To quote myself:

Spell hit: Point for point, 1 spell hit rating returns a larger increase in DPS than anything else. However, this is because spell hit can become capped, and IS capped very quickly for shadow priests. Against a boss type mob, you will have your spells resisted 17% of the time. 16% of this can be negated via spell hit. Of that 16%, ten can be negated through talents alone, meaning 76 spell hit rating is needed. For every 25 points of spell hit rating above this cap that can not be avoided, you can drop a point in shadow focus to spend elsewhere. However, never itemise for spell hit unless you need 4-6 spell hit rating to drop another point in shadow focus and have an item that gives a +damage bonus with a yellow socket.

Spell Crit: Spell crit affects every single shadow priest spell that can crit. Yes, both of them. Only MB and SW:D are affected by spell crit, and they only crit for 150% damage, meaning that spell crit is a fairly weak stat for shadow priests. The current accepted conversion is roughly 6 spell crit rating = 1 damage. Yes, it's that weak. And it does nothing if you are not using MB or SW:D.

As an aside, I've had more free time to work on the main revision with classes being out, just dealing with the usual guild drama and such. Extremely sorry for the delay.

Thanks for all the great info! helps a ton!!

Quick question.

You can look me up on armoury. I have 0 haste. 1227 natural dmg + blessings.

I just downed illidan and ninja'd myself a second piece of t6. Gems advice.

3 +12 dmg

or some kind of haste hybrid and a sta dmg?

Sorry to bother.

Edit: Please confirm the exalted rep trinket sucks. I just hit exalted and it seems lacklustre.

I like using Reckless Pyrestones for Yellow, Glowing Shadowsong Amethysts for Blue, when the bonus is worthwhile like the +5dmg. It also helps save the Guild's overall lack of Spinels, since our server's gem vendor isn't up yet...

Trinkets, I'd say keep Crusade and get Timbal's. Timbal's is fun, considering it can proc when you're miles away and disregards LOS as long as you have dots up.

I'm not sure how accurate this site is, but I like to use shadowpriest.com • View topic - Best Raiding Gear Available for a basic gear reference.

Stick with straight +12 damage until you start getting gear that has red/yellow sockets allowing you to pick up socket bonuses (none of the gear in BT/Hyjal meets this requirment). Once you start using yellow gems you must switch to the +14 spell damage, +2% int meta gem, until then stick with MSF (haste proc gem). Also, your post is visually ugly, you could have compressed that all into an easy to read paragraph instead of your choppy lines of text. Something to consider as the mods 'round these parts are bad mother -- SHUT YO MOUTH!

I'm going to have to disagree with that. He should switch to Ember Skyfire now.

IMO, MSD is no longer of use to a Shadow Priest. MSD was good because it let you cast Flay in 1.5 seconds instead of 3, making room for another spell in your rotation. 20% haste for 5 seconds only serves to screw your rotations up; you'll usually lose the extra second waiting on CDs, or the extra damage will be negated by enforced clipping - at least, that's my experience of it post-2.4. I suspect there's an amount of haste that makes it viable again, but I'd rather have the gear flexibility than plan around a proc.

(Also, DeeNogger, your post is visually ugly. You should have moved the last two sentences into a second paragraph, because they were not on the same subject. People who live in glass houses... )

Er, how do you figure. 36 dmg (3x spinel) vs 23 (18+5) dmg, 10 haste, 7 stam doesn't look like a 3 spell damage upgrade.... looks like you're losing 3 dmg equivalent to pick up 7 stam.

Continuing to play SWP raids as 0/11/50, I'm happier and happier with it, and suspect this may be our best option for an end-of-Sunwell spec, since it allows us to maintain all of our required shadow talents even with the low levels of +hit from gear we're looking at.

Nevermind; it was just bad math on my part.

