dbresq

Whether or not SoL lowers your DPS depends on a couple of things, most importantly the length of time spent casting (or the amount of smites cast) and your crit chance. If you have a look at the model Kalman has been kind enough to point out it shows that a crit and with a SoL proc is 250% damage over 3.5 seconds. Two non crits would be 200% damage over four seconds and two crits without SoL would be 300% damage over 4 seconds. If you extrapolate crit + SoL proc to 4 seconds to find a comparable dps, it would be close to 286% damage over four seconds. Taking the average of the total damage of two non crits and two crits (no SoL) over four seconds (which I assume would equal a crit rate of 50%) you find that over four seconds the average would be 250% damage over 4 seconds. Is it correct to assume then that, over a lengthy period of casting, SoL will only begin to decrease total DPS once you are well over 50% crit rate?

In case you couldn't tell, yes I'm interested in the spec, and yes it's because I play a priest. I spec Smite from time to time to smash 5 mans and while I admit that smite will never (and should never) be 'min/max raid' viable, I'm still interested in squeezing as much out of the spec as possible for a laugh now and then. Only a few days ago I was talking to another guildy about a couple of specs and whether it's worth giving up SoL for PI in an attempt to improve DPS a bit more. I'm reasonably confident now that SoL will net you a DPS increase beyond a 50% crit rate (which is basically unattainable), now it's just a matter of figuring out whether the net dps increase from SoL or PI is bigger.

Edit - The only reason I've had to decide between PI and SoL at all is the fact that my gear is sub par for the task at hand and I want to take Focused Power for the extra hit. I was also taking SoR for the extra spirit given iDS and SG, but after looking at Heel's spec I feel that if I can get enough hit to drop Focused Power dropping SoR too and picking up PI *and* SoL would definately net an increase in DPS.

 

GIJebus

Might as well put my two cents in since I love running around smite spec. The question isn't if or if not smite spec can match the damage of other classes but it's what does it bring to the raid. Damage is important but so is utility.

In 5 or 10 man instance I can keep good dps and stop to heal whenever the group is threatened. I've saved plenty of wipes being the back up healer. But in 25 man instance there's always going to be enough healing via other classes. The question on the raid leaders mind is going to be, "could that dps slot go to something better?" The answer will always be yes. Any other dps class or spec brings something extra to the raid, a smite priest only bring emergency healing. That alone isn't enough to convince anyone.

Power Infusion and Pain Suppression would be great to have in a raid but the priest would lose SoL which is huge for damage as well as spiritual guidance.

 

Yavor

Yeah as poster above said the key here is raid utilty which other specs give. I was lookin around for stuff for my priest and i came over this SimulationCraft/DPS Ranking - Shadowpriest.com Wiki

You'll notice it has high DPS, well i'm not going to say it gives utilty but it sure would be fun to 'lolsmite' and outdps fellow mages and lokcs.

/Side note - this is a game - have fun go for it!

 

callidas

One aspect of utility that has not really been covered is in raids that have not finished their current progression instance. We are progressing through SSC atm, and often use Moonkins (we have plenty) as dps on the bosses we have on farm and then as healers on the bosses we are learning/require more healing than we have.

While this is clearly not relevant to min/max discussions of raid viability, I am struggling to come up with a better class/spec that can dps one boss and heal the next, without being gimped one way or the other (concerns about smite dps aside..).

 

Lam

That simply won't happen. It would be nice, but it won't happen. 2 million 3-minute mages would suddenly flood the forums screaming "Nerf!!!"

The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm right at 1150 +holy damage, self buffed, now. It's been a while since I posted last, but life as smite is pretty much the same. +Healing gear is pushing 2200, and it's still quite easy to main-heal through Gruul, up to Magtheridon, which is as far as I've been. The poster who said it's good for ZA is dead-on. It's hard to beat the smite priest's burst on trash. It speeds up clearing time. Then just switch him to healing role for bosses for extra safety.

DPS classes still send me tells after heroics or a pug Karazhan asking me "how the hell did you do that?!?" It's especially good for the ePeen when someone rolls a toon on your server after a battleground just to ask you "wtf?!?"

Sadly, though, the mana efficiency is still not there to warrant dps role on 25-man raids. That, and arenas are no less than a form of masochism.

Rather than having smite damage raised by a percentage, I don't think it's too much to ask to simply lower the casting cost of the spell. Even if it was reduced to the cost of Holy Fire, I seriously don't think that would be over-powered. At best, it would enable a pure smite priest to fill a viable dps role on 25-man encounters. He still wouldn't shine, and would be smoked by rogues, warlocks and the like, but he'd do significant damage to warrant having him there.

