Yeah! Starting off with SWP->MF til orb proc is great of you want to sit around waiting on RNG all day, losing DPS. I'm sure there are a couple situations where it makes sense, but most of the time when I tried opening this way, I just lost DPS.

This may depend on how high your mastery rating is. The lower your mastery rating is, the more viable it is using MS MS MB circles during AA.

I focused on haste and left out mastery whereever it was possible. I will give that a shot.

With how shadow word death has been revamped, and with the new healing mechanics making healer mana a premium, has anyone else noticed how much backlash damage SW: D is now doing during the execute phase? With dark evangelism, flasks, and double trinket procs, I have pulled off over 60K SW: D crits, and on double crits that can be nearly 50k backlash damage.

Sometimes the double backlash damage is a boon, but on certain fights where raid damage starts flying out (council for example) SW: D execute becomes a liability. Lightwell offsets that to some extent, but it can be very annoying to play around.

The new Cataclysm thread is up here: Shadow Priest -- Cataclysm

I'm closing this thread. I'd like to get a consensus on several items before I update them in the new thread -- see my first reply for details.