[Shadow Priest] How to make us scale ? - Page 3

Muphrid · 04/21/08, 6:43 PM

Originally Posted by Atemporal

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.

Oh of course a major rebalancing is not likely until such time. And yes, an increase in the Mind Flay coefficient can help compensate for the problem of shadow priest scaling. But it can never be perfect.

But yes, the static CD length in the face of haste is a problem I've written on at length. It's fairly obvious in the context of viewing balance as the preservation of dimensionless numbers.

Eolung · 04/22/08, 7:52 AM

A few somehow disconnect ideas and opinions relative to shadow priest scaling and raid viability:

- TBC redefinition of the spec has been a huge success in terms of how popular it has become, but it's still a flawed one in my view, for 2 reasons:

1. The mana battery concept, taken to the point it has been, is a poor design decision, because it trivializes one of the game's fundamental mechanics. Of course it's not the only issue with regen, as mana pots are just as bad or even worse, but the fact remains that a shadow priest in a group basically makes any mana related decisions non relevant for its members. It also negates Blizzard's ability to use mana constraints as a restriction for encounter design.

I would do one of two things: either nerf the mana regen and increase the dps output of the class (bad in that it makes us shadow mages, good in that it makes regen more relevant in the grand scheme), or make it targeted. The latter solution is the better one in my opinion, as it can easily be done in a way that requires or scales with skill.

2. The specific mechanics that support the mana battery role are flawed in that they are broken in the long term, and thus will have to be changed. This is not bad per se, but there's uncertainty on the viability of the class after the change.

- The power of a class is only really relevant as a relative measure towards others, because the resource that really matters in the end is the raid spot being fought for. There are too many priests in raids at the moment. This is something that cannot but be frowned upon from a non biased balancing standpoint, and only to become worse with the upcome of death knights. Moreover, the non-defining spec of the class has the stronger presence, another thing that raises an eye brow.

- An admittedly not very elegant but effective way to solve shadow priest and affli lock scaling issues would be to put both shadow damage and spell damage on items, assuming they count as different stats towards item budget.

Elerion · 04/22/08, 10:28 AM

Before we can get our damage fixed, two things need to be corrected:
- VT is off the hook. Returning 400mp5 to every member of the group in a static nuke scenario is ridiculous. This immense number means that shadow priests are incredibly powerful whenever mana is a big limiting factor, and lose significant power when it's not. At around 100-200mp5 it would be more comparable to chugging potions.
- The first shadow priest provides ridiculous dps. Shadow Weaving and Misery is a nuts combo. In a typical static raid fight those two buffs provide somewhere around 1000-1500dps depending on composition. That's more than enough to cover for even our current terrible personal dps, and that's without counting VE and VT. This gimps your raid significantly if you don't have a representative of this hybrid spec online, in ways you won't see with any other spec.

Initial shadow priest raid damage boost needs to be lowered. VT returns need to be lowered (at the high end) and scaling reduced drastically (some scaling, to match the mana regen scaling on gear, should be expected).
Once we have addressed these two issues, we now have a class that doesn't get it's power quadrupled or massively cut depending on the type of encounter and the presence/non-presence of a shadow priest in the raid already.
With that taken care of, it would be time to look at personal dps (and adjust personal longevity) to something more reasonable.

LucidityAxel · 04/22/08, 11:50 AM

All they would need to do would be to change the Misery debuff to add some fixed amount of spell damage (~50 or so) to all spells cast at that target. Additional ranks of the spell could add more spell damage, and they could even allow Misery to stack. This redesigned talent would still be big a big help on the low end as an spriest is getting started without scaling ridiculously at end-game.

Similarly, the Shadow Weaving debuff could add shadow spell damage to all spells cast at the target.

This change would mirror other game play balance tweaks they've made in other classes -- moving away from a percentage bonus (multiplication) to a static bonus (addition) on the abilities. Multiplicative effects tend to scale too well at end-game, and the current Shadow Priest design is loaded with them.

Muphrid · 04/22/08, 3:42 PM

Originally Posted by LucidityAxel

All they would need to do would be to change the Misery debuff to add some fixed amount of spell damage (~50 or so) to all spells cast at that target. Additional ranks of the spell could add more spell damage, and they could even allow Misery to stack. This redesigned talent would still be big a big help on the low end as an spriest is getting started without scaling ridiculously at end-game.

Similarly, the Shadow Weaving debuff could add shadow spell damage to all spells cast at the target.

This change would mirror other game play balance tweaks they've made in other classes -- moving away from a percentage bonus (multiplication) to a static bonus (addition) on the abilities. Multiplicative effects tend to scale too well at end-game, and the current Shadow Priest design is loaded with them.

