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.
Go to Doctor Boom and chain cast 5 Mind Flays. If you have less than 15 ticks, you're clipping. That said, having a 0.2-0.3 second delay between Mind Flays is far better than clipping at 2.9 if you're not able to play it any closer than that.
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.
You have 3 cooldowns in your control: Trinket, Pot, and Plague. Tedv covered Plague usage so I'll focus more on the other two. Like he said, you'll be able to use them 3 times. Also like he said, you'll want to save the last pot/trinket for Bloodlust. Let's assume Brut will hit 20% with at least 90 seconds left, just to be safe. A diagram would sort of look like this:
Start of Fight (0 seconds) -> Initial Use (??) -> Second use (??) -> Final use (??) -> End of Fight (330-375 seconds)
Let's fill this in working backwards. First, we'll say you'll use your last trinket at 270 seconds, or 90 seconds before beserk. If you use it later, fine, it doesn't affect this all that much, if you use it earlier, then your guild isn't struggling to kill him.
Start of Fight (0 seconds) -> Initial Use (30) -> Second use (150) -> Final use (270) -> End of Fight (330-375)
So, you need to use your first trinket/pot by the 30 second mark, the second by the 150 second mark, and the third when you get lust. This flexibility means you can try to time it to get 2 VTs, 2-3 MBs, 1 SW:P, and 2 SWs within the trinket's duration, and at least some of those with the potion. If in doubt, pop your trinket right away, when it's up again, and then when you get lust.
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.
The 1863 ms delay is probably from a refresh of Vampiric Embrace, for a total of 363 ms wasted. But still, that's far, far too much, especially with the extra 830 ms wasted between Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death. Are you by chance clicking your spells instead of using key presses?
The 1863 ms delay is probably from a refresh of Vampiric Embrace, for a total of 363 ms wasted. But still, that's far, far too much, especially with the extra 830 ms wasted between Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death. Are you by chance clicking your spells instead of using key presses?
He's got 146 haste rating so the 1863 ms delay should be 491 ms after accounting for the VE cast. I think thats the second time you've caught me not noticing a Vampiric Embrace though.
Hey everyone, I'd like to seek the advice of experienced shadowpriests on EJ for a spriest in my guild. He's the only shadowpriest we have and many of us haven't rolled one before so we can't really offer anything other than general gear-type advice.
He's not been doing too well in terms of dps lately in our raids (about 760+ dps on Anetheron) and is getting increasingly disappointed, but doesn't quite know how to improve, so all advice is welcome. As much as we value his presence as a support class, we don't want him to think he's only there because he's a support class, but also that he can bring good dps to the raids.
I know his gear is missing proper enchants, and his gemming probably isn't the best (he should be going for straight red dmg gems) but what I wouldn't be able to tell is his spell rotation and timings - is he doing them right? Given his existing gear, what additional tips could we give him to help him improve?
Very grateful for any help and advice given, please. Thanks much!
- Gear seems to be OK (ignoring gemming/enchanting issues) for the level you're at.
- Template looks OK (although if he's having mana issues he probably should ditch improved VE for Meditation)
- Ability breakdown of damage seems OK at first sight : from what I can see he's DPSing right when he does DPS but has long periods of inactivity, whether he has mana problems or he is simply overcautious I cannot tell
Don't forget that, whatever your friend imagined, from the middle of BT/Hyjal onward we are a support class. We cannot compare to pure DPS classes and hybrid classes are marginally better DPSers than we are. We bring too much to the table to hope for anything else.
First, Lurker isn't a good fight because there's a lot of downtime when he submerges. You can't tell if DoT uptime is poor from Lurker being down and the naga dying quickly, or if it's poor because they were bad at refreshing. So I looked at the Tidewalker kill and it turns out his DoT uptime is poor from a lack of refreshing. In a kill that took almost 9 minutes, he had fewer than 6 minutes of DoT ticks from both Pain and Touch, and he only got watery graved once. That's less than 70% uptime, and you should really have 90%. He's bleeding a lot of damage and mana regen from poor DoT uptime alone. Also, he averaged fewer than 5 mind blasts per minute. Since mind blast is such a large portion of our damage, that's a lot of damage lost. So the usual recommendations apply
A) Keep your DoTs up
B) Cast Mindblast on cooldown
Also make sure he never clips his dots, better to be a half second late or so on refreshing pain/vt than to clip the last tick of the fading one.
As far as gear/spec goes I see several things that could be improved.
-no meditation at that gear level might hurt. Does he have mana problems at all? If he's slowing down his casting because he's running dry after 4-5 minutes have him try tweaking his spec. Take out imp VE and a point of out of shadow weaving to max meditation, to see if he's more comfortable with mana (and that won't really hurt dps in the least). Coincidentally that'd make his spec identical to mine and my gearing is just a step or two ahead of him.
-Gear. It's not awful but there's a lot of tweaks I see...
-Gem for damage! Haste is ok too but he's going for every socket bonus out there and nearly all of them aren't worth it. It takes about 6 spell crit to equal 1 spell damage for shadow priests and he's way above the hit cap, so those hit/crit/hybrid/non-damage gems that are making a +3 spell socket bonus would be more effective if they were just straight 9/12 spell damage gems and a missed socket bonus.
