The best I could come up with to explain this is 0.2 per tick for a normal dot - 15%/2 penalty for the extra healing. Or 24/15*0.925 = 1.48 for the full dot. It makes a twisted kind of sense that they wanted to maintain the healing for flavour reasons but didn't want to damage raid damage too much so they halved the penalty.

Yeah that makes sense. That's probably how they arrived at that number.

Didn't plague originally heal for 100% of the value, nerfed to 15% for the patch?

Yes it used to be a 3 minute cooldown undead priest only spell that returned 100% of damage as healing. When they buffed it's dps and lowered the cooldown to 24 seconds and gave it to every priest they decided to decrease the healing. Whether it was for pvp balance or just so they could justify increasing the coefficient we are unlikely to ever know.

For comparison the 21 point affliction talent siphon life, has a coefficient before talents of 30/15*0.5=1 over its 30 second duration. Which is normal for a 30 second dot with 100% damage->healing.

No comments

#7 doesn't worry me, I think it's fair that a minor advantage be given to those people lacking in the versatility of a hybrid class. Blizzard obviously wants to keep the advantage within the margin of error, and if they succeed I think the vast majority of players won't even notice the advantage being there.

What's important is that Blizzard does succeed. As it stands a small 3-5% advantage can be overwhelmed by the Law of Large Numbers, fight mechanics, bringing buffs and differences in skill. If Blizzard makes the difference larger then we'll see issues.

This is untrue at least in the case of Shadow Priests (it's also untrue for at least Unholy Deathknights).
While there are definitely places where Mind Sear might not be the optimal choice due to it hitting 1 less target than some other AoE spells, it is also the most damaging AoE spell per tick I know of (Deathknight AoE might be stronger, I'm unsure) and with it's large range it's not too hard to use.

Where *I* have concerns about Shadow Priests currently in PvE has nothing to do with small tweaks to the numbers of various spells and talents or how far behind or ahead we are from other classes. With all the recent buffs I do feel that Blizzard will make sure that we (at least for their test cases and those of top US/Euro guilds) end up pretty much where it is they want us to end up on meters. And they'll make changes until they feel that's correct.

Now, I happen to think that at some point down the track they'll either have to give our DoTs some better scaling with +haste rating or tweak some of our other talents to compensate as ilvls increase in T8 and T9 etc. Obviously I feel improving our scaling with +haste would make more long term sense, but we'll see what happens there.

Where my main problems lie with the Shadow Priest class in PvE currently are with mechanics and bugs. And, being lucky enough to be in Beta I've been helping test and posting various bug reports for this.

Some of the outstanding issues are:

1) Mind Flay and Mind Sear are buggy currently in a number of ways. There's a large delay between the application of the debuff on the target and the first tick of damage. This ends up with the last tick of damage happening after the end of the channel. And this has the effect that especially if you're using Quartz etc. to determine when to recast, you can clip that last tick even though you think you're safe to recast. However it's *also* causing the same problem (albeit less often) if you're using the client side [nochanneling] option in a macro. Why does this matter? The extra delay alone decreases our DPS from the theoretical maximum and from what low ping testing would show. The loss of ticks further increases the loss of DPS and it shows up more with people on a higher latency. This means that Shadow might feel balanced in internal testing or in US or Euro guilds but will perform relatively far worse for Oceanic guilds compared to other classes.

2) Misery has a large delay before it's refreshed from Mind Flay and randomly falls off entirely (even when the debuff limit hasn't been reached). This increases the number of spell misses especially on Mind Flay because even if Misery was already up, a recast of Mind Flay can remove the Misery but not refresh it like it should until a second or so after the hit check for the Mind Flay. This is just a pure bug, however it's somewhat lag dependent it seems and thus again might effect higher latency guilds more. In this case however it would have an effect on all the casters.

3) Channeled spells in general have significant issues compared to direct cast spells. They suffer more from pushback (any pushback suffered will ensure you lose at least 1 tick even with say 2/2 Improved Shadowform). So with Mind Flay if you suffer any pushback at all you're going to lose at least 33% of that Mind Flay's damage. This however might be an intended balance compared with direct cast spells due to getting it's damage out sooner or something. A bigger issue however is how you can interrupt your current channeled spell at any time (once the GCD has passed) by pressing a new spell button unless you're using [nochanneling] macros everywhere. This is different behaviour from cast time spells where, once casting you won't interrupt the cast by spamming another (or the same) button.