But percentage bonuses have zero effect on how proportionality changes. If anything, percentage bonuses are fundamental, and addition is, to coin a word, terribad.

In short, you have it backwards. Percentage bonuses scale evenly; they simply cannot make a class scale faster or slower than another. It's other effects that can do this.

To touch on the other comments, the dimensionless number perspective tells us that mana regeneration simply should not increase unless mana costs also increase (or mana per second usage increases). What this means is that mana regen must actually be balanced against haste. With a shadow priest at it stands, you have mana regeneration increasing with damage, which makes this a very hairy situation.

Amonra · 04/22/08, 6:27 PM

Originally Posted by Muphrid

To touch on the other comments, the dimensionless number perspective tells us that mana regeneration simply should not increase unless mana costs also increase (or mana per second usage increases). What this means is that mana regen must actually be balanced against haste. With a shadow priest at it stands, you have mana regeneration increasing with damage, which makes this a very hairy situation.

I agree with you in principle, however mana usage needs to be considered in the light of how Blizzard have balanced dps classes. Infinite mana doesn't translate into ridiculous levels of dps.

In general, mage/warlock dps is broadly comparable to rogue dps. At least until the mage/warlock runs out of mana, at which point their dps drops off a cliff.

Given that methods are available for mages/warlocks to pretty much maintain their mana supply indefinitely, if a guild wants to add a dps person then it is fairly neutral whether to add a mage/warlock or a rogue (obviously particular fights may favor one over the other).

Take away the means for mages/warlocks to sustain their mana supply and rogues would immediately become the favored source of dps. Mages/warlocks have a mana supply to start fights, but Blizzard have tended to make fights longer and longer and the starting mana pool isn't going to last the distance. 10 minute fights are pretty much the norm now, with others such as Illidan being 15+ minutes long. That kind of fight length was unheard of back in MC.

So in summary, if Blizzard want to take away means for casters to sustain their mana, they will need to radically rethink (and almost certainly shorten) their boss fights.

Muphrid · 04/22/08, 9:01 PM

No, it doesn't, but it is a matter of what tradeoffs are made to sustain the mana pool. A warlock loses dps by tapping, for instance. A mage loses dps if he has to evocate or chugs a mana pot instead of a destruction pot or a mana emerald instead of a flame cap. That is how mana regen can turn into an effective dps increase.

I'm not saying regen must disappear completely, only that the amount of regen available should be related to the amount of haste available and vice versa.

Elerion · 04/23/08, 4:52 AM

Scaling VT through haste alone would give it relative negative scaling. Since gear increases mana regeneration, the impact of a flat regen boost would be higher at low gear levels than at high.

Thus, the mana return from VT ideally needs to scale with haste AND a factor similar to the regeneration increase available on gear.

Nahiag · 04/23/08, 8:55 AM

Heya, first of all, I don't play spriest myself. I see spriest scaling worse off then other classes, this is imho due to the "lack of crit" or well, you're not able to use crit as just a low % of your damage comes from spells that can crit. Though, with the "new" changes to haste, shouldn't this be the new stat to aim for? Generaly, most ppl know that hit is a way important stat, for any class. And seeing spell haste rating being just as expsnsive, or should I say cheep, as hit rating for 1% hit // 1% spellhaste I wouldn't be supriced if you would benefit quite well from the stat. Question is though if there's any good gear with +haste on.

Only question is if you can keep your mana up or not, and seeing those calcs in the first page it looks like you should be able to.

Muphrid · 04/23/08, 9:39 AM

Originally Posted by Elerion

Scaling VT through haste alone would give it relative negative scaling. Since gear increases mana regeneration, the impact of a flat regen boost would be higher at low gear levels than at high.

Thus, the mana return from VT ideally needs to scale with haste AND a factor similar to the regeneration increase available on gear.

I didn't say that VT should scale solely via haste. But to be more precise, let me elaborate on what proportionality means for shadow priests.

One of the core principles of proportionality is that balance between classes and spells is determined by a unique set of dimensionless numbers. The common dimensionless numbers to look at (the ones that spawned the investigation of the concept) are the ratios of one spell's damage to another's. The ratio of Mind Flay to Shadow Bolt, for instance. This is dimensionless, as damage/damage yields unity (1). The number is the same regardless of how you "choose" to measure damage (if you could imagine, for instance, milli-damage or kilo-damage).

