I'm pretty sure that one of those two time gaps of 3+ seconds includes refreshing Vampiric Embrace, but the issue about not spending time casting still stands.

Also:

First, 716 is still very low. I was getting 850 DPS when we first killed Gruul. Now there are three things out of your control that are hurting your damage.

A) There is only one shaman in the raid and he is Enhancement. (Also, he needs to stop casting healing spells except right as the shield goes up.) Lack of Wrath of Air and bloodlust will account for around 70 DPS lost. Also, if there are two restoration shaman, you can steal Earthshield from one for pushback protection. It helps a lot.

B) There is only one warlock in the raid, so improved shadowbolt uptime was terrible. He was casting curse of shadows, so you didn't lose 10% damage. But you should have! With only 3 shadow casters in the raid and a ton of melee, he should have cast Curse of Recklessness.

C) There are only two paladins in the raid. You are at roughly 8100 health without blessing of kings, so you need that to survive shield breaks. Salvation is basically required because of how much threat vampiric embrace generates. This means you don't get blessing of Wisdom, so chances are you ran pretty low on mana. I assume that's why you averaged only 1 Mind Blast every 13 seconds, even though you drank two mana potions. A paladin also increases the chance you can get one for concentration aura.

If these raid makeup issues were fixed, I think you'd hit around 900 DPS. That's still not very good, but it's an improvement. You should be hitting around 1100 DPS here. So there are some things you can do to increase your damage. You should use shadow word death more aggressively, but still be careful with it. Use it right after a spine goes out and not right before he puts up his shield, for example. Don't just use it on cooldown until you can break 10k health buffed. And drink a flask, for God's sake! 80 is a lot of spell damage, and you spent about an hour killing him. It seems well worth the investment.

By the way, your gem choices are all wrong. You should put spinels in everything, unless it's a yellow socket *and* the socket bonus is worth it (ie. spell damage). Then you put a reckless pyrestone in. Under no circumstances should you ever socket a Quick Lionseye. You'll gain around 10 spell damage (5 DPS) if you swap around your gems, so clearly that's not the major issue here.

Yeah it definitely is, the only thing though for the second attempt is I'd have to pop out of form and heal because of the way my guild did the fight(I.E. right after a shatter), so I lost a lot of cast time due to that and some FPS lag issues my computer has. Or I just have to run around like an idiot cause of Cave Ins.

Vampiric Embrace will heal far more damage than direct healing will, so just keep doing damage if you want to top people off. I can think of exactly one fight where leaving shadow form to heal is a good idea, and that's Archimonde, when you get Air Bursted away from the fight.

Thanks for the feedback I did that spreadsheet to compare haste x 12 spell damage gems, and although I wouldn't gain much dps output theoratically, I think for my playstyle will be far better, since apparantly I am not clicking as fast as you guys So, going to change gems around again.

Another thing I will change is disable "face Melter" and try to get used to just watch DotTimer and Quartz. I am definatly not used to anything other than tanking and just recently changed my main...had no idea a simple thing as basic as visual human reaction or mms can afect your dps output so much.


However I DID use flask of pure death, wizzard oil and buffed food the entire time - put them even for trash. I have no idea why WWS is not showing so.

I am very happy though that I am not dot clipping as much.... looking back that was something I did A LOT - with no idea whatsoever that was a big NO NO. I would always refresh SWP and VT at the same time mostly, and not really pay attention to always keep them on.

Now I have to work on click faster and try to cast VT 1.5 sec before it ends, SWP when the bar is blue, and MF when cant do nothing else.

Hello, I'm a holy priest who also collected a decent shadow set, so I regularly also check the spriest threads. One thing that bothers me so far is that I here a lot of people talking about "Thirds texture" for Quartz or something, that supposedly helps you with breaking MF. I have Googled for it but haven't been successful, can somebody explain what this is and or should do?

http://elitistjerks.com/733745-post1166.html

You patch it into the Mind Flay file of Quartz or whatever and it divides your MF into three parts, making it easier to clip after 2 ticks.

