I would enjoy having Mind Flay do an increased amount of damage equal to my critical strike chance rather than actually critting. One thing I enjoyed about the Shadow Priests pre-3.0 was that the results of RNG had much much less effect on Shadow Priests than any other class/spec since such a small percentage of damage could crit (and only did 1.5x damage at that). In addition to this hit could always be assumed capped and partial resist checks occurred so often that because of the Law of Large Numbers they were nearly always within 1-2% of the expected value anyways. What I'm getting at was that when you had awesome DPS on a fight, you knew that you earned it. Now lucky crits can sway oyur overall dps by quite a bit. The coding would be easier, and the class more fun, the only thing you lose out on is a convoluted Shadow Power tooltip, and on crit procs occurring less frequently.

My limited data from a BT clear this evening shows us still at the bottom of the list. Granted it's only one clear, and the fights are so short that it's really dangerous to immediately draw conclusions from it, but a Teron parse had me at 2714 DPS, sitting at #14. All other main DPS classes were over 3k, with a fury warrior leading the way at 4.2k. Gurtogg had me at 2623 DPS, Mother was 2512. The Akama->Illidan parse is here for those curious: Wow Web Stats

I'm willing to add 5-10% to my numbers to account for still not playing optimally, including having a dot timer for VT. (DP obviously is easy to track since when the CD is up, you simply cast it again)

With the additional benefit of crit on our dots, how does this change the value of crit vs haste? (and vs spell dmg, etc.) Crit actually affects all of our spells now, while haste is a rather small benefit on dots (by lowering your GCD), and primarily impacts MF/MB. For example, right now I'm sitting with enough haste that 2 consectutive Flays leaves me with a few split seconds before MB comes off cooldown. It would seem logical that I'd actually want to shed a slight bit of haste and convert that into crit?

For Arena, I don't think VE was necessarily intended to be a mechanism to heal your team. You still retain the same % of healing to yourself, increasing to 25% like old if you spec for Imp VE, so you'll still have some decent self-healing going on. Most people seem to be highly negative on Disperson for PvP. I suggested that it should get its healing returned to it, since it was removed only to add that quirky damage increase, which was later taken away. Granted, the arenas have changed some since S2, which was the last full season I played extensively and seriously (getting to 2300+) and I can say Dispersion would have undoubtably made the difference in more than just a few games, most notably vs RMP, and to a lesser extent vs War+Sham+Pal. Giving the 6% health per tick back to Dispersion would at least remove the "haha you just prolonged your death for 6 seconds" factor.

Finally a note for everyone, this thread will be closed in the coming weeks as WotLK launches. We can start with a clean slate then, since this thread is filled with a lot of information that is no longer relevant.

For Arenas, a far more crippling nerf than disperson getting removed is that shadow weaving is gone. We now have absolutely no dispell protection and are utterly unable to do damage to a class with a cleanse/dispell button and a brain. Misery is also no longer dispellable, so that's one less junk debuff as well.

As far as PvE DPS goes, I'll test out our damage tonight on Brutallus. I need to fix my spec a bit since 2/2 imp VE is now a complete waste in a PvE spec, but I am curious to see how damage has changed.

Snowy: Given your gear at the moment, point for point crit is better than haste. There is more information here. If your armory is right, the healing T6 bracers are better for shadow than the "shadow" ones. Meta-gem should also be CSD.

Snowy: don't forget that you might very well also be missing about 5% to 10% of the DPS you might otherwise achieve if Mind Flay wasn't so buggy. Possibly more.

Any reason why you don't have a DoT timer? Vampiric Touch scale so well now that you really don't want to not have it up.

Also one thing for all Shadow Priests to maybe take into consideration:
With the exception of +spellpower and *dmg increasing debuffs the buffs and debuffs on you and the target at the time of the initial cast of your DoTs is what will persist for their full duration.

So for example, if you're looking for that "ideal" rolling SW:P, you'll want to make sure it's when:
1) You're in Shadowform (obviously)
2) You have 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving built up.
3) Improved Scorch or Winter's Chill is up and maxed.
4) You've got the Moonkin Aura up.
5) The Totem of Wrath crit debuff is up on the mob.
6) If you've got an On Use: increases crit rating trinket, you activate it.

Any changes to your +spellpower will take effect on SW:P when you next refresh it with Mind Flay. But things listed above will not. Also damage vuln debuffs (CoEl, Earth&Moon etc) happen immediately on each tick.

hah, that's really interesting - I was convinced those things were changed in the last patch. Absolutely means you want to wait to cast SW: P probably ~20 seconds into the boss fight.

Why would use trinket + SW: P? And SW: D is not worth casting.

Do this: trinket VT, mindblast, mindflay, then maybe SW: P -

The impression I've got from the Shadowform changes to increase DoT damage by crit% is that it purely works from character screen figures, not debuffs on mobs. I'll try and get some proper testing in over the weekend, but I'd be surprised if it counts Scorch / Winters Chill or Totem of Wrath.

SW: D applies 2 stacks of Shadow Weaving. And this is the time when you want to stack up Shadow Weaving as fast as possible.

I would probably do SW: D even before the MB since the 4% damage might offset the GCD loss on the MB (still need to calc this first)

The actual wording implies it counts the crit chance you have on the target which should include major and minor crit debuffs.

