If you have good raid healing (read: resto shamans) than you should only be missing 1 SW:D, which is the one you would cast but its right before the 3rd Meteor Slash. Burn hurts your dps a lot more as you have to run at least a little distance and then you cant use SW:D for at least 30s, probably more like 40s as your burn healers will be not so pleased.

The most dps I have gotten on Brut is 1547 with a resto shaman (so 1 lust) and no drums. Also, I am very skeptical of Mr. "I do 1800 dps but cant get above 1400 dps on Brut." You do know that listing Curator/Netherspite numbers is cheating, right?

I wouldn't necessarily say "horrendously". There are a few seconds before and after the 3rd stack of burn that you cannot use SWD (or shouldn't really) other than that I SWD through slash stack 1 and 2 and am prepared to shield myself if something goes horribly wrong. Obviously if 3 people in your soak group have burn and you're gonna take a 8k+ slash you don't want to SWD but it's perfectly viable to time the casting so that you get healed up right afterwards.

You can also time your casts so that you're refreshing your instants or just starting a cast (thereby mostly nullifying the pushback). Since slash is on a hard timer it just requires that you think a few steps ahead and plan for this.

Soaker group, Ele shaman, Moonkin, 3 sets of drums, 1 Heroism and 1 Destro pot (yeah I know, use your consumables newbie).

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I suggest you say the following line to your guildmate: "What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

All right, now specifically...I have no idea what the hell he means by "29% more hit rating CAP capable." Bosses will resist spells due to level 17% of the time. You can eliminate 16% of that. I have never seen or heard anything to suggest otherwise.

He's not even claiming you can reduce the last 1%...he's claiming you can...get "more hit rating CAP capable?" My conclusions? He's an idiot and you're correct.

I certainly wouldn't use horrendously to describe our pushback issues either, but we certainly suffer more than mages or warlocks. Getting hit during a Mind Flay is particularly brutal as it can cost 2 ticks. Sure, you can refresh instants when Meteor Slash is due, but you've still incurred an opportunity cost.

It really doesn't cost us anything standing outside the soak group, since our shamans all bounce Chain Heal off the tanks. There's one or two people soaking outside the VE group but they get patched up with the CH bounces. The bonus is that I stand over by the burn area, so if I get burned I'm already in the right spot and don't lose all that time moving there.

Phew, got through the whole thread - took me a few days and I think I skipped a little :p

Anyway, I have been playing a Mage since release but, due to guild requirements, I have had to start playing on my alt Shadow Priest (a story you don't want to hear). Been running TK instances to hell to get revered for the helm enchant >.<

The World of Warcraft Armory

I have only been playing this character for 1 Hyjal and 1 BT clear (and 1 Kalecgos kill) so have pretty decent gear for only half a raids week of playing her. Any comments on gear spec would be appreciated as I don't have any in-depth knowledge and have only been playing the class for 1 week =/ I understand all caster type raid issues, as have played a Mage extensively. I have the Kalecgos pants, but missed out on the T6 shoulders so am unable to wear them atm.

I try to maintain 100% VT+SW:P uptime (btw, how do I check that in WWS? I cannot find the option) and MB+SW every cooldown (hp pool permitting) and MF inbetween. I use my inner focus with a trinket then MB+SW instantly to get the benefit on both (I believe it works the same as Mage shatter/combustion with an instant cast following, I tested it once and the free mana cost was associated with both, so I assume it works).

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This is the second half of BT (Teron -> Illidan). I cannot recall, but I was switched between the healer group (with resto shaman) and the caster DPS group (with elemental shaman). There was another SPriest in the raid (who gquit that night =/). I got my 4pc bonus after this nights raid, so I was running with 2pc only from Hyjal. I had very bad gear for this run, so I am more interested in uptimes and such rather then DPS.



As for gear, I am curious as to what gear I should spend haste on and, in particular, what gear I should aim for. Ofc, hit capping as an SPriest is very easy at T6 level - especially with talents. But I figure the more hit I can get from gear (without gemming for it) the more points I can drop out of Shadow Focus and put into other places (mind blast, imp VE). I have ~80 badges atm, and considering getting the badge vendor spellblade as I would consider it better then the Hyjal trash mace and there is still 2 people ahead of me for the Illidan staff.

Which brings me to my next questions, which I don't believe there is a definitive answer out there for : haste. I read that haste scales just as good as (or better then) damage above ~1400 shadow damage (raid buffed). Which makes the Illidan staff very sexy. Is this accurate or are my eyes bleeding?

