We are hardly the only class with a PvP-centric 51-pointer. Elemental shaman, those affliction warlocks you just mentioned, destro 'locks (though they'll take DS anyways so maybe they don't care), probably demo 'locks (metamorphosis would have to be immensely powerful to be a DPS gain in PvE, which would make it completely overpowered in PvP), and frost mages, from the top of my head, all have 51-pointers with minimal PvE benefit.

That said, I am less than thrilled with dispersion. Full debuff removal and/or an aggro drop (partial or full) would go a long way towards making it more useful. Group-wide effect would do it too, but that seems less likely (both thematically and in terms of power).

I'm not sure that we have to be hitting something to be useful any more so than any other DPSer. A rogue is completely useless when not hitting anything either, and the only basis on which you can say the situation is more so for us is if our regen (which will be less in Wrath with a corresponding increase in personal DPS) is worth more than the rogue's DPS. (Actually a rogue is a bad example due to the energy mechanic. Basic point holds though.)

I see dispersion as a VERY good talent to have. If you screw up and don't get out of a fire/beam/random damage or get into the protection of various shields and so on this is an ace talent. Kil'Jaeden comes to mind here as a very good place to use the talent.

Emphasis mine. Are we sure about this? If Mind Sear is that much better of a spell for single target DPS, then I can't imagine people not finding a way to take advantage of that (assuming it's ignoring of VT is a bug, as you mention). Whether that means macroing a /target Critter in front of the spell, leaving an add banished next to the boss, or what have you, unless the spell either scales very poorly or is prohibitively expensive, I'd be amazed if people don't find a way to make use of it, especially given the fact that it can crit while Mindflay cannot.

Oh I'm sure that when you can make use of a nearby mob you will, but I also doubt that such will be the norm. In any sort of group environment while you can selectively choose to not damage one mob in particular, the same isn't really true for the other AoE classes. Maybe something like Banish will work for it, maybe not.

I think for most cases though in a group it won't be viable on anything but trash or add waves on some bosses. Which means that for everything else we're back to using Mind Flay with it's...less than ideal scaling.

I doubt it will work on banished targets. You'll just get an "immune" message and the spell will fail (this is what happens currently if you try to flay a banished mob - you can't maintain the channel). Critters may work, if there is one nearby, but they have a tendency of randomly running away from combat (and are especially prone to fleeing when you hit them with a spell or effect).

Sure, on any encounter where there's two mobs side by side you can replace mind flay (and you can presumably even channel it on a sheep since it does no damage to the targetted mob), but there aren't a lot of those. Obviously we don't know what future raid encounters will look like, but taking Sunwell as an example, it would be usable on the Twins. It could be used on the adds on M'uru but given shadow priest reliance on debuffs they are more likely to be assigned to DPSing M'uru himself. (I don't know much about Kil'Jaeden so can't comment on that.)

It would be useful on Felmyst, of course, but only on the add phase when everyone else is AoEing as well. I guess you could keep one skeleton alive to provide a target for it (have the MT grab one and drag it far away from the pack so it doesn't get AoEed down, and then have the protadin OT it next to the dragon during the ground phase). I'm not sure the loss of the protadin's ability to help out a little with healing would be worth a small increase in shadow priest DPS though.

Would be great on KJ :>

Apart from the addition of an AoE ability I haven't seen any real sign that they intend to increase our DPS. And from the WWI stream Chilton only mentioned PvP for Shadow Priests as an area that they felt we were weak in.

They aren't going to mention damage buffs without also mentioning the VT nerf, since they go together. Also, much of the reason for our poor DPS is inferior scaling with any stat except spellpower, and Blizzard has said elsewhere that they're changing all classes to have less peculiar itemization needs; the result can only benefit us.

We get 30% of spirit as +spellpower (36% with Imp DS). 33% and 39.6% if you factor in BoK.
At present in the alpha we have 3 crittable spells. Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death and Mind Sear. Mind Sear gets the normal *1.5 hit damage on crits, Mind Blast and SW when talented get *1.75. Either way it's still a case of 1% crit is < 1% DPS improvement and Mind Sear will probably be a niche spell on fights that matter.
We lose 7% of SpellHit from talents so we have to spend more itemisation points on spellhit now than we did before to achieve the same results.
We can gain spirit (and thus spellpower) when we crit with MB and SW. This mind you is a very minor DPS buff.