Why is this an issue? It's an issue because it makes it impossible to effectively and efficiently chain cast a channeled spell or cast a new spell after the channel ends. The current options are to use [nochanneling] macros everywhere or to use a 3rd-party mod like Quartz to *guess* when it's safe to cast a new spell without clipping that last tick. Quartz is just a guess of course because latencies change. Even if you did manage to land it in the red zone, you might still end up clipping that last tick. (I'm assuming of course that Issue #1 is fixed). As for [nochanneling], quite aside from it forcing you to make up a bunch of macros for all of your spells that you might want to use after you finish a channeled spell, it is a client side only check which has the unfortunate effect of making your average time per channel equal to the correct channel time plus your latency (or maybe half of your latency).

Again, this is something that effects people on larger (and more variable) latencies more than someone at Blizzard HQ or playing with a low ping. And it effects only those classes that use channeled spells often in their rotations.

If channeled spells were changed so that they're not interrupted by new button presses, just like direct cast spells, then there wouldn't be the need to rely upon the *luck* of guessing when it's safe to cast thanks to a 3rd-party mod or using a macro option that will *ensure* you do less DPS in proportion to how high your latency is.

Are Oceanic guilds likely to top WWS Rankings no matter the class? Not really. Latency will always have some effect. However currently it has a far larger effect on those classes that use channeled spells. And this throws off the balance of the classes. And it's something that can be fixed easily.

4) As already mentioned our lack of proper scaling with +haste on our DoTs. It's going to lead to balancing issues down the road, though I'm sure Blizzard will come up with some way to adjust for this.

5) The refresh on SW:P via Mind Flay and Pain&Suffering is bugged currently. The refreshed SW:P still does 6 ticks from when it's refreshed, however as the tick timer isn't reset, that first tick can happen almost instantly after the spell is refreshed. What's the bug? The bug is timer on the debuff shows a full 18 seconds rather than the correct value which would be somewhere between 15 and 18 seconds depending upon when that first tick happened. This means that you think you've got a little bit of time left still to refresh SW:P because the timers tell you see, and then suddenly SW:P drops off "early". A side bug here is that the refreshed SW:P doesn't take into account the 2 piece T6 (the initial cast does).

6) Trying to manually recast DoTs (and HoTs and PW:S for that matter) currently is a pain. You can easily run the risk of seeing a "A more powerful spell is active" error messages when it fact this might not be true. How so? DoTs currently calculate all of their multipliers (including crit% debuffs on the target via the Shadowform talent buff) with the exception of flat damage multiplying debuffs (CoEl, EP, E&M) on the target on the initial cast of the DoT. Don't have 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving up when you first cast that SW:P? Sorry. Even if you refresh the SW:P with Mind Flay it won't start taking into account that you should be doing 10% more damage. You'll have to manually recast the DoT. But this is where you run into the "A more powerful spell is active" problem. You see it decides this pretty much entirely upon how much +spellpower was involved in that cast (or after a refresh thanks to Pain&Suffering. Unlike other buffs and crit debuffs spellpower changes *are* recalculated upon a refresh of the DoT). You activated a trinket or had a Improved Spirit Tap proc before? Sorry, even though your DoT might tick for more now (you've stacked up Shadow Weaving for example), you can't overwrite it manually. (Note: sometimes it *does* let you overwrite it for no apparent reason. Other times it does not).



Conclusion:

As I said, a number of these are just pure bugs. And it's my hope that they end up getting fixed. Some are deeper changes however they're pretty much just as important given the emphasis on balancing the classes. It's all well and good to balance the classes at 0 ping or 50 ping. But if the balance is totally thrown out of whack at 400ping and there's ways to easily fix the issue, then maybe it's a good idea to do so.

That wasn't my point. They could have given "pure dps" classes enough "utility" that would still justify their raidspot (oh, ever tryied clearing pre nerf SSC without mages? CC does matter), instead of giving them more dps, since if "pures" do more dps, why take "hybrids" at all, except for the buffs?

