Depending on how long the fight lasts you should definitely only use AA (Archangel) sub-25% so SW: Death gains the low health bonus damage.

If you can get multiple ones it, thats great. But it should still be saved for the end of a fight and use on heavy add phases where you don't have time to ramp DoTs up on them.

Obviously just my opinions.

There will be be hardly any situation where you can't viably get off atleast three Archangel casts during a singular raid encounter. I also find beyond increasing damage it is essential for restoring mana.

I'm not sure I'd do that. You can at best use SWD 4x during one AA. If fight length is short enough that you can only use it once and you have bloodlust I'm pretty sure AA will give bigger DPS boost if you use it during BL than during execute range. Similarly with any kind of enironmental buffs (omitron defens system or many of the heroic bosses). Get as much of it as possible. IIRC it takes around 5k haste to reach softcap and you are not going to reach that before several tiers.

I was wondering if we could be updated on the status of Mastery. At 80 everyone stated it was worthless. Is this still the case or should I stop reforging it to haste. Also, is crit a priority at all or is it still simply a bonus stat on gear.

Hello,

Regarding haste, according to this post (Lux et Umbra - A Priest Mechanics Guide - Forums - World of Warcraft) the following haste tables are listed:


Devouring Plague - 8 ticks base
Ticks Haste
9 6.25%
10 18.75%
11 31.25%
12 43.75%
13 56.25%

Shadow Word: Pain - 6 ticks base
Ticks Haste
7 8.3333...%
8 25%
9 41.6666...%
10 58.3333...%

Vampiric Touch - 5 ticks base
Ticks Haste
6 10%
7 30%
8 50%
9 70%

My question: Since it is not possible to currently gain more than 1 additional tick of each dot, is it beneficial to stack haste to 10% and then switch to crit/mastery? Or do the benefits to casting time and GCD reduction make it a superior stat regardless?

You're forgetting the reduction in Mind Flay channeling which will impact Dark Evangelism/Shadow Orbs uptime and (in conjunction with crit) your Shadowfiend cooldown.

Are people leaving Evangelism up at 5 stacks for any appreciable time? It seems like people are treating Archangel as a CD situation, but it seems like it may be better to use Archangel as VT/DP falls off and then go to SWD/MS-> MB then back to dotting and MFing.

Or am i missing something?

Very roughly put 1 int = 1.5 haste = 3 crit/mastery/hit/spirit. There are minor fluctuations depending on gear level but the rough idea remains the same. That means mastery isn't quite worthless, at least not much more so than crit or hit. During last two expansions there have never been softcaps for haste other than GCD cap that would have changed stat values enough to stop stacking more haste, at least as long as you weren't doing some mistakes in gearing like having 40% haste vs 15% crit but even then it wasn't the "haste plateau" that made crit worth more.

In other words, ignore the additional dot ticks, as long as you refresh them properly you won't even notice them gaining new ticks. That highly depens on situation but generally I can't think of any where I'd start spamming spike instead of continuing with regular rotation. So far I've used it shortly after having refreshed VT and DP and then simply continued my normal rotation. If possible and reasonable I try to save it for damage boost phases (many bosses seem to have them) and/or <25% execute phase. Spike spam is higher than flay but not as high as flay+dot ticks so if the target has full dots and is goign to live for more than 3-5s I'd definitely not use spike. you also forget 3% from darkness and how they stack multiplicatively. In my gear with 3 epics I have around 17% haste, with talents that should be a bit over 25%.


As for general gearing, I've tried raiding with 5% under hitcap tonight and things seemed to go pretty well. I know I did several mistakes and wasn't multidotting as well as I could have but overall having a dot or even MB miss didn't really have much influence on my DPS. My current gearing philosophy is to get anything with haste on it and leave other stats as-is, except for mastery that I reforge to crit to lower the DPS drop I'd get when emp. shadows happens to drop. If I have any item without haste I'll reforge some other stat to it, even spirit/hit while under hitcap. As long as I don't need to interrupt things I'm fairly certain this will work pretty well. Biggest problem is having to pay a bit more attention to see if the spell actually landed or not.

[edit]
As for rotation, I try to avoid situations where I need to refresh dots too soon as much as possible. For VT to be worth hard-casting it should gain roughly 10% boost, for DP it's a bit less. My usual opening is SWP->VT->flay->MB if I have orbs->DP->regular rotation. That would delat DP by 2-3 GCDs and put up VT without either evangelism or emp. shadows but it should still provide higher DPS than most other openings. Though if you have tons of mastery it might be worth waiting for emp. shadows for 2-3 GCDs before casting VT. As DP is relatively low DPS but long duration then delaying that isn't that much of a loss and benefit gained from stacked buffs will likely out-balance the loss from the delay. VT is shorter so you'll need far stronger emp. shadows to balance that out. I never cast MB without orbs as it would mean if I do get orbs shortly after using it it'll be on cd and emp. shadows could drop and I can't refresh it. Also, I'm fairly certain flay with emp. shadows up is higher DPET than MB without orbs.