 

heel

I never ran out of mana chain-potting and chain-casting Smite. The damage simply wasn't there.

 

Caligula

I wonder if haste gear would make any difference. Probably not a 20% more damage difference... I'm just not sure any priest spec that relies on spells that can crit will ever be in line with a mage or lock. Crit damage talents make them scale so much better.

 

Jaedis

Well, if spot healing from a ranged DPS is what you're looking for, then why not bring an elemental Shaman? They bring a lot more to the raid than a Holy Smite Priest- more dps, Totem of Wrath, Bloodlust/Heroism, etc.- and can also spot heal on demand.

I think unfortunately if a raid was looking for something to fill the spot you describe, they would almost always choose a Elemental Shammy.

 

Hegen

Maybe so, though NOT having a shaman in the raid at Malacrass is a plus by itself. The stolen totems are nasty, while priest abilities are a joke if you have two dispellers in the raid, which you will almost always have.

That aside, my remark was more aimed towards a hybrid smiter that still keeps the important talents in the holy tree. If you do that, you can still do reasonable damage where 3 healers are needed and still perform as a full healer by switching gear.

Things a hybrid smiter priest brings to Zul'Aman in addition to DPS and healing:

- Dispell, Cure disease and Mass Dispell (Zul'Jin phase 2). All of these are important in ZA, and Cure disease cannot be done by druids and shadow priests without switching form.
- One additional PoM in the raid speeds up trash tanking by giving the tanks more starting aggro, healing effect besides.
- IDS buff.

Whether in the end an elemental shaman or a hybrid smiter brings more value to a ZA raid, that's very hard for me to rate as I cannot judge which kind of healing an elemental shaman can do without compromising his DPS and support too much. For me as a shaman novice, this looks like the kind of sacrifices a shadowpriest would have to make.

 

Amiko

What was your spell haste?

Much like Destro warlocks, the napkin math i've done seems to indicate that spell haste is more useful then anything but damage. Stacking crit is nice, but less important because you can always force SOL procs with HN, where as if you stack haste you can easily get that 15-20% bonus out of raw casting speed --- tune that with crit ( you should be able to maintain that 27% holy crit with stacked haste -- that's not a lot of crit ).

 

heel

31 from the BT trash ring, that's it.

 

Amiko

I tend not to talk about spell hit because it's a pre-requ stack and cap. Everything else comes _after_ spell hit.

Most of the math i see has spell haste equating somewhere from 2:1 to 1.2:1 for +damage. I'm currently building a haste suit out of the hero gear and ZA drops with quag's eye, and that's my intended direction for the smite build.

Incredibly Simple Math follows.

Assumptions:
1) boss encounter is exactly 10 minutes.
2) Each smite takes 2 seconds to cast.
3) Each smite deals exactly 1000 damage.
4) The encounter is simple -- the priest is simply chain casting smite.

So:
10 minutes is 600 seconds which allows for 300 castings of smite doing 300,000 equating to 500dps.

Using this formula: New Casting Time = Base Casting Time / (1 + (Spell Haste Rating/1570))

Add 225 spell haste, reducing the smite cast time to ~1.75 seconds ( rounded up ).

600 / 1.75 = ~342 ( rounded down ) which is 342,000 damage equating to equating to 570dps, ~14% improvement.

So, all other things being equal, Heel's 1300dps becomes ~1480dps. I'm not sure where that would put him in terms of "viability" acceptance.

Note that even 100 haste rating is ~6% increase in dps ( 500 to ~530 ).

On a side note though: The DPS returns on SoL get gradually lower as spell haste increases.

 

ObservingLife

I know pre-2.3 SoL *could* crit and *could* proc off itself. Was this fixed in 2.3? If not, it seems relevant to the theorycrafting at hand.

 

Amiko

No -- SoL can no longer proc itself.

 

HengeMaker

How much spell haste would you need to reduce Holy Fire to a 2 second cast? At that point, what about a holy fire rank 9 -> 4x holy fire rank 8 rotation? you can forget about SoL at that point

 

Finkum

You would need 875 haste rating (i.e. an unachievable amount, discounting proc effects) in order to reduce talented Holy Fire to a two second cast. No achievable amount of any stat (spell damage, haste, crit, whatever) will ever make Holy Fire good for anything other than an opener. I keep hoping Blizzard will take a look at Holy Fire - maybe add some sort of holy damage multiplier while the dot is up - but to be fair it's (rightly) got to be pretty far down on their list of priorities.

