I'm sorry, but the extent to which "viable" is being stretched in this thread is laughable.
Smite builds are not good for raiding, and unless Blizzard does something fundamental to both the talent trees and priest skill-set to change that, no amount of gear will help. Just take it for what it is: a soloing, screw-around build that blizzard put together to throw holy priests a bone.
Maybe not in Sunwell, but being able to run with the "9th healer" putting out respectable dps the entire rest of the time and then insta-switching to perfectly reasonable healing if a healer went down is certainly viable in our guilld.
Apparently, you have determined they are completely not viable for some reason. The insight is unclear, but your opinion is.
Why not just bring a moonkin who can put out more DPS, brings a group buff, and can battle res the healer who dies so that you don't have to try to manage the second half of the fight with someone trying to heal while wearing DPS gear? Plus the moonkin can pick up some of those over-abundant vanquisher tokens and the silly boots from Reliquary!
(I'm being facetious, but that and other comparisons like it are why people do not consider smite priests viable.)
All priest dps can be described as bad. Bottom of the barrel bad. Shadow gives mana back and offers great raid buffs though, smite just kind of.. does nothing.
In our raid, Vanquisher tokens are gold. The priest tokens are a dime a dozen. Our moonkin is great, but isn't exactly spec-ed for healing. Regardless, it's an alternative and one that would let every other holy priest take CoH and none of them not take it for imp DS. It's... an option... Like moonkins -- which are hardly in all raids -- are an option.
All priest dps can be described as bad. Bottom of the barrel bad. Shadow gives mana back and offers great raid buffs though, smite just kind of.. does nothing.
So roughly shadowpriest level DPS without the raid benefits of VE/VT, partially compensated for by the ability to snap off some heals here and there when needed, looks like.
>Here's< a WWS from another guild of a mag kill. They're in tier 4. What's your excuse?
Edit: WWS mistakenly gave a healer 1.1k DPS, vastly inflating the reported raid DPS in the WWS I linked, but the overall point remains: Your raid DPS is very low for a guild that's been farming SSC and TK for any period of time.
5. I need Subtlety enchant on my cloaks. There's no threat reduction talent which works for both holy and shadow, and we have no threat reduction abilities. No, fade doesn't work or count - it's a purely temporary threat reduction with a 30 second cooldown, and two ticks of SW:Pain will out-threat it anyway, or one cast of any other spell. Useful on aggro resets or starts of fights, no use at all after that.
Don't use SW: Pain. The only time a Holy smiter should use it is on multi-tank pulls, and there is not need to worry about aggro there anyway, especially with a -20% aggro talent (on Holy spells though).
Sub is better than anything else, because even spell penetration is useless (no holy resistances).
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
>Here's< a WWS from another guild of a mag kill. They're in tier 4. What's your excuse?
Edit: WWS mistakenly gave a healer 1.1k DPS, vastly inflating the reported raid DPS in the WWS I linked, but the overall point remains: Your raid DPS is very low for a guild that's been farming SSC and TK for any period of time.
um... they have SSC/TK/ZA gear (most of 'em)... and how the WWS "mistakenly" gives a healer 1.1k dps makes me think that it's incorrect anyway
It did not "mistakenly" give him 1.1k dps. He dropped Holy Shock/Hammer of Wrath right at the end, which equates out to *tada* 1.1k dps for about 2 seconds.
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.
". 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."
Amazing given that 2 years ago there was no Burning Crusade, no Karazhan, no Gruul, and no Frozen Shadoweave.
We obviously disagree on what viable means. You think it means "the priest can dps with a mage". I think it means "the priest can dps enough to be in the raid". Mine is way closer to the dictionary definition of the word.
Moonkins can rez someone every 20 mins while "under dpsing" most casters. The smite priest can allow all priests to spec out of divine spirit. It hardly seems so radically different.
Yes, let's over parse words... It allows whoever the last priest is that was stuck being the "imp DS" priest to no longer have to deal with that otherwise inferior spec and to pick up Circle of Healing, which I no longer enjoy being a full-timer healer without, personally.
Smite's raid synergy is also pretty bad if you look at it at first glance
Benefits from :
1) Ret Pally - Judgment of Crusader is a gimme. Sanctity Aura? The Ret Pally needs a Windfury to function, if you're stealing him from the WIndfury Group, you're just lowering his DPS to increase you own. If you put yourself in the Windfury group, you're kicking out another melee, who is probably also buffing the other melee, e.g. Feral Druid with 5% crit, assuming your Enh Shaman is Twisting Windfury and Grace etc.