I will often refer to "even" scaling. To me, an effect scales "evenly" or, perhaps better to say, "appropriately," if it does not change various dimensionless numbers related to the spell. Applying Curse of Shadows, for example, allows all Arcane and Shadow spells to scale evenly with each others' damage values. In practice, it's unusual to say that the uptime of various buffs like CoS or Misery will change substantially as gear levels rise; this is why percentage multipliers are typically irrelevant to a discussion of scaling. How often those percentage multipliers are in play doesn't change much; therefore, they aren't a big factor in how the dimensionless numbers change with gear, which is what happens when one effect scales faster than another. Note that this is true regardless of what you choose to come up with a dimensionless number.

Now then, what dimensionless numbers are important to shadow priests? Aside from the typical ones (ratios of damage values or DPS values), there are the ratios of GCD/CD for SWD, cast time / CD for Mind Blast, GCD/DoT time for SWP and VT...a multitude of time-derived dimensionless numbers. The consequences of these numbers changing can rather depend, but in general, they are decreasing, which means more and more of your time is spent on the Mind Flay button. There is also the ratio of mana spent to mana generated (mana/mana = unity). This is, without a doubt, increasing. As appealing as that may be to you, this is very troubling from a balance standpoint. There is, frankly, no reason for a shadow priest to become a "more efficient" converter of his own mana to others' mana. A faster converter is fine; but what we have now is very, very dangerous. You could imagine a simple example, where all values in terms of HP (damage, healing, and health) increase proportionally (which is what I call a "balance-preserving transformation"). This is balance-preserving because any dimensionless number should remain the same.

But on the surface, there is a paradox: if I increase all damage, healing, and HP by a factor of 10, doesn't this mean I restore 10 times the mana with VT? If this were the case, well, you could see how broken that gets. The solution is to realize that VT itself has a dimensioned number as key to its functionality: 5% of shadow damage dealt is converted to mana for the party. 0.05 mana/damage. If damage increases by a factor of 10, then 0.05 mana/damage becomes 0.005 mana per damage in order to maintain proportionality.

Kangrave · 04/23/08, 10:37 AM

Well, I just posted this on the official forums, tell me what you think.

It will be nice to have some intelligent input (which is hard to come by on the official forums)for once.

Today, I was thinking about the reason Blizzard most likely feels they can't let shadow DPS scale properly with the other DPS classes, and in turn must ruin the shadow priest class for PVP. It mostly likely has to do with the fact that the more dmg we do, the more mana and health we return. So if they allowed us to scale properly, we would be too imbalanced in raids. This means Blizzard feels that they have to chose to put the PVE needs of the game over the PVP needs of the game. I however, feel the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I have thought of a way (which I'm sure many have thought of before, and, I'm sure there will be something wrong with the suggestion, as there always is... but I'm gonna throw it out there anyway) to maybe fix this problem.

The suggestion is this: change each rank of the shadow priest's ability vampiric touch to have an internal limit to how much mana it will return regardless of how much damage the shadow priest is doing. Now, of course we wouldn't want the limit being too low, and I don't know where the limit should be set myself, but I'm sure theer is a happy level where each rank can have a return cap.

What I mean to say is if a priest with +1350 dmg is returning say 90 (random numbers, both of them) mana a second to his party members, and blizzard feels that that is the point where if they allowed shadow priest damage to scale any further it would be too imbalanced, then make that the limit. Meaning that a shadow priest with +1350 dmg will be returning 90 mana a second to his party, and a priest with +1450 dmg will be returning 90 mana a second also. However, those with less than +1350 will still be returning less than 90 as they haven't reached the internal limit on mana return yet. This would allow Blizzard to let priest DPS scale much better.

This means that there is still an incentive to get better gear for a shadow priest who has already reached +1350 shadow damage (and once reaching lvl 80 becomes an option, since the internal limit is based on ranks they can just change the internal limit with each new rank of VT as they feel needed) since they will still see an increase in general DPS, just not too huge a boost in the utility part of their spec, which blizzard feels would be the main problem if they alowed the class to scale "properly". This also has the side effect of possibly allowing the shadow priests's DPS to increase just enough to be more viable when facing Brutallus' enrage timer without gaining too much utility.

I am also aware that Vampiric Embrace might become a problem if the shadow priests were allowed to scale better (giving the spec the ability to PVP well). What I propose is that they could also either also put an internal return limit on vampiric embrace or change the base vampiric embrace and improved vampiric embrace % values to return less, or do both.

These proposed changes would allow the shadow priests to both be able to continue to have their raid utility but also allow blizzard to change their scaling to let them scale well enough that they would once again be PVP viable as a damage class. Blizzard would not even have to let them scale fully as well as the other damage classes, but at least better than they scale now.

And yes, my gear is not that great right now, and no, I don't really have an arena rating. However, I have heard the complaints from those with both and still feel that I have thought of a viable solution that is worth posting and possibly getting flamed for.

