My guild has only killed Bruttallis, but with Sunwell, shadowpriests have come back into our own again. With the fights as tightly tuned as they are in Sunwell the healing from VE has become something useful again. Raid leaders are actually incorporating into their strategies, instead of this annoying thing that adds to our aggro. I know all of our shadow priests have respec'd into improved VE with Sunwell. Also with the raid healing requirements on a fight like Bruttalis if you have good shadowpriests going with 3 shadowpriests so you can drop an additional healer is a completely viable strategy.

I think where the complaining is comming from is there were a lot of people who re-rolled shadowpriests at the start of TBC because we were along with warlocks at the top of the ranged DPS pyramid. Since that point, all that they see was our damage numbers decrease. It seems to me, in a perfect world, at equal gear levels we would always do 70-80% of the damage of a pure dps class and provide enough utility to make up for that at each gear level. This would mean each classes scaling co-efficient would be the same with all the gear and stats available, it would be the starting point that would be different.

remove please

IMO, it is likely that Vampiric Touch scaling will be changed sometime in Lich King, and it's because of the level 80 factor. A level 60 nuke is more mana efficient than a level 40 nuke. A level 70 nuke is more mana efficient than a level 60 nuke. I see no reason for this trend to fail at level 80.

The current VT mana regen is fixed at 5%, and this really will become more and more out-of-whack as characters level up. Already the group mana regen from a 70 shadowpriest is an entirely different order of magnitude from mana tide, innervate, or other mana buffs. It will only get more ridiculous with level scaling.


Once VT mana return is dissociated from actual damage dealt, Blizzard can improve shadowpriest DPS without breaking raid mana dynamics.

I hope this is the right thread to post this, sorry if not:

I read some of the unofficial changes to talents/spells in WotLK and two of the talents sound very interesting in my opinion:

It sounds to me like Shadow Priests rolling on healers' gear. Of course all assuming these changes really make it into the final release. What do you think?

It looks as though Blizzard wants to change the percentage from 5 to 2. From the WotLK F&F alpha DBC. Not sure what to make of the fact that the tooltip uses a human-readable, fixed percentage and the spell description has the percentage only as a placeholder string.

There also appears to be a healing priest ability that converts healing done into party mana, which will further reduce dependance on VT if it does go live. It seems we're being given AoE dots and survivability in return.

Other points of interest are that Shadow Power increases crit bonus on MB/SWD by 10% per rank, and Shadow Focus caps out at only 3% hit (3 points, down from 5) while reducing shadow spell costs.

But we all know how much the priest trees changed during TBC development... from Misery being in Disc to VT replacing Shadow Mend. So all this needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt.