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.

To my recollection, all talent affected the spells after gear. If I am wrong, then the correct answer is that only Darkness affected the base damage for only some spells.

In my personal spreadsheets I always calculated the talent increases after damage gear and I had the exact same numbers when testing ingame.

The illusion that it was different most likely came with WoW 2.0, where Misery and the upped MF scaling all of a sudden gave bigger damage output.

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.

This is wrong. Putting multiple shadow priests in a group does not increase their damage. It increases their sustainability. One priest can sustain his maximum damage rotation for couple of minutes if alone, and exponentially longer when grouped with other shadow priests. I'm not considering the faster stacking up of Shadow Weaving, since you get that with multiple shadow priests in different groups as well.

Ironically, the only way to really increase the shadow priests dps (past elemental shaman and BM Hunter) is to stack the raid with warlocks and leech their ISB procs.