Thanks for listening, and I hope the people at Blizzard, even if they don't agree with me, at least see and consider my suggestion.

Thanks for making a great game Blizzard, this suggestion is just something that hopefully you feel can make your already fantastic game even better.

Cosimé · 04/23/08, 11:01 AM

Regarding the scaling of the mana-returns, I wonder what Blizzards plans for lvl 80 are? Compared to lvl 60, our +dmg values and the damage itself more than doubled. If this is what can be expected for lvl 80 too, with current VT, will all the manacosts of any lvl 80 spell of any class in the game be double their lvl 70 values to keep the balancing?

dreadai · 04/23/08, 11:33 AM

Originally Posted by Cosimé

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.

Wow, you show some lack of knowledge in this post tucked in among some relevant points.
Yes, Shadow Priests have always been great at adding to healing *if* there was not a meaningful threat cap. cf Lurker/Brutallus fights. In almost any other fight, VE is next to useless. Look back at the talent specs for PvE Shadow Priests who have not yet reached Sunwell, you will see a lack of the Imp VE talent. Mainly because the healing portion of the spell is just too little to deal with AE raid damage.

To your point about 'losing' a raid spot to a Ret Paladin, you need to consider that what you provide to the raid roughly equates to what they provide, but for different classes. Your debuffs massively power-up mana based dps, caster classes and healers. His massively power up melee and to an extent caster classes (If he judges wisdom)
It all depends on your raid composition, bringing a ret Paladin if you have stacked magical dps is a wasted slot, similarly bringing 3 Shadow Priests when you have only a couple of caster dps aside from them is wasteful. If you have lost your raid spot to a Ret Paladin then it would indicate an overall shift in your Raid Leader's overriding tactics, not the lack of utility that you provide.

I think that in the current iteration of WoW, Shadow Priests are pretty much the best balanced hybrid class out there. We have utility, coupled with longevity and more than half decent personal dps. There are, for sure, considerations for WotL when it arrives. Checking the math, and info here on EJ and over on SP.com, there is an acknowledgement that Blizzard will need to reduce the amount of mana restored by VT come 3.0 since at ~2200 + Damage a Shadow Priest becomes utterly mana neutral excluding fiend. While this level of gearing is not currently possible, we proved here earlier, a T6 Shadow Priest is pretty much mana neutral using fiend and the occasional pot already.

Should we scale better? Significantly No, our DPS is fine. Add 15% of every Destruction warlock's dps, 5% of every caster's dps, then add the dps increase that is gained from 4 other casters effectively having infinite mana. A while back, when we were first beginning to think about Brutallus, we had the discussion about Shadow Priests being brought, and the overwhelming desire was that we had Shadow Priests for healers and Casters as the drop in direct dps from the class is more than paid back by the increases in RDPS by having 2-3 Shadow Priests there to maintain debuffs during movement periods, provide mana for all mana users and finally to add some healing power.

If we wanted to increase DPS by a reasonable amount, give Shadow Priests a 200% crit modifier, at least that would give us something to think about when gearing rather than stacking one stat.

Muphrid · 04/23/08, 1:46 PM

Originally Posted by Kangrave

Well, I just posted this on the official forums, tell me what you think.

It will be nice to have some intelligent input (which is hard to come by on the official forums)for once.

Today, I was thinking about the reason Blizzard most likely feels they can't let shadow DPS scale properly with the other DPS classes, and in turn must ruin the shadow priest class for PVP. It mostly likely has to do with the fact that the more dmg we do, the more mana and health we return. So if they allowed us to scale properly, we would be too imbalanced in raids. This means Blizzard feels that they have to chose to put the PVE needs of the game over the PVP needs of the game. I however, feel the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I have thought of a way (which I'm sure many have thought of before, and, I'm sure there will be something wrong with the suggestion, as there always is... but I'm gonna throw it out there anyway) to maybe fix this problem.

The suggestion is this: change each rank of the shadow priest's ability vampiric touch to have an internal limit to how much mana it will return regardless of how much damage the shadow priest is doing. Now, of course we wouldn't want the limit being too low, and I don't know where the limit should be set myself, but I'm sure theer is a happy level where each rank can have a return cap.

I'd be more inclined to go with each spell returning a fixed amount of mana (but it could be different for each spell, or perhaps the same) when it hits a target that has VT up.

LucidityAxel · 04/23/08, 2:39 PM

Originally Posted by Muphrid

I'd be more inclined to go with each spell returning a fixed amount of mana (but it could be different for each spell, or perhaps the same) when it hits a target that has VT up.

They already change spell damage/healing coefficients based on the rank of a spell; they could do the same with mana return.