-He needs 76 spell hit to be capped and is at 101. If he regemmed for pure damage he'd lose 28 spell hit which would put him just under (73/76). Solution: Find a single hit gem (or +hit socket bonus) to keep, and regem the rest with damage.
-I'd probably keep the FSW robe over the current chest he's got. With semi-decent gems (ie. +damage) FSW is better. That's a badge item too, isn't it? *wince*
-FSW boots and that badge wand at the very least are worth epic gems, as you won't see upgrades until sunwell (it sounds like your guild isn't there yet). The FSW robe is worth it too unless you're killing vashj regularly, then he should wait to see if he can get vestments of the sea witch and epic gem that one instead, as it's a straight upgrade over FSW.
-Timbal's, Hex-shrunken head, crusades card (blessings deck)--and in roughly that order--are each an upgrade over either of his trinkets. So it'd be good to go for whichever of those are attainable for him to get.
-I noticed he's got a spi/stam food buff on. Dunno if it's just a fluke thing, but obviously spell damage food would be better.
Of course there's more that can be done but I'm just trying to list out things that are simple/cheap to fix or at least have a large return on investment (ie. the trinkets)
Thanks much for the awesome help, guys. I broke 1500 dps on our first Brutallus kill. Being more aggressive on the mindblasting helped, as did 5/5 Imp Mindblast.
Now I just have to help the two other shadowpriests... whose dps was 1100 and 960, respectively. >< They're both undergeared (Mas's trinketing makes me weep) but that still seems a little too low.
Mirrielle in particular seems to have massive issues with Mind Flay. Tell him not to wait a second or two for another spell to be ready. Oh, and prioritize SW:P over VT unless you're with Arcane mages.
Mirielle's SWP>DP>SWD>MB>MF is a pretty bad start to the fight
Mas' 12 int to bracers is pretty disgusting, is gkick an option? He also ate a HS before the first Kalecgos attempt started, and did VT>SWP>MF>MB on the first Kalecgos attempt. Given the amount of time he waited to start dps and the fact that your tanks seem to be holding aggro off of people doing 2400+, dps I don't think he flayed because he was afraid of pulling. This guy seems to be hopeless.
I'll probably end up pointing the raid leader to this thread (if he hasn't already seen it). I'm not an officer, and Mirrielle just blames my outdpsing him on my gear. I was happy when the raid leader backed my call that the shadowpriests should all be speccing into Imp VE for Sunwell (I beat out our spirit priest on effective healing on Brut.)
Mas has bad gemming, weird talent choices, and some of his gear calls just confuse me. He's getting in on the Black Temple farm runs, which has helped (New MH item, new pants) but he was one of 5 people we apparently recruited just because they were high-level PvP'ers and the raid leader figured they'd pick up the raiding game easily enough. I know he needs to max his hit, and he's been running Heroic MgT daily to try and get Timbals, but I'm kind of at a loss about what advice to give him *right now* to help him be more effective. Regem for hit? Spell hit on gloves?
On the helpful side of things, once your gear starts getting up there, dropping a point or two out of Focused Mind is a really easy way to snag an extra talent point or two. I'm sitting at 2/3 and I only ever have to drink mana pots on Illidari Council (Stupid spell immune/Resistance auras). I'll probably drop to 1/3 if I manage to get the Kalecgos pants (and lose the hit from Devastation) and I'm not expecting to have any issues with it.
To start off, I have been playing spriest for the last month and a half or so after being one of our guild's tanks for over a year (spriests flaking out FTL). That being said, I'm still trying to perfect my play as a shadow priest. After the usual summer woes we are finally beginning to work on sunwell again. Last night we put in a few Brut attempts.
In our setup I'm able to be out of the soak groups. My best dps was our last attempt. I was only able to put up 1454 dps. I feel like I should be able to put up higher numbers than what I am. Here is the link to that attempt. It seems like my SWP and VT uptimes are fine and I try to avoid clipping them. However, my MB and SWD numbers seem low. I'm not sure if I'm flaying too much or what the deal is.
Here is a link to my armory. I'm sitting at only 137 haste.
To start off, I have been playing spriest for the last month and a half or so after being one of our guild's tanks for over a year (spriests flaking out FTL). That being said, I'm still trying to perfect my play as a shadow priest. After the usual summer woes we are finally beginning to work on sunwell again. Last night we put in a few Brut attempts.
In our setup I'm able to be out of the soak groups. My best dps was our last attempt. I was only able to put up 1454 dps. I feel like I should be able to put up higher numbers than what I am. Here is the link to that attempt. It seems like my SWP and VT uptimes are fine and I try to avoid clipping them. However, my MB and SWD numbers seem low. I'm not sure if I'm flaying too much or what the deal is.
Here is a link to my armory. I'm sitting at only 137 haste.
Any help will be much appreciated.
