Not sure if this belongs to a thread of its own but I don't think it fits in the current sp threads.

I would like to address two things mainly :
1/ Where should we stand on the dmgmeter scale ?
2/ How can devs make us scale so that we can avoid the BC situation in the first place (from being way overpowered at the beginning of the expansion to our final slide at the bottom of dpsmeters)

On the first point :
We are a utility spec, actually we are THE utility spec given our impact on mana/hp regen and on other classes DPS (misery + weaving), no other hybrid brings as much to the raid in terms of overall efficiency increase. Given that I think we should stand at the bottom of the dmgmeter (yes, being lower than other hybrids is normal considering what we bring to the raid). Managing roughly 25% DPS less than top single-target classes (rogues) is a goal to reach for.
Right now we already seem to be standing below that 75% threshold (Brutallus fight being the metric used now : top rogues around 2200DPS and shadowpriest doing 1400-1500DPS), which brings me to my second point : with no change to our scaling we are mathematically going to slide further down.

On the second point :
Given our extreme capability to get to hit-cap with shadow focus, our only meaningful stat has always been shadow dmg. Granted spell haste changes in 2.4 is a step in the right direction but so far the final gain is still being highly debated (sweet spot or no sweet spot ? is there a meaningful conversion between dmg and haste ?).
I don't need to go into the mathematics of itemization but depending on two stats (or even worse : one stat) is bad. If we compare our situation to mage / warlock (assuming destruction for them) situation their DPS is scaling through hit / dmg / haste and crit, allowing for much more DPS increase for the same investment in iLevel item points.
Said another way our main problem is that the slope of our progression is too much less than the slope of other DPS classes :


WotLK
The gear reset (not sure if the effect we'll be as groundbreaking as for BC release) won't change the basic fact that our scaling is not on par with other DPS classes, I'm sure the devs will find a way to make the DPS curves shift a little so that they seem to be okay at first but unless our scaling radically changes come the expansion we will have the same problem later.

Any solutions ?
Some come to mind (I'm assuming there won't be any enormous change to our playstyle in WotlK) :
- Add ruine-like talent + talent to make dots crittable : increase in crit dmg percentage debatable (common arguments against : DoTs scale better than anything with +dmg => would be overpowered to make them crit, DoTs allow more mobility, might be more difficult to control aggro)
- Maybe allow for more itemization with +shadow dmg (cheaper investment than generic spell +spell dmg) > not sure if this makes sense mathematically (?)
- Make spell haste affect the DoT ticking speed

The problem with letting haste decrease time between ticks on a DoT is your mana/life regen will not last as long. The entire idea is to do as much damage as humanly possible in that window, but the more often you have to refresh it, the less regeneration you do. It's more important to throw as much into the 15 second window as humanly possibly, instead of stacking haste that will reduce you to a 12 second window. After all, if you're just trying to scale your damage at the cost of your utility, why did the raid bring you?

The best thing they could do to scale our damage would be an extra rank of our primary spells in BoP books found on certain raid bosses. Problem with that is, every other class is going to want it too. Just thinking about the potential reward in getting another rank of mindblast from Maggie, SW:D from serpent lady whose name I can't friggin remember, SW:P from Kael, Mindflay from Archimonde, Vamp Touch from Illidan.

Also, we have to consider something. Shadow priest is truly a utility class for a party or raid. Hell, I'll put money that more than 1 tank was bought enough time by our chip healing for the healers to get him out of the imminent death zone. We're pretty much equal to chain chugging super mana pots as well. The real question is, SHOULD our damage really scale as well as Pure DPS oriented classes? To me, it makes sense for the gap between the best and us should widen. If it doesn't, it's becoming more and more of an "win" button to throw in a shadow priest in every group. Instead of making sure you have the best to make up the lost DPS of putting an SP in every caster group, it begins to promote mediocrity. Meh, that's my rant, have fun ripping it to shreds/agreeing with me :p

For damage, you should be between 1200 and 1600 DPS, depending on how well geared you are, how many consumables you're using, and how much the raid is stacked in your favor. Your position on damage meters obviously depends on the performance of other raid members, of course. I generally hit #1 or #2 on Illidan and Supremus, for example, and am lucky to hit #11 on Brutallus. That's just the nature of the fight.

