPS of mf, vt and SW:P could be reasons.


I myself think a reason could be that shadowpriests scale in 2 ways. They can push out more DPS the higher DPM they have.

For each DPM we have, we get 5% of spell cost refunded by VT. If Your Mind Flay has 10 DPM you gain 50% of mana cost spent back.

The more +damage we have, the more mana we get refunded, wich means we can spend more mana on Shadow Word: Death and Mind Blast.


These 2 spells scale at a normal ~28.6% basic ScalePerSec.

The more of those you add, the more scale per sec you have.

These 2 spells also have over double of what Mind Flay has in Basic DPS.


So the more +damage you get as a shadow priest, the more mana you will have left over to use shadow word: death and Mind Blast, increasing both scaling and basic damage by quite reasonably huge amounts.

Shadow Priests scale with DPM the way warriors scale with the rage they gain from white damage. It is ofcourse capped useage due to cooldowns :)

I would almost dare to call Shadow Priests the fury warrior version of offensive casters. So in theory, if we reach a certain amount of gear (one can probably not obtain good enough gear to reach the cap), we are only limited by our cooldowns.

First problem I'd see with that is spell resists (and/or partials).

Taking your example of a Fury warrior, if they miss, they don't really lose out on much except a bit more rage, however if you get a resisted spell, you lose that mana for good, and you also wouldn't be gaining HP / Mana back from Vampiric Embrace and Touch. Maybe +spell hit would compensate for this, but as far as I know there is still always a chance to resist, whereas there isn't a chance to miss (with the right gear at least.)

I'm not 100% sure on the +spell hit affecting resists, someone please correct me >.>

Quick Ninja Edit ; Some shadow stuff might also be in this thread somewhere : http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8413 , as it's TBC priests.

It is quite easy for a shadow priest to cap out +hit as one has +10 hit from talents. A decent amount of spell penetration is always nice for adds wich are not cos'd or bosses wich could maybe have above 88 shadow resistsance in TBC.

Shadowpriests can easily counter most resist issues :)

I asked for a burger, but you gave me cheese, lettuce and tomoto in a sesame seed bun. Now I ask you, where's the beef?

In other words, where is the data? How much +hit and spell penetration are we talking about here? Is spell penetration still in TBC or is it lumped into spell hit rating?

Pretty certain spell penetration is still alive in TBC, there's even a spell penetration potion. =/

Well, I think the interesting part is that shadow priests with VT scale better when grouped together. So, 2 shadow priests can achieve 100% efficiency if their DPM is 10:1, 4 shadow priests can do so if their DPM is 5:1, etc... It would be even more crazy if Misery stacked.

Imagine a ranged dps group consisting of 3x Shadow priests (all with VT), 1x Warlock (for CoS and crowd control), and 1x Arcane Mage (for Slow and CC, with the high mana cost of Arcane Blast totally negated by the sick amount of mana return of the 3 SP's all while benefiting from CoS). I don't think they would ever have mana issues, regardless of how long the battle lasted.

As far as our scaling goes, Blizz say pretty regularly these days that they have levels of dps they want each spec to achieve. So if they want us to do 80% of the dps of a mage for example, then our overall scaling will reflect that. I don't think it really requires any more of an explanation. Certainly I don't consider shadow at all weak for PvE in the TBC.

It is always fun to discuss about out how a spec functions and developes. Especially in this particular case, where it seems to work in a different way than all other offensive caster builds :)

If you're a paladin, it's even better. You'd get the 125mp/5 from VT plus ((500*.3)*.1)*5 = 75mp/5 from VE and the paladin's passive heal to mana conversion.

That's 200mp/5 from one priest.

Paladin's spiritual attunement only activates if you receive healing when you were actually missing health, so it wouldn't be a full 75mp/5 from vampiric embrace.

It WOULD still be pretty darn helpful though

BoSac on the nearest offtank should solve that problem without endangering anything on most fights. Depends if it's worth giving up BoMight, I suppose.

Incorrect. At least on PTR, I know my paladin gets mana even if healed at full HP. Unless they've changed this in a later beta build.

