This is a thread for completely constructive discussion of the extremely reasonable changes made to Shadow priests in the 2.1 patch. The changes specific to us are as follows:

- "Shadow Weaving" (Shadow): Effect reduced by 1% per rank.
- "Shadow Word: Death": Cooldown increased to 12 sec.
- "Spirit of Redemption" and "Spiritual Guidance" now work while the
priest is in "Shadowform".
- "Vampiric Touch": This spell now consumes the "Inner Focus buff".
- Spell Haste: The amount of spell haste rating needed per percentage
of haste has been increased substantially. However, spell haste will
now affect channeled spells, increasing the rate of their effects and
decreasing their total duration. The same amount of damage/healing
per casting will occur, but will take less time.


These exciting new modifications bring up several questions, and the answers to those questions have wide-ranging repercussions. Among some of the items I would like to see addressed are the following:

- Just how much will this modify our total damage output?
- Just how much will this modify our longevity/mana efficiency?
- How much might the spell haste changes (from such effects as Quagmirran's Eye, Bloodlust, etc.) help to ameliorate the other items?
- How do these changes modify the effectiveness of the Inner Focus and Shadow Power talents?
- Might some number of points in the Improved Mind Blast talent now make a drastically more effective spell rotation available?
- Keeping the previous point in mind, what does the new optimal spell rotation look like?

Discuss.

From my spreadsheet:

My current gear + buffs + spec + etc: 1318 dps max possible (for 6.9 minutes)

The 15% to 10% nerf to shadowweaving: 1261 dps max possible (for 6.1 minutes)

The SW: Death cooldown nerf: 1169 dps max possible (for 9.6 minutes)

So.... an 11% drop in max dps?

The change in rotation changes it from a 1:5.1 dmg:crit rating ratio for a dps increase to a 1:6.6 ratio. Going from 0/5 shadow power to 5/5 shadow power used to be about 2.6% increase to DPS, it's now 2.1%.

edit: added a few things

Another interesting number: that 1169 from about is flask + elixir. New flask value and no elixir since they don't stack anymore is 1099, which is about 6% drop.

Going from 1/5 imp MB to 4/5 imp MB makes 1127 for 6.6 min go to 1147 for 6.0 min, about a 1.8% increase.

I'm going to see if I can get haste rating modeled...

Also, for those of us who are not tailors, maybe this is a sign we need to give up and drop a profession:

Spirit, spirit and more spirit.

# "Spiritual Attunement": Mana is no longer healed if the paladin is at full health.

Just in case you overlooked it, the dual synergy of priest->pally is nerfed as well. The paladin is still getting mana from VT, but not from VE unless he's taking hits.

warlocks are eating your nerfs as well. I probably won't be yelling "SYNERGY!" when posted meters show our spriest/locks as the top 5 that often anymore.

Well I'm sure healers I'm grouped with will be pleased with the 12 second cooldown on SW. I spam it as much as possible, and they often get annoyed with all the self nuking.

I would complain more but these changes had to happen. Pally +SPriest + Warlock were just too powerful together.

I don't have the time to model the numbers at the moment (just got home from work, near midnight :x ), but just from a preliminary analysis it is going to be Mind Flay that is the main beneficiary of spell haste. It will provide a very real DPS boost for that, but as far as overall DPS increase goes it's not going to be huge. Remember that Mind Flay makes up only a portion of total DPS...you also have SW:P and VT ticking constantly, and MB and SW: D as mana allows. You have to amortize the time saved casting VT and MB over their duration and cooldown respectively, so even at 50% spell haste you're only looking at a 4.5% and 9.4% increase in DPS for those two spells (assuming full 8 sec cooldown for MB).

Even without doing the numbers, it's obvious spell haste won't be nearly as big of a factor as it is for mages or elemental shamans or moonkins. My guess is that the itemization points used in spell haste would likely be better spent on spell damage or even spell hit.