Sure but the limiting factor is the stacks of winters chill since that's the slowest debuff to get applied.

Keep in mind that historically, crit has been so bad for us that it's affected all of our gearing choices. Perhaps some of the DPS disparity is due to gear-- Kalecgos haste pants instead of Felmyst crit pants, for example. I doubt this accounts for a 10% DPS loss though.

I think the real culprit is short fight durations, however. Shorter fight durations means a comparatively larger portion of time that occurs during Bloodlust, and the only damage increase we get during Bloodlust is additional Mind Flays. Our DoTs don't tick faster and Mind Blast doesn't come off cooldown any sooner. (Okay, 0.15 seconds sooner, but whatever.) If you did a fight without Bloodlust, I think you'd find the numbers much closer.

On the plus side, this gives me hope that Blizzard might eventually decide DoTs need to get affected by spell haste the same way crit needs to affect them. But I suspect that will take another year or two, given how long it took them to change their mind on crit (and see how it didn't really break the game). Right now, however, Blizzard sees shadow priests stacking lots of haste and concludes that the stat must be fine. I'm not sure if they realize it because we had to choose between haste and crit, and at the time haste was far superior.

I've been following Dedmon's simulator so from what I read I thought the ratio was very roughly 1.8:1:1 for spellpower/crit/haste, with crit slightly higher than haste, but I wanted to confirm that. I actually like that crit is useful because it opens us up to a lot more gear, and allows us to take well rounded items which distribute stats more efficiently.

Dot timer: Used Kalman's which doesn't work anymore, and I figured I'd wait until 80 to get a replacement. Same thing for my helm, honestly at this point with the expansion so close I'm not inclined to spend a lot of money regemming, since we raid one night a week (if that) and we annihilate everything anyways.

I, too, was curious about the crit mechanics on Shadowform. At least last night, I'd open with VT/DP/MB/SWD, and then apply SWP since Weaving would be stacked to 5 (since SWD applies it twice) If it really does benefit from debuffs on the mob, then absolutely you'd want to wait longer until the necessary debuffs were on the mob. This is something that is able to be tested on a training dummy though.

Ted, I doubt we'll ever do a meaningful fight without Bloodlust, but your point is noted, in that at least the fights would be longer so the distortion of it would be lessened.

It's also worth noting that crit increases our damage per mana while haste does not. There's no reason we should gem for haste anymore. Regarding the Bloodlust comment, I was just citing how we now scale poorly with haste relative to other classes, not that you would actually do a fight without lusts.

My testing on beta (with Totem of Wrath from a friendly Shaman...who I wasn't even grouped with for most of it) shows that crit debuffs on the mob do increase the tick damage of our DoTs.

That's only 4 stacks of Shadow Weaving before you cast SW:P and the SW:P ticks will be based upon how many stacks there were when you cast it, so it doesn't count that 1 more stack that the SW:P itself will add to bring it up to 5.

I really need at some point to sit down and work out mathematically what's the "ideal" opening sequence (although of course as mentioned some of it is out of my control as would need to wait for Winter's Chill or Imp. Scorch debuff to be up).

To the mod authors out there: Any chance of a small mod that either tells you when it's "ideal" to cast (or recast) SW:P or tells you how much your SW:P would tick for if you cast it now? Like, it might look through a checklist of things to determine if now is the ideal time etc. For example, if there's a Moonkin in the raid and you've not got Moonkin Aura or there's an Elemental Shaman in the raid and the target doesn't have the ToW debuff or Winter's Chill isn't stacked to 5 then maybe now isn't the ideal time to cast.
I'd be happy enough even with just a Red, Yellow, Green status indicator (Red == Not a good idea to cast now, Yellow == got most of the buffs/debuffs happening, Green == Go for it).

Of course, all this would be unneeded if Blizzard would recode how the DoTs function so that they tick based upon what buffs and debuffs are present at each tick rather than on cast (or at least reevaluate all buffs and debuffs for SW:P when you refresh it via Mind Flay + Pain & Suffering).

VE doesn't stack Shadow Weaving. Devouring Plague however does.

Mind Sear by the way applies 1 stack per tick and it has a 5 ticks.

Yup, I just tested with a Boomkin & Frost Mage - I had assumed Boomkin aura would increase DoT ticks as it affects the character sheet numbers, and it did do. A 5 stack of Winters Chill also increased DoT ticks - so I was wrong above, DoT ticks are affects by both buffs on the Priest and debuffs on mobs.

Smarty? Add a debuff profile for the debuffs that will affect your dots and dont cast until they are all lit up. That wouldn't account for buffs on you though and you'd have to be a bit aware of which debuffs are actually available.

I might try and code such a thing quick and dirty style :
- Target debuff : Spell Critical Strike Chance Debuff: Improved Scorch(*5) or Winter’s Chill(*5)
- Self buff : Shadow weaving (*5)
- Self buff : Spell Critical Strike Chance Buff: Moonkin Aura, Elemental Oath
Taking into account whether the buff / debuff is actually available in raid should be pretty straightforward with talent libraries.

As for the UI I was thinking a single circle that would go from red to bright green with the actual percentage of SW:P increase, I'll see about more options when/if I see nothing coming as correction of this bug...

Let me know if I forgot to take something into account.

Misery was never dispellable. It just disappears when VT or SW:P is dispelled and Mind Flay is not afflicting the target.