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.

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.

I think allowing DoTs and channeled effects to crit could replace at least some of number two. Such a change would also help to address a glaring problem with caster itemization, in that crit is such a waste of stat points for us at the moment.

Crittable Mindflay + 200% crit damage would be nice.

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.

Why would it be overpowered for haste to scale with DoTs?

Scenario

Imagine a scenario with a simplistic class (I will call Easypriest)which has only 2 spells to cast. The first is a DoT which takes 10 seconds to cast, lasts for 20 seconds and does 2k dps (while ticking), i.e. 40k total damage per cast.

The second spell is a simple channelled damage spell which does 1k dps for as long as we channel it.

Results with no haste

Over a typical 20 second period with no haste Easypriest can do the following:

1 x DoT = 10 seconds casting = 40k damage.
10 seconds channelling = 10k damage

Total damage = 50k.

We will decide that 50k damage per 20 seconds puts this imaginary class exactly where it should be compared to other classes. So, say Easypriest does 75% of the damage of a straight dps class, it should scale just as well as them such that with better gear it still do 75% of their damage.

Results with haste and current DoT rules

Now imagine adding 100% haste under current haste rules (i.e. just affects cast time). A normal casting class (e.g. mage/destro lock) would expect this to add 100% to their dps (assuming no GCD issues and no mana shortages). Our simplistic scenario gets a rather different result:

1x DoT = 5 seconds casting = 40k damage.
15 seconds channelling = 30k damage

Total damage = 70k.

So 100% haste has only increased damage by 40% and Easypriest is scaling very badly.


Results with haste and proposed hasted DoT rules

Now imagine if haste fully affected DoTs (i.e. both cast time and duration)

2x DoT = 10 seconds casting = 80k damage
10 seconds channelling = 20k damage

Total damage = 100k.

So now 100% haste has increased our damage by 100%, keeping Easypriest in line with other dps classes.


Comparison to real shadowpriests

Now, this is an oversimplified scenario, however it isn’t too far from reality as far as shadowpriests are concerned, just very much exaggerated.

Our highest dps spells are on cooldowns which are not affected by haste. This means that additional haste merely allows us more time to cast our lowest dps spell – mindflay. Allowing the GCD to be reduced by haste has helped somewhat, but we still scale pretty badly with haste compared to mages and destro locks.

Blizzard have compensated for this to some extent by massively boosting our ungeared damage. This is why we start out dominating the damage meters in Kara/Gruul, end up being pretty reasonable in late T5/early T6 and are going to head rapidly downhill as Sunwell progresses.

Unfortunately at this stage they can’t just fix the problem by allowing DoT spells (and other spell cooldowns) to be reduced by spell haste. That would simply mean that our dominant performance in early gear will be transferred into the end game. They need to tackle both problems at once, and realistically that isn’t going to happen before WotLK.

What I hope they will do in WotLK is to ensure that our new ranks of spells are less powerful to start with, but fully scale with haste. Critical hits are a similar issue to haste, and so hopefully they will take the opportunity to do the same kind of exercise and allow all our spells to crit.

With respect, it's still scaling up. I mean, if you're going to change how shadow priests scale, you might as well do so in a proportional fashion.

But changing a coefficient (that is, increasing how well you scale with spell damage) by a fixed amount cannot make up for how crit and hit would help you scale, for the stacking effect that occurs when multiple stats are increased rather than just one stat.

Indeed. At present, VT allows you a fixed DPM ratio in a sense: the mana returned is a fixed percentage of damage done. This is at odds with how DPM scales for everything else in the game (that is, it goes up).

If I recall correctly Blizzard's provided reason for Mind Flay's poor coefficient was that recieving full damage in addition to having a slowing effect was imbalanced in PvP. An interesting TBC inscription would be: Mind flay gains an additional x% from your bonus damage effects but no longer has a slowing effect.

If you need help understanding how shadow priests are limited by the interaction between dot cycles, static mb/swd cooldowns and haste there's a post by Amonra at the top of this page that explains it quite well.

I'm not sure there's much else to say on this subject until the 51 point talents are revealed, as anything outside of a MF coefficient adjustment would likely qualify as major rebalancing and not be taken care of until wrath hits anyways.