Absolutely. I certainly drop points in it as my hit rating from gear improves. It allows for you to stay at max dps while having regen/pvp talents. I've always argued that excessive hit isnt worthless as many have stated. It is simply a way to buy back talent points, and that is always worthwhile.

Bekah did some math on the Shadowpriest.com forums way back in TBC Beta, when the coefficient was at 81% for the short time. The number was far, far lower(below 1700), and was easily attainable with TBC gear and old consumables. It was changed back to the default rate it's always been, and the number went up quite a bit. I don't know that it's that high however.

I don't really see other classes leaving us in the dust as we do them now, the gear upgrades aren't that significant, and there's plenty of off-set loot that's still good upgrades for us, some of it better than FSW. We'll maintain high damage, and high utility on more than a situational level. Our nerfs past T6 won't be class level, they'll be gear level; we're not going to be relegated to "mana battery" anytime soon.

Keep in mind that with talents, Shadow Priests receive a whopping +40% to shadow damage (Shadow Weaving - 10%, Darkness - 10%, Shadowform - 15%, Misery - 5%). That effectively turns the coefficients into:

SW:P - 161%
MB - 62%
MF - 83%
VT - 145%
SW:D - 62%

So? The majority of your damage comes from swp/flay/vt.

Proof by contradiction:
Shadow priests have shadowform for 15% shadow damage which an affliction lock can't get therefore shadow priets have better scaling.
Also elemental shamans have the best cast time reduction in the game so they should scale better than everyone else.

The only way to demonstrate relative scaling between classes is to get a spreadsheet or simulator you trust and compare the effect of 100dmg or 100 crit rating. Obviously shadow priests scale worse with crit but compared to other classes their scaling with 100 dmg will probably far closer.

http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.ph...er=asc&start=0 would be a good place to do that.

You only really care about +%damage scaled per second of cast time and or dot duration when figuring out how things scale.

Vampiric Touch not scaling correctly is very old news. I would bet money that they rework the talent before the level cap gets raised again, but I wouldn't expect any changes before then.

Would putting a cap on the mana gained for the Shadowpriest only fix this problem?

Say "You can only gain back 10% of your mana pool per VT" or something (dunno what numbers are appropriate). You keep the group mana battery aspect of the spec, while not making them infinitely sustainable without some investment into longevity itemization points. Actually, you could even set a max on the entire group gains (10% of mana pool each) to make raid mana sustainability even less simple. You go from "stick a shadowpriest with X spell power in the group" to "stick a shadowpriest X spell power in the group and make sure everyone has Y mana pool".

Well if it will get nerfed i dont know of course but a fact is still that even if you have the 1100 +dmg you will still be chainpotting mana potions, making shadowpriests sill the most consumable dependant "DPS class".

Example: On an avarage magtheridon kill i pop about 3-4 mana pots and i am able to use my shadowfiend 3 times. now after some time i watched a movie from a mage on magtheridon. The optimal mana preservation (without popping pots) would have been using his evocation at the start of the fight (75% mana?) and then be able to use it again near the end of the fight. but the mage actually didnt do this but only used his evo Once in the fight making him near oom near the end of the fight so he had to pop a mana potion. For me not popping a mana potion in this fight would make me oom around 50% i think and i have 1000 spelldmg unbuffed on this magtheridon kill it would have been a lil higher since i had raidbuffs obviously.

The fact is that with the dmg nerf shadowpriests have we cant do optimal dmg anymore unless we can use the optimall cycle in which you can include SW and MB. well if i use this cycle for more then 3 minutes without any mana regens (except normal raidbuffs and wisdom) i would be oom.

Untill the optimal DPS cycle would be allmost free of mana and shadowpriests get free of the usage of mana potions i dont think the mana regen should be nerfed. Not to forget that this is what makes shadowpriests actually needed in raids.
I havent played WoW to long before the burning crusade but i do know that raiding shadowpriests were rare in those days. Why? because they were not mana efficient enough. Blizzard fixed this with VT and Shadowfiend and gave shadowpriests an important raid position if they start nerfing these abilities again i doubt how long it will take before lots of priests will spec back to Holy for raiding (and we cant say holy priests are very powerfull in raids atm :P)

I am not an expert so correct me if i am wrong on many of these points but this is my vision on how shadowpriests currently work in raids.

I don't find merely VT being the major "role" for shadow priests, it is a combination of both Misery and VT.

All of the changes that have been listed regarding what priests have lost personally in terms of DPS were in the context of other classes benefitting too much from our abilities.


As far as mana inefficient, that is probably the case if you cycle in blast / SW:D to maximize your DPS. Otherwise we essentially can downrank flay and even SW:P without having too much impact on our overall DPS addition to the raid, since a huge chunk of it is from misery.

If you are using your fiend 3 times on a Magtheridon kill, that length of a fight would drain a ton of mana. 15 minutes? Ouch. Mileage varies depending on if you hold the banish a little longer so people can refresh dots and such.

On top of that, shadowpriests are probably the only class that gains an exponential amount of DPS if there are multiples of that class in the group. Even a poorly geared shadowpriest can add a tremendous amount of DPS to a raid simply because of VT, if there are a pair in a group. The senior priest can even grab other talents instead of misery in that case, which offers another slight dps increase through other talents ;P

But yea, if you are gunning your max DPS with blasts and SWD and such, you're going to run low on mana. Then again, my avg blast basically refunds 1/3rd of itself if VT is up, heck, vt itself refunds 20% of its cost at +1200 damage.

You are missing the fact that all talents were changed to work after gear, instead of just working on the base damage as before. The reason why mages/warlocks scaled better than any "hybrids" in vanilla wow was mostly because their talents already worked that way, while the hybrids had talents that only affected the base damage of spells.

It seems to me that Shadow Priests will likely run into the problem that Fury Warriors have-- Since both scale exponentially with gear (in a more powerful way than Combat Potency does since CP has a min. speed limit right?), they'll eventually come to a point where they're simply threat limited. And since both HS and VT generate exponential threat with damage dealt, they can rocket towards the tank's threat pretty quickly.