Blizzard made quite a number of contradicting statements about "pures vs hybrids" issue. GC once said there are no "hybrids" since all "pures" now got utility. Few weeks later, she states "who would take pures, if hybrids do same dps". Well I would take them, since a) they also bring some buffs b) they have unique CC c) I am not convinced about "hybrids" doing as efficient AOE as locks/mages.

Just read into this:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Balancing Classes

So what do the "hybrids" bring to raids, so that if their dps was equal to "pures" I would give all raidspots to theym and abandon "pures"? And now, why would I take more than absolute minimum (in terms of buffs) of "hybrids"?

I agree that they kept changing their minds and that it seems that they didn't reach the logical conclusions quickly.
However I once again will point out that Shadow Priests do *amazingly good AoE DPS* currently at level 80. And that it would appear that Moonkin AoE isn't that shabby. And Unholy Deathknight DPS is also very, very strong.

*edit*
To add some numbers to my assertion that Mind Sear is strong.
1) It has a 1/3.5 (28.5%) base coefficient with +spellpower per tick.
2) It benefits from: Darkness, Shadowweaving, Shadowform, Mind Melt and Misery (would also benefit from debuffs on the target of course)
3) It can crit (albeit only at *1.5 damage which is a shame).
4) It benefits from haste.

It's spellpower coefficient with talents is 45.72% per tick. That is....strong.

I saw T7 geared Shadow Priest on beta the other night. He had +2077 spell power, 20% crit and 9% spell haste unbuffed other than Inner Fire and a hit/spirit food buff.

Let's say he'd gain another 300 spellpower from full raid buffs. He'd also gain probably 10% crit from buffs.

So that'd be 2337 spell power, 34% crit with Mind Sear (20% + 10% + 4% from Mind Melt).

Average base tick for Rank 2 Mind Sear is 220 dmg.

His average non-crit Mind Sear would hit for (220 + 1.15*2337/3.5)*1.1*1.1*1.15 = 1374.6 per tick.

Average in the crit% and that bumps his average crit damage to 1608.3 per tick.

Assuming no haste for a second, that's 1608.3 DPS per target.

If there's a pull of 5 mobs, that's 4 targets or 6433.2 DPS at a cost of 170.6 mana/second.
A pull of 10 mobs (9 targets) and you're at 14474.7 DPS.

AOE is just a sidenote, however I wonder how many times could SP cast MS until he/she ooms?

AOE is definitely not just a sidenote, why do you think that mages are triply annoyed at warlocks in TBC? Better utility, better dps, and superior AOE. Lets not forget that an entire zone was designed around AOE in essence, and there's plenty of boss fights outside Hyjal that require it. Having strong AOE merits us consideration alongside another caster classes, otherwise the choice would be clearcut in most cases. Bring an extra mage/warlock to a Solarian-type encounter or a shadow priest that didn't have Mind Sear? It's also critical that we have a viable AOE for 10 mans, so that the group leader doesn't say "well, we got our replenishment from a ret pally, so we need a warlock instead of a shadowpriest because we need AOE."

I can't quote exact numbers, but Mind Sear is reasonably priced in mana. It's 28% of base mana. For comparison, Arcane Explosion is 25% of base mana. I'm pretty pleased from my experiences in Naxx where it's ended up.

I also posted in the new Damage Dealing live forum. Still not much success as of yet.

I continue to bump up some of them every so often. Even if it doesn't attract a blue comment it might still raise the issue with other Priests (and other channeled spells users).


As for Replenishment with Mind Sear etc. One of the few advantages of the replenishment system compared to the old VT is that we can still pretty much keep up our mana regen utility fairly easily while AoEing. Every 15 seconds we need to spend 3 seconds casting VT and then Mind Blast, sure. But as it's no longer linked to how much DPS we do we can just AoE away for the next 12 seconds or whatever and we're still doing our "job" when it comes to Replenishment. Under the old VT system we'd either be spending a lot of time tab-dotting up VT or we'd just not bother with the regen at all.

As for the question of how long could we sustain our AoE....

I've seen a well geared 80 with around 17.4k unbuffed mana. Let's call it 20k buffed mana.
He had 170mp5 while casting unbuffed. Add in 91mp5 from BoW, 250mp5 from Replenishment (either from ourselves or another provider). We'll ignore Mana Spring Totem, Improved Water Elemental, and JoW etc. That's 511mp5 regen from base + BoW + Replenishment.