I'll definitely give that spec a try, and it looks particularly good if I never get a Skull, as the hit rating is very hard to come by. I confess I'm still worried about mana consumption though, particularly when things go wrong for some reason. If you die and get rebirthed, a mana potion just won't be enough, especially if your shadow fiend is on cooldown. Aggressive mind flay clipping has been great for my DPS but it definitely costs more mana. I guess there's just no substitute for trying it out though.

The real question is 5/5 shadow focus and 4/5 weaving or the reverse. For Draenei, 5/5 Weaving seems clear. And there are times I really wish I had that 5th point as well. But 5/5 focus seems like it gives so much more flexibility in gear upgrade options.

You can drop Holy Nova if you want 5/5 of both.

Only effective use I'm imagining for Holy Nova would be as a very expensive "ho shit" button, that heals for a bit under 700 instantly but costs 875 per cast and then 35% of your base mana to get back to Shadowform...

I'm going to try 0/11/50 today as well. Spell Warding might be tremendously useful in Sunwell, as every encounter has heavy magic damage, as well as eating a bit of those backlashes from SW: D. I've already been running with 0/3 Meditation since 2.4 release, without any mana issues whatsoever...

i would love to try 0/11/50

but i don't think i have quite the +dmg yet to have enough mana regen. At about what point unbuffed dmg do you think you will need to ditch meditation and inner focus?

The real benefit of Holy Nova is that it's a threatless mana dump. You won't cast it very much at all, but it could actually be a DPS increase, while I highly doubt the last point to get 5/5 in focus and weaving will be as much damage.

There's also the question of the AoE cap on the spell (5k for max rank) and if it's worth downranking the spell when doing AoE against a lot of adds (eg. Felmyst).

There is very little in the way of effective use of it, but it is pretty fucking funny for AoE pulls and for Felmyst.

(Again. Not USEFUL or EFFECTIVE, but HILARIOUS.)

It depends on what drops for you in my opinion, but I think you might be undervaluing haste. If you have an option between an item with dmg/stats and an item with dmg/haste then I would take the haste every time. With FSW, the spellstrike set, belt of blasting, bracers of nimble thought and that rather nice 'your main can spend badges getting your alt crimson spinels' vendor (along with a lot of new 'better than t5/kz' pieces for badges), hitting 1150-1200 damage isn't as much of a milestone as it used to be.

You're right that there are a few so-called 'sweet spots' where you have the 'perfect' rotation, but I've found from testing that even dropping my GCD to 1.4 meant I was dotting things up that bit faster and it made a big difference when bloodlusted, drummed or beserking which always messed up the nice smooth rotation anyway.

Hit rating > Damage > Haste > Stats

I tend to run with an elixir of major fortitude as my guardian elixir and those points that would be spent on stamina are redirected into more damage and most importantly, more party mana regen.

T6 gloves! Yellow socket for +2 damage bonus

Sorry - guardian elixir? Is there a particular reason you don't use Flask of Pure Death?

What spell rotation? If all my cooldowns/dots are up, I'm mind flaying. If one ends while mind flay is up, I clip it. If one is going to end in less than a GCD, I wait. All haste does is let me get more total ticks of mind flay in between the cooldowns/dots. The only time I consider MSD bad is when I have bloodlust and drums and my 1.5s cast spells get down to 0.9 if/when MSD procs.

Learning encounters generally get flasks. Archimonde and a few other non-guaranteed one-shots. I generally found it cheaper and just as good for the raid if I was using elixirs for farming (4 elixirs in 4 hours, vs 1 flask when fel lotus is 40g a shot).

There's definately some encounters where you should aim for >9500 health (hex lord, bloodboil and a few other aoe damage fights) and as these fights tend to involve raid damage, you're often close to threat capped so the extra damage might just be a liability. Fortunately, these are also the fights where your stats are important. Rather than keep 2 sets of gear enchanted, I'd grab different food, elixirs and consumables when learning these ones.

But in a fight where your health is unimportant (e.g. most of them), flask up, go for max damage and haste (slight bias towards damage) and melt away.

