Kink

I know a lot of people suggest you bring along a shadowpriest to help your locks DPS on Patchwerk. But I am curious as to what sort of sustained DPS the priest themselves are getting on the fight.

Or failing that, what sort of DPS shadow priests expect to put out after the patch on any boss fight (assuming no specific reisstance or vulnerability).

I have never played a priest myself, shadow or otherwise, so I'll appeal to your desire to show off your DPS in answering this question =).


And I tried to search the forums for an answer but I keep getting:
Which is just plain mean and tbh, a personal attack on me by the evil monorail cat.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Fithvael

I'm hoping to test this myself very soon. Beckon has released a few PvE videos you can find here to give ou a decent estimation: http://hosted.filefront.com/beckon

Edit: You can also find some very informative work being done on www.shadowpriest.com, more specificaly here: http://www.shadowpriest.com/viewforum.php?f=13

 

Kink

Cheers.

If anyone has any numbers from current raids, I'd appreciate it too.

Mainly I am curious to see how Vampiric touch is going to affect our raids. So getting a good base DPS value should help calculate the average extra mana to be expected from a decently geared shadow priest able to keep this spell and all other damage abilities going.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Gogusrl

we already have a priest with almost 500 spell damage (leveling gear :) ) that can`t wait to go shadow and check it out next tuesday. very excited about that as a warlock since i get 20% damage increase (15% shadow weaving + 5% misery).

 

Ayr

A quick look into my very crude Excel mini-database yields the following:
-with +600 dmg from gear
-with a talent build that includes Vampiric Touch, Darkness, Shadowform, 5/5 Shadow Weaving, Misery, Focused Mind, Imp SW:P
-CoS on the target
-using lvl 60 spells and talents, after Wednesday's patch - so no Meditation

SW:P R8 will do 3512 dmg for 470 mana over 24s, for 146.33 DPS and 7.47 DPM
MF R6 will do 1290 dmg for 174 mana over 3s, for 430 DPS and 7.41 DPM
VT R1 will do 1764 dmg for 325 mana over 15s, for 117.60 DPS and 5.43 DPM
MB R8 will do 1302 dmg for 297 mana over 1.5s, for 868.00 DPS and 4.38 DPM (has 8s cooldown that can be reduced up to 5.5s with talents, and should probably be downranked for better DPM)

A simple "keep the dots up and spam MF" strategy will yield 694 DPS, that returns 35.74 MPS to everyone in their party (178 mp5) and heals for 214.2 HPS (equivalent to a 642.6 renew).

Over a 2 min period, the priest will be using 5 SW:P, 8 VT and 33 MF (rounded down), for a total of 10692 mana. He gains back 3712 mana from his VT alone, so that leaves roughly 7k mana spend in 2 min. MMPs are 1800 mana, Magebloods are another 12 mp5 = 288 mana, and NDBs are another 425 mana. Total mana expended in 2 min = 4467. Which means he will probably need at least 1 innervate to go through the whole fight, but the advantages are there: 5% extra spelldmg for every spellcaster, 15% extra shadow damage, 178 mp5 to every other person in his group (if they are healers already the innervate has paid off), and a 214.2 HPS for the warlocks - if any - in his group.

The DPS can be increased by interweaving downranked MB for roughly the same DPM but higher damage. It then gets really complicated to get the best cycle of MB in, how many talent points should one use in Imp MB, are JoW and BoW present (these 2 are pretty much vital before TBC), but this should do for a preliminary view on Shadowpriest DPS at 60.

 

Kink

<3

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Boevis

Also consider the effects of VE Healing for Thaddius. A MB with +600 dmg from gear is going to be doing (assuming Ayr is correct) 3775 damage to Thaddius, resulting in a heal on your party for 755. Between MF and SW:P right now, our shadow priest never needs assistance healing his group.

edit: I know you mean well, but a post consisting of nothing but quoting and "ty" "grats" "lol" "<3" and the like are generally frowned upon here.

 

• Nfariessence

A SPriest would be much much better off using Dark or Demonic Runes for 1.5-3k mana (they can crit too!) and are on the same cooldown as NDB. Any warlock in your guild would likely be glad to go help you farm, especially if you had them assigned to your party on a fight like Patchwerk. Me and a pally farm 10-20 of them per hour in Azshara, and make decent gold while we do it (I take down about 25 mobs all at once in the one big camp - it takes about 60 seconds).

 

Ayr

Indeed, up to now the biggest drawback to Shadowpriests being viable in Naxx was the limited number of debuffs. One Shadowpriest used 4 debuffs (SW:P, VE, MF, SW) by himself, with 3 others for every other Shadowpriest in the raid.