Talented at level 80, Mind Sear costs 853 mana. It's a 5 second channel. i.e. ignoring haste, it's 853mp5 to cast.

So, ignoring haste, our net loss would be 850-511 = 339 mana/5 seconds.

With a 20k mana pool, that's 295 seconds until you're OOM.

So (assuming someone else was providing us with Replenishment 100% of the time) we could keep Mind Searing non-stop for almost 5 minutes in Naxx25 gear. All the while doing probably more sustained AoE DPS than any other class (possible exception being an Unholy DK).

And now RLs would say "we need a warlock instead of SP, because he does more DPS". So what is that, that SP's/Warriors/Druids/Paladins/DKs "hybridness" brings, that justifies him/her doing X% less DPS than "pures"?

Those are exactly my feelings. It's just so frustrating to know how much DPS you should be doing, and then see how much DPS you're losing because of those bugs.

I did some tests with Mind Flay, and I found it quite hard to improve my DPS by changing from pure MF spam to a MB, MF, MF rotation. The reason is that the transition channeled->channeled is more forgiving than channeled->cast when it comes to MF clipping. Most of the time I get the third tick when I recast MF about 3.1s after the last cast (cast time plus latency). But when I cast MB I have to wait for the MF debuff to fall of. What happens is: I send the cast, receive the success message (that's 2 times my latency already), and then it takes another 0-400ms for the debuff to be applied. In total, my estimate is that I need to wait 2-4 times longer before I can cast MB. You could say that this effectively raises the cast time of MB to 1.8s, or lowers MB DPS to 1.5/1.8=83% of its potential.

While I can improve my DPS by minimizing the number of channeled->cast/instant transitions, it still really bothers me that improving shadow DPS is not about finding the best rotation/priorities/gear balance, it's about minimizing the impact of all those bugs we have to deal with.

But warlocks dont do shadow protection or fortitude or VE or misery or...etc. The classes are unique enough that there is no/very little disadvantage and the situation that you are whining about is not going to happen.

One priest in a raid (and it shouldn't be shadow priest) is enough to have both fortitude and shadow protection (oh, and spirit buff on top of it, if he's not shadow). Misery is not unique and overlaps with what other classes provide.

So X% less DPS is, according to you, justified by VE and misterious "..."? What exactly is "..."?

It is indeed going to happen, at least in my raids, since if I would have to choose between SP's VE (situational at best) and, say, warlocks X% more DPS (which is always there, and I am even ignoring other goodies locks bring, like soulstone or unique CC), SP (other hybrids) hardly has a chance, as long as I already have buffs they provide.

And why do we limit "hybridness tax" to dps only? Shouldn't druids heal a bit worse than priests, since they could not only dps and heal, but also tank? Or paladins and druids be lesser tanks than warriors, since they could also heal? Wait a minute, havenät we been there...

P.S.
Oh, and I am discussing brand new concept from blizzard here, not whining (since "raid spot problem" is hardly applicable to me in my case)

Althor, I am assuming that Blizzard knows what it's talking about, and even if they are mistaken about certain hybrids DPS, it's unimportant detail.
Idea behind GCs words was: they are fighting _hypothetical_ situation, when you'll bring 25 hybrids into the raid. For that not to happen, they lower hybrid DPS by X%. What I am asking is (I really want to come to conclusion that they are either rather right or rather wrong, nothing else):

1) Why would I bring 25 hybrids in the first place? From fight to fight I might need at max 1-2 +healer/+tanks, why "hybridize" the rest?
2) Why invite hybrids, if you already have all buffs? For situational VE? For AOE? (hope you were kidding) Holy/disc priests could also dispell (mage's remove curse also has no cooldown, don't get what you ment there) and dispells are again situational, whereas doing less dps is always there.
3) Why tax only "dps" spec of hybrids, why not tanking/healing aspects as well? If you expect raids fullof hybrids (in case they would do "same" dps) shouldn't you also worry about warriors being replaced by tanks that could also heal?

I don't think you likely would bring 25 hybrids. Certainly a Nihlium or an SK-Gaming wouldn't be bringing 25 hybrids if pure classes did more DPS. However the differences will probably be small enough that (assuming you bring enough pure classes to cover their unique buffs/debuffs at least) you can still get through content if you did have a heap of hybrids in your guild that wanted to raid.

