Quite often I loose a few seconds (too much) with targeting and releasing my shadowfiend. I usually have a friendly target as target. Does anyone have a nice macro so it attacks the target of your friendly target?

I'm also wondering; would equiping a damage staff just before releasing your shadowfiend be negligible or maybe worth it? Was thinking of using it in a macro as well. I would be using [Crystalheart Pulse-Staff] and [Terokk's Shadowstaff], both properly enchanted ofc. You loose a few seconds switching weapons. Not sure if it can all be done in the same macro without too much delay.

Help/feedback much appriciated!

My experience is as a pet class, but not a shadow priest. I think it would be safe to use normal pet mechanics for back-of-the-envelope calculations until proven to work differently.

First, do you have a pet pane available when shadowfiend is out? This is an additional tab under your character/rep/skill window, default hotkey shift-P. It lists fun things like base stats, AP, default DPS, resistances, etc. It's actually a toss-up whether you might have one; warlocks don't have one for enslaved demons, and I have no idea about frost mages. If you do, screenshot it.

While the spell damage -> pet AP function is well known for warlock pets, and constant across pets, each pet tends to have its own AP -> dps calculation, much to my chagrin. The voidwalker is like 28:1, half the dps increase of a PC, whereas the sexybus is more like 10:1. Basically this means you would be better off sampling pet damage at different +dmg levels rather than trying to calculate, unless you have a) mouseover of your spell damage of dmg->AP and b) pet pane mouseover of pet's AP listing AP->dps.

If it is a shadow-based melee attack, I would assume it follows elemental rules, which says that dodge parry miss crit glance and resist apply, block and ac do not. If it's being mitigated by AC, then it's very specially coded, and I must wonder if that means it bypasses normal resists (ie, it's mitigated as if physical, and the only effect the Shadow has is multiplicative effects like CoS/SW).

Pets tend to have normal mob combat resolution tables, that is 5% miss/crit/block/dodge/parry against even-level mobs, slightly modified by base stats, and with normal player mechanics for glancing blows. AFAIK they do not gain spell crit or hit on their melee attacks. They gain a small amount of spell crit from int gained from the owner's int, but the shadowfiend's appears to be a melee attack so I doubt it will have any effect. Pets do usually obtain a portion of their owner's AC, although on cloth classes this tends to be minimal compared to their base AC. Even my imp has something like 2k base, and only gets about 400 (35%?).


There used to be a mod to get you a pet pane window even on an enslaved demon, but I have no idea if it was pulling real stats or if it was entirely hueristic. Also, I think it got broked even before 2.0 so there's no guarantee that the information is still available. However, it does give hope that such information as pet stats might be obtainable via a UI mod, even on non-standard pets. If you don't have a pet pane you might consider writing a UI mod that could attempt to recreate one.

No pet pane.

Does anyone know why the Shadowfriend has mana, by the way?

I've noticed when playing my Shadow Priest that if my shadowfiend has a strength of earth totem and catches a battle Shout after he's summoned he hits significantly harder. I had both and trueshot aura once and he was critting for almost 700.

Perhaps slightly OT for which i apologise but the below macro will do what you request ie attack your MT's target while you keep healing.

#showtooltip Shadowfiend
/cast [nopet,harm][nopet,target=targettarget,harm] Shadowfiend
/petattack [harm][target=targettarget,harm]

Swapping a staff in combat causes a 1.5 global cooldown. However you can overlap this with the cooldown from spells. For example you should be able to do:

/cast Shadowfiend
/use Terokk's Shadowstaff

And the staff should equip after the fiend is launched, causing an overlapping cooldown. However, I do not know if the fiend's attack strength is scaled based on your spell damage when you cast it, or in real-time, so it may not be effective.

According to the numbers in this thread you can expect 338* extra mana given no crits or misses and the fiend spending the full duration alive and on target. Not exactly earth-shattering, but the opportunity cost there is also pretty low.

*i'm assuming you did not blow soulfrost on an offspec piece, add 16 if you did.

hmm.

In pally heavy raids, using Blessing of Might on a priest / shadow priest.

As this would increase the priests attack power, it should therefore, in theory, increase the attack power of the shadowfiend and increase the mana returned.

If there is any change at all, then it would be worthwhile a shadowpriest getting BoM if they already have the max amount of pally buff's to start with. I may be wrong in this, but i believe that there is only really 4 buff's a shadow priest would benefit from in a "typical" raid situation from a pally. These would be:

blessing of light
blessing of wisdom
blessing of salvation
blessing of kings

Now with some heavy Pally raid's, it may be prudent knowing that if a shadowfiend gained AP from this blessing, that the shadow priest will return more mana. It may not exactly set the world alight with the amount of mana returned. But meh, any "little extra" would be beneficial.

Personaly we are running around 5-6 pally's in some raids, this is due to 1-2 pally tanks and 4 regular pally healers. So for some guild's having more than 4 pally blessing's per player, it is more than realistic that a spare BoM could be placed on the Shadow priest. It may be useful to direct them to this thread if they question your logic in buffing them with BoM. If not, some strange reactions may occur and they may also "click off" the buff thinking it was a mistake.

*I do not play a pally nor a priest, so please excuse if i have missed off some rather important pally buff that a priest would benefit from other than the 4 listed more than possible extra mana from BoM.

I didn't think anyone still ran 6-pally raids. Back in the Naxx days, we regularly had 6-7 paladins in the raid. One even spec'd into BoSanc, just because he was bored and figured we might as well buff everyone with every possible buff.

If you had 5 paladins, I see no reason why you couldn't get BoM, esp if it does indeed affect SF mechanics. I might play around with it sometime today, and if I get some results, I'll let you all know.

For those that are doing the testing, another suggestion would be putting blessing of might on the fiend. If it works well, in a raid environment with good communication you could possibly have a paladin blessing fiends as they come out via a macro.

Update.

1.) I missed off my shaman class leader by calling her big brother, so, I did not get a chance to test strength of earth.

2.) I did not take into consideration the shadowfiend scaling with the AP buff from both me and the fiend. I must admit, I thought it would be useless since I always figured scaling was done on the cast, not afterwords.

However, as to point 2, I think when I get home I have a method of testing it. (Going to swap weapon/activate +damage trinket after cast and before cast to see any differences).