2) Shadow Priest - THis isn't bad. Shadow Priests and caster groups go together, there's nothing unusual about having one in your group. Score one for Smite. Misery also affects you and the Spriest doesnt have to be in your group for it
3) Boomkin/Ele Shammy - Assuming you have a Shadow Priest in your group, having a Boomkin or Ele Shammy essentially means you have two other slots. Unless the number of Mages and Destro Locks in your raid group is 2 or less, would it not be better to give THEM the Boomkin/Ele Shammy group? They outdps you and their dps scales with crit better than Smite does, since Surge of Light is not the same as Ruin or Ignite.
4) BM Hunters - Score two for the Smite Priest.
So you're talking a caster group of - Smite Priest - BM Hunter - Aff Lock - Shadow Priest - Resto Shammy (Heroism). Just does not seem like the Smite Priest can possibly keep up under those conditions in a typical raid at high end. Any more stacking in favour of the Smite Priest end up in a dps loss for someone else, in those conditions, a Shadow Priest simply seems to synergize much better, with Shadow Vuln, Imp Shadowbolt, affecting their dps, plus you could toss one to the healers.
I drafted this post and initially it seemed that a smite/shadow spec might be viable. However when checking through I found a big mistake in my maths which changed this. I thought I would post it anyway for anyone who was interested and who might be having a similar idea (who knows, maybe there are more mistakes in my maths which actually makes the spec viable!).
The basic idea would be that you don't raid in shadowform and you raid much like a shadowpriest except that instead of using MF as filler, you use Smite instead. So your spell priority would be VT > SWP > MB > SWD > Smite (or maybe SWD wouldn't be worthwhile).
Now granted you would be returning less mana/health to the party (but full smite spec returns none), however I'm mainly just considering the dps here rather than the utility considerations (after all, a full smite spec has no real utility). Mana might well be an issue (especially without meditation, inner focus and focused mind) but this is true for a full smite spec. And finally threat might be an issue with nothing to reduce thread from smite damage.
Still, lets imagine a typical Brutallus fight:
A decent performance is 1600 dps for a full shadowpriest. I'll assume that fully buffed the priest has 1500 +damage (none of which is shadow only). I'm ignoring haste since this should have the same effect on smite as it does for MF. Finally I'll assume a basic crit rate of 15% from gear.
So at 1600 damage, the full shadowpriest would do 576k damage over a 360 second fight.
Without shadowform, dps would drop to 1391 = 501k damage. So thats 76k less, however you can then replace MF with Smite.
On my top fights, MF ticks for about 1k damage (1k dps) but without shadowform this would be 870 dps and I typically spend about 50% of the fight casting MF. So thats 180 seconds at 870 dps = 157k damage from smite.
Smite averages 429 damage base (wish we had a better version than level 61!) and gains 72% from +damage. So at 1500 +damage and 273 for paladin debuff, thats 1695 damage per cast. On top of that we add 10% for searing light, 10% for a paladin aura, 5% for misery and 10% for crits (assuming 15% crit from gear + 5% from talents). = 1695 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 1.1 = 2370 damage per cast = 1184 dps. Now, hit isn't likely to be capped so actual dps will (generously) be more like 1184 * 95% = 1125.
So we should be able to spend 180 seconds casting smite = 180 * 1125 = 203k damage from smite. Overall our smite/shadow spec would do 501 - 156 + 203 = 548k damage = 1520 dps. Oh well, back to the drawing board! Still, with a L70 version of smite it would probably have broken even compared to a shadow spec (for dps at least).
"
We obviously disagree on what viable means. You think it means "the priest can dps with a mage". I think it means "the priest can dps enough to be in the raid". Mine is way closer to the dictionary definition of the word.
The difference here is the attitude of the guild. Either:
1. The guild is a high performance guild that expects every member to spec, gear and play in a style which maximises the raid dps - via personal dps or group/raid buffing.
2. The guild allows people to do what they want as long as they are not a complete joke at their role.
To the first example guild type, doing 'enough dps to be in the raid' via not being last on personal dps (or whatever benchmark is given) is not viable if your class can increase personal dps and/or increase raid dps via buffs by using a different spec. Their response will be 'spec to a standard SP spec and we will consider you viable if you play well enough, otherwise we will take a mage/lock in your place' (assuming an equally geared/played mage/lock do greater damage).
