I've been doing some very random tests on the Beta for Shadowfiend. They're hardly professional, but my tests clearly indicate that the Shadowfiend's damage no longer determines the amount of mana received.
I have discovered several things:
-Shadowfiend now restores mana equal to 4% of your maximum mana every time it deals damage. To test this I took off several pieces of gear to lower my total mana pool. Sure enough, the amount changed and still came out to be 4% of my mana pool.
-The amount of damage dealt by the Shadowfiend no longer determines the amount of mana returned.
-The Shadowfiend must simply deal any amount of damage in order to trigger the mana return. I had a fiend attack a shielded target and hit it for only 50 damage, but I still got 4% of my maximum mana.
Numbers:
Mana pool at level 80: 14608.
Mana returned by Shadowfiend melee swing: 584-585. 4% of this mana pool = 584.52, explaining the occasional difference.
Mana pool with three pieces of gear off: 12763
Mana returned by Shadowfiend melee swing: 510-511. 4% of this mana pool = 510.52, explaining the occasional difference.
Since the Shadowfiend lasts 15 seconds and typically can get off 10-11 melee swings, this ability is now designed to restore approximately 40% of your maximum mana.
Since the Shadowfiend lasts 15 seconds and typically can get off 10-11 melee swings, this ability is now designed to restore approximately 40% of your maximum mana.
With all the raid wide buffs, is it possible the shadowfiend will benefit from any? (specifically haste)
Does mind flay now work on totems? (Curious to see if it coded more like AM than a DoT with the changes)
The Fiend will benefit from Arcane Intellect on the Priest by the looks of it. It's a bit sad because once again Intellect becomes more important than Spirit. I can't see any Shadow Priest stacking Spirit they way things currently stand.
I haven't tested it on Beta, but on Live the Fiend does not benefit from Spell Haste either on the caster or on himself. Maybe Bloodlust would make it hit more often. On Live the Fiend damage scales with the caster damage. That's why Shadow Priests get more mana from it.
It looks to me as though the new Fiend is better rounded, giving equal mana to all specs. (Even though with the spell power change it would've done that anyway.) Shadow Priests will sadly lose a bit, while the healers will gain some.
The Fiend will benefit from Arcane Intellect on the Priest by the looks of it. It's a bit sad because once again Intellect becomes more important than Spirit. I can't see any Shadow Priest stacking Spirit they way things currently stand.
Spirit still improves spellpower with Twisted Faith. The crit increase from Intellect won't beat that, DPS-wise.
So for Spirit-scaling regen we have Meditation and Improved Spirit Tap.
Intellect improves Meditation (again), Improved Spirit Tap(again), Shadowfiend, Dispersion*, and the Replenishment effect.
So it may be that you need a baseline of intellect to be able to make it through a battle, and after that you are free to move more toward spirit.
Contrast this to the present, when mana regen scales more or less solely with spellpower.
*until it gets totally changed to something even more bizarro.
Devouring Plague mana cost reduced from 31 to 25% for higher ranks, from 35 to 28% for lower ranks.
Dispersion doesn't increase your spell damage anymore if it runs its full duration without you taking damage.
Glyph of Shadowfiend - Receive 5% of your maximum mana if your Shadowfiend dies from damage. (Old - 1%)
It would appear that Mind Flay has had it's scaling cut again. Back down to somewhere between 68.5% and 69% it would seem.
*edit* Actually it appears it's at 77%. My mistake was caused because they've lowered the base DPS of both Mind Flay and SW:P without updating the tooltips.
Top rank of Mind Flay does 196 a tick (meant to do 230 according to the tooltip).
Top rank of SW:P does 230 a tick (meant to do 255 according to the tooltip). SW:P scaling is unchanged.
So it may be that you need a baseline of intellect to be able to make it through a battle, and after that you are free to move more toward spirit.
Over on the Holy/Discipline thread, someone ran the math taking into account Replenishment abilities (which, it's fair to say, you'll have available as a Shadow Priest) and determined that you'd want about twice as much Intellect as Spirit running Meditation with high FSR. Currently, it's twice as much Spirit as Intellect. Note that this doesn't take into account IST, though.
Over on the Holy/Discipline thread, someone ran the math taking into account Replenishment abilities (which, it's fair to say, you'll have available as a Shadow Priest) and determined that you'd want about twice as much Intellect as Spirit running Meditation with high FSR. Currently, it's twice as much Spirit as Intellect. Note that this doesn't take into account IST, though.
Probably also wouldn't take into account Dispersion which boosts the value of +int even more.
Also Veiled Shadows boosts our benefit from Shadowfiend over that of a Holy Priest which again makes +int more valuable.
