It seems to me that the simulation is unable to roll a miss on any spell at this point. I've tried the current SimulationCraft build a few tries with varying hit ratings, and have not seen a miss yet.

I am *extremely* skeptical of these results. I can't imagine why hit would be so devalued since the patch. I would have assumed hit would have gone up in value considering mind blast accounts for ~15% of our dps now. Perhaps there's a bug in simcraft, who knows. I'm going to wait for confirmation before making any significant re-gearing decisions though.

As a side note, hooray for 4.0.6: Dawn of the Shadowpriest. Going to enjoy the ridiculous dps while it lasts.

If you look at the Origin, you will see the toon is hit capped. Maybe that is why hit is so undervalued ? I don't know SimC well enough to make that an affirmative, but it seems a good possibility to me.

One thing I always found, on all my toons (and classes) is that stat priority will change quite a bit as you get more gear. Which is why it 372 was quite clearly stated on the Simulationcraft data.
So I took the time to run it with my undergeared shadow priest (ilvl 339), and these are the results I've got. Yes, I know my gear is a mess. Which might make it an even more interesting test toon.

Origin: Ylanna @ Khaz Modan - Game - World of Warcraft

Int: 1.0000
SP: 0.6732
Crit: 0.3261
Mastery: 0.2886
Haste: 0.2621
Spirit: 0.1417
Hit: 0.1344


This seem to agree that Hit/Spirit is not that good (even with only 15.44% hit), and that Crit is better at lower lvl gear than any other secundary. Also, it shows Mastery over haste.

That latest simcraft is also using the wrong meta

I'm very surpised myself that hit has gone down in value so much since the patch. It's halved in value, more in some simulations.

I'm not aware of anything which would be causing this to happen. If anything I would have thought it would become slightly more valuable because MB is a bigger part of our damage now and misses on MB are the most costly (because we can't just recast it).

Mana tide totem is raid wide and will basically guarantee to hit cap us for the duration, but unless the sim raid is massively overstocked with resto shamans then I wouldn't have thought this would have a big impact overall.

I have never been satisfied with most major glyph choices on the main "compendium" type threads for shadow priests. I have pretty much only seen major glyph discussion as "this may result in a small DPS increase sometimes." Taking a more dynamic approach to your game than just min/maxing DPS can save damage on tanks, save mana for healers, and ultimately result in boss kills, and major glyphs are one of the very few areas of the game where we can afford to do so without sacrificing too much. My play style lends me toward getting more benefit from the following than glyphs like Spirit Tap and Fade.

My three choices are Psychic Horror, Holy Nova, and Mass Dispel.

PH

Psychic Horror is a handy spell for mitigating damage on a tank. Mobs who are not immune to fear can be interrupted with PH, but even more mitigation comes from the rather long disarm duration. This glyph allows you to get off an extra PH during some encounters, but is only worth taking if you are actually going to use it, and wisely so. A perfect time to use this is when healers are CCed or worse. If you hear your tank say rather urgently over vent, "Popping cooldowns" then you may want to cast this on their target. People who have learned how to PVP as a shadow priest will have an easier time with this.

HN

Ever since the changes to max cap damage on AoE spells (holy nova used to be capped at a dismal 5k per cast before crits), multi-dotting with vampiric touch followed by holy nova spam has been my max damage option for an AoE-friendly fight that lasts 12-18 seconds, roughly speaking. Between our stacked haste and the lowered global cooldown provided by the major glyph, it is very easy to reach DPS outputs near 18k per second from holy nova alone. This does not even mention the clutch healing this spell provides. Mind Sear is typically not far behind - in a fight where it will take you a few seconds to get into position for holy nova, you should probably mind sear instead. (However, if you are not in position at the right time, that is a different problem.) The whelps on Halfus Wyrmbreaker are one example where this glyph shines. Frankly I am shocked that I have not seen a -lot- more discussion of this glyph.

