Remember that we got a spell at level 70 that revolutionized the entire makeup of a 25 man raid. At least 4 sunwell fights can't even be done without one shadow priest. Other classes are getting revolutionary abilities at 80 because they didn't get one when TBC was released. We can hardly complain that we didn't get a second such ability when some classe have talent trees don't even have the first.

Oh, and I'm casting my vote for very slight nerf overall, but I have a much higher opinion of how much a good shadow priest actually contributes to the raid than the average raider does.

We already have two revolutionary abilities.

Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch. It's selfish to ask for a third.

Think back to vanilla wow. Shadow priests were pvp monsters. When TBC came around, we lost all pvp viability in exchange for being incredibly good support in pve. Blizzard is trying to return our ability to melt faces without overpowering us in pve.

For those of you who think i am whiney, I tend to agree. I came into this class at TBC, (I raided a lock through vanilla wow), so perhaps my perspective is screwy.

After thinking it through, I do think all I would like is something shiney to play with. (I was daydreaming all the different interesting possibilities earlier).

The Ret Paladin talent was already addressed. It's only beneficial to 3 people in the raid and reports indicate it's not nearly as wonderful as it sounds. You should have learned by now not to get worked up by how talents sound on paper. Blessed Recovery comes to mind.

As for the Restro Druid talent, it's for one spell, and it's a 15% chance per tick for 2% mana. I can guarantee you that Resto druids are not going to be spamming Rejuvenation to give you this buff.

As for our role as mana-batteries, it was always going to be nerfed anyway. Infinite mana to 5 people is a little extreme, don't you think? That's something any raiding Shadow Priest should have made peace with a long time ago. We knew the nerf was coming and agreed with the given reasons for it. But we haven't been robbed of it by a few talents that are still very early in Beta and aren't as good as they are hyped.

Twisted Faith also gives you a 10% increase to Mind Blast and Mind Flay. If I'm not mistaken (and I very well might be), Mind Flay also counts as a periodic damage effect, so that helps as well. The talent is not just about the 30% spirit scaling. But it's your character. Do what you will with it.

But the main issue you seem to be having is a stylistic issue, nothing with any actual problems with the spec. And frankly, your woe is your own. If you're getting bored of the S-Priest style of DPS'ing, there's not much to be done for you besides rolling another class or changing specs. I can't think of a reason for changing our current style of play. It's balanced, it's unique, it keeps us busy, and it's rather fun. S-Priests haven't had much to complain about in PVE.

No, we don't get many great, shiny new toys, and be careful for wishing for such things. Shiny new toys have a habit of duplicity. And all the other kids' shiny new toys aren't so shiny if you look at them closely. We don't need shiny new toys, and can you even give me an idea for a shiny new toy that would be useful for us?

Our issues have been mostly PVP-related. And lo and behold, look at what we're getting in the expansion:

• Pushback Resistance
• Better Status Scaling
• An Anti-Focus-Fire Ability
• A Useful Fade
• A Ridiculously Powerful Psychic Scream
• Less SW Backlash

I'm not complaining about anything in that list. All of that addresses what we've needed for quite some time. Our problem area has been Arenas. Now we're going to get pushback, a Fade that frees us from Spamstring and all those wonderful abilities on a short cooldown, a Fear that bypasses all fear breaks, and something to help us survive getting trained by 3 melee. How is any of that in anyway bad or unexciting?

Comparing us to Retribution, an awfully handled tree that has been long overdue for an overhaul is contrived and self-defeating. Shadow is a stable, reasonably well-designed tree, the flaws of which are being addressed in the expansion. it's like a well-kept wheel complaining that it's only getting polished while an old, broken-down wheel is getting all the new shiny replacement parts. You forget that Ret has been laughed at for the majority of its existence, and has only now found a possible niche in Sunwell. I don't envy Ret one bit, and neither should you.

By the way, all those big numbers on Beta? They're because of bugs. This has been public knowledge for a while now.

No, nobody's gasping over Dispersion and wondering how it'll work. It's straightforward, like most Priest abilities. We don't have to twist our heads and speculate about how Frostfire Bolt is going to work in our rotation. Whether you like that or not is a personal problem.

We're a stable spec and a stable class, and I, for one, am thankful for that. However, there's been plenty of questions over on the official forums about Priest abilities and what not, as well as Shadowpriest.com. There's interest. Just because people haven't answered your specific topic doesn't mean anything.

As for Resto druids no one's sure whether or not it will tic if you're at full health. Even if it does it's still a 15% chance.