Regarding your scaling question, I think this can only end in baseless speculation. We don't know what new talents or spells we or any other class are gaining next expansion. We certainly have no idea how adding a 10th class will shift raid balance or needs. It's a fair assumption that shadow priests will retain their role of mana battery, but we have no idea if they will be relatively better or worse than other support classes, or how much other classes will need mana. No one here can contribute to this discussion in any meaningful way unless you work for Blizzard.

Last, I'd like to stress that Shadow Priests are fine. And by fine I mean actually slightly overpowered, even if they are only putting out 80% the damage of a mage or warlock and they don't have AoE spells. Even though I topped damage meters when working on Gruul, I honestly believe my contribution to the raid is more important now than then. Shadow priests have never been more essential to a raid's success than now, and that's a sign that their relative damage scaling just doesn't factor into how well balanced the class is.

For example, on Brutallus as a shadow priest I put out 1600 DPS, only 300 DPS short of the margin. I also heal 90% as much damage as a holy priest. And I restore almost 30,000 mana to EACH of my party members. That's more than 10 mana potions per person. Our guild has two shadow priests right now and we're recruiting for a third. If people want multiple copies of your spec in the raid, your class is fine.

Had the same feelings when I was spec'd affliction with the lack of DoT scaling. The thing is, your utility to the raid allows decision making to occur in whether to bring spriest_X over dps_Y or healer_Z based on the needs of the raid. If you scaled with rogues or other pure dps classes, the choice would be simple:

Two tanks, three healers (1 paladin, 2 shamans), 1 CoS warlock, and 19 shadow priests (hello debuff limit lol)

For certain fights, VE can do substantial effective healing, eliminating a healer slot (ie Brutallus). VT can boost certain classes DPS tremendously, which you should factor in as part of your effective raid DPS. And rogues at 2200 dps don't achieve those numbers alone - that's windfury, battleshout, bloodlust, unleashed rage, curse of recklessness, expose weakness, expose/sunder armor and more all coming together.

The only raid buffs to your DPS you can take advantage of are far more minimal- curse of shadows, improved shadowbolt, wrath of air, bloodlust, ferocious inspiration and to a very small extent, moonkin aura/totem of wrath.

Brutallus is also a tank and spank fight. Fights with high mobility tip in your favor and for any DoT class really.

Adjusting the coefficients on spells compared to the base damage can completely balance for the poor scaling of a single stat. This isn't a complicated issue at all. Resto druids have the exact same issue. Beyond a small based amount of regen needed to sustain casting, that anyone in epic gear has, druids only scale effectively with +healing. Other healers can use less efficient, higher ranks or higher HPS spells to turn more regen into more output, resto druids for all intents and purposes only have 1 rank of each spell. The reason you don't see too many resto druids complaining about this is that our spells were kind of weak when we first hit 70, to the point where it was difficult to actually spec full resto because you often couldn't keep a tank alive with the spells that were castable in tree form, but our spell coefficients are setup to account for that. A druid simply gains more healing output per point of healing than any other class, which directly balances the fact that it costs more on gear to stack 1 stat.

So, the question is, why didn't they do that with shadow priests? The answer is they didn't because its a bad idea. If SP damage scaled at the same rate as other caster's damage, so would VT, further letting those other casters scale faster. Say at one point in gear a mage and a sp do the same amount of damage in a stationary fight. Ok, now if they both double their damage, the SP and mage are both doing the same amount of damage, but the SP is also doing double the VT. That allows the mage to completely stop using mana pots in favor of destro pots, it lets the warlock stop life tapping at all and use destro pots. It lets the shaman drop his mana regen crit for a bit more spell damage.

If you do out a formula for total raid benefit, striking some balance for ve healing, vt mana, damage, debuffs, and compare gear with Scaling of total raid benefit, I'd imagine SPs are actually scaling too fast.

Part of this is a gear issue. Shadow Priests gain a huge gear advantage early on with the Frozen Shadoweave set, probably more than any other class gains with the early crafted epics. It so easy to get and essentially puts you more than halfway through T5 gear before you even do Kara. Of course you're overpowered, you're essentially a full tier ahead in gear. Try running Kara or SSC/TK without the Frozen Shadoweave set and you might find your place on the damage meter is pretty consistent as you go through the gear levels.

I believe there's a situation like that on the Shadowpriest wiki, not that I completely trust the results.

Here's the 'Theorycraft' page (Theorycraft/Caster DPS Comparison - Shadowpriest.com Wiki)

The simulationcraft page ( SimulationCraft/DPS Ranking - Shadowpriest.com Wiki) doesn't have this comparison, however.

So really: it's not even that big of a deal. There are more issues than just MF's crappy coefficient.

The core problem is single-stat scaling (or now two-stat scaling with haste), compared to other classes's (hit, crit, haste, damage for warlocks, for example) scaling.

To that end--having dot ticks 'crit' might be useful, afterall.

Maybe a self-debuff with a short timer that trades +hit for +dmg? "Shadow Word: Haze - - For the next 20 seconds, your shadow damage spells do 10% more damage, reduces your chance to hit with Shadow Spells by 10%". 30 second cooldown, 200 mana.

<shrug> The mechanism for having Shadow scale better does not exist at the moment. I would surmise that this can only effectively be dealt with via a new spell in WotLK.

When you gain too much hit from gear, you can actually convert some of it into crit via talent swaps (up to 4% hit => 6% crit from toying around with the calculator).
Which would be nice if crit actually offered some meaningful scaling.

Haste has become quite nice since the GCD change, it decreases your time spent casting DoTs/cooldowns.
However, with the new free cast time from haste, you can only cast more of your filler spell, Mind Flay.
Which cannot crit and has a horribly low scaling coefficient.


Mind Flay Scaling

Mind Flay is a 3s spell with 57% scaling that cannot crit. Shadow Bolt is a 2.5s spell with 106% scaling that can crit.
Yes, apples and oranges.
Destro locks have a 15% shadow damage multiplier and no other spells to cast (they would lower DPS). Shadow Priests have a 15% and 10% multiplier and other spells with high scaling to cast. Mind Flay also costs only half the mana, and there is the health/mana regeneration synergy.

Mind Flay with, say, 120% scaling would probably be overpowered at entry level raiding. It would be a much closer call at endgame raiding though.
But I think a lot can be changed with damage scaling. I hear numbers of 0.5-0.6 dps per point of +damage. Mages hover at 0.9-1.1, warlocks are beyond 1.0 as well.


That shows that your scaling with +damage is way sub-par and I think a fix to Mind Flay could make a big difference to start with.


An idea might be a self buff like Healing Way, "Your Mind Blast hits (crits?) increase your Mind Flay scaling by x% for y seconds, stacks up to z times."
That wouldn't touch burst DPS and tab-dotting, but help for single target damage. And it would would improve the scaling of crit, making Mind Flay scale indirectly with crits.

Or adding an "Empowered" talent to increase the scaling of MD/SWD.
A 200% crit damage talent might help too, although I don't think it adds much.

Moonkin have 200% crits and a -0.5s cast time after a crit to make crits attractive.

The bottom line is: Increase the current 0.5-0.6 DPS/+dmg to around 0.7-0.8 DPS/+dmg. My personal preference would be talents that scale with crit.



Vampiric Touch

Now, about Vampiric Touch. My personal opinion is "damage is damage, mana is mana", the two shouldn't be connected.

Going from low-end to top-end gear, my damage takes a huge jump, it doubles, triples, or even more. My mana consumption essentially stays the same.
Haste has some impact on mana consumption, yes, but it's mostly because you go from ~50 haste before Illidan to ~450 haste when you have everything from Sunwell, it just a sudden flood of haste on gear.
So, why should VT mana regeneration take that huge jump as well? Or Life Tap return twice the amount of mana? Mana drains don't scale with damage stats either (just with haste).

But that's just my opinion.

A valid point however is that the combination of vampiric touch and (nearly) full damage scaling would be too strong. Think warriors pre-BC - more damage means more rage means even more damage. So they scaled down the rage/damage by 50%, but increased rage at low gear levels.
Also, Tigole (I think) stated at some point that shadow priests should top damage meters and healing meters and give their party a huge amount of mana, which I think is a valid point.

I think there are quite a few options to somehow normalise mana returns from VE. Make them scale with mana stats (int/spi), the characters natural regeneration, maybe crit, but not 1:1 with damage done.


The current dilemma is that the whole mana system is pretty messy. They can't fix shadow priest scaling with 1:1 VT scaling. They can't fix VT scaling before they adjust all relevant classes to less mana returned from VT.
Hunters are nearly self-sufficient with JoW, priests/druids got their big spirit boost. Still some classes to go.


