"Shadow Vulnerability (ISB debuff) now only affects non-periodic spells."

Wonderful : /

Well, I get we'll still get the bonus on MB and SW:D. We'll also have to see which of the new spells are considered non-periodic as well.

I never said they would be, they will probobly be the worst healers, but as to my knowledge there really aren't any utility healers. We have utility DPS (moonkins and SPs specifically), but no utility heals. Shamans would be the closest with totems. Those two classes (moonkin/sp) don't dps as well as 'pure' dps classes (they can, but on average they dont), but they improve the overall raid. I see Disc priests being the same type of role. Yes they won't heal at the top, but they will bring lots of abilities. I mean, SPs get by with just mana regen. Disc Preists have 6 abilities that lend to their utility. (Rapture, Grace, Imp Spirit, .5 Sec Mass Dispell, Pain Supression, Power Infusion). Thats an ass load of utility if you ask me.

(i don't know if i actually would include Divine Aegis as a "utility" ability, but its is a nice ability).

Assuming that the crit modifier stays in place (which I think is likely) how does that change our gearing? SWP, VT, and MF still dont gain anything from +crit gear. Would we still use similar (or identical) gearing trends (all +damage and +haste) ??

It may be that during AoE, mana regen will no longer be our priority, but rather a useful support item we have.

Remeber with the change to Shadow Focus we will need to start stacking more spell hit as well. My guess is that crit will remain a low priority.

This is true of all casters now. arcane got its +10% hit tallent modded as well. I guess this is to the benefit of blizzard making 'all-class' gear. If your raid can get a boomkin in it, you'll get +3% hit back from the new faery fire. Not too bad.

It's probably reasonable to assume it doesn't queue anything, since the word on the street has been that it refreshes the SW:P that's already up. It'd make the most sense to me that it resets the duration on an existing aura (i.e. the SWP dot) rather than reapplying anything. Queuing a reapplication would be pretty clumsy UI: what happens if you Flay twice before an existing SWP wears off?

Isn't a 35 dmg/healing Golden Spellthread the exact same thing as current Runic? I don't get it.

Edit: The question on my mind right now is whether or not Twisted Faith counts Devouring Plague as a shadow damage over time spell?

Currently,

Lifebloom and Lacerate are two druid over time spells/skills that "remember" their ticks.

i.e. if I refresh lacerate every gcd it will tick every 3 seconds from the initial lacerate.

So blizzard has this functionallity already in the game, it shouldn't be too much of a hurdle to apply the same change to SWP and all the other refreshable skills coming into WoTLK.

It will be interesting to see if this talent (and the similar Warlock talent for Corruption) will preserve temporary damage bonuses. Originally Lifebloom did, but it got changed a few patches ago. If temporary bonuses are preserved, then it's likely that Shadow Priests would do more damage overall (burst damage trinkets, Improved Spirit Tap) but the Priest would need to refresh Shadow Word: Pain more often (every time you hit a new high +damage).

I suspect if it does preserve temporary damage buffs Blizzard will fix it to stop doing so. They clearly don't want that kind of mechanic, given the fate of scorpid poison and lifebloom. (Of course, it is entirely possible it could take them months to get around to fixing it, but eventually fix it they will.)

The change is a 50% increase in the damage that crit provides. So before 6 crit rating = 1 spell damage and after, 4 crit rating = 1 spell damage. Think of it like... If you were going from the new system to the old, you'd need 50% more crit to compensate and keep your damage constant, and 150% of 4 is 6, the current estimation.

In other words, crit it still horrible, and will remain that way until we have a spammable single target nuke that can crit.

Keep in mind that crits will also trigger an IST proc (and a subsequent increase in damage from Twisted Faith).

At the start of a mind flay so basically your shadow word pain wouldn't tick a lot and be refreshed.

It doesn't look like anyone's answered the question made near the start of this thread about how the timing for Growing Pains/Pain and Suffering will work for SW:P ticks getting refreshing by Mind Flay. I can make an informed statement that I think it won't change the tick timer at all, because a Feral druid refreshing a stack of Lacerate does not effect the tick timer. The bleed keeps ticking as normal, but depending on when you last refreshed it, the debuff may fall off a little less than 1 tick early. So, refreshing SW:P with Mind Flay shouldn't have any effect on the DPS as long as you never let SW:P get near the end of it's life on the target, as you may see it fall off before your debuff timer says it should have.

A number of people have answered the question. It works fine.

Did no one else notice that Dispersion is exactly 6 second duration? Making it perfect timing with all of our other abilities.
Ideal situational use for Dispersion (yes I know you have to worry about factors like moving and whatnot):
Mid-fight you are down to about 50% mana (maybe even down some health too). I'm not including spell haste as a factor because that would only improve the ability to refresh dots.