MD

A priest's mass dispel ability can be immensely more mana efficient for removing debuffs than single casts, particularly when compared to a paladin's Cleanse. Unglyphed, this spell is painfully slow. I try to utilize this spell as much as I can, quite frankly this is an area of my game that needs work. If you find that you use this spell in PVE at all this glyph is a must in my opinion. Likewise, shadow priests with PVP experience are more likely to be comfortable with this option. Compared to discipline and holy priests, during a raid boss fight I tend to have far more mana and far more "free time" at my disposal. IMHO when a mass dispel is in order, it is the shadow priest who should be casting it in general.

If you are in one of those elite raid groups that never asks a shadow priest to stop DPS in order to cast Hymn of Hope or Divine Hymn because they have it covered (or would rather wipe than think that hard), then it's fine (?) to not consider glyphs that mitigate damage rather than cause it. If you are confident in your ability to get kills to proc spirit tap (and in the middle of a fight when it is useful, not at the end) then spirit tap works. If you are confident in your ability to frequently draw aggro requiring multiple uses of fade during an encounter AND without interfering with the tank's threat generation, by all means take the glyph that lowers Fade's cooldown.

By no means do I intend to criticize one play style or another. I am though skeptical at the idea that most players are using the standard fare of Major Glyphs correctly. I get the feeling that a lot of people look up what glyphs to take and then get stuff like spirit tap and fade without really understanding what is required to make those glyphs worth the ink they are scribed with.

I have yet to run into another shadow priest that uses glyph of holy nova on my server. If you know of any modeling that has been done to provide actual data that can be compared to mind sear straight off the bat please post the link with a quote from this post. Thank you.

So with hit/spirit simming so low for shadowpriests in 4.0.6, what is the minimum hit % you'd feel comfortable raiding with? For maximum DPS, the weights seem to suggest getting hit essentially as low as possible (without sacrificing ilvl of course). If I regem, reforge all my hit/spirit away I end up somewhere in the 6% hit range (my gear is average ilvl 354). So, what do you all think... 6%? Keep enough to be at 12%? 15%?
Thanks for the thoughts -

[edit]I did a few tests with Simcraft using my gear adjusted for different hit% and standard shadowpriest model (10k its):
6%: 22156 dps
11%: 21914 dps (-242 dps = ~1% loss)
14.5%: 21683 dps (-473 dps = ~2.1% loss)
17%: 21493 dps (-663 dps = ~3% loss)
[/edit]

There is something going on with our mastery.
Naked we have 8 Mastery and would expect a 12% increase on our periodic damage and 12% increase per orb on Mind Blast. However, in game I get 22% on DoTs and 22% per orb(!) on Mind Blast. No matter how much Mastery I have on gear, I'm always ending up with 10% more damage from mastery than expected.
This might be the result of a simple typo and would explain why Spriest dps seems a bit out of control at the moment.

Wrong. Mastery was buffed this last patch, I even corrected the description of our mastery in the OP:

We have fixed a bug with our scale factor generation which manifests when a rating was reduced to below 0.
This was throwing off the scale factor results for Hit and Spirit and artificially lowering them below what they should have been.

I have run a new 100k iteration Priest_Shadow_T11_372.simc profile and got the following scale factors:

Scale Factors:
Priest_Shadow_T11_372 Int=1.0000 Spi=0.3923 SP=0.7841 Hit=0.3930 Crit=0.4480 Haste=0.5844 Mastery=0.4366 DPS/Int=3.6383

These numbers seem much more reasonable for the gear given.
I will upload the full report to the simulationcraft.org site shortly (well, actually another rerun of it to fix an HTML bug I had with this run).

Does Simulcraft takes it in account that Synapse trigger a 12s cooldown to Igniacious trinket ? ( so there is a lower uptime )

and :

Int=1.0000
Spi = 0.2009
SP = 0.7703
Crit=0.4461
Haste=0.4480
Mastery =0.4181

I can't imagine these scales valors can be ok
0.20 PP for spi then i have 15.3% hit, then MB was buffed