Yes, VT fundamentally changed raid viability for Shadow Priests. At 60, raiding SP's were fairly rare. I can only recall one notable raiding SP. The release of TBC gave us much desired raid slots.

Conversely, our ability to to melt face in PvP dropped dramatically (once people acquired resilience). This was further diminished when resilience began to affect DoTs; and only got worse as melee finally scaled up in damage. I believe Dispersion and the other pvp-centric talents are directly aimed at renewing some of our former PvP power.

Yeah I've also got no qualms with Dispersion. It's a mix of shield wall and self innervate. It's going to be huge in PvP and PvE.

Lets not forget the abomination we could have been with Shadowmend...

Anyone know a method of estimating how much +heal/damage/spellpower, spellhaste, int, and spirit at level 80? Would you guess that there will be a similar item level increase and then estimate based off of that formula?

Most of the changes we're getting in WotLK (assuming no major changes between now and release, which is a pretty damn big assumption) are good changes; unfortunately, they're changes that any brain-dead person could see that we needed a long time ago, and it looks like we will still remain with some fundamental limitations through the release of WotLK.

Changes that are undeniably good:

- 30 yard range on Mind Flay
- More threat reduction
- Mana reduction through Pain and Suffering/Shadow Focus/Imp Spirit Tap
- A more reliable mana restore method than Shadowfiend
- Better surivivability (Imp Shadowform, adding a horror effect to PS, much improved Shadow Resilience, Dispersion)
- AoE!

One of the nicest things about these talent changes is that (hopefully) WotLK will mean the end of shadow priests putting 14 points in Disc for the mana regen. Between having a second castable form of mana regen (and a superior one to the crappy shadowfiend), SW:P becoming virtually a zero mana-cost spell on a long fight due to Pain and Suffering, the new Shadow Focus, and Imp Spirit Tap, my hope is that Meditation will become unnecessary. If that's the case, then 71-point Shadow builds would seem to become the norm.

However, what happens to crit now? The fact that we get a crit modifier talent is long overdue, and the 60% damage reduction from SW was a no-brainer change (Blizzard, really, just remove the stupid self-damage already). But even with those changes, I can't see crit overtaking haste as the preferred shadow priest stat (after +spellpower and +hit, of course). As others have mentioned, for single-target DPS we still only have two spells that can crit, and they're both on cooldowns (one on a very long CD). Therefore, I can't really see shadow priests stacking crit instead of haste - these changes will just mean that we'll get a little damage bonus, but it won't fundamentally change the way shadow priests gear.

Then again, who knows what will happen to haste - the nerf to Shadow Focus in terms of +hit really hurts, and will I think serve to limit how much haste people can gear for, since reaching the hit cap (which while no means impossible) will take much more work now. It seems like a lot of raiding shadow priests had to start putting points back into Shadow Focus once they hit Sunwell, as they were picking up lots of haste items with no hit on them. But in WotLK we won't have that option to fall back on.

In the end, the main problem that shadow priests will have in WotLK is the same problem they have now: Mind Flay. Until this spell is fixed or ditched entirely, we will continue to have scaling/gearing issues.

One thing that does intrigue me is shadow priests using Mark of Divinity on a tank, combined with VE. If MoD was added in right now, consider a shadow priest doing 1200 DPS - that's 300 HPS per group member, or 1500 HPS total. Take 30% of that, and you've got another 450 HPS on the tank, or the equivalent of a HoT ticking for 1350 every 3 seconds. Not bad, considering that's completely (well, except for the cost of VE) free healing. Only things I'm not sure of are if MoD really has a 30 min duration, and if VE healing applies to it. Could be cool though.

Overall, we're gaining survivability, better mana regen, and some AoE utility, but we're still left with two not-so-great options for gearing after hit and damage. Crit hasn't been improved enough, and haste still (as far as I know) won't affect DoTs. Two easy-fix options would be to make Mind Flay crittable, or having haste affect DoTs. If neither of those happens (or something else to make crit worthwhile), then even with a few more dmg % modifiers such as Imp SW:P and Twisted Faith, I still think shadow priests will begin to fall behind in damage at the high end of gear, as Mind Flay will hold us back, and the lack of a good %dmg stat to gear for.

Can't say I think the WotLK changes (as they are) are bad - they are a step foward, the issue is that they're not as big a step forward as I think we needed to keep up with the buffs that I'm sure other DPS classes are getting.

I do like the look of the new talents. They are strong pvp survivability/damage talents and decent pve talents. Unfortunately it no longer looks like I can get everything or nearly everything I want for raiding and pvp in one build...but I'm willing to sacrifice that for the ability to survive more than 3 seconds with a rogue.