Cast MF to refresh SWP (18 seconds to refresh it, with the talent change)
Refresh VT 1.5 sec cast (15 seconds to refresh it)
(1.5 sec) MB 1.5 sec cast
(3 sec) SWD 1.5 sec GCD
(9 sec) Dispersion 6 sec cast
(12 sec) Mindflay 3 sec channel (SW:P is refreshed)
(13.5 sec) MB 1.5 sec cast
(15 sec) VT is refreshed right as it ends

So basically my point is that, if timed correctly, your group would only lose out on mana regen from the two lost MF's that you would be doing during that time that Dispersion is included in the rotation. They would still be getting mana from your MB, SWD, SWP, and VT. And in the process you are gaining back 36% hp/mana and not taking much damage.

As for the people claiming that our raid utility will go away. They have added Dark Spirit which will make gearing spirit in wotlk higher up on the priority list. Dark Spirit will increase our damage by 40% of our spirit with IDS. So if right now we were gearing with some spirit and we had around 500 spirit, that would be an additional 200 +dmg. So 5 spirit would be equal to 2 damage. Not amazing, but it's better than the + that holy priests are currently getting. Not to mention Shadow Power making our MB and SWD hit for 200% damage instead of just 150%. I think the intent of these talents is to make us do more damage at high end raiding content without making VT completely broken. I would guess that with improvements to our damage, our group mana generation will not suffer as much as many people on here are saying.

Edited out colons so that SWD didnt have an emoticon

My guess is 175%, but we all know how confusing blizzard words anything to do with crit modifiers.

If it is anything like the mage talents, it usually works out as: (standard) 50% crit modifier, 50% of that is 25%, so new modifier is 75% making it 175% damage on crit.

I think as a whole shadow priests like other healing capable classes are still looking to be in a good spot. Sure, there's probably only room for one of each of the hybrid tank/dps spec, but there's still all the healer spots open, and with the spell power change it should still be pretty easy to have more than one shadow priest on your roster. If more than one turns up on a night, just have the excess spec for healing. They'll be just as well geared for it as for DPS.

Sure, maybe not everyone wants to heal even part time, but I think the history of this game has shown over and over that if you never want to heal, you have to roll a class without healing spells.

There are a few interesting things to note about Mindsear it seems:

1) It doesn't do any damage to the target of the spell. It only does damage to those enemies with 10 yards of the target. (This means it isn't going to be replacing Mind Flay any time soon for us on single mob pulls).
2) Each tick can crit (rolled separately for each affected target of course). Just at the normal 1.5*, not the 1.75*
3) It seems that it just rolls once per cast to determine the size of a normal tick and then every mob takes that same amount of damage per tick (except for crits of course).
4) If a mob that takes damage from it is affected by VE, then it *will* return healing to the caster.
5) However the same is *not* currently true for VT. I'm wondering if this is a bug or not....
6) It's apparently *not* affected by haste currently. Also wondering if this is a bug or not...
7) The current scaling per tick (untalented) seems to be slightly higher than 20%.
8) A mob dying from Mind Sear *will* proc Spirit Tap.

Also, Spirit Tap overwrites Improved Spirit Tap.

For those that aren't very excited about Dispersion: Have you looked at the 51 point talents for other classes? Most of them seem to be PVP oriented. In a few cases where a particular spec is designed for PVE, the 51 pointer is an activated ability with mixed PVP/PVE applications. If the option is a PVP-only talent or an extra mana pot, I'm satisfied with the mana pot, especially given all the other buffs.

If your suggesting that it would be worth it for the mana only, remember that this spell takes 6 seconds to complete and you can't dps while it is running. It may be viable in PvE as a sort of oh-crap button, kind of like ice block except much less useful. (Doesn't remove buffs etc)

I don't see it as very useful in anything but arena.. and even then it is only mildly so.

90% dmg reduction is nice, but without a good aggro dump mechanic, I doubt it would really prevent that many "oh crap!" deaths anyway. It just feels so out-of-character in the sense that SPs more than any other character, has to be hitting something in order to be useful. And so what do they give as a 51 point talent? Something to make us not hit anything. There was some speculation that dispersion's regen effects would be group-wide, but barring that development, I don't see this as something to be excited about.

As mentioned before, while I think the changes are all "balanced" and even give us what we thought we need to fix the class, there is considerably less sexiness than resto shaman spirit link, enh shaman ghost wolves, and aff lock's cripple. Personally, I think the changes feel like they belong in a class balancing patch rather than as an expansion pack. (that costs money!).