Quag's Eye definitely looks attractive to me now though. The passive +dmg is good on its own, the proc is just a nice little bonus. Depending where you end up in your spell cycle, you might be able to get off 3 hasted Flays. 2 is much more likely however. Quag's Eye still wont help us with MB or VT though. Those spells are 1.5 sec cast, the same as the global cooldown. They'll cast faster, sure, but you'll still run up against the global CD.

As for my overall thought of the changes, I think they're quite reasonable to bring us down a notch. If I go into Gruul with guns blazing, use SWD every cooldown, I am most definitely threat bound. A fight like Hydross with constant aggro wipes also means using SWD sparingly. The SWD change to me honestly will affect my PvP a lot more than anything else.

This was one of the more amusing patch notes. Finally they found someone who had a build like that to notice it didn't work, or what? I'm just imagining someone running around with a 9/21/31, 0/21/40, or 0/30/31 build. Creepy.

"The amount of spell haste rating needed per percentage
of haste has been increased substantially."


What is the new ratio? It may make Quag's Eye simply not worth it. Since Bloodlust is still a straight percentage, you may want tyo determine the best dps cycle when in Bloodlust, as MB and SWD may not be dps upgrades versus MF spam alone (ofcourse with dot refreshes).

And Snowy, are you sure that a spell cast in under 1.5s forces a small wait due to GC for the next cast? I dont recall experiencing that when I was casting 2s (talented) LBs under Bloodlust and Quag's proc meaning my LBs were every ~1.05s. I read somewhere, perhaps erroneously, that the GC is the shorter of the standard 1.5s or the spell (with a casting time) just cast cast time. If this is true (and again I dont know for sure) then Bloodlust approaches a 30% dps upgrade for you just as it did for me. (Not 30% due to dots, SWD/MB cooldown times, etc, etc).

Quag used to be almost +100dmg trinket for fireball spamming mage. I'd assume they cut the spellhaste about 50% and which makes it about +70dmg trinket for mage. I'm still assuming that it won't reduce GCD, but I can't tell for sure as I don't have it myself. If I get it, the first thing I will be doing is to go for Dr. Boom and test it. (10+ runs for Slave Pens, one lost /roll against a shaman :/ )

I believe it's been hashed out on this forum that Bloodlust/Heroism affect the GCD, all other forms of haste do not. I'm not sure on the current stats of Quag's Eye, but if that proc makes the speed still more than 1.5s, you could stack both of them without noticing any GCD clipping.

I believe they also changed the 4 piece set bonus. If i remember correctly, it used to read, "each time SW:P deals dmg, there is a chance to grant you 100spell dmg for 15 sec." Now its, "each time SW:P deals dmg, there is a chance to grant you 100spell dmg for your next spell cast within 15sec." The 4 piece set bonus is actually what made the set reasonable, and up to par with the shadowweave stuff. Now, its just "ok."

Can I ask you what's so bad about spirit? I haven't played shadowpriest with my priest but I would value stamina and int lower than spirit. Ok 15% regen isn't that good, but on mobile fights, you go a lot out of the 5s rule and thus regen a lot of extra mana.
Or do shadowpriest don't have mana issues? :p

they do.. but the best way to solve them is to stack more +shadow and +hit (if somehow you managed to not be capped) and-- Well. more +shadow and +spell
The harder your spells hit, the more mana you get back from vampiric touch.

I regularly spend 90%+ of a fight under the 5SR. MP5 would be strictly better, and even that's bad due to VT. Mana is somewhat of a concern, but there's pretty much no situation where I'd rather have more regen than more +damage.

Yeah they seriously need to completely rework the t5 damage set. When I logged on to test to check it out and saw the heal and damage sets next to each other I noticed there are actually more spirit on some of the damage pieces. That alone says something about how extremely poorly spent the itembudget is on that set. Basically everything is wrong with it heh.

Take off all spirit or at least drastically reduce it and put some of that into mp5. Reduce the int and convert a bit of that into sta. All left over itembudget from reducing int and spi into dmg. Would probably be best to completely get rid of all crit too even though there isn't much left admittedly. Would maybe make it at least small upgrades over the tailoring gear then.

Also looking at the sockets legs only have 1, gloves have 0. Personally I consider red>blue>yellow, current breakdown for the set is 0 red, 2blue and 5 yellow more or less making it impossible to use any socketbonuses either.

Thats entirely the issue though. PVE-wise, our aggro already limits our dps, and in many encounters, using SW might not be a good idea anyways. Increasing the cooldown in SW is not going to affect PVE shadow priests nearly as much as PVP shadow priests, where it was one of their primary methods of doing damage. I'm pretty sure we can agree that aside from 1v1 and 2v2 arenas, shadow priests definitely did not need a nerf in the PVP front, so this nerf strikes me as completely misguided.

Also, nerfing shadow-weaving may lower the shadowpriest-lock synergy, but warlocks can simply switch to an incinerate build with DS and have synergy with fire-mages, so in the end, it affects warlocks less than it does priests.

Except we don't have any talents to improve the cast time of incinerate, so at the end of the day it loses versus Shadowbolt. This is definitely aimed at warlocks, not just shadow priests .


I don't get why "synergy" is bad, I never have. Why doesn't anyone rant about Shaman/melee "synergy"? Or the fact that two fire mages produce more than double the DPS of one because their "synergy" with the scorch debuff (one can maintain it for the whole raid.)

All of the primary dps classes do far more damage in a raid due to buffs/debuffs from duplicates of themselves and other classes. It's a nice mechanic: lets Blizzard boost the damage of a raid without affecting small-group pve and pvp as much (since every class in those situations won't have every possible buff/debuff.)

It's also why debuff-based dps increases like scorch and shadow vulnerability (and the new change to hunters mark) are good: they take time to build up, and they fade, meaning they don't have a big pvp dps increase but on any "real" pve fight they can be assumed to be available.

Deliberate ones like scorch are even nicer since they add a bit of attention to detail to an otherwise pure nuke-spamming class. Elemental shaman could use something like it, to add some casting variety.


Lest that be construed as against the spirit of the thread: I do agree some tuning down was needed. I just am perplexed by people upset that spriests boost warlock damage too, when that happens all over the place with other classes.

I don't think anyone are "upset". Unless you mean the masses on the WoW forums. But it merely needed tuning, like you say yourself. I can usually beat Warlocks when they run without SPs. But I'm not beating them by a 15% margin (assuming he's good, it's at most a few percents).

And yes synergy is great. It's probably the most interesting aspect of DPS, which in raids is, let's face it, a fairly simplistic business in-action (you spam your optimal DPS/DPM ratio spell(s)). Fire mages will forever mourn pre 2.0 Ignite, since that's probably one of the most interesting examples of inter-class synergy I've ever seen. It's too bad it was horribly OP.

I just realized I made a mistake (now corrected) in the tier 5 stats, the gloves have hit on them instead of crit.

Hilariously enough, this means wearing tier 5 as a shadow priest actually causes us to exceed the spell hit cap... just those pieces alone plus the helm enchant. *sigh* This depresses me...

Put one less talent point into shadow focus.

Little bit offtopic but: After patch there will be yellow +Spellhit and orange +Spellhit/Spelldamage-Gems. So as long as hitcap is not achieved I would say red>yellow>blue.
At least it will be really easy to reahc max hit. And gives you the possibilities to get some socket bonuses/meta conditions without wasting slots for crit gems.

Anyway, this doesn't change the poor sockets in T5. I'm thinking 'bout going for helm & legs (assuming we will get to Vashj before I have all the cloth for Spellstrike) to complement Shadoweave, which sadly is still stronger than the updated version of T5.

Shadowweaving nerf: Well, I think it had to come one way or another. Locks/SPs dominate the raid damage by a fair margin at the moment. But that's partly because of the massive strength of the tailoring set. I think melee classes will catch up with T5 and SSC/TK weapons while Tailors won't get good upgrades for a longer time. Just wait and see, I don't think this is the end of the book.

SW nerf: Don't like it but can live with it. Especially since I don't use it all the time because too many healers just see a little HP drop and start healing like mad. 1 Mindblast and 1 Mindflay later + DoT ticks all damage would have been healed anyway