Do realize that, whatever modelling you do on spellhaste, this can all be thrown overboard in fights where you can not stand still and nuke, which you just admitted to be the vast majority of T6 content fights.

If you have to move around a lot in a fight, the DPS of a spell becomes a lot less interesting, and the Damage per Global Cooldown becomes the leading factor. Obviously DOT's score good at this. They also don't benenefit from haste, but moreso from +spelldamage.

I ran some numbers on it a while back. Best case is 1 spell haste = .6 spell damage for shadow priests. Not remotely worth stacking, but also not a meaningless stat. I've since reworked my gear to focus on spell damage. The information is in the Haste Mechanic Primer thread.

Thanks Tedv, I'll look it up.

Yes, absolutely. There is no discussion around the fact that gear is constantly interchangable. More Stamina, More Damage, More Mana/5, SR, I hold about 6 configurations of gear that take me through a weeks raiding in MH and BT. Mainly because the healers shout at me if I have < 10k buffed HP.

I'd like to build a haste set, but not as a priority, it is very much a pet project.

I actually built that set, minus the staff, and went back to normal spell damage gear. However, I've been working on a different set lately: spell penetration. Sadly it's only useful on Illidari council, but last week I swapped in my PvP wand and noticed good results. I'm thinking of getting a spare nethervoid cloak with penetration enchant and using it with the PvP wand, offhand, and the Hyjal penetration shoulders for another 80 penetration or so. Combined with Curse of Shadows, this should reduce Galthos' shadow resistance to around 80 (counting curse of shadows) when his magic resistance aura is up. Seems worth losing 50 spell damage and 2% threat reduction.

I do the same, however I also use the s3 ring (fairly decent with 14 spell pen).

Just a few questions, I didn't see them answered elsewhere in the topic, my apologies if they have been.

Firstly, is there any advantage to taking 1/5 Imp. MB over 4/5? I'd like to be able to work Silence into my build and the original post mentioned 1/5 is viable, but in what way? Is it a latency issue (I usually run about 200ms, if that makes a difference) or is it simply playstyle?

My other question regards Improved Shadow Bolt. We're not at a particularly high gear level, but we still run with 2 Destruction Warlocks with about 20% crit each (I think 25% after the talents). One is hit capped, the other is still working at it and is at about 11%. Especially on the nights where we only have one Destro Lock, I've been asked to stop using Mind Blast and Shadow Word Death so as to preserve ISB uptime, as my DoTs can still tick through it and the Destro Lock can utilize the charges for himself. Is it worth losing my DPS (and my mana output) to preserve ISB uptime in these situations, or is it more important to keep MB and SWD on cooldown no matter what?

To be fair, using 4 charges on spell with base 4000 damage is better than 4 charges on base 2000 damage spells, and yes, eating up the last ISB charge will be a net loss of damage if the Warlock can't refresh the debuff in three casts (9 seconds). It's not so much padding damage meters as... The warlock can't "not cast shadow bolt" and get improved shadow bolt up. Given that this direct damage spell is non-negotiable, it seems best to cut others. If-- and this is a big if-- doing so would increase raid damage.

The other question is whether all four charges are likely to get used before the buff is refreshed again. If there is only one charge left, in your situation I wouldn't cast Shadow Word Death. If there were four, I would. So the real answer depends heavily on his crit rating and the number of warlocks in the raid. With 2 or more warlocks, I'd never stop.

On the other hand, doing this on the fly analysis of ISB charges while you also have to track your threat, mana, interfering DoT cooldowns, and whatever is going on in the fight is a pain. It seems likely thinking this hard would just cause you to make mistakes. I know it would for me. Those mistakes would probably cause a greater damage loss that would be gained through increased ISB uptime. So it does smell of damage meter padding to me.