As Chemii said before, I found that managing your mana was very important, with a proper usage of shadowfiend and archangel.
It seems obvious that to max your damage you should blow them on cooldown, shadowfiend on pull and archangel as soon as you have 5 evangelism buff and no dot to refresh before 4s~, but doing so you will run OOM very quickly.
From my 10 man experience, on nearly every boss i have to use dispersion even while delaying mana cooldowns to make them efficient, and even doing so i sometimes run oom and must use SW: D before the execute phase.
Don't know if someone has other feelings but to me it's the real key of how to max your dps for the moment, far more than the opening sequence; furthermore, many fights allows you to multi dot mobs, increasing raid dps because they share health or whatever (omnitron after the bubbles, halfus, theralion etc), and you have to know when to stop wasting 5K+ mana dotting the second mob to not run oom. And to finish, sometimes you may have to hymn or heal or dispell if things goes weird, and it may save you from a wipe on a progression fight if you think before the pull that you could have to do that and therefore save mana to be able to.

And about hit, I ran with something around 8% last night, really annoying to miss 4 mf in a row, but didn't notice a dps drop, rather an increase. As it was stated before, when missing a dot you don't loose all the damage you get from applying it, only a tick and the filler you should have casted on the next gcd. The only spells that really suffer from low hit are MB and SW: D (as mind spike is only casted on non boss adds for my part, like toxitron's ones), and their contribution in your global damage is too low to make some misses be a big deal (even if SW: D miss don't make the glyph proc, and let you be very sad to miss your double super crit on magmaw weak phase.)

While I've seen the Simulationcraft outputs with regards to hit, I have yet to see a coherent causation argument as to why the relative value of hit versus haste/crit has shifted so massively from 3.3. Althor mentioned a few points on an earlier page, but they don't add up.

His points:
1. We're normalizing against a better stat (intellect)
2. Hit's power is dependant on haste/crit, so with lower haste/crit the value of hit has dropped as well
3. Combat rating requirements have quadrupled while spell power has only doubled (roughly)
4. DoTs treat haste differently and are now longer duration, which lowers the required applications and thus impact of hit
5. Mind Flay is now a channeled DoT so can only resist once per cast rather than on each tick

My comments:
1. Irrelevant for comparing hit vs. crit/haste
2. Haste/crit effects are also multiplicative with the other ratings, so this should not have a large impact
3. This applies to haste/crit as well
4. The new treatment definitely increases the value of haste relative to hit/crit, but the slightly lower number of DoT applications should not have a massive effect on hit, since you're also casting more filler spells
5. Largely irrelevant. If you're spamming Mind Flay, the lost dps from resists should be identical whether it resists per application or per tick. Actually, the new mechanic very slightly increases the value of hit.

Despite these underwhelming arguments, Simulationcraft indicates hit has gone from being more than twice as valuable as crit and almost twice as valuable as haste in 3.3, to being worth less than crit and 33% less than haste now in 4.0. I'm very curious of what caused that shift to occur.

On an intuition side, I understand the new value of hit (even compared to crit / haste) with many reasons :
1/ The new mechanism of dots and their high damage, meaning that a missed dot can be recast with low dps loss; In particular, the new synergy of dots with MF and mastery increase their importance in our cycle.
2/ The new mind-flay mechanism. If MF miss, we can recast it after one GCD. If it succeed, we have 2 GCD miss-free MF. In fine, this halves the effective miss chance for MF. Combined with point 1/, this means that only MB and SW are now taking the full miss penalty;
3/ This point is less important, but with the new ratings, we have a much longer GCD and a lot more time to react to miss events, except for VT (for others, the miss event is at the beginning of the GCD).
4/ We've lost "only" 17% (and in fact less) hit, whereas the loss in haste and crit is much higher. Since all of these are multiplicative factor, hit value took the highest hit, because it was multiplied by the two other highest values.
5/ Crit rating gained some value with direct synergy in the new tree. Haste and hit also have a synergy (because they increase the number of potential crits), but the effect of the proc chance is much higher than the effect of the number of events.
6/ In a similar manner, the new dot mechanism double-dips the value of haste for dots. It decreases their cast time and increases their damage (in other words, with haste, we have more dot damage and more time to cast other spells, whereas in WotLK, we had the same proportion of time for other spells). With the high proportion of dps they do, it's pretty significative.

In fine, the only reason now that hit is not below crit is that it has a nice rating conversion value. From the mechanism part, it should be well below other stats for shadow priests.