I do have one question about psychic horror... Does that make psychic scream horror someone for 4 seconds and then fear for an additional 4 or is it a replacement ability where it's a 4 second horror and then it's done. It seems like if it was only 4 seconds then it could be a bit risky to have, like using it on a druid who's already used his trinket. In that case I'd rather have a 8 second fear. Not that I'm complaining, just curious if anyone knows if it's a replacement or if it just makes the first 4 of 8 horror.

This.


Something that plagued just about every off spec healer that turned full time dps in TBC is that most (like.. 99%) of these people had no experience in raid dps and instead associated the spec with pvp. They had dabbled in the off spec (shadow priest, ret pally, enh shaman, etc) for all of wow classic but had never raided in the spec nor applied a critical mind to it. Because of this, they foolishly considered them selves the end-all-be-all of that spec. In the case of Enh Shaman and ret paladins, their dps was looked at quite critically and their abysmal real knowledge of the spec resulted in them falling flat on their face, and then either getting better or quitting.

With Shadow Priests, however, our enormous raid synergies (VT mana, Misery, Shadow Weaving) made most fellow raiders hardly notice (or care) at the difference between a good shadow priests dps and a bad ones (Not to mention the dps ceiling of a SP is pretty low, so unlike with rogues where a bad one will do maybe 1500 dps and a great one 2200 dps, our disparity is quite small). Many many Shadow Priests are terrible. Yes, you you and you with the hello kitty keyboard. With the current nerfs to synergies there will not longer be room for shitty shadow priests and their 1k dps l33t skills. This doesnt bother me. In fact, I am happy. It irks me when a person can get a raid spot simply because of the class they play. Force some skill. If you are a 2nd rate shadow priest you shouldnt be in a 1st rate raid team.


/end soap box

Mind you, as it is now - horror effect can still be PvP trinketted out of. You can trinket out of death coil for example (foolish, but can be done). It just goes though normal fear immunities (warrior fear immuniites come into mind). Also undead can't use racial on terror effect.

What I'm wondering is, if someone trinkets out of improved scream within first 4 seconds, will it strip both fear and terror, or only terror (leaving fear still, and in effect wasting the trinket). I'd think it should be the former.

It'll remove both, just as trinketing out of hamstring/crippling while being frost novaed does.

It applies 2 debuffs. One is a horror debuff and one is a fear debuff. The horror debuff wears off after 4 seconds, the fear one wears off after 8 seconds.

Also means that a Paladin that was trying to cleanse a friend that had been hit by this would have to use 2 cleanses to remove it in the first 4 seconds, but only 1 if they waited for the horror effect to wear off.
And it would mean that a Felhunter could not defensively cleanse someone that had been feared.

I withheld judgment on these talents when they were alpha leaks, but now that it's beta stuff I'm going to express my reservation.

I expected VT and Shadow Focus nerfs, but I expected them to go hand-in-hand with crit scaling, and these talents don't deliver that. Without it, we'll get a repeat of TBC: inflated damage at low gear levels where spellpower is the stat of choice, but poor scaling once everyone has enough spellpower (or attack power) that crit and haste become important.

Imp Spirit Tap may make us want some amount of spellcrit for regen, but this has (almost) nothing to do with improving how our damage scales with multiplying stats, especially spellcrit. It's an attempt to make us want similar gear to other casters, and that's fine, but once we're wearing that gear, the issue of how our damage benefits from it remains. At this point it's clear Blizzard doesn't like heavy-handed solutions like "make dots crit", but any of these should work just as well:

- When you crit, your next Mind Flay does double damage
- When you crit, your next Mind Flay casts in half time
- When you crit, you do X% more damage for Y seconds
- When you cirt, you gain X% spell haste for Y seconds

This isn't radical at all; lots of classes have similar "when you crit ..." things. There are lots of possibilities, and I'm not picky. I'm disappointed though, to see no real attempt to solve this problem, only the token change to Shadow Power.

Bear in mind that Shadow Priests provide +5% spell damage and +10% shadow damage on top of VT and VE returns. We shouldnt do the same amount of damage as a class that provides less (or no) raid buffs like we do.

Lets suppose the objective is to make 1 crit rating = 1 spell damage, which seems like a noble goal. A full burn rotation will only cast 12 spells per minute that can crit, and you'll probably only get 10 or 11 if you're lacking in spell haste. How much extra damage a crit need to be worth to reach this level?

Well assuming a 25% increase in overall damage and scaling from the new talents, a rough estimation says 1 spell damage = .6 DPS. And lets forget about the two talents that benefit crit right now (since we're trying to estimate what they need to contribute). 1 spell crit will give an extra crit once every 2208 casts. 12 crittable spells per minute means one crittable cast every 5 seconds. So for 1 crit rating to give .6 DPS increase, it needs to average 3 extra damage per crittable cast. That means than once every 2208 casts, the critical strike damage bonus needs to be 2208*3 = 6624.