Considering the huge dps difference of SWD/MB over MF, and considering the fact that when you click the button to cast the spell you don't really know how many ISB charges will be on the boss when the spell is actually cast, due to latency+reaction time, say with 200ms and lightning-fast brain you will have a total delay of 0.4 seconds between your decision to cast the spell and the spell to actually cast, with 1.5s extra for MB due to casting time - I would highly doubt it would be a good idea to adjust your rotation based on the number of ISB charges on the target or anything of that sort. Having to pay attention to an extra thing effectively lowering your dps/survivability is just icing on that cake.

i manage to make my gear selfbufed with 1454 shadow dmg and i use 1/5 shadow focus so have 4/5 imp mind blast with 5/5 crit talent , mana reg is helpfull but with this amout of spell dmg raid buffed with shaman and shadow pot i have around 1650 spell dmg so mana is endless anyway on encounter like ilidari for example , last reset i gave back to my party 57k mana i don`t see the point to say we are not dps class ;0 i am in top 5 on most of ecounter allways first on ilidan etc , so just go max spell dmg i play raid gear with 33% crit unufed so raid bufed i get around 36% my spell rottation is like

1 - swp
2 - vt
3 - wd
4 mb
5 mf
6 mf
7 mb
8 mf
9 vt (interupt mf when 1.6 sec left on vt,cuz of lag so can land on boss exactly when expire)
and again just if needed put VE , but with it i make too much agro on encounter like ros for exaple and on blodboil so is up to u when to use it

i use WD on cd rly helps some shadow priest are saying to me when i don`t use it is more dmg , but mf cand`t do dmg like wd for sure and if crit is 3.5-4k depend of the boss so mindflay can`t cover even non crit 1,7-2k of wd P

there is calculation make on teorycraft


When we calculate we use these values & this template:

* 6.14 crit rating = 1 dmg (with SW in rotation)
* 10 haste = 5.08 spelldmg (presuming ~1400 dmg)
* 10 spirit = 1.1 dmg (1 dmg without kings with imp DS)
* 70 int = 1 crit = ~3.85 dmg (3.5 dmg without kings)
* dmg + crit/6.14 + int*0.055 + spirit*0.11 + haste*.508 + sockets [+12 gems] + meta [Mystical Skyfire Diamond]

so we can see spell dmg >>> all just cap u hit with gear or with talents i prefer with gear and then is not a prob to have mix spec to no respect when doing pvp 14/0/47 ,with fear imp and silence , no improved VE , and 4/5 or 5/5 mb depend of how talents u need on shadow focus i am using 1/5 cuz playing with crit gear and have 14.87% hit from gear, if use 4/5 t6 0/5 shadow focus

thk for good topic and hf all <3

name of my priest is Plami btw

I've just recently started leveling my spriest and wondered a few things:

1) A sub 60's gear level, is it worth stacking +dmg as opposed to pure stats the majority of the time? OR what is the ratio of spell dmg to int/crit (I'm guessing they are valued higher at lower levels than straight dmg?)

2) I noticed that a lot of spriests have dropped imp VE at lower levels in favor of keeping more dmg talents (more mana) WHILE maintaining the shadow affinity 5/5. Any word on this from spriests that know? I'll be just hitting 70 here soon and probably unable to get into anything past kara for a bit...is imp VE important enough?

Int is worthless. Crit is almost completely worthless, on the order of 8 crit rating = 1 spell damage or worse. This is true even while leveling. Just wear enough stamina to survive and otherwise max out on shadow wrath gear while leveling.

Improved Vampiric Embrace is really a question of how often you're casting mind blast. If you will cast mind blast often enough to keep it on cooldown even with 4/5 improved mind blast, you should drop improved vampiric embrace. But at early gear level, you don't have enough spell damage to maintain that kind of longevity, so improved mind blast is wasted. That means the points are better spent in improved vampiric embrace. I suspect this will be true until you have most of the useful gear from Kara.

When leveling, you want spirit first and damage second. Stamina is the only other stat that matters...and it doesn't matter all that much. Stacking Spirit will reduce your downtime to zero and allow you to constantly chain cast. Remember, Spirit Tap always gives the same amount of mana, even while casting.

Edit: Althir, can you run your numbers with a 9 second cooldown on Mind Blast (aka only 1 point in Improved Mind Blast). I'm not sure if your method is correct, but I'm curious to see what you get with a 9 second cooldown. In the meantime, I'll try to deciper your math.

For leveling both spirit and spell damage will increase your kills/hour ratio. I did some pretty rough math back in the days showing spell dmg increases kills/hour a bit more per itemization point than spirit, although the lower your level the harder it is to find spell dmg gear over spirit. Just remember spell dmg makes you more mana efficient and get that spirit tap proc faster.

My SP is my alt that has only recently made it to 70. while rushing to get to the magic mark I largely ignored gearing up through runs because the all wanted me to heal them.

