◊ Bekah

They are paying attention to it. I was on Beta when we got 81% scaling and while it was lovely- given the "infinite mana" issue at around 1200+dmg, it had to be scaled back. Blizzard is wary of another fury warrior episode and, frankly, VT is simply too strong to give to us if we scale at 81% given normal expected upgrades to raiding gear and pots. I can already acquire 1000+dmg vs undead if I go nuts with the pots and flasks, and I would be shocked if, between new enchants and pots, I can't acquire another 2-300+dmg.

That's not to say that scaling was the right solution. I'm looking at my glass half full and looking forward to the upgrades we are given rather than bitching about the ones we're not getting. I don't like the stress level associated with spazzing out about how my view of the class and the designers view differ.

We are better off in beta, by far, than we are in live. We will suffer scaling issues, but they could not be avoided given the insane amount of talented scaling we receive and our ability to reflect back 10% hp and 5% mp of the damage we do.

Sure I'd love to be broken. I think they're trying to avoid that tho =P

 

Elerion

Actually, our huge talented scaling only makes up for the lack of ability to crit and various critboosting talents. I thought the correct scaling coefficient would be lower too, because of those talents, until I made a spreadsheet of shadow priests versus frost mages and applied talents. The correct coefficient for keeping MF spam scaling at the same rate as FB spam was actually 81%.

VE is irrelevant with regards to scaling, since incoming damage scales at roughly the same rate as outgoing. In PvP it's obviously true, and in most PvE content it will be true as new content is made. If it's balanced that a shadow priest does 600dps and 200hps while a mage does 900dps, then the same ratios would be balanced if the numbers were twice as high and incoming damage twice as high.

VT on the other hand, is troubling, as you said. Since mana costs never scale, added damage will increase relative endurance in addition to damage. That creates complications when calculating "correct" scaling.

 

Rennoko

I see what your saying about the scaling issue, and its always bad to be on THAT side of the road, but thats the price you pay as a off-spec priest. Just like shaman/druids, you cant have the ability to cast heals no matter how weak, and expect to match the DPS of a mage.

Shadow priests already have much higher survivability than they did in the past, with very high damage reduction. Asking to scale and/or dps equivalently to a mage seems a bit over the top. While i sympathize with your lower coefficient, its still pretty damn awsome for a healing capable class.

 

Elerion

God. No.

Scaling should not be worse because it's an offspec. Base damage should be lower.

If scaling is off, it just means that the shadow priest is overpowered compared to pure dps classes when poorly geared, and underpowered when well geared. Ideally, they should deal a certain percentage of the dps a pure dps class is capable of at all levels of gear.

For what it's worth, every single dps offspec in the game scales better. Balancedruid, smitepriest, feraldruid, elemshaman, etc. Elemshamans actually have some of the most absurd scaling in the game, due to the huge cast time reduction on lightning bolt. And all of those actually retain the ability to toss emergency heals while dpsing.

 

LuckyAC

Did you acount for mindblast and SW:D? That 56% for mindflay gets boosted by 40% talent scalars making it like 78.4%. You have SWP up which get 140% over 15 seconds, which is 28% over 3 seconds, making a total of 106.4% (but without crits). However, you also VT, which gets 140% for a 1.5 second cast, and also Mindblast and Shadow Word: Death, which I think scale better than frostbolt, since they crit, have a concurrent DOT and get the 40% talent scalars without any penalties.

 

Elerion

I did not include VT, MB and SWD. I did include SWP, which actually made the scaling worse, but I used the old DoT +damage calculation, which is inferior to the new one. With old formula, it had worse scaling than frostbolt, since it can't crit and doesn't benefit from a cast time reduction. MB and SWD are not really realistic in current scenarios, since mana is the limiting factor. That could change with VT scaling, which I did not model. It was a 1 hour project for the sake of curiosity.

The exact numbers were vague because of the simplified model, but I was mainly looking for a ballpark. The 56% coefficient of current beta scaling was on the other side of town.

 

LuckyAC

No doubt mana is the limiting factor. However, we already know shadow priests are great with crappy gear, and the more you scale, the less of a limit mana will be, since you will have more intellect and regen and get more mana back from VT.

BTW I don't see how an instant DOT can make scaling worse. You get the damage simultaneously to your direct damage, so any benefit from +damage is entirely free - you just add it.