Acu: Slow reaction/clicking time is a reason to use damage over haste. Haste depends upon you being able to use the small amounts of time you save. If you gain 10% haste and your sequence of spells does not change one bit, you're completely wasting it in general and your DPS will be lower than if you had damage.

Can Someone explain to me how to do this. Thank you.

1. Install a bar texture.

2. Change the Mind Flay part to what is linked above.

3. Cast VT/SW:P/SW/MB right after the second tick (2/3 of the way through) for increased DPS but more mana consumption. The greater mana consumption is pretty meaningless, though.

4. Profit.

I cant get the bar texture mod to work, is there somewhere specific in my addons folder that I need to put it or something?

WoW Directory/Interface/Addons/Quartz/Textures/

Make sure you replace the texture you are currently using (default is litestep.tga)

I installed it into my textures folder but it doesn't do anything to the cast bar in game.

There is a little more work unfortunately than just tossing into the Quartz folder.

You need to open Quartz.lua, and search for the lines that look like:

sm:Register("statusbar", "LiteStep", "Interface\\AddOns\\Quartz\\textures\\LiteStep")

Add another line similar to this underneath the last one, and change where it would say "LiteStep" to the name of the texture you are wanting.

After doing this, you should be able to see the new Quartz texture in-game in the Quartz skin settings like you would any other skin.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Asgorath and Balkoth, great little tip here. Hope this will up my dps, being a holy nub I never even thought about flay clipping till I read it

So, my guild is pushing to get Brutallus down. Did a ton of attempts last night, including a heartbreaking 1% wipe.

My DPS on the best 2 attempts was 1358 and 1399. I'm popping Destruction potions every cooldown. The 1358 attempt I wasn't in range of my shaman's totems ><. 1 Bloodlust, 1 drummer in the group, I'm not in a soak group.

WWS Report

Am I pushing myself to the limit, or is there something else I can do to maximize my dps on the fight?

Looks perfectly fine to be honest. Couldn't find anything that you would have done wrong.
More drums, more gear -> 1500+ DPS
There are half a ton of things you could optimize in your raid, but that's a different story.

You're losing cast time. Here's a similar report from one of our attempts, we lasted 14 seconds longer but I think you'll see what I mean:

Wow Web Stats

So. First of all, more Mind Blasts. You got off 37, I got off 45. A second 14 difference in length doesn't account for 8 Mind Blasts. Second, more SW:P. I had 8 extra ticks than you, or 24 more seconds of uptime. There are two excuses for this: 1, you were casting Mind Blast instead or you were maintaining VT. We know that #1 isn't true since I got off 8 more, and I had 7 more VT ticks than you did, or 21 more seconds of uptime, which invalidates #2. Again, I know we lasted 14 seconds longer, but that doesn't address the issue here. If you need me to expand on this topic, I will, but for the moment I'm going to assume you see the problem.

Now let's look at SW:D. I got off 26, you got off 17. Again, problem.

Of course, we could excuse all of this if you were busy spamming Mind Flay to avoid any gap in casting. So let's look at the Mind Flay ticks. You: 135. Me: 212. That's a problem.

So, assuming we cancel out the 14 seconds difference, our summary is as follows:

I got off 6 more Mind Blasts than you did.
I got 10 off more seconds of SW:P uptime.
I got 7 off more seconds of VT uptime.
I got off 8 more SW:Ds.
I got off 63 more MFs.

Ninja edit: Just realized I didn't factor in the mitigated spells. That said, I had the same % mitigated roughly and the essence of this is still true. We both got off a few more spells than this says.

All in all, leaving out the DoTs, that's another 84 seconds of casting that I had that you did *not*. Let's see the impact on our relative DPS.

Your average tick of MF: 912. Mine: 850.
Your average MB: 2792. Mine: 2719.
Your average SW:P: 866. Mine: 841.
Your average SW:D: 2360. Mine: 2172.
Your average VT: 813. Mine: 760.