Assuming you have all the buffs/debuffs, why bring hybrids? Because, despite what they might say, some of the hybrid classes do in fact do just as well as the pure classes in DPS it would seem. And why exactly do you think I'm kidding when I mention AoE as a strong suit? Sure I haven't seen all the instances and raid encounters so far in beta, but I've seen a few. AoE seems a pretty desireable ability to have. On trash of course, but it has it's uses on some boss fights too. Sure, noone likes to think about trash. Personally, I know I'd rather do Hyjal waves with some Mages and Warlocks in the raid than trying to do it without AoE. I know I'd rather be able to do AoE myself on Gothik than rely purely upon single target DPS. Not every boss fight is Patchwerk. Some require AoE. Some require movement (and a DoT heavy class like a Shadow Priest can do well on such fights compared to a stand and nuke class).
I think that the difference in DPS between a "pure" class and a hybrid isn't going to be so great so that anything but the most extreme guilds dump hybrids purely because they lack DPS. I mean there's still talk about how great Rebirth is and how the top guilds might stack Moonkin while learning fights.

As for the "tax" issue...to be honest, I agree with you that I don't feel that DPS specced hybrids *should* be taxed because they can possibly perform other roles. I think it'd be better instead to give the pure classes possibly a few more unique buffs that only the pure classes can bring to balance for that fact. However I don't feel that the situation at present (in terms of Blizzard's vision) is overly terrible.

But I think we'll have to see how it plays out.

You were originally talking about a 10 man raid and that is what I responded to.

I bolded the important bits. In a 25 man you usually want a 2nd replenishment, and bringing 2 ret paladins is not (any longer at least) optimal and survival hunters are weak. As mentioned earlier, misery is unique to moonkins and shadow priests, and in a ten man, why would you bring both? The entire point of this homogenization is to avoid needing X class to have a good raid or you're screwed. For a 10 man the dps difference between a "hybrid" and a "pure" class is offset by the unique buffs brought by hybrids. Overlapping hybrids in a 10 man is incredibly unlikely given the # of classes and specs in the game and if it is happening alot is is likely due to poor recruitment or poor raid leadership rather than encounter design.

For 25 mans as mentioned you want 2 replenishers generally and if you want all the nice stacking buffs, you need to have a decent assortment of hybrids (which makes up for the dps difference). Some also bring CC or AOE or interrupts or off healing or what have you. Again, the changes are intended to do the exact opposite of what you are implying is going to happen. Skill will shine over a persons class.

And I think the reason for this "tax" is because there is no class that can ONLY tank or ONLY heal (anymore) but there are classes that can ONLY dps. Rogues and hunters do so with very few other useful abilities or buffs that are not given by other classes. Mages and locks give CC, but ultimately there are now many forms of CC and their buffs are not unique (curses got "nerfed" rather hard by the hunter/druid changes).

With Mind Flay being as broken as it is (source), and without a fix in the horizon, I wonder why Blizzard doesn't change Mind Flay the way it was in TBC back into a channeled dot and adding it to the list of dots affected by crit of the 3.0.3 Shadowform.

If the above change is implemented it will make Shadow Power a pretty bad investment for 5 talent points. This can be solved by rolling the crit to dot scaling component of 3.0.3 Shadowform in Shadow Power instead. This will bring back Shadowform to more reasonable levels of power of a single talent point and make Shadow Power a good investment of 5 talent points.

This is probably a good idea...... but I would miss SP's current ability to generate massive "hit events" per minute...... allowing exploits of JoW and hit-based trinkets.

Well, I'm rather pleased with the new changes, I realise this probably isn't the same for every guild, especially those with glaive rogues/kj bow hunters, but I've gone from being mid/bottom in DPS to somewhere near the top, 2nd on Brut last night (no burn, but no BoW and mana issues) and 1st on twins (with conflag). Comparatively, I've gone from 1900 DPS last week to 2400 DPS this week, even being rather undergeared.

Worried about our arena viability come Wotlk though, the VE nerf hit us very hard, and I don't know how I'm supposed to keep my rogue partner up in a 2v2 setting. In fact, what has been done to improve our arena viability at all? We seem even worse off than at the end of S4.