Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel

And a mage/warlock with your gear should be able to put out 1500 dps. What's your point? Just because the rest of your raid sucks at dps doesn't mean smite is good.

In order for smite priests to be viable, they either need to:

1) do as much dps as a pure dps class
-or-
2) provide raid utility that will increase the effectiveness of said "pure" classes in order to offset reduced damage.

Neither is true of smite-spec, and don't give me that imp-DS bullshit when you know that a heal priest can provide that as well as heal. Heck, even an offline priest can provide imp-DS. Giving a buff that someone can park an alt outside the instance for is not utility.

If you wanted blizz to make your spec useful you would need:

1) More cohesion in talents. I mean seriously, the abominations that are smite builds is proof enough that the talent trees aren't build around smite dps. Move surge of light into disc and adding another 10% damage scaling on smite is the bare minimum.

2) Better scaling. Smite priests scale better than shadow, but only barely. Crits need to do more damage, either with a crit multiplier talent or by buffing surge of light. I already mentioned the 10% scaling talent, which is a bare minimum to keep smite in line with the empowered talents other classes get.

3) Useful utility talent deep in the tree. A buff/debuff proc would be perfect, and it must be deep in disc so a simple heal spec has no access to it. Something like: every time you crit with a holy spell your party gets 10% extra healing for 10 seconds. Whatever it is, it has to be useful to the raid, and it can only be accessed by a smite priest dpsing. One of the best utility talents disc has in pain suppression is unavailable to smite priests because of talent issues. Plus, most smite priests have to use PI on themselves or they run out of mana, which further reduces their "utility". Allowing priests to give PS and PI to their raid along with a procced buff/debuff would make smite priests useful and wanted.

People who advocate smite spec need to seriously step out of their mire of mediocrity and think of how the class functions when you perform at the highest levels. Showing WWS'es of damage levels I could achieve two years ago as shadow in kara/gruul gear and frozen shadoweave is not going to prove anything.