I already had an idea of what gear to look for having another shadow class as my main ( i know why bother right? but its fun)
Looking through your posting helped steer me to a few items i might otherwise not have thought of but I also notice a few items that could be added if one is not a crafter, or if the want alternatives.

For wands the control rod from arc is by far best blue. I would actually rather have it than the black stalk, though the witchdoctors if gemmed correctly wins the battle.

For chest.. if you can not make the fsw set (I did this on my lock. I really cant see me leveling tailoring again)
the warp infused drape from bot is a good blue for SP

If you don't want to run heroic sl for th kirin tor pants .. devil stitched are best blues.. the gem slots leave it open to many options depending on what stat you are lacking.

Quite a few nice heroic drops available as well and since you now only need heroic rep to get the keys it is easier to get groups to go.
Demonfang ritual helm
grand scepter of nex kings in her mt
boots of blashphemy from her pens
Kirin tor legs from slabs
and belt of depravity from her arc.


There are quite a few nice drops with good spell hit out there, sadly they seem to have a lower drop rate. I am looking forward to all the rep I will get while grinding instances for these drops.


Now if the realms would just come back up for me to test out spec ideas I have picked up here

Does this thread really need to turn into a "How do I level a shadow priest" every 4 pages?

Technically no. I'm working on some new sections, including a leveling section and finishing the spell scaling section. It should be ready by the end of this weekend.

If anyone feels more confident than I do in writing a Haste primer, please do so.

Does anyones have some info of how wrath of air holds up against ferocious inspiration comparing a group with 1 elemental shaman, and another with 1 hunter? (I know shaman means an extra 101 spelldamage, hunter an extra 3% damage for 10 seconds when pet crits, but i am having some dificulty evaluating the benefit each setup gives for shadowpriests).
Apologies if this has been mentioned in this thread already.

The shaman, by far. 101 Spell damage is roughly 45 extra DPS. Even with full uptime and 1300 DPS, 3% extra damage is only gives 39 extra damage. Then factor in Bloodlust, mana spring, and the neither exceptional nor worthless 3% crit from the shaman, and the shaman is the clear winner.

Might want to look at this, the best simulation/theorycraft I could find when our guild had this discussion a while ago.

SimulationCraft/ImprovedShadowBolt - Shadowpriest.com Wiki

This post has some impressive math. The point where I get lost is: "At a very rough estimate of +1 spell damage = +0.5 DPS..."

Where does +1 spell damage = +.5 dps come from?

Seems a rather key point, as that is what you base your conversion factors around.

Oh and could we get spell scaling included in the first post? There seemed to be talk of it mentioned, but never materialized.

Yes, Chase, that's one of the sections I'm working on.

Tedv, I'm aware of the 0.54 spell haste = 1 damage number. I can type that out. My question is, can you explain exactly why that is so? Considering it only benefits one spell of ours, Mind Flay, and that finishing a Mind Flay 0.3 seconds earlier doesn't help if MB or SW:D still has 0.3 seconds left on the cooldown, what is the reason for spell haste's rating?

I understand that Destruction Warlocks and Mages will scale better, since most or all of their spells scale directly with haste. We only have one spell out of five that scales with haste, and we just use it as filler between our more powerful spells.

THAT is the section I'm wondering if someone can write.

Edit: I hate smilies.

If you look at the number of damage spells you cast in a minute, add the total damage increase from +1 spell damage (from spell coefficients, increased for spells that can crit), multiply by all damage scaling factors (curse of shadows, darkness talent, shadow weaving, etc), and divide by 60, you get roughly .5 DPS increase. I suppose we could work out the exact number, but I'm not convinced that including that in the first post would be that helpful.

Well I thought the math post explained it. All that matters is the percent of time you spend casting a hastable spell and the DPS of whatever spell you cast when everything else is on cooldown. While it's true that a hasted mind flay doesn't help if Mind blast still has .3 seconds on cooldown, it helps immensely if pre-haste the cooldown would have been up for .3 seconds, since post haste it's ready on time. The math in question ignores these interactions except to note that they are complicated and every cycle has some time values where a certain amount of haste will help more than the average and other values where it helps less than average. However, the actual value (hastable time * haste percent * mind flay DPS) is indeed the average, ignoring these interactions. It is NOT the maximum.

If the equations aren't making things clear, perhaps working through some examples with actual values would help?