I run heroic MgT daily, but Timbal's just doesn't want to drop for me ... and I am also collecting Blessings cards for the Crusade card. As you can see by my armory, I am also levelling LWing for drums for Brut. Is there anything else I could be working towards (Sha'tar rep is coming)?

I have sub enchant mats ready for the Nethervoid Cloak, and don't want to waste mats on making/enchanting the haste bracers with the 3 tokens per boss kill we will be offspeccing bracers soon enough. We do ZA Bear runs almost every reset, so am looking to get the haste boots/ring from there, as well as hopefully the hex lords trinket (though I already took one on my Mage, so would have to pass for some first). Also considering the haste belt from Supremus, depending on the haste consensus.

Long winded I know, but I always try to play my class 110% and do everything I can to perform well. Any comments/tips would be greatly appreciated.

You have to do this manually, at the top of the WWS pages, next to the date, there is a fight duration and if you mouse over it it gives you the duration in seconds.
Divide that by three, as your DoT's tick every three seconds, and that is the maximum theoretical amount of DoT ticks you could have had on that fight. It will very rarely be that high for a few reasons like the tank establishing threat and VT having a cast time.
I haven't got to play my shadowpriest much as it is on a different server I don't log into very often but when I did SW:P would have a better uptime as it is instant and you can get it up while running into position.

It would be nice to hear from the full time shadow priests what kind of uptimes you are consistently getting on both DoT's.

Before plumping for the dagger from badges, consider that it is only 11 more +dam and a loss of 1.74% hit.
This could affect your talent point selection, but the main reason I'd give due consideration is you could buy 10 +12 damage gems for the same badges, boosting you by 30 +dam compared to rare gems and retaining the +hit from the mace.

Hmm, true, but the badge vendor is not open yet on my server ... also, my Mage (former main) has 300 odd badges :p

I'm at a loss as to why I did so well on this recent gorefiend we did,

Anoch - WWS

Now I'm certainly not trying to brag, as I don't consider myself a very good player, and looking at other WWS parses something definetly seems amiss. Theres something going on causing the high dps which isn't present in the other parses. Also I never really do this well at all, in the past I'd never broke 1450, and then got the 4t6 and zhardoom (which gave enough haste to fully reap benefits of 5/5 imp. MB) and managed 1550 the previous week, which was a faster kill too.

Firstly, we had a lock with 13% cos. With 10% cos the dps would still have been roughly 1621, which still seems too high. Then there was also two destruction locks present, maybe I was lucky with timing of my spells/powerups and ISB? I didn't have concentration aura, so the doom blossoms were causing interrupts, which further adds to my confusion.

Is there anything glaringly obvious I've missed in that parse that could be causing inflated numbers?

Also, with regard to the talk about Brutallus being different to other fights hence expecting different (lower) dps, assuming you aren't getting burned, and not soaking meteor slash, is the fight that much different to a gorefiend outside of it being longer? (I've not read much on brutallus so far, we are currently working on Kalecgos.) I'm just curious as to how much worse I would perform.

Anoch
I am assuming WWS does not get distorted by being a ghost. I can see no sign of it.

You have totems and bloodlust, used destruction potions, but no drums, and an atrophy. You have some pretty hefty mind blasts at 32% crit which is high. For no conc. aura the matrydom appears to have procced to help avoid interruption.

Basically you just did well, and WWS seems to be normal. Teron is a fight I always do well on cause it really is a tank and spank all out DPS until you get debuffed. Ideal. Jealous of devouring plague ^^.

Plenty of comments at top of page about brutallus. Burning hurts DPS a lot. Slash soaking just takes SWD out of rotation on occasion.

Xei - the badge dagger has 247 +dmg to my knowledge, and your armoury shows you in jaded crystal dagger which has only 185 and a +40 dmg enchant.

Badge dagger + soulfrost is a 74 (ish) increase unless I am in some way confused? Unless you have the hammer from BT/MH trash which would make more sense. Either way I think hit is easy enough to go with badge dagger and buy gems on mage (or just get from Gbank surely?). Also, on a side note, I have not seen the badge blade but the mace is horribly ugly.

I love that green trinket (mine is still in bank) but crusader is very nice with a bit of practice at keeping a stack.

Matrydom procs off of critical strikes and mob spells cannot crit. If you see matrydom procs in that wws than something screwy happened.

Yeah I did get a proc, thats due to being crit by a construct (Yes, people still fail to kill them in time).