 

Vurrin

It would take something like 300-400 haste rating. to get Holy fire down to two second. If you filled every slot but helm and gloves ( 2 slots with no haste options to the best of my knowledge) you'd be around 359 haste rating and holy fire would cast at about 2.04 seconds if my math isn't off. You'd also be at like 900-1k spell dmg and 4% hit > >

I mean if you can get that much haste it would be interesting to see and you could certainly use the ZA timed rings with spell hit and haste over ancient knowledge and such. All told though you'd still do better DPS with smite ( 1.69 cast time), and your crit would be low enoguh that SoL wouldn't proc much and its DPS gains would be marginal at best.

Anyway I don't know much about how much you'd do in gear like that, but if such a method was viable I'm fairly sure other DPS casters would already be doing so, but even I can see you'd be chronically short of spell hit and even without that ( say chain casting on an own level mob/trash) I don't think a set like this would be competitive, nor would Holy Fire get particularly better. I mean it'd still be more efficient and less DPS than smite... haste doesn't change that unless with say heroism and Skull of Gul'dan your smites get under 1.5 sec.

Edit I'm retarded and thought holy fire was 2.5 second cast when talented ( I cast it a lot as you can tell), my numbers are right if holy fire was a 2.5 second cast, and my points are no less valid for me being retarded > >

 

heel

I think the real bottom line for Smite is that the spec is good for nothing but DPS (and Imp DS, which is neither significant nor unique to the spec), and even jumping through a lot of hoops, the spec deals less DPS than . . . well, than anything. It was a fun idea, but, unfortunately, it is still very far from being viable. Let it die.

 

HengeMaker

Wow... my brain was on hold last night, that's what I get for posting late.

The number I was thinking of was 2.5 seconds(since that also fits the dot rotation nicely). still may not be practical, but what's the haste for 2.5?

 

Finkum

350 haste rating is needed for 2.5s Holy Fires. I'm guessing this might be achievable if you got every single piece of haste gear currently in game, but it will be at the expense of other stats - most importantly, spell hit rating.

However the same amount of haste rating will give you 1.67s Smites (still more effective dps than Holy Fire).

More generally, if you are interested in finding out the quantity of haste rating required to reduce some spell with base cast time A to cast time B, you can use the formula B = A / (1 + (x / 1750)) and solve for x (e.g. for 2.5s Holy Fire, 2.5 = 3 / (1 + (x / 1750)), therefore x = 350).

 

Havoc12

Someone already did the calculations. No need to double post

 

HengeMaker

Not to beat a dead horse... but I don't quite understand why shadow is out-damaging holy by so much.

Shadow's main damaging spell is mind flay, no? it seems the holy spells just scale far better;
mind flay coefficient: 57% over 3 seconds
smite coefficient: 71.43%(yanked these from wowwiki)
some off the cuff math:
57%*2/3 = 38%
Therefore in the same time period(2 seconds), mind flay benefits just over half as much as smite from +damage.

Now lets add in talents and buffs:
shadow gets:+35% damage (assuming a full stack of shadow weaving, darkness and shadow form)
+10%from CoS = 45%

Smite gets:
+10% from talents(plus extra bonuses from spirit and stuff... but I was just looking at %'s for now)
+10% from ret aura = 20%

so 0.38 * 1.45 = 0.551 = 55.1% scaling for mind flay
vs
0.7143 * 1.20 = 0.85716 = 85.716% scaling for smite

Over 2 seonds.
Given such a huge difference in the scaling factors... I have trouble understanding why smite lags.

I'm pretty sure I included every major scaling buff for each spec. If you include stuff like Divine spirit, BoK, etc, which further scale a Smite priests damage, it would seem the difference would be bigger.

I will readily confess that I don't have a high level priest, so I may be unaware... but the topic intrigues me, and the math, if I've done it right, puzzles me.

 

◊ Kasi

1) All a holy priest would do as dps is spam smite.
2) A shadow priest uses mind flay as a filler when they are not using MB, SWD, SWP and VT/E. Shadow's main spell is not mind flay. They really don't have a main spell. I'm guessing that yeah smite spam might beat mind flay spam but thats not the whole question.
3) Putting a ret pally and holy smite priest in the same group destroys group synergy. The ret pally wants to be in a melee group, and the priest doesn't really work there. Much better to put the priest in with casters and another rogue/etc in with the ret pally.
4) A shadow priest isn't there because of their amazing dps. If you want better dps, bring a destro lock. They are there because of the utility of VT/VE when added to solid dps. Smite is okay dps, but no group synergy dooms it. It would have to be on the order of single target mage/lock dps to be viable, and that it isn't.

The question one should ask is not why smite priests are better/worse than shadow. You can't compare two specs, one which has no raid synergy with on that has tons. You have to compare it to something like a warlock or mage. A dps'er that is taken on his own merits. For that a smite priest fails.

 

HengeMaker