So every single spell of yours hit significantly harder, and assuming that Mind Flay will be a baseline DPS and using anything else will benefit your DPS even more, you should have done 62 more DPS than I did, or 1599. That's not perfectly accurate, but you get the general idea. Instead, you did 138 *less*, simply because you lost 84 seconds out of a 368 second fight to not casting at all, or 23% of it. Chain your spells together and watch your MF/DoT clipping to make sure you aren't losing DPS by messing them up. If you're trying to clip MFs, stop doing it for now since you're just hurting yourself significantly.

Hopefully some of that helps.

Edit: Needless to say, I strongly disagree with

I checked his armory, his gear is roughly equal to mine and I had no drums on my attempt. Therefore, he should have been able to match me at the very least and should have beaten me due to all of his spells hitting harder.

Out of curiousity Balkoth and Aural, what are your haste ratings? (Wow armory for some odd reason doesn't list total haste values, and i am not of mind to add them myself). I would think that if Balkoth had a significantly higher haste (and lower dmg) it may account for some of the discrepancy?

Only like 150. ZA healing necklace, t6 bracers, Supremus belt, Ancient Knowledge x2. He has the exact same, only with the Zul'jin neck instead of eagle. He also used 3 Destro pots, I used 1.

I had a lengthy post written and checked the thread before hitting submit -- and frankly Balkoth and Hope covered it all already. Short version: Go to 5/5 Imp MB, and focus more on Mind Blasts. You can improve there, I cast more MB's in our 5'30" kills than you did in your 6+ minute attempts.

Thanks much for the pointers I picked up the T6 robe and bracers this week, so I can drop another point from the +hit to get 5/5 imp mindblast. I think I've been accidently clipping the third tick of mindflay. I use quartz and try not to start another cast until I'm in the red, but I'm pretty sure I've been clipping the third tick on a regular basis and I'm not exactly sure how I can tell if I'm doing it.

I'm in the mage group, so the shaman is saving bloodlust for sub 20%. Is it better to hold off on the second Hex/Destruction popping until then, or am I better off using them as soon as the cooldown is up? I've been popping the destro potion at the same time as the hex head, right at the start, and then again every cooldown, but I haven't found anything yet on how to maximize destruction potion returns as a shadowpriest.

As far as Brutallus goes, you want to save your cooldowns for use during Bloodlust. Since the shaman will either lust when Brutallus hits 19% or when there's 40 seconds until enrage, this means you'll use one set of cooldowns at 0 minutes, the next at 2 minutes, but no cooldowns get used at the 4 minute mark.

On the subject of cooldowns, I recommend not refreshing your devouring plague at the 3 minute mark. Instead, if you get burned, cast plague when the burn debuff has 24 seconds left. This will give you a lot of extra healing during the time you need it the most. Realistically the only time it's unsafe to cast Shadow Word: Death is during the last 8 or 16 seconds of burn. With Devouring Plague as additional backup, you can often safely cast death even during those last 8 seconds, but be sure to healthstone as well. Good timing of plague will stop you from wasting potential death cooldowns. Oh, and remember to cast plague when you get bloodlust if you haven't been burned after the 3 minute mark.

-Aural

Here's time between casts for the fourth attempt on Brutallus:

21'30.415 Auralez's Vampiric Touch dots Brutallus for 789 Shadow damage
21'30.885 Auralez's Shadow Word: Pain dots Brutallus for 859 Shadow damage <-- 470 ms
21'32.499 Auralez's Devouring Plague dots Brutallus for 541 Shadow damage <--272 ms
21'32.734 Auralez's Mind Blast hits Brutallus for 2660 Shadow damage <--1863 ms
21'33.564 Auralez's Shadow Word: Death hits Brutallus for 2323 Shadow damage<-- 830 ms

Way too much lag between casts. Only thing that might be excusable is the Mind Blast/SWD if the tank got a parry/miss streak.