So there are the changes (currently). We get the same bonus from +spellpower as we get from +spell dmg (no coefficients have changed so far and we've gained no new direct multipliers).
We gain some more scaling from spirit. We gain slightly more DPS from the extra crit power on MB and SW (though we lose 5% crit chance on them).

The problem is: Mind Flay still scales poorly from +spellpower and still has no synergy with crit. Our DoTs scale poorly due to them not being able to crit and not benefiting from +haste.

+spellpower (and +haste rating) are thus likely to remain our best ways to boost our DPS (apart from +hit rating, and making us need +hit rating because they nerfed one of our talents is not in any way a good thing from a DPS perspective) and +crit rating will still be pretty much undesired and +spirit while becoming more useful will still be less useful than more +spellpower until the ^1.5 comes into effect.

Allow our DoTs and Channeled spells to crit and our DoTs (and Mind Sear) benefit from haste and then a lot of our troubles go away and we *can* actually make use of the new itemisation system.

I've been thinking about Improved Spirit Tap (+50% spirit& +25% regen on crit for 8 seconds) and Twisted Faith (30% spirit to damage), and what it will mean for our overall damage and scaling of crit rating. In full BT/Hyjal gear gemmed for damage, we should have about 360 (more if you're human) spirit after kings, motw, and divine spirit, which is a constant increase of 130 spell damage. With the +50% bonus from Imp Spirit Tap, we'll gain 180 spirit, bringing us to 540, which gives us 194 damage, an increase of 64 over the non-tapped bonus.

So with SW and MB crits being worth around 50-70 spell damage based on gear and buffs, how will this alter our EP values of crit and spirit?

Not a lot - as we still need to crit with our 2 crittable spells to activate the effect. Thats the 2 spells that are on cooldowns.

No matter which way you twist it - crit, with as much information as we have about WOTLK at the moment will not be a valuable stat. Sure, it has some extra usefulness - and the talents procing from crits ARE nice, but still not enough to consider it anywhere near spell damage or haste due to the cooldowns and the fact that we still don't crit to the same level as other casters. It's also worth keeping in mind that we've lost a base 5% crit through changes to Shadow Power...

With the way that class changes are looking, I would anticipate WLk gear to have a lot more spirit than it does currently, which is a good thing because we'll be both wanting and needing it more. You guys probably less than the rest of us because of VT, even nerfed, but if warlocks want spirit I can't imagine it would be useless for shadow priests. The damage bonus for iST+DS is likely going to be much more significant than the current numbers would have you believe. You're still stuck with only two crittable nukes, but I would not be surprised to see crit rating for shadow priests upgraded from "trivial" to at least "eh..."

"trivial" to "eh..." might describe it, heh. As Mind Sear can crit, there might still be a case to be made for wearing a "crit-set" that has a bit more crit rating on it than other gear, but I'm guessing we'd see more returns from IDS+IST by stacking more +spi than stacking more +crit rating.

It really seems like they want to make us a self centered class, awesome, praising noob's and slapping the wrists of people that care


Correct me if Im wrong but the point of shadow priest is to keep others mana up, not ours

I think the design so far has turned some of our accepted ideas for our class on its head. Just about everyone and their mother now has AE dmg, and we now get Moonkin and Disc priests who can also return mana along with Resto Shamans, Pallys and Shadowpriests. I suspect we are still the best at mana regen (though I am still unclear on how overpowered 2.5% mana return on heals from a deep disc priest will be on the tank.).

I can understand the gear standardization idea (though I completely disagree with it), but classes are starting to get homogenized. I almost expect us to get a version of Shackle that works on humanoids and warlocks getting a demonic heal ability.

Did I miss something? How do moonkin return mana? Do you mean innervate?

I can't find anything on Main Page - Wotlkwiki about mana refund to party from moonkins.