*edit* Actually it appears it's at 77%. My mistake was caused because they've lowered the base DPS of both Mind Flay and SW:P without updating the tooltips.
It's still not being affected by Twin Disciplines, if I'm not mistaken. And Darkness is bugged and doesn't do anything right now. This may change the results of your calculations.
It's still not being affected by Twin Disciplines, if I'm not mistaken. And Darkness is bugged and doesn't do anything right now. This may change the results of your calculations.
Nah it is being affected by Twin Disciplines.
Darkness does work btw. But not for Mind Flay.
Also my base coefficient tests were performed with 0/0/11. Just enough points to get Mind Flay. I took ST, Imp ST, Blackout and then Mind Flay. (I try to avoid picking up any DPS boosting talents when I'm testing base coefficients. Then I add them in one at a time to test).
Dispersion doesn't increase your spell damage anymore if it runs its full duration without you taking damage.
I don't mind that change really. In PvE, Dispersion could previously be used when you needed the damage reduction timed so you would regenerate 36% mana too. The new effect made it so you wanted to use it right at the start when you wouldn't get hit, but I don't think it's good design to have two such conflicting uses for a skill.
I don't mind that change really. In PvE, Dispersion could previously be used when you needed the damage reduction timed so you would regenerate 36% mana too. The new effect made it so you wanted to use it right at the start when you wouldn't get hit, but I don't think it's good design to have two such conflicting uses for a skill.
Garbage. If you need the 90% dmg reduction in pve you're not doing it right. Shield, health stone, or god forbid, heal yourself! Our 51 point talent is a pvp talent with an innervate that we don't need. The +dmg addition was brilliant. It wouldn't imbalance pvp, (unless your opponent was afk) but gave the talent a legitimate pve use. Yes, you would have used it before the pull, had to manage your threat, and then made a decision when to use it next and for what purpose 3 min into the fight. It would have made us think about how to use a versatile and powerful talent. Now I'd just as soon take the replacement for improved fade, get an extra mana fiend with it's dmg, and not miss out on 6 sec of dps.
Garbage. If you need the 90% dmg reduction in pve you're not doing it right. Shield, health stone, or god forbid, heal yourself! Our 51 point talent is a pvp talent with an innervate that we don't need. The +dmg addition was brilliant. It wouldn't imbalance pvp, (unless your opponent was afk) but gave the talent a legitimate pve use. Yes, you would have used it before the pull, had to manage your threat, and then made a decision when to use it next and for what purpose 3 min into the fight. It would have made us think about how to use a versatile and powerful talent. Now I'd just as soon take the replacement for improved fade, get an extra mana fiend with it's dmg, and not miss out on 6 sec of dps.
Sorry, but I don't think that's fair. Blizzard has said mana regeneration will be important (even if I'm not so sure of the current state of mana consumption for shadowpriests to be honest) and in that case I hardly think 6 seconds for 36% mana isn't a good deal. There's also still an element of choice existent : do you use it so you'll make maximum use of the damage reduction or do you use it to minimize lost dps time. I think this is well designed because using it involves trying to find instances where you can get the best out of both effects. The damage bonus effect runs counter to this choice, requiring you to use it right at the start even.
That said, if many people find their new 51p-talent boring and uninventive that's of course unfortunate, but at any rate it seems a bit late in the beta to change this, especially if the current talent works well and is only wrong because it's merely decent instead of great.
Between being infinite mana-wise on live and having an effective OOM time with a shadowfiend of like 7 minutes on the PTR without Meditation on a Blasted Lands Servant, I'm not sure Dispersion is that bad. Though I'm starting to think I might have to spec for Meditation and leave a few points off the bottom of the shadow tree and see if that works better. The mana issue aside, Dispersion does have PvE applications for when something goes wrong and your healthstone can't fix it (Kalec or Archimonde curses not being removed fast enough, getting unlucky on Council, or flat out screwing up with fires, whatever). It's probably fair to say that if you need it, you're not doing it right, but the whole PvE game is about learning how to do an encounter right, so I see no reason to think the extra margin for error has no value at all. Definitely unexciting, though.
Mind Flay glyph doesn't appear to do anything for the coefficient, but my testing wasn't exactly scientific.
Saying you screwed up if you need to use Dispersion is like saying every mage or paladin screwed up when they needed to use Ice Block/Divine Shield. That's definitely not true at all. Of course, those are baseline talents, but honestly, not every 51 pointer has to be a class defining talent in PvE. See rogues and shadowstep, nobody would deny that wasn't an amazing talent. Avenger's Shield for paladins is very useful, although it's hardly "amazing" and class defining like Vampiric Touch. Same goes for mages and Dragon's Breath.