Fast forward to 70, with Paladins for BoW and the godly JoW for both sides, 40 debuffs, new ranks of spells, a very cool new spell in SW:D, shadowfiend for incredible mana regen, and easy to get gear (the 132 +dmg mace from Shadow Labs to name one), and Shadowpriests will be indeed viable for raiding. And if you stack 2 or 3 of them in the same group, they will feed each other mana to be able to spam max rank MB and SW:D on cooldown, for top tier DPS even in long fights. The fact that they can get massive aggro reduction doesn't hurt, either ;)

 

• Arawethion

This reminds me--will VE uber-healing on Thaddius disappear in the patch, much like giant Ignites?

Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.

 

Ayr

Indeed, you are perfectly right. I'm just too used to NDBs from doing my herb farming runs in Felwood, but yes Runes are vastly superior. You don't even have to worry about accidentally killing yourself with a Rune crit, VE will heal you up (yes we actually had someone do that on one of our Patch kills, we still tease him to this day).

 

Lumi

One of the biggest impacts on shadow priest longevity is JoW/BoW. While learning Patchwerk, Horde generally doesn't give mana using dps mana totems (mana spring/mana tide). Alliance doesn't make any sacrifices from putting both of their mana buffs up (besides a global cooldown from a paladin I guess). Of course the next patch might give shadow priests enough dps to ignore that faction distinction.

 

theemus

Very true, I have dpsed on most fights in Naxx as a priest and I spend a ton of money on dps and mana consumables just to keep up. I'll have to check my screenshots for any dmg meters but on patchwerk the locks seemed to do quite a bit better. The difference a shadow priest makes in a lock group on a fight like grob or an anub attempt where he evades a few times is pretty big.

I have pretty solid dps gear I think around ~640 shadow dmg at the moment. Can't wait for vampiric touch ; ).

 

Kink

My bad, I was at work and found that post to be pretty much all I needed, so I just wanted to let him know I appreciated it in the small window I had between chasing up coders and yelling at my PC for not doing what it should have done =).

So far it looks like a shadow priest will be very useful as a healer/manaregen/DPs person in TBC given that they can do all of those jobs simultaneously and we are limited to 25man raids (currently)

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

• Glass

I really like the viability of a shadowpriest at 70 in the expansion. They've given us alot of things that we have been asking for. Unfortunately, the biggest enemy of a shadow priest seems to be the stigma of being a "priest". It's difficult to even get the most level-headed well informed raid leaders to let you go full shadow and not have to heal. For as much as I love shadow, I hate healing.

I know I rolled the wrong class.. yadda yadda, but I don't want to dress like a drag queen (mage) or the pain of a pet class (warlock) and i'm sorry, but nothing in the game looks as cool as shadowform. With the expansion we're finally getting raid viability but IMO it's still going to be a precious few (as it is now) that will be "allowed" to stay full shadow.

It's a real shame, it's such a cool concept... I heal by doing damage, how awesome and twisted is that? /sigh.. back to my rogue where my only option is to damage... (grumble)

 

Ayr

Viability is something that cares of that. Think back in early 2005, many were laughing at the ideea of a fury warrior doing DPS in raids. Preposterous, warriors are there to tank! And if you really want to DPS, you go get one of them 2 handers and MS away. Look where fury warriors are now.

 

Darkmantle

It shouldn't, VE does haeling based on a percentage of your damage, unless the healing on each person is getting the percentage increase as well nothing should change.
This would seem to indicate that there is no double dipping in the healing done. Ignites are so uber on thaddius because the multiplier is applied on the fireball so you get a big ignite but then again on each tick of ignite so it is far more powerful than it should be.

 

• Glass

I know this may make some people throw up in thier mouth a bit.. but I would have really liked to have been able to spec so far down into shadow that it would effectively disable your healing talents. I don't mean going so deep that you couldn't do any holy/disc spells, I mean effectively removing any healing spells outside of VE. That way they could have boosted our dps to dmg caster levels and not had the imbalance in pvp of being able to heal yourself.

Something like a 51 point shadow talent that increases our critical strike bonus by 100% and our damage coefficients of shadow spells by 70% but removes access to all non passive healing spells. /drool

Sorry for the slight derail.. just daydreaming

 

• Arawethion

Ok, never mind. I thought VE was bigger on Thaddius currently.

Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.

 

◊ Kaubel

We're a little late this time on our weekly Patchwerk thread.