But this is where currently shadow priest DPS lies. Their mana increases mage DPS by up to 350 (Brutallus fight in sunwell gear), warlock DPS by up to 150, or allows you to drop another healer.

From this perspective, they are still very worth their raid spot if they get a group that fully benefits from their support. Similar to DPS shaman and paladins, and probably druids - but I think it's a much closer call there, I don't have the numbers, so I won't argue.

However, these classes already scale much better, and some of them give even bigger boosts to their party than shadow priests.
But their party boosts are limited and well defined - you can't have two windfury totems, and one strength totem is always X additional raid damage.
A huge amount of scaling raid mana is a much more generic boost. It requires you to think on every raid encounter "Does infinite mana trivialise any part of this?". Which is good since simple mana checks are pretty silly anyway.


Whoops, that was a bit longer than intended, ending in a rather large collection of thoughts about VT.

So, my opinion is that damage and mana stats should be separated rather than scaling. Even with the currently bad damage scaling, shadow priests still offer very good DPS if you factor in the gains from VT in a caster group, or supporting some other group to give you a benefit in an encounter.

The gap is however closing as the lack of personal DPS increases.
I don't think that shadow priest scaling can be fixed before VT and the mana regeneration system in general get some changes.

(1) Scrap the existing VT so that it doesn't scale with damage dealt and we can't "go infinite".

--> "Whenever your shadow spells deal damage to a target while Vampiric Touch is active on that target, you return 40 mana to your party."

(2) Change the coefficient on Mind Flay to something reasonable.

That's it.

So a priest in +100 damage returns the same mana as a priest in +1100? Stupid.

Somehow this double posted on an edit.. no idea how.

Priest in +100 damage returns the same mana.

Priest in +100 haste returns more.

As to a downranking safeguard, we can already go infinite by downranking. I don't think it's as big of a concern as people make it out to be, especially since spriests are effectively already infinite by way of shadowfiend and occasionally a pot, even going full out. Being able to go infinite in a low DPS cycle strikes me as a silly thing.

Math:

MF6 has a 54% damage coefficient and costs 205 mana prior to Focused Mind. Assume 30% of ooc regen while casting via Meditation plus incidental gear mp5 yielding 118 mp5 total while casting, or 70 mana during the duration of a flay)

So:

(426 + .54*K)*1.1*1.15*1.13*1.05*1.1*.05 = 205*.85 - 70
(426+.54*K)*.0825 = 174.25 - 70
426 + .54*K = 1263
.54*K = 837
K = 1550

MF6 goes infinite at 1550 spell damage. For every 50 spell damage over 1550, we regen an additional 2 mana beyond what we consume.

MF5:

(330 + .47*K)*1.1*1.15*1.13*1.05*1.1*.05 = 165*.85 - 70
330 + .47*K = 851.51
.47*K = 521.51
K = 1108

MF5 goes infinite at 1108 +dmg. For every 50 spell damage over 1108, we regen an additional 2 mana per MF beyond consumption.

VT1: 80% coefficient, costs 325 mana. 35 mana during casting from MP5.

(450 + .8*K)*.0825 = 325 - 35
.8*K = 3065
K = 3831

VT1 goes infinite at 3831.

If we assume zero haste, cycle is:

VT MF MF MF MF pause 1.5 repeat, which also nets a single 5SR tick (3s from MF, 1.5s pause, 1.5s cast, gives 6s not casting).

So, spend 325+140.25*4 = 886 mana in 15 seconds. Regen is 1 full tick, 6.5 30% ticks, plus 40 static mp5. 103 mana on a full tick, 30 on a 30% tick, gives a total regen of 103+6.5*30+120 = 418. Thus, we need to deal 8360 total damage in 15 seconds in order to go infinite.

VT1 damage: 450 + .8*K
MF5 damage: 330 + .47*K

(450 + 4*330 + (.8 + .47*4)*K)*1.1*1.15*1.13*1.05*1.1 = 8360
(450 + 4*330 + (.8 + .47*4)*K)*1.65 = 8360
1770 + 2.68K = 5066
2.68K = 3296
K = 1229

Any shadow priest in 10 man gear can go infinite. Who cares?