Treat the shadow priest tree like the feral druid tree and add some bloat, like a bear/tanking (pvp) spec and a cat/dps (pve) spec.
I see us needing:
1. Shadow priests need more survivability in PvP only.
2. Shadow priests need comparable dps in PvE settings to justify a raid slot.
3. Shadow priests need to scale with haste, crit, and spell power to maximize Ilvl budget.
1) Move dispersion up, scale back it's power, modify the cooldown timer, make it a 2-3 pt talent.
2,3) Make the 51 pt talent modify mind flay, off the GCD, so it crits on every tick, with a reasonable cooldown. You get guaranteed I:ST uptime and it scales with crit/haste/spell power. I'm sure the idea isn't perfect, but it feels like a better 51 point dps tree talent to me.
Note : MF base coeficient is assumed to be 0.77%, assuming no glyph, or no change from glyph.
I ignored haste and hit under the assumption it affects both spells equally.
I found out that during the GCD you use to cast SW:D you only gain 23% more damage over half a MF, at 2000 spellpower. And only 15% more damage at 3000 spellpower. (Think "dps" if you don't like the idea of half-a-MF).
Now I don't want to start theoricrafting about the best way to manage cycles. But it seems using SW:D every 12s would only give arround 1 - 2% more overall dps over not using it at all. The less improvement the more spellpower you have.
SW:D also has a much worse dpm factor than MF, and an average 2k+ damage on yourself (2k spellpower, 20% crit, P&S).
I am not saying "SW:D sucks, use MF". I think they left SW:D a bit behind while buffing MF :(. MB gets more talent scaling than SW:D, who has a longer cooldown and a self-damage effect. As it is right now, I'd save SW:D to fill gaps in cycles. Or if you need to move, it is a GCD's worth of dps. It just doesn't seem to be worth it to spam it like we could in most tbc fights.
Edit : I made a mistake with twin disciplines.
SW:D = (810 + Spell * (0.43 * 1.05)) * (1.10 * 1.15 * 1.10) * (1 + Crit)
We get even worse numbers ... 19% more dps from SW:D over MF at 2000 spellpower. 10% at 3000 spellpower.
Vampiric Touch - "Causes $o2 Shadow damage over $d to your target and causes all party members to gain mana equal to 2% of any Shadow spell damage you deal."
Isn't it .25% of damage done my Mind Blast? Just making sure.
Isn't it .25% of damage done my Mind Blast? Just making sure.
That tooltip is wrong.
Priest's party or raid members gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second when the priest deals damage from Mind Blast.
Every mind blast causes the replenishment effect to be applied to 10 people in the raid/group, causing them to gain .25% of their max mana per second for 15 seconds.
2tasha
Strange results, SW: D ,not being nerfed for being a "filling spell", should scale with spellpower better than MF Could you explain formulas you've used?
Shadow Word: Death also gives you the chance to proc Imp. Spirit Tap, so even if MF became slightly better for DPS the extra mana regen and slight spirit -> dmg conversion would mean its probably favorable to keep it in your rotation.
We test single target DPS with blue, epic and green gear. In all trials the Shadow Priest was doing more than expected DPS, I believe it was around ~2500 in epics. This was solo in a 5-minute trial (without raid buffs). In a raid setting, your DPS would probably be significantly higher. In a nutshell, we feel we've made a lot of progress in our goal of bumping the Shadow Priest DPS numbers/scaling to where we want it to be
Could someone directly ask where exactly do they want SP DPS/scaling to be?
Could someone directly ask where exactly do they want SP DPS/scaling to be?
They want all the DPS specs to be within the margin of skill with one another.
Anyway, I made my own post in that thread, but it was in reply to Koraa's frankly foolish comment about the usefulness of +spirit for a Shadow Priest's regen.
As I demonstrated in my post, given raid buffs etc, a generous 50% uptime on Imp. ST, Dispersion used on cooldown, 2/2 Veiled Shadow's Shadowfiend used on cooldown (with all hits landing), an Imp. Water Elemental used once every 3 minutes, BoK and Replenishment (but no JoW), then with +1000 int/+1000 spirit and a 6 minute fight +1 int gives you 2.5 times more effective mana "regen" than +1 point of +spirit. +1 int gives more effective "regen" than 1 point of mp5. And mp5 is 2.4 times costlier than +int and +spi.
This is an example of just how in love with % of max mana abilities the devs are currently. Spirit is far less useful than Intellect for regen purposes. And for a Shadow Priest it gives barely any DPS boost anymore either.
09/18/08, 6:13 PM
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