I also doubt we will see many raiding disc priests in Wotlk, at this point in the alpha it appears that Holy still has so much more to offer than Disc for pve. Guardian Spirit is a cheat death with a hot that you can cast on tanks- who wouldn't want that?

I'm going to attempt to model how IST procs will affect us, hopefully if I get it right we can learn more about how spirit and crit are going to scale with each other and affect our output.

Guardian Spirit is not as powerful as it might appear, while it's a nice spell, what people forget to take into account is that it lasts for 10 seconds and has a 3 minute cooldown. So while it can potentially be a life saver, that'd require some good timing or a very predictable damage pattern. I'd rather take the Discipline Priests constant extra 9% healing and 9% damage reduction on the tank. It's a smaller number sure, but it'll save lifes much more often, even if not in in such an obvious way.

Ah, I found it, Replenish a deep resto talent gives every rejuv a 15% chance to return 2% mana per tick of rejuv on the target. (it also gives rage,energy and runic power.)

I also think that Disc has become extremely viable as a raiding healer in 25 mans. I am not sure anything beyond one disc priest would be needed, but the disc talents certainly make MT healing much smoother. Besides the mana return is especially nice since it means we don't have to go into healer groups anymore.

I think that makes Guardian Spirit bait for changes through the alpha/beta period. Perhaps it's too short a window. I'm sure the duration/cooldown on GS is going to get tweaked as we get closer to release.

A note on guardian spirit: There is some evidence that tanking is going to be changed around a bit in WOTLK. The warrior Shield Block is going to have a much longer cooldown. People are reading this to mean that crushing blows will be removed, and Shield Block will be used to reduce a predicted damage spike.

That suggests that predicted damage spikes may become a lot more common, and Guardian Spirit would be quite helpful for these. GS also trivializes any further mechanics like heroic MGT Kael's shock barrier/pyroblast.

Let us also remember that blizzard stated in the WWI that they are considering allowing people to have 2 talent specs that they can change between without having to respec. If that idea makes it into WoTLk then I would say Growing pains is an absolutely fantastic talent for priests.
Furthermore, I completely disagree with your point of still needing two separate sets of gear, you will in fact only need one. What you will however need is more gems. At the end of the day, having one set of gear and multiple sets of enchants and gems is a far faaaar easier proposition than having multiple sets of gear, since gems and enchants are readily available whereas you actually have to farm out 2 or more sets of gear. Lets not forget that just because you gemmed a particular gear with something doesn't mean that that gem cannot be changed.

I also think that you have gravely misunderstood what blizzard is trying to do with the shadowpriest talents. I am quite certain that the point isn't to have shadowpriests drop shadowform and start healing mid-fight, but to allow a holy priest to turn into a fully loaded spriest with minimal effort (in fact, the only effort will be re gemming). This will help out a lot of people since there are many times when you could, for example, have enough healers but not enough caster support, in that case one of your spare holy priests can respec shadow (though he wont even have to spend cash on respecs if they put in the 2 specs per char idea) and you are good to go. This allows for far more flexibility and removes some major hurdles people have when changing specs, that being, the need to completely re-gear yourself.

The only main issue with the system, as someone has pointed out, is spell hit. I do however foresee that blizz will try to have +spell hit gems and +spell hit enchants that will allow a holy priest -> shadow priest convert to achieve the hit cap. I am however interested in seeing how blizz solves the spell hit problem. If they do a good enough job, then what a lot of you are hypothesizing wont actually happen. That being, spriests wont be rolling against dps casters for gear, but will be instead rolling on healing gear, since they can convert +heal -> +dmg but not the other way around. This will allow spriests to have a fully decked out healing gear which they can convert to +dmg, but rolling on just +dmg gear will not do well since if they are suddenly needed to go holy, they will not have the ability to turn that gear into extra heals.

I also wouldn't be surprised if one of the "specs" a Jewelcrafter can take in WoTLk will be something akin to "Socketing Specialization - gives a chance that you will recover the existing gem from a gem slot when you are placing a new gem into that slot", but that is a separate speculation :P