Guild type two are just asking you to attend raids. They do not care if you maximise your class/spec/gear and so pretty much anything is considered 'viable'.
Relinor, my guild is neither (1) or (2). We are somewhere in between. We do expect people to play a spec, gear and play in a style which largely benefits the raid and brings strong dps. That said, we have a standard a lot higher than "be better than a complete joke".
I don't usually have the poison talent on my rogue, preferring to have a utility talent or two in the rogue trees. In a given week, we are without an imp DS priest and we don't go apoplectic about it. I mean, sure, this will be different when we reach Brutallus. But week in and week out, it's kind of silly to overstress the minutiae from our perspective. It's a game. But that said, it's a game we don't take entirely unseriously.
Our guild has only recently downed Illidan, and with sunwell in mind, I started thinking of the role a PoS priest would have. Obviously CoH is king, and there is nothing a PoS priest can do, that any of the other healing classes can't do better. 50 Spirit to all our healers is a big amount of mana regen though, so to head into Sunwell without it seemed like a pretty big pain in the ass, however, 3 CoH priest seemed like it would lower the learning curve tremendously.
So,
Over the past few weeks I've been gathering caster dps gear, with the changes to spirit in 2.4 in mind. I'm not going to go into details here, so I'll give you guys the link to the post. You can follow the progress using our WWS stats. we did Illidan last night, as well as 4/5 in Hyjal, with me being specc'd Holy for Illidan and Power Infusion for Hyjal.
I wasn't in the optimal group, nowhere near it. For the first few bosses in Hyjal I only had a BM hunter for ferocious inspiration, no Sp, boomkin, or any other enhancement class in my group.
I managed roughly 1100 dps on the boss fights (while not in the SR gear) and absolutely destroyed on the AOE trash pulls.
There is still a lot of tweaking and testing to do, but here is a link to our (old, we just changed)Forum and a link to my armory with build and gear.
(please keep in mind that my main role and spec in raids is holy,20/41)
Let me know what you guys think, spirit changed everything for the Power Infusion build in 2.4 I feel.
Oh, and I'm still waiting for our WWS to be put up for last night, to get exact numbers, but it should be shortly. If not everyone create an alt on Velen and PST Babylon with 'reacharound"
I always found that when I played around with a smite build, the issue was never dps. It was mana. I could go full out and do pretty decent dmg for about... 90 seconds or so. Then I had to sit around and regen my mana. Even with a SP in the party mana was just not there. Perhaps with a new holy concentration talent it might be doable with a SP and a resto shaman, but while it looks fun, I can't see it being very useful in the raid setting.
4 Minutes of solid 1100 dps, using my current gear, and could have went longer if needed. No SP, no shammy, or any other enhancement class besides a Bm hunter for ferocisou inspiration.
I don't have the WWS at the moment to support this (and I won't for a couple of weeks because I'm out of town), but I ran smite last week and found myself doing much more dps than I did as shadow, in BT quality gear.
The best way to spec smite, in my opinion (I tried a few different builds) is to abandon Surge of Light and take Improved Divine Spirit. In this way, you're not only packing some raid utility and allowing your holy priests to go full holy, but you're also getting more damage out of the smite cast itself.
I run without about 250 haste, and my Smite was a 1.72 second cast. Again, I haven't done the math, but the 50% chance to get a 1.5s (GCD) cast 0% crit smite was not worth the two talent points to me.
As shadow I normally pull 1300-1500 dps (1560 best on Teron, no fucking shaman then either), and I was over 1400 every fight, including 1800 on Patchwerk during a saturday night Naxx run and 1690 on Kaz'rogal.
At the end what you get is higher average dps, but with less mana efficiency, less raid utility (but still some utitlity! Imp DS frees up your other priests and I think this is significant, especially with how much druids and priests want DS in their raids since 2.4), and a less exciting spell rotation (i was rotating holy fire-->SW:P-->mb-->SW:D-->smite with that priority, occasionally dropping off SW:D so as to *sigh* not die).
But let me tell you, PI+smite with 250 haste is a lot of fkin fun. I recommend it
05/06/08, 8:00 AM
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