Shadow Word: Death was added to the game as a finisher. It was intended to be used to kill players/mobs and punish you if you didn't use it that way. If you played pre BC you may remember the woes that we had finishing off targets at times. Not that we couldn't do it but that if you got kicked/spell push back you ended up waiting for 1-3 SW:Pain ticks to finish off your target. SW: Death was a amazing in this role but it quickly took on its current status as a high dps spell used every CD...which is why Blizz had to nerf it to 12 seconds. VE can take care of so much of the damage so quickly that it didn't really punish us for using it outside of its intended design.

The problem with Mind Flay is not related to its inability to crit but rather the terrible damage coefficient it recieves because it is considered a snare spell. This would be warrented if it were like any other snare spell that recieves this same punishment in that it remained on the target for a period of time after casting it (i.e. Frost Shock, Frostbolt, Cone of Cold). However since MF does not remain it allows us no kiting ability or ability to move away from the target and therefore it's damage should not be punished in my opinion. If it were given a damage coefficient as a 3 second cast rather than an instant it would scale significantly better.

Well, Mind Flay has 3 problems (used to be 4, but they're fixing the range issue finally):

1) Poor +dmg coefficient
2) Can't crit
3) Damage breaks the channel

All three of these reasons serve to reduce MF's damage output, and the first two hurt its scaling. The addition of VT and SW helped lessen the burden of MF a bit, since those spells meant we don't cast MF as often as we did pre-BC, but they didn't fix the problem.

It's been said a million times, and who knows, maybe in the 3rd or 4th expansion Blizzard will finally get it, but Mind Flay should be the priest version of Arcane Missiles: each tick can crit, proper damage coefficient, and talented it should be uninterruptible. I'm not saying MF needs to become a high damage/mana spell, those can remain as is. But in the other three aspects, AM is what MF should be. I'd be willing to trade the snare in order to get those changes to MF, though I guess the possibly outcry from the PvP folks might be ugly (then again, how could you complain about an uninterruptible MF in PvP?).

In a sense, fixing Mind Flay would have been quite possibly the most important change for PvE that Blizzard could have made, but they aren't doing it. And I don't just mean in terms of our damage scaling, I mean in terms of our gearing. Right now shadow priests at high levels of +dmg have two not-so-great choices for gearing: haste, which is decent, but not great because it doesn't affect DoTs; and crit, which is close to useless. So while a SB-spamming lock can stack haste or crit and get good benefit from both, we're stuck between two 'meh' choices. I've been gearing myself for haste in the hope that it will one day affect DoTs, but who knows?

So this is the real problem shadow priests have - we don't really have one stat that's spectacular to gear for once you already have large +dmg. Maybe that was okay for most of TBC, because our support from VT meant we didn't need to be topping the damage meters (though I don't really know how shadow priests are doing towards the end of Sunwell - I know VE is important on a couple fights, but personal-DPS wise). But in WotLK, it seems Blizzard wanted to tone down VT in favor of upping our personal DPS. Which is all well and good, the problem is are the changes enough? IMO, as long as we're saddled with a crappy spell that is our *only* option while DoTs are ticking and MB/SW are on CD, we will eventually start to fall behind again.

anyone heard a word does VE healing work out with mark of divinity (Marks the target with Divinity, causing 30% of all of your healing to also heal the target. Lasts for 30 min.)

That would offer some pretty focused healing on the marked target by thinking from 2k dps you would have 500hps per member in your party making it total 750 health per sec for the marked target if that spell counts in VE made healing.

Or maybe i understood it totally wrong and it means the healing you receive

I've looked a bit into the talents and my PoV might be an interesting one

There are significant changes to our viability as a mana battery and it's been shifted towards actually beeing a dps class. Both positive and negative, depends on what you prefer to be honest. Yes we will probably be slightly less "OMG NEED SP", but we'll not lose it entirely. Our MP5 from VT goes down, but our dps goes up, so the loss isn't fully 3%, but somwhere around 1.5-2%.