This mightn't make a whole amount of sense, I did just get in on a Saturday night.

If you can go all out in bloodboil, I envy you. I have to sneak mind blasts in during the threat sensitive phase. I've recently dropped to 1/2 VE because I am threat capping in Naj'entus even though our tank has 4/6 t6 and pretty much all the BT/MH gear except a main hand weapon (dont ask, unluckiest couple of months of drops). Maybe that counts as proof that ~80 haste rating works well. WWS has been a bit funny uploading logs recently but if i can find one of me in haste gear, I'll gladly post it.

If you have >9000 health though, why are you considering picking up stats over haste? A little bit of haste is still a very useful thing. Dropping ~10 damage for ~30 haste will improve your dps in a lot of fights (for example ZJ's neck over the KZ trash one) even if you don't have enough haste to give you a perfect rotation. Maybe you can slip an extra tick of mind flay in before you cut it off etc.

(The jury is still out on whether max damage is preferable for fights like archi that involve a lot of movement so more damage comes from dots)

We ain't on Bloodboil. When we get there, then in the unlikely event I'm needed to take in my S-Priest over my Paladin healer I'll look at it again. (Stranger things have happened ... I'm having to go DPS on our next Vashj Bashj because the RL wants DOT overkill on the Striders.)

If you're Exalted with the Aldor, as I am, the [Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen] is ahead of both ZJ's neck and Ritssyn's until you're over 1400 +Shadow (at which point [Loop of Cursed Bones] becomes better due to increased benefit from haste).

I hate clipping. I find it very mana-inefficient, and IMO you shouldn't do it unless you have to squeeze out every last bit of DPS you can. That said, when you do need to wring the DPS lemon dry DPS is more important than mana conservation. Any amount of haste is useful then. Otherwise, I think the right amount of haste is either 175 (GCD reduced to 1.35s) or 0.

The problem is that on almost every fight, you simply have too much mana to spend. A lot of fights I clip aggressively and end at 60% mana. Even on fights where you are more likely to run out of mana for whatever reason (eg. you do a lot of mass dispells on Felmyst), the shadow fiend typically returns 8000 mana. Yes, clipping is mana inefficient. So is Mind Blast. That doesn't make it bad.

By the way, the simulators show a roughly linear increase in DPS as you increase haste, as far as the haste has been modeled (generally up to 500). My experiences match with this. I can get up to 240 haste or so, and it's definitely more damage. There's no "right" amount of haste any more than there's a right amount of spell damage.

Sorry to ask, I just have a hard time seeing the benefit of this build... Holy Nova just doesn't seem worth losing out on Inner fire / meditation. I can understand the -spell damage talent, but is it really worth losing all the mana regain?

I don't trust simulators - they always forget something - but I'll take your word for it from the first hand checks. OTOH, there's been some fairly extensive theorycrafting on this subject at shadowpriest.com and the results drawn there suggest that the raw value of spell haste versus spell damage is roughly (X-400)/1000, where X is your buffed +Shadow. Your Armory shows you at 1379 unbuffed; fully buffed I'm guessing you're around 1520, so 1 spell haste = 1.1 spell damage for you. However, S-Priests below the magic 1400 mark are going to see more benefit to their DPS by stacking spell damage.

Well in a perfect world, if you could choose exactly the stats your gear has, then yes it's better to take spell damage than haste. Even now, a spinel is 12 damage and a lionseye is 10 haste, so spell damage is still "better" given the item costing budget.

In reality though, upgrades options aren't that analog. It's never a question of "spell damage or haste". It's "Item X or item Y". An item with 40 damage and 20 haste will always be better than an item with 50 damage and 0 haste. It's just that for some people it's "more" better. Don't think about whether to stack one stat or another. Think about whether an item is an upgrade. Given how sunwell is itemized, pieces with haste on them are almost always upgrades.

By the way, my math puts me at 1623 buffed when you add Wrath of Air. Improved divine spirit is another 38, but we usually don't get it.