Any chance of having this confirmed? It'd be really nice to know. Because that sort of group set up could give paladins huge mana boost increases (as if they need them) Especially with BoW and SoW.

With this kind of mana regeneration possible, does that mean that raid groups will be forced in to having Shadow Priests in their healing groups? It just seems like this kind of mana regeneration is so amazingly good that with out a shadow priest mana regeneration your healers won't be able to keep up. It also makes me wonder that kind of spike/healing output we are going to be seeing if we are going to have mana spring / tide / BoW / JoW / Consumables / Shadowpriest dumping mana in to our healers.

Quick math could be wrong...

Just using level 60 values...

31.25 Mp5 Mana Spring
48.33 Mp5 Mana Tide
33.50 Mp5 Blessing of Wisdom
75.00 Mp5 Major Mana Potion
12.00 Mp5 Mana Oil
8.00 Mp5 Nightfin Soup

208 Mp5

125.00 Mp5 Shadowpriest doing 500 dps

333 Mp5

Then toss on JoW, your gear, and Spirit buffs....

Are you going to be able to raid with your healers missing half of what mana regen they could be getting?

500 DPS is actually rather lowballing it (though sure you're talking about level 60).

You're also forgetting NDB's (17.7 mp5) or alternatively Demonic/Dark Runes (50 mp5).

But yeah, the difference in mana regen a Shadow Priest will add to their group is pretty incredible.

The big question I have though is how much DPS will the Shadow Priest be able to output *safely* before he or she runs into threat issues (I'm guessing that the mana regen counts to the Priest's threat levels rather than the casters who receive the benefit).

If say a Shadow Priest is doing 500 DPS (again, that's low) then (without talents or Salv) they're generating 500 Threat/Second from Damage (Mind Blast is no longer high threat so whatever cycle used with actual spells it's 1:1).

If the party are all casters who aren't just afking, waiting for epics to drop...anyway....if they're all casters with mana being restored then that's 500 * 5% * 5 mana restored per second to the group. i.e. 125 mana/second. Power gain (along with healing) is half threat, so that's 62.5 threat/second extra at 500 DPS. (Or 1.125:1 Threat:DPS ratio).

Now if we add in VE healing too with say 60% overheal (i.e. only 40% of the VE does something and thus only 40% of the threat it would otherwise generate) then with Imp. VE: Threat/second = 5 * 0.3 * 0.4 * 0.5 * DPS. i.e. +30% threat/second.
Added together and we're at 1.425:1 Threat:DPS ratio.
(For added measure if we're getting 100% overheal we're obviously still at 1.125:1 and if we're getting 0% overheal we're at 1.875 Threat:DPS)

Now let's factor in Blessing of Salvation and 3/3 Shadow Affinity (and we'll assume that Shadow Affinity affects VE and VT):

100% VE overheal, 5 caster group: 1.125 * 0.7 * 0.75 = 0.590625:1 Threat:DPS
60% VE overheal, 5 caster group: 1.425 * 0.7 * 0.75 = 0.78125:1 Threat:DPS
0% VE overheal, 5 caster group: 1.875 * 0.7 * 0.75 = 0.984375:1 Threat:DPS

With 5/5 Silent Resolve added:
100% VE overheal, 5 caster group: 1.125 * 0.7 * 0.75 * 0.8 = 0.4725:1 Threat:DPS
60% VE overheal, 5 caster group: 1.425 * 0.7 * 0.75 * 0.8 = 0.625:1 Threat:DPS
0% VE overheal, 5 caster group: 1.875 * 0.7 * 0.75 * 0.8 = 0.7875:1 Threat:DPS

Now I haven't really looked into it, but I'm under the impression that the other caster DPS classes have talents to give 20% threat reduction (on top of Salv):
So for them: 1 * 0.7 * 0.8 = 0.56:1 Threat:DPS

I've also noticed that Mages have been given a 100% agro wipe in Invisbility and Warlocks a 50% one. No such wipe for a Priest it seems.