 

• Althor

In a 120 second, 0 delay between cast cycle with 2*VE, 5*SW:P, 8*VT, 12*MB, 15*SW:D, 19*MF with a 23% crit rate and not counting resists (that cycle by the way ensures that VE, SW:P and VT are always up), then a Shadow Priest will be doing (assuming a 10% Curse of Shadows):

(614.34 + 0.556328*D) DPS

Where D is the amount of +dmg gear.

(Calculations can be found at http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?p=5651#5651 )

So a 55.6% DPS scaling rate. That's definitely up on what a Shadow Priest's scaling was in the current game (around 33%) but it's still no match for some other classes. Still though, a Shadow Priest brings so much more than just pure DPS that I don't mind this *too* much. I imagine in the next expansion pack we'll get a look at again. As long as there's a benefit to bringing at least 1 Shadow Priest for DPS I'll be happy ;)

 

• Vema

I will bite, but what you say is true, every patchwerk kill but this one I have ended up healing


The Warlocks ranked 5th and 9th were in my party, and both were DS spec with succi sacced. The 18th and 21st were both SM spec and in MT groups.

I am slightly undergeared, with flask + greater arcane(ran out of shadow power), my +shadow to undead was 678. Even with full mana pots/oil/etc I still run myself good and dry much faster then when I heal. My dps was also hurt by the fact I came out of shadowform at about 40% to heal up the MT group warlocks, and the pallies let BoWis expire 3 min into the fight. (my base +damage is 493 and +mp5 around 50.) Also, my guild told me not to use SW:P on patchwerk as I already eat enough debuff slots :P

I am looking forward to patchwerk next week, I expect that i can do over 175k, around a normal hunter-level, with the addition of the new PvE toybox shadow gets.

 

Elerion

It's not free, it costs 1,5 second of cast time. It does add significantly more dps to the cycle, but the more +damage you get, the more of the damage is done with mind flay. This means that the insane base dps of talented swp becomes less and less relevant, until a point where it stabilizes. It's just a result of dots being unspammable, so the spammable spell eventually ends up doing the majority of the damage. When the spammable spell of the dotting class scales worse than the other, it will make the scaling worse by adding dots into the calculation, since the ungeared dps will be so high on the dot.

 

heel

My numbers put DPS at about 650 on Patchwerk with 700 +dmg and no consumables, equating to 200hp/s healed on each of two tanks with VE. Not too shabby.

 

◊ Bekah

For general informations sake and to back up the concerns with an 81% co-efficient, here are some dpm numbers calculated out a while back by one of my fellow shadow priests.

From Harmann (I take absolutely no credit for the theorycrafting here)
http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.ph...er=asc&start=0 (5th post down)
Lowering the base damage cannot compensate for the % based increases that shadow priests aquire through talents. The better we get, the more exponentially better we get, and with a high coefficient on our base damage spell, we reach the point where not only can we go forever (the infinite mana concern) but we can ALSO reach a point where everyone in our group can achieve infinite mana as well.

You can't get mindflay to 0 mana with 81% coefficient until around 1750+dmg, but consider M/5, Meditation, major mana pots, dark runes, and mana regen foods, all of which lower the +dmg required to regen while using top dps. Don't even think about 2 shadow priest groups with 3 other dps casters who simply never, ever, run out of mana.

This is BECAUSE of scaling, not in spite of scaling. Direct correlation- an increase to our coefficient is a decrease to the amount of +dmg needed to break 0 mana cost to dps.

I assume that when they did the retune on dps they took a look at all of the classes and decided that, rather than limiting the non-set +dmg gear potentials to remain under some artificially low cap to keep shadow priests from becoming FurryWarriorV2.0 and instead of removing the single strongest advantage a shadow priest has in end game raiding (VT is insane and I expect people to be slapped with harsh reality of it come Dec5) that they instead decided to bring our scaling down to 57% which increases the potential +dmg caps in the game significantly (I think I read in another thread that it was well over 2000+dmg, which is perfectly reasonable to me)

It is intentional that we are limited in our dps- we provide incredibly strong boosts to our raids/parties. 5% spelldamage, 15% shadow damage, scaling +mana (for reference at 600dps we give a 150m/5 boost to everyone in our group.), and DPS that's never going to match, exactly, the pure dps classes that we are boosting.