Two thirds of the time the crit is from a mind blast and one third from shadow word death. Currently blasts in top end gear are hitting for 2.6k on average and death is hitting for 2.1k. Suppose the crit scaling factor (currently .5, or .75 with talents) is c. The bonus damage equals 6624 when this equation is met:

c * (2/3 * 2600 + 1/3 * 2100) = 6624

Solving for c we get 2.72.

In other words, spell crit will be as good as spell damage once the critical strike bonus is 272%. That means that a spell that deals 1000 damage on a non crit will deal 3720 damage on a crit (1k base damage and 2.72k crit damage).

At any rate, the point of this exercise is to show the extreme steps necessary to make crit a useful stat when you can only cast one crittable spell every 5 seconds. There is no way blizzard will add over 200% crit bonus damage to shadow priests. So unless they give us more than one crit opportunity every 5 seconds, crit will always be bad. These changes just make it less bad. And the suggested changes require an X value so high that blizzard will never implement them either.

Perhaps none of you are aware, but even mages stack spellpower over crit. Hell, warlocks do the same as well.

Shadow Priests real problem is the lack of equal scaling with haste. Having your two primary direct damage spells on 5.5 and 12 second cooldowns is what hurts, not that crit has little value.

And what it comes back to is Mind Flay simply is not a good bread and butter spam nuke spell for raiding. MB and SWD being on CD's wouldn't matter nearly as much if Flay scaled better.

Just making Mind Flay crit, like arcane missiles does, would solve both of these problems. Well it would make a big dent on the "crit is still useless" problem at least. We might get in the range of 1 crit = .7 spell damage, as opposed to .15 like it is now, or .3 like the talent changes will do.

Only class righ now that brings no raid buffs are rogues. All hybrid classes provide more buffs and since they benefit from crit, possibily more damage.

Your point?

Imp EA is a lot better armor reduction than sunder, the only real reason not to use Imp EA over sunder is due to sunder's extra threat when a warrior is tanking.

2600 vs 3075 Armor pen, while very good for melee, I believe is still significantly less utility than providing 5% damage bonus to ALL spells and 15% bonus to shadow damage. And of course the 60,000 mana returned (to group members OTHER than the shadowpriest themself) and the 375,000 healing that a 1000 dps shadow priest would return over a 5 minute fight.

The 2% vampiric touch nerf is a good thing. It means that shadow priests' dps no longer has to be capped. With the addition of Mind Sear (a legitimate AoE), these will help convert the shadow priest into a pure caster dps role, as opposed to the mana(health) battery role they currently serve.



Mana 1000(dps) * 300 (seconds) *.05(vampiric touch) * 4 (other party members)
healing 1000(dps) * 300(seconds) *.25(imp vamp embrace) *5 (total party members)

Mass Dispel is just a gimmick that can be used in gimmicky fights. If Blizzard didn't design fights like Felmyst or M'uru, noone would ever remember about it in PvE. If you meant another spell, just nvm.

This is a nice concept, but neither alpha nor beta builds to this moment show it's being implemented. Regarding dps increase I believe dedmonwakeen, and if he's right, there's nothing to be overhyped about. What about channeled interruptible aoe that costs 3k mana... do I need to say anything more?

I was referring to Vampiric Touch, and it's nearly impossible to do Kil'jaeden, M'uru, Eredar Twins, and Brutallus without at least one shadow priest for mana regeneration. Vampiric Embrace doesn't hurt either.

Mindflay is a unique snow flake in the world of wow spells. It is, functionally, a dot that must be channeled to keep up by the caster. It may seem, visually, to be similar to Arcane Missles, but it isnt at all, under the hood. For that reason hopes of MF being crittable in the not-to-distant future are a waste of energy: it aint happening. To further complicate things for poor run down Mind Flay is that its tied to the 50% movement snare. A significant feature in at least some forms of PvP yet completely usless in nearly all forms of PvE raiding.

It seems unlikely that MF will ever be the spammable bread and butter nuke that we want (need?) because of the snare effect. It is our burden. It is our curse.

Hey hey hey heyyyy ooooooooohh whooooaaaa hey hey hey hey ooooooooohhh whoooaaaaaaa Dont you forget about me.

It's pretty cool that our "main nuke" also requires a talent point. No other class has to deal with that. =(

But that aside, anyone else excited about the potion sickness debuff? Looks like the 2 spriests per raid standard might continue in wotlk