I do notice that the log contains 6.2 million damage.... yet Gorefiend has 5 million hp. So its counting extra damage somewhere, I just cant figure out where it is shown within the log. When I total all of the individual damage it only totals 4.6 million aswell. Something is definetly wrong with that parse I'm just buggered if I know what!

This doesnt make sense to me. If you have points of resilience, which reduce crit chance, than boss spells which cannot crit are being wrongly flagged as a crit and thus procing Martyrdom? That sounds a bit fishy, though I certainly havent tested this myself.

Resilience reduces the chance to be crit. To make up for that, it treats the same percentage of non-crits as-if they were crits for any effects that trigger based on taking a crit (such as Silent Resolve). The wording isn't so good, but you get what I mean.

Works the same way for warriors, I wear some vengeful and <3 enrage procs. I've even taking to intentionally getting hit by aoe for extra aoe/enrage procs....and yes sometimes it gets me killed and causes 24 people to laugh in vent at me >_<

The reason the numbers don't add up is because the Vengeful Spirit's are being counted as pets, meaning the damage they do to the constructs is included in the total damage done by your raid to mobs.
This seems to happen with the new version of the WWS client and I see no way of changing it like the old version with the actors list where you could classify what each was.

Either way you did well and it gives you something to aim at repeating or beating, the Mind Blast crit rate may make that tricky but there is room for more DoT uptime.

This totally depends on the fight. On fights like Brutallus, our mages tell me that they never have enough mana. Felmyst is completely threat capped though, so mana regen isn't the top priority.

By the way, we ran numbers on Shadow Word Death versus Pain, and I believe it's always a slight increase to cast pain first and then death (assuming you'll get a reasonable number of pain ticks before the monster dies). We should check this math again, however.

(warlock) - I figured this would be better fitting here than the Warlock compendium.

For the past 2 weeks we had a growing mourning in the guild from our 2 spriests because our warlocks started to switch to fire in order to test DPS gains and losses.
We came up with:
Wow Web Stats
3 Fire Warlocks - 1 Burn each on priest

Wow Web Stats
1 Fire/2 shadow - no burns
I was expecting a net-DPS-loss of 100-150 for each spriest with no ISBs up, which pretty much hit the target.

Did any of you/your guilds test it through as well or decide on a guideline for your warlocks?
Thanks in advance

Here's what to do to figure out whether you should use SW:D or SW:P:

1. Figure out your average SW:P tick and divide this by 3
2. Figure out your average SW:D hit (factor in crits) and divide this by 12.
3. Prioritize whichever is higher.

Ex: Balkoth - WWS

SW:D = 2318 plus factoring in 18% crit.
2318 * 82 = 190076
3477 * 18 = 62586
Total = 252662
Divide by 100 = 2527 (rounded up)
Divide by 12 = 211 (rounded up)

SW:P = 835
Divide by 3 = 278 (rounding down)

Using Shadow Word Pain is clearly better in this clear, specificially 33% better and I gain about 100 damage each time I prioritize SW:P over SW:D. If this happens every 30 seconds in a 4 minute fight, I gain 800 damage divided by 240, or 3.33 DPS.

So yes, whether you prioritize SW:D or SW:P will make almost no difference. Even MB versus SW:P shouldn't be a massive difference.

There are 3 basic rules for Shadow Priest DPS which make more difference than any other things you can do:

1. Never, ever, ever stop casting
2. Keep your non Mind Flay spells on "cooldown"
3. Minimize the effect of latency as best you can

Edit: Quick and dirty MB math as a comparison, just by claiming MB will do 15% more damage.

2527 * 1.15 = 2906
With 5/5 Imp Mind Blast it has a 7 second cooldown
2906 divided by 7 = 415

That's an advantage of 137 DPS each time you use a global cooldown in favor of MB, or 206 damage. If we again say it happens every 30 seconds, that's 206 divided by 30, which is 7 DPS. Yes, you gain less than 7 DPS by prioritizing MB over SW:P. Again, look to those three rules.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't those parses show shadow outperforming fire anyway? Mathematically, I believe Fire and Shadow break even on personal DPS, but obviously there is no reason to screw shadow priests, so the Shadow warlock spec is flat out superior for raiding.

Fire outperforms Shadow in personal DPS by a good margin currently. Hence the worries.

In theory, it does. In reality, I have not seen any fire parses that beat the top Shadow parses on Brut by any significant margin.