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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.