 

Elerion

The one massive problem with shadow priests has not been addressed properly in TBC. MF, the main nuke, scales far worse than it's supposed to. They upped the scaling a bit (56% at the moment, I believe), but it's still a far cry from the ~81% it should have to make shadow priest dps scale on par with frost mage dps.

The result will be that poorly geared shadow priests will once again be massively overpowered in TBC, midrange shadow priests will be decent, and as the raid gears up, their usefulness will fade away until they're a subpar raid slot better occupied by a real dps class.

God how I wish they would nerf the base values of MF and up the scaling.

 

◊ Bekah

There's probably less than 100 people in the entire game who could back this up with epeen screenshots, and I'd guess less than 5 reading the thread. =P Current naxx dps priests are rare, and more rare still is to not be assigned to healing patchwerk regardless of spec.

We had one 18 healer night on Patch that I got to dps for. Numbers weren't impressive, but I was saving all of my dps pots for Thaddius attempts later in the evening. I got informed after the trash clear that I was going to be dps... Talk about putting me out in the spotlight. wheee. I think I was 16th on the damage meters, 16th on the effective healing meters (beat a DC. yay me. I did get pretty close to the next nearest though). No Shadow Word: Pain (the warlocks begged me to let them have the debuff slot so they could run some number tests of thier own) but I did use top rank everything- flay flay blast cycle. 2 mana pots, 2 dark runes, mageblood, brilliant mana oil and I think a cheap-o arcane elixir. Essentially beat the tanks in damage and beat the dc in healing- although the warlocks experienced much joy and happiness as 2 broke into the top 10 for the first time ever on patch.

There's lots of potential for theorycrafting available, but the end of the line is that VT/57% mf co-efficient makes raiding much much more comfortable/viable/happy making than it currently is.

I'm a monster on Thaddius though- top 15 damage, top 12 healing the closest attempt so far. Too bad I can't solo him =/


Edit:
2.0 hard numbers start on Page 4, although the discussion of OVERALL relevance (rather than specifically Patchwerk, the slight topic change keeping this thread from the shit heal lol) starts around page 2.

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Elerion

It doesn't change the fact that however you look at it, shadow priests get less returns from gear than pure dps classes. If shadow priests end up in the top 10% of damage meters initially in TBC it doesn't mean this justifies the poor scaling and it's a non-issue, it just means that the base MF values are too high. Upping the scaling from 40-something to 57% helps, but it really only means that it takes more gear before the difference is apparent.

Scaling is so integral to an item-centric MMO that I really don't understand why they don't pay more attention to it.

Note that VT will cause these calculations to be harder, since mana usage doesn't scale with gear. Higher VT returns from more gear thus means that longevity of the Shadow Priest's group scales faster than the damage. This will move the shadow priest gradually from damage dealer to mana battery as gear improves, as their damage falls behind but the relative value of VT increases. That would justify slightly lower scaling of damage if this is the intended path of their scaling. I'm not sure Blizzard has considered this though. VE does not face the same issue, since incoming damage generally scales, meaning that VE does not justify lower damage scaling.

 

Ayr

Agreed. However, it is not a big problem until the shadowpriest reaches his maximum possible DPS. Right now, the largest limitation is mana. Just looking at the spells and their mana costs, it simply is not possible for a shadowpriest to use all his abilities on cooldown without running oom quickly.

This is where VT enters the frame, and introduces a new scaling pattern. The more +dmg you do, the more mana you get back, which leads the shadowpriest affording to use his more mana expensive cooldowns, which yields more DPS. This is somewhat similar to warriors, where gear upgrades scaled far better than for rogues simply because it increased their rage generation and allowed them to use more cooldowns.

There is ofcourse a point where shadowpriests won't be limited by mana. Starting from that point the scaling on mindflay will start to matter more - although less than one would assume, since if you use SW:D and MB every time they're up you optimally have time for only one MF in between cooldowns.


edit: Now that I think about it, it's actually in the early phases that the poor scaling of MF is detrimental. Hitting 70 is not similar at all to hitting 60, you actually get some massive +dmg gear opposed to just "of the Eagle" gear (I have +650 shadow at 70 atm, and I haven't tried really hard, no enchantments at all). And at this point, even with an increased mana pool, you cannot realistically sustain a max rank SW:D-MB-MF cycle for long before running oom. So you naturally turn to a MF-MF cycle for the same 6s period (keeping dots up in both cases ofcourse). Where your odd 600 +dmg scales worse than when you have, I don't know, +1200 dmg and you can actually do the SW:D-MB-MF cycle. MB and SW:D both scale at 1.5/3.5, so a larger part of your DPS scales properly than one had when he just dinged 70.