One of the bigger problems in our scaling is that while our mana regen scaling is not fixed, mana consumption generally is, and regen generally scales *up*. As content and gear scales, we tend to become less necessary as a mana battery, and the difference between 300mp5 VT regen and 325 mp5 regen tends to be very minimal in practice - it won't usually let a DPS caster convert from mana pots to destro pots if they couldn't already, and with the 2.4 regen changes, healer regen isn't typically an issue. In reality, boosting our damage (by giving us back 6 second SWD and 15% weaving) wouldn't matter - although the 15% weaving would throw off lock/mage/rogue balance and remove fire lock viability, so maybe make Darkness 15% instead.

A priest in 1100 spell damage returning the same amount of mana as a priest in 100 spell damage actually does make sense, specifically because it's mana. The priest in 1100 spell damage can do a hell of a lot more with that mana than the undergeared one, as does the rest of his equivalently-geared group. The fact is, because spell costs are 100% static (outside of like 2 shaman relics), mana returns not only don't need to scale, but they really shouldn't scale. The spells that use the mana already scale, which means that mana return scaling would be either quadratic or exponential (in this case exponential).

If blizzard is aware of this, it's probably why shadow priest damage scales so poorly. Doubling the mana regen they gave would gum up mana regen mechanics even worse than they already are. VT was an interesting, awesome idea, but I think for the sake of allowing shadow priests to scale in a way that doesn't introduce fundamentally flawed balance mechanics, VT needs to go static, or at least scale with something other than total damage output. Scaling with haste would be interesting, wouldn't make it scale horribly out of whack, and would actually counteract the greater mana strain that haste already introduces. Scaling with crit (eg 100 mana per shadow crit) would put it's scaling in the right range with respect to gear, and give a better reason to have crit in the first place. Simply having a static portion and a scaling portion, like 50mp/5 + 2% of your damage, would fix it but be the bulkiest of the fixes.

With spirit regen, they have already allowed for root functions to be used. They could, for example, make regen equal to Dmg^X, where X is less than 1. Granted this is more processor intensive than the spirit regen model which only has to be calculated (or looked up) on gear switches, rather than on every tick of a SPriest's 2+ dots and direct damage spells.

Hi - mage butting in on this one....

Just for reference, I have a Spriest (nontailor) alt working through Tier4 content - so I have a little bit (not a ton) of perspective on both classes.

First, the whole thing about Damage = Mana that spriests do - that is the primary reason for their scaling. if mana return was constant raids would simply gear them out to an acceptable stamina level for each boss (maybe just using green "of stamina" items) and supply their mana pots forever. Any cloth dps item that drops would automatically be better serving the raid if it went to a mage or warlock because of the dps differences.

Second, we already have mages and warlocks in the game - and they are almost too similar. The fact that warlocks may or may not have a 1-4% dps advantage over mages in a straight nuke fight worries a lot of mages. They're THAT similar in what they offer the raid. Having one that scales similarly and offers similar dps with the only tradeoff being AoE vs ManaBattery (nerfed mana battery at that), well - it seems like duplication to me.

Third, in Tier5 content (where my mage is atm), nothing in the world makes me more happy than seeing a spriest in my group. I love my boomkin. And I love JoW on the boss. But the SPriest means my dps can scale up much higher than before. They are so needed and wanted that I really can't imagine them being at a disadvantage as far as raid contribution goes. I know some folks were worried about the regen changes making spriests obsolete, but that simply hasn't happened. It has given raid groups a bit more flexibility than before, but Spriests are in very very high demand, at least on my server.

Anyway, for people who wanted spriests to be a "Shadow Mage" or something like that, it is probably disappointing. But for those of us who raid next to our shadowy brethren, we <3 you guys a lot. It's pretty normal for the mages in my raid to carry extra pots to give to the spriest "just in case." We don't do that for any other class, not because we don't like the others - but just because you guys mean that much to us. So if Blizzard needs to tweak your damage output a bit or find ways to let you scale with crit or haste, that's fine. But from the inside (at a T4 level) and from the outside (at a T5 level), SPriests are far from a broken class.


EDIT: The whole thing about gear at the beginning was hyperbolic. I know that such a scenario wouldn't happen.

Your believe astonishes me. VE was at least with the "final" Version of Gruul great for shatter-healing. Staying in the water at Lurker made it quite a lot easier for those special people most raids have to deal with. There would be a lot of examples from the past, where shadowpriests did not only help greatly with healing (what ist so much discussed today), but on top give healers at that time essential mana and even on top of that dealing the most damage. Shadowpriests have been realy great whenever progressing across any instance.

