WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!!

That spriest is doing less DPS at 80 than these 3 spriests did on Brutallus at 70 on the PTR. I'd call those numbers anything but "conclusive". Not to mention that it's been stated multiple times that DPS balancing is nowhere near finished.

Since its obvious Spriests damage output is still being adjusted, I was more curious about our utility in raids. As of right now, Spriests have 4 buffs, VE, VT, Shadow weaving and misery.

We share the VT buff with Ret Paladins and Survival Hunters, but what I was more interested in was how the buff would stack in raids and how it would choose its targets. I was curious if anyone has done any testing on if the buff targets players with lower mana over players with higher mana or if it chooses targets with out the replenish buff over people with it.

VE is obviously still pretty situational, as its always been but at least its a class unique buff still, as is shadow weaving. Shadow weaving I can see still being required for a raid, even if VT no longer is, more so with Death Knights.

As for misery, I personally feel that Balance speced druids will be more useful in a raid then in BC, so this might have some over lap. +hit always struck me as a gimped buff. To fully take advantage of it, you would have to gear for it. Which is fine for a shadow priest because he will always have the buff. But for other classes, gearing around another classes buff means that you might not be hit capped at a vital point, or if you lose the buff because the spriest goes down. Which means you would have to still gear to cap your hit, meaning you would lose a lot from this buff. Granted classes still get +hit on there off hands and white hits but I'm wondering what that equals in actual dps.

Really, I'm just wondering if there is still a reason to have a Shadow Priest around.

Something I just sort of stumbled upon while discussing the benefits of +hit and what not.

Misery increases the chance for harmful spells to hit a target by 3%. And this debuff is applied by SWP, VT, or MF. If I'm assuming Misery is up and I have 3 points in Shadow Focus I should have 11% to hit from my gear? Right.

However, since my first cast of VT or SWP doesn't have the misery debuff up I only have a 97% chance to successfully cast it. Therefore shouldn't I actually try to gear for 14% to hit i.e. ignore the +hit bonus of Misery since I may be spending more time casting VT and SWP if I miss my first few casts?

And if that's the case then Misery's +hit effect is pretty pointless as you're going to need to have more hit then needed to apply the debuff unless you do a weapon switcheroo after Misery is applied.

Thoughts?

Do you really think that you're going to miss a lot of 97% hits?

Yes, it is conveivable that you'll miss your first two (pretty unlikely) or even three (extremely unlikely) casts in a row. But that's still less than five seconds. How much are five seconds worth in a boss encounter? Not a lot.

Your only alternative is to gear more hit. Then you either waste +3 hit for the vast majority of the fight (99%+ of the encounter duration). Or you don't spec Misery. In that case you miss out on Mind Flay damage. I doubt there's a better dps talent to spend your points on. Especially because Mind Flay makes up for ~50% of Shadow Priest damage if I read the posted damage logs correctly.

In short: Take Misery, skip hit on gear. Everything else is silly.

I'm interested in the overall usefulness of shadow priests as well. In 25s is one ret pally and 1 shadow priest enough replenishment?

Yeah, you gear for 11% hit and take Misery. To do anything else would be silly.

I'd say your DPS decreases or remains constant going to 80 for another reason -- mana. When I first hit 80, it was very easy to get gassed on mana in any long fight. That's because I was only running around 12-13k mana buffed. Now after getting a couple pieces of T7 and assorted epics, I'm running anywhere from 18-20k mana buffed, and my spirit unbuffed has soared to almost 700. Regen is no longer a problem, and I find I can fit more and more Devouring Plagues into my rotation.

I ran a 25 man Naxx night with Fusion and some EJ members, and it appears that we're still lagging a bit behind, but it's just hard to emphatically state this since I don't have a great feel on how well geared the other classes are, and I'm hesitatnt to make judgements on just one or two raids. There were 3 spriests, and generally I'd say we were topping off around 2500 DPS in most fights, while rogues were sitting anywhere from 3400 to 3800 as an example. Mages weren't far behind them in most fights as well. I really don't have much in the way of mods, and debuffs were definitely getting pushed off, so that's a factor as well.

VE is still extremely strong and that's a consideration as well. Trying to do Sapphiron-10 with 2 healers and no spriest at the start is rather difficult. Sapphiron-25 with no FrR wasn't bad for us with 3 spriests to allow most non-tank healers to focus on the 2 groups without one.

The good news is honestly none of this will be crippling through the first tiers of raid contant even if we are underpowered. Naxx is not intended to be a hard raid zone for any guild that's finished BT or entered Sunwell. K'T is still fairly difficult and Sapphiron can be long and taxing on healers, but the rest of the zone is really just knowing the fights and they'll probably fall over for most people. (Although if you can't kite Gluth zombies....)

Yeah, but it is still rather annoying on a personal level to play an underpowered class just because the instance isn't challenging. I wish Blizzard was a lot more upfront about what their DPS targets were, because right now if you parse the blue posts you can get all sorts of different ideas about where they expect different classes to be. For examples, if they said that they expect shadowpriests to be 1000 dps behind ret paladin/rogues/DKs because VE is incredibly powerful, then people could adjust their plans.

Melees also scale much much better than casters and always have, if this close to the expansion start melees are already well ahead of casters, then there really isn't much point for caster DPS, and I haven't seen anything that indicates that this has changed.

The advantage of being a healer is that there is no infinite energy/rage class to compete with, so healers at least are quite safe in their positions. I am quite sure I'll go holy in the expansion as well, out of all the classes providing replenishments,ret paladins are clearly the strongest and vampiric embrace is lovely but does not justify incredibly substandard dps.

Let's wait and see what tweaks are coming until 3.0/WOTLK, but so far I am cautiously pessimistic.

That's absolutely true. I cannot imagine that VE will stay in the current form though, given that in theory shadowpriests should be doing the same damage as any of the other classes that provide replenishment, you could be looking at ~1000 healing per second from a shadowpriest in a group.

This would normally be impossible threat, but given the changes to tank threat, right now even going full out the healing from VE is not problematic. I do worry as Tedv said that VE might mean that for fights with heavy aoe damage you stack shadowpriests, and for regular encounters you sideline they end up becoming second string DPS.

Regarding VE, it sounds like a lot but remember how HP pools and healers scale as well in the expansion. I'm sitting buffed around 20k hp as a shadow priest for example. Gheals can hit for 10k, renews are 1200-1300, and so on. Having said that, at Sapphiron we were almost at the top for effective healing but lets be honest, that's the perfect situation for VE. Group composition doesn't matter much for most buffs, so we can even be placed in the "tank" group for a little extra healing.

I absolutely will be taking the 2/2 Imp VE talent though, at the moment it's easy to make that fit because you don't need Shadow Affinity at all with current threat levels.

Well, if you consider that CoH hits ~5 people for 2000 every GCD, VE is almost as good as chain spamming CoH as far as the ability to heal raid damage.

That's pretty incredible and probably our ticket into raids.

Haste loses a lot of its value in situations where you don't have infinite mana as well, and our mana returns are no longer really affected by out damage done.