I'd argue that overall raid dps is close to equal if you exchange a mage for a shadow priest given the party buffs available and the increase in damage potential of everyone around us. But how much of that is put under may name on the damage meters? I'll place below the mages and rogues.

In short: We are significantly better after 2.0 than before. While our dps will still not top the charts, we provide strong boosts to the raid to compensate for any lack on a personal side. This doens't mean that you'll want some holy priest noobing it up with stratholme/scholomance blues because omg shadow is too leet- but if your guild has been smart and allowed one or two priests to gear up sufficiently well (nothing less than 500+dmg kids- gear from BWL+ just like you'd ask of ANY dps class on Patchwerk) AND you can provide sufficient healing- there's no reason not to have a solid dedicated shadow priest in your guild.

 

◊ Kalman

Much like HOTs, can't see why you'd put a shadow priest into a tank group rather than a group with your locks. 200 HP/s helps them a lot more than a HS tank who'll be back up to full quickly enough that a large portion of your VE will go to waste.

Not to mention VT mana regen.

http://mmorchive.net

The WoW forums, explained:

 

• Cryect

Except who do you normally put the locks with ;)

I need to do something useless.

 

Elerion

I doubt you will be able to fit a shadow priest with two tanks in TBC. Warlock, paladin, shaman, warrior will be a staple in pretty much every fight, leaving one slot for a second tank or the situational utility slot (hunter for NR, feral for threat, priest for PoH).

 

Wyndryder

Just some real world figures to push in here.

I did Patchwerk the other day with 1001 spell damage against Undead. I had a constant Demonic Rune + Major Mana Pot rotation to maintain DPS and unfortunately no JoW was kept up otherwise I probably wouldn't have needed the runes. I ended the fight on 400 mana after a constant MF + SW:P rotation and added in MBs below 10%.

I was in the MT group with 2 Warlocks and a Paladin. Final figures were:
10th on damage with 140k damage done.
1st on healing (I forget that figure).
Both Warlocks were above me in DPS along with some Fire mages and the 4 Rogues. Only 3 healers were on our MT.

If you've got any questions feel free to ask away.

 

Gogusrl

provide a screenshot so i can show it to my guild, they are still holding back on the decision of getting a shadow priest in the raid.

 

Evert

QFT




sorry, wont ever do it again. More relevant: you said shadow priests how many do you have? how many do you bring to Naxx normally? and and how shadow are they?

\"Listen, I\'m trying to have a serious conversation about ferret bras and you are not listening\"

 

Wyndryder

I'll get one next Patch kill with our new and updated talents which should increase my DPS by about 40%.

 

Zurai

I've had the pleasure to group with some shadow priests in beta. Even with a small amount of +damage (482 at level 70 was the lowest), they put up respectable DPS and respectable healing. They still won't main heal in shadowform, but they'll keep the rest of the party topped off from AOEs so that the main healer can concentrate on the tank.

 

◊ Bekah

As I can't give you solid numbers from Patchwerk (as I've only ever done it as dps once, and I deferred to the warlocks for debuff slots), here's the numbers from our first Thaddius kill this evening. I can only give relative ranks (and % for healing) because I was so damn excited about the kill that I didn't run through the meters and check off options on numbers. I am specced shadow specifically for this fight and I am pure dps. 656+dmg vs undead unbuffed. Buffed with generic alliance buffs (no world buffs) flask of supreme power, shadow power, arcane elixir, nightfin soup, mageblood. No oil (embarrassingly enough I totally forgot to apply it).

Effective healing - - Damage meter - - My group (Tankman MT)

Same fight, I never dropped shadowform.

2nd in effective healing, 16th in damage.

Vampiric embrace even in current form is incredibly powerful when used and abused. This is simply the most dramatic example I have handy... but it can easily be extrapolated out to other useful situations, especially given 40 debuff slots to work with and our boost in damage, raid damage, and mana return. I know that Nikita has been pure DPS through KT with very solid results. It's not something you can just call up 50 screenshots of though.

 

Boevis

We run with 1-3 shadow priests. 2 are officers that respec bi-weekly depending on what is needed (if we're very short on healers, like we are right now, they're Holy spec) We're always priest heavy though, 'short on healers' means only 5 priests.

 

◊ Bekah