In my opinion, shadowpriests already lost one raidspot - to the ret-paly. I'm fine with that, they deserve their place in the raid and it probably allows more and better options for group-synergies.

There have been reasons for the nerfs, not all of it was the Frozen Shadoweave set. Nevertheless scaling of shadowpriests would be the far better way to solve the problems, especially for the expansion. Right now shadowpriests are still fine. But somewhere past Sunwell this would probably no longer be the case. Of course there will probably be no "past Sunwell" with lvl 70 spells.


For how to do the scaling, I think dot-scaling with +haste would be quite a good way. It would still make us scale worse, but lessen the gap. In fact, all dot-classes face the same scaling issue, why not solve the very reason for that, which ist mostly dots only gaining improvements from 1 stat?

Back in the day, when Blizzard made the decision to have them unaffected by +haste, there may have been good reasons to not further buff shadowpriests and affliction-warlocks, but I don't see any of that reasons left, even when considering warlock PvP.

Crittable Mindflay + 200% crit damage would be nice.

Just because we are an "utility class" doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to dps as much as other hybrid classes; elem/enh. shamans, ret paladins, they all do more damage than us and have more or less the same utility.

Pre-BC, our Mind Flay could crit, and I think they should make it like it was before. With the greater coeff. from before too. Right now, MF is only used to fill gaps between your Mind Blast and SW: D cooldown is the priest is looking to maximize his damage output.

Haste working with DOT's would be, IMO, way too "overpowered". Maybe DOT should only beneficiate of 50% of the player's haste.

Anyway, now that the shadowpriest has nearly become a new 'class'. We don't even call them priest in our guilds but only "shadows".

No, Mind Flay could never crit. You may be thinking of Vampiric Embrace heals.

Ah my bad, mixed those two totally different things. Though, it did scale more with spell damage.

The problem with this viewpoint is that it ignores how not scaling down the time of the DoT is actually positive scaling. As it stands, you must spend X% of your time to recast VT. If that percentage goes down (that is, you spend less of your time recasting it), then you have more time to cast more DPS-worthy spells. Hence, you've scaled up.

Furthermore, there's still the problem of having mana regeneration that scales period. Adding mana regeneration increases in usefulness as you stack it...up until you have more than enough that is necessary for a given fight. The irregularities in how mana regeneration scaling work make balancing the shadow priest very, very difficult.

To me, though, the key is to maintain proportionality.

Except that in a zero haste scenario we're already keeping all of our decently scaling spells on cooldown 100% of the time. For shadow priests, "time to cast more DPS-worthy spells" equates to "time spent spamming MF because you can't cast anything else". Yes, we're still scaling up; but with the very huge caveat that we're now doing so based around the coefficient of mind flay.

There's a definite elegance in allowing haste to affect dot ticks and durations. This would allow both the dot specs to have an alternative method of scaling that doesnt involve coming up with ways of making crit or hit desirable. The downside is that this still leaves us dependent on stacking two stats instead of four, and in the long term this could cause a repeat of our current scaling issues late in WotLK. Again though, careful changes to our coefficients could easily fix this.

Another problem with haste directly affecting dot durations is that without a simultaneous change to VT our group mana return would quickly go through the roof. Unlinking VT from our damage done and changing it to a fixed amount per dot tick/spell hit would be an easy fix to this which would also scale with haste and provide a way of differentiating geared spriest mana return.

VE would not necessarily need to be changed in this way as it is only particularly powerful for group healing on fights with steady raidwide aoe damage and a minimum of burst, i.e. fights which are designed to make use of it.


Edit- Also, check wwsscoreboard. Spriests are doing significantly less than 75% of top end warlock/rogue dps. Spriest-1297. Lock- 2103 (61.6%). Rogue- 2896 (44.7%). This gap is likely only going to get larger as people gear up through sunwell.

Given how absolutely amazing VE is for 2/4 sunwell fights so far (and the necessity of mass dispel for Felmyst) I certainly don't think that we're in danger of losing our raid slots any time soon- but it would be nice to have our raw dps brought back up to par with the other hybrids. There's no good argument for why shadow priests should be doing less dps than prot specced warriors in dps gear.