I see some people still wish MF would be addressed and changed towards better scaling and that Mind Shear is more or less just a drop in the sea. I do disagree to some extent, due to not knowing fully how Mind Shear works.
My thoughts beeing (disclaimer: pure speculations):

From what I can understand of the wording on Mind Shear, it's not like Mind Flay, but will be a Arcane Missile kind of spell and with an AOE effect to it as well (graphically like Fatal Attraction on Mother maybe?).
Due to longer cast time it will receive a greater effect from spell haste and each tick is unscaled more damaging than Mind Flay (~500 vs 330). It can crit and it's uninteruptable due to Imp. Shadowform as it is now. As of now getting 25% spell haste is rather hard and will diminish your others stats quite significantly, but it might be easier on lvl 80. Thus the spell would be down to a 3.75sec cast. Doing ~2500 damage over it's duration (per AOE target). Depending on how it will scale with spell damage it might turn out to be Mind Shear beeing cast between dots and MB/SWD. We do lose out on the refreshing MF, but in wording it seems like it will "recast" it every time making SWP not able to tick (refer to chain casting SWP on a target).

Another great thing with Mind Shear is that we can probably proc blackout on it as well, giving us a non-cooldown "Shadowfury". In a Mount Hyjal kind of environment this could turn out very desireable.

Got some thoughts on spirit tap and other talents as well, but will post it later. Work calls ;D

I was just reading over this thread, and I read a bit of the first page, and saw some issues people were having. What I'm going to say might or might not have been covered by someone else, and I just didn't get to it.

Anyways, the first thing I noticed was about the Growing Paints talent, convering up to a maximum of 20% of plus healing to plus damage. ALot of priests it seems were worried that they would have to be rolling on healing gear, and it would be difficult to hit cap and such. You have to remember, these talents are suited to go along with WotLK itemization. From what I've read of blue posts, there is no long +healing and +damage gear. They are combined into a single stat, with talents interacting differently, and spells (mainly healing) getting new coefficients. So the way I interpret the talent is that it will basically give shadowpriets 20% more damage than someone else using the same gear. I'm not saying this is the case, but it seems plausible to me.

And somewhere else I also saw a reply talking about how spriests will be needing itemization with more spirit, exclusively to be for them, so they don't compete with warlocks and mages. While warlocks might not need spirit, spirit is still quite valuable to mages. Especially arcane mages. And with the new talents in arcane, spirit is going to be just as vital to a shadow priest as it is to an arcane mage. So damage gear with higher amounts of spirit probably isnt going to exclusively be for shadow priests.

I actually play a mage, just to make it known, but I've read up a bit about shadow priests, and I was reading this thread for the fun of it. Anyways, what I've said is not guaranteed to be accurate, and chances are, it isnt totally accurate. What it is is my interpretation of what I've read here, and in blue posts, and my thoughts about what it may mean. Just thought I'd post this, to see if anyone agrees or whatnot. Food for thought

This is more or less true afaik. Officials have stated that the itemization will be different in terms of dmg/healing. They haven't explicitly said how it will be, but it will not follow the until know known model. Yet Growing Pains was removed some alpha patches ago according to the data mining. What they are probably meaning to address is the luck based loot system. As we all know it happens more than often enough that noone in the raid needs an item or more, not even for offspecs. It's most likely a system like the one in Sunwell only not based upon a "badge-item" to change it.

Up until 2.4 spirit was a useless stat for many classes/specs, but after it got changed to what it is now, many have started to open their eyes to it. Not necessarily as a main stat to stack, but a secondary stat. Seeing the changes made in the Alpha talent tree spirit will end up beeing a main stat for shadow priest due to Improved Spirit tap and Twisted Faith. Seeing as shadow priests now also will stack some crit IST will probably turn out to be up roughly around 20-30% of the time you dps. Combined with a resonable amount of spirit (~500 fully buffed) and Meditation from Discipline tree the personal mana regen will probably increase even after the VT nerf. Your spell damage will also increase with more spirit, not only from Twisted Faith, but from Imp. DS as well. In total turning 36% of your spirit into spell damage. Now as spirit is usefull for shadow priests it will turn humans more viable again, 10% + spirit racial isn't that bad anymore

Edit: Forgot something I was meaning to mention.. :P
So even warlocks will have some use of spirit on their gear now. This vs life tap probably isn't hard to calculate, but I have no idea on warlock abilities tbh. So the desirability of spirit for warlocks I have no clue on. :P

You've overlooked that Mind Sear doesn't damage the target it is cast on, only other enemies near the target (which admittedly it doesn't actually come out and say directly). So using it instead of Mind Flay with only one enemy around won't do anything. It might be interesting for mixing aoe and crowd control, something none of the other aoe spells can do.

I can't see why they don't just change Mind Flay to work like Arcane Missiles, the mechanic already exists, has been debugged throughout the last few years, and it would help a lot on shadow priest scaling problems.

And I doubt VE will work with Mark of Divinity, it doesn't work together with any other priest abilities that involve healing.