The amount over heal with VE the Shadow Priest needs to do to match a caster with Salv and 20% less threat via talents would be:
1 - ((0.56 / 0.8 / 0.75 / 0.7 - 1.125) / 0.5 / 5 / 0.3) = 0.722.

i.e. with 72.2% overheal the 3/3 Shadow Affinity, 5/5 Silent Resolve, VT (with 5 casters), Imp. VE, Blessing of Salvation matches the threat/second of another DPS caster with Blessing of Salvation and a 20% threat reduction from talents.

Note that if you add SW:D to your DPS cycle you'll probably be getting a bare minimum 10 to 15% effective healing from VE.

In my experience on live, in general 60% overheal is a pretty fair approximation, so in general the Shadow Priest will be generating more threat than say a Warlock (that's not using Searing Pain of course) or a Mage, given the same DPS. Of course Mage and Lock DPS will be higher but not by that much.

On a splash damage heavy fight (say something like Flamegor with slow hunters) the Shadow Priest will be generating some decent threat considering that we can achieve fairly high DPS.

Question is, will tanks (who tend to have much higher threat:dps ratios but lower dps) be able to maintain an agro hold. I'm hoping they can. :)

As a followup to my comment, I have a question to ask of the Warriors, Feral Druids and Prot Paladins (esp. those on TBC):

Assuming no knock-backs etc. or other funny threat business, what sort of Threat/Second are you estimating you'll be doing at 70 if Shadow Priests are doing around 1100 DPS and Warlocks and Mages are doing around 1300 DPS? (i.e. roughly +800 dmg base gear not counting raid buffs). In a raid situation do you see yourself being able to easily generate say 900 threat/second? What about 1200 threat/second?

I've never played a tank so I'm by no means confident on what people have theorycrafted on estimated threat generation in TBC.

VT's DoT scales with +dmg just like any other DoT. It's a 15 second DoT so it gets 100% of +dmg.

However the mana return is linked directly to your (shadow spell) DPS while VT is active. VE is also linked directly to your (shadow spell) DPS while VE is active.

Ah, ok, you can tell I haven't played my priest in a while. When I used to play, VE only healed based on your base damage and wasn't affected by +damage. Looking it up, though, I see that was changed in 1.7.

Interestingly enough, I find the Shadowpriest to be the most stackable offspec in TBC. You don't want more than 1 Enhancement shaman in your party, you don't want more one than Retribution paladin in your raid, but you can never have too much mana returned from VT. For example, if you stack 2 Shadowpriests in the same group, both benefit from the other's mana return, which allows them to use more instants for more DPS, which means more mana/life returned to the other 3 members of the party.

For example, a shadowpriest at +600 dmg will do 675 DPS just by keeping dots up and mindflay, with a 19.91 DPM (JoW+BoW+Meditation included) and returns 169 mp5 to the whole party. However if you stack two shadowpriests in the same party, you can use SW:D and MB every time they are up to reach 898 DPS and 224 mp5 to the whole party, for roughly the same mana spent. And ofcourse, the more +dmg increases, the better the scaling.

It will be interesting to see what kind of group setups will be made. Do you put the shadowpriests in the group with the mana hungry fire mages? Or give mana to the healers? Or put them in the main tank group so the MT gets constant health renewed, the paladin gets mana and the imp warlock gets both mana and health?

That is what is so nice about it, you can put him in a different group depending on what is most important in the encounter. Adds raid flexibility, just a resto shaman (mana tide, mana spring and spelldmg totem).

I think shadowpriests will be high on the innervate priority list in TBC raids. "Recharging the raid battery" :)

For warlocks, it's 10% reduction to affliction spells, and 10% to destruction spells. For a mage it's 10% to fire, 10% to frost and 40% to arcane. Should make priests slightly more comparable in the TPS department I guess. And thanks for the numbers.

Well from what I can see, we're going to be getting new ranks of the aggro moves, Sunder, Revenge, etc. But further more is that Shield Slam will be scaling better as you'll have better block value, and all that. That will all help. Also once Blizz fix devastate (I've read a few things here it ain't all it's cracked up to be.) Then that'll help the MTs that are prot spec.

If Blizz have intended to give casters 800+ Damage, I'm sure they've thought of a way for us to hold aggro... I hope.