In practice, the numbers I've seen from the best WWS parses show 8 mind blasts a minute and 4 shadow word: death. That's assuming 5/5 improved mind blast, of course. The parse you linked was only 4 minutes long and you had 28 Mind Blasts (ideally 32) and 18 shadow word death (ideally 16). Are you prioritizing Death over Blast or something? That would explain the difference in casts. Always cast blast first, then death.
Also, you should drop inner focus from your spec. It's not doing you any good, especially in that you're a troll, not undead. The last point in Focused Mind seems worthwhile, although with enough gear upgrades, you'll want 4/5 Shadow Focus.
On the subject of race, you aren't using Berserking. Berserking is actually really good if you cast it while under 40% health (30% haste), since it buys you a free mind flay. With enough haste, it's comparable to Devouring Plague for damage. Even in the 40% to 80% bracket it's good, since that's 20% haste.
You should socket a Glowing Amethyst in your T6 helm, since you trade 1 spell damage for 7 stamina. That's worth it.
Last, I don't think you'll get a first kill on Brutallus with only one shadow priest in the raid. The second (and even third) add tremendous value, since healers can focus on the tanks, which in turn lets you stack more damage classes.
I'm having a somewhat disturbing phenomenon happen during Brut. I'm fairly certain I haven't seen it on any other fights, but that may be because I'm paying so much closer attention to timers during this fight. The WWS parse doesn't support my feeling that my VT is being resisted, but never-the-less I find myself casting it and it's not on the mob.
Here is the WWS from last nights raid. My resist rate seems to be where it should on pretty much every attempt, but I've paid very close attention and there are times when I cast the spell, but it doesn't show up on my dot-timers or (seemingly) on the mob. Given there are 2 Spreists in the raid it's a little difficult to differentiate which VT is which, but it doesn't seem like my dottimer is lying to me.
Could it be that you have reached the debuff limit? I am not sure what happens in those scenarios, whether the VT gets bumped off or, whether it will kick a different debuff off first and be given priority.
In practice, the numbers I've seen from the best WWS parses show 8 mind blasts a minute and 4 shadow word: death. That's assuming 5/5 improved mind blast, of course. The parse you linked was only 4 minutes long and you had 28 Mind Blasts (ideally 32) and 18 shadow word death (ideally 16). Are you prioritizing Death over Blast or something? That would explain the difference in casts. Always cast blast first, then death.
I have been trying to used SWD over MB to cover the damage that SWD does to me. I'm not in the soak groups so I don't receive spot heals.
Originally Posted by tedv
On the subject of race, you aren't using Berserking. Berserking is actually really good if you cast it while under 40% health (30% haste), since it buys you a free mind flay. With enough haste, it's comparable to Devouring Plague for damage. Even in the 40% to 80% bracket it's good, since that's 20% haste.
Again, not being in the soak groups and the only damage to me being kickback from SWD, I rarely drop down that low. (Excluding getting burn, of course) I'll definitely start using it more situationally that I have in the past.
Originally Posted by tedv
Last, I don't think you'll get a first kill on Brutallus with only one shadow priest in the raid. The second (and even third) add tremendous value, since healers can focus on the tanks, which in turn lets you stack more damage classes.
I've thought about this as well. Our raid leader choses to bring only one for the tank healer group because of the lack of damage that we do compared to other dps classes. The healer group consists of two paladins and either two priests or a priest and druid. I'm the 5th person in that party which means I rarely get drums and I don't get totems or lust. As you can see from our raid group, we had 3 mages, 3 locks, and 3 hunters. Would it be best to sit a mage or a hunter to bring in another spriest despite the dps loss?
I have been trying to used SWD over MB to cover the damage that SWD does to me. I'm not in the soak groups so I don't receive spot heals.
I won't go into the math, but trust me that this is a bad idea. Use mind blast first and then death, and trust that your general vampiric embrace healing will keep you mostly topped off. A druid can toss you a HoT once every 20 seconds.
Originally Posted by Poor
I've thought about this as well. Our raid leader choses to bring only one for the tank healer group because of the lack of damage that we do compared to other dps classes. The healer group consists of two paladins and either two priests or a priest and druid. I'm the 5th person in that party which means I rarely get drums and I don't get totems or lust. As you can see from our raid group, we had 3 mages, 3 locks, and 3 hunters. Would it be best to sit a mage or a hunter to bring in another spriest despite the dps loss?
When you said "I'm not in the soak group" I originally thought you meant "I'm not taking burns like the rest of my group is", but it sounds like no one in your group is taking burns. That's a flat out mistake on a number of levels.
A) A shadow priest with VE on a soak group will heal almost as much as a holy priest on this fight. I actually outhealed half our healers on the first kill, as a shadow priest. When we bring 2 tanks, 14 pure DPS, 7 healers and 2 shadow priests to Brutallus, we're actually bringing 15.5 DPS and 9 healers. Combined with the 2 tanks, that's like bringing 26.5 people to a 25 man raid. Your problem is that you're still bringing 25 people instead of 26.5.
B) If your paladins are taking damage from burn, they will regenerate more mana from Spiritual Guidance or whatever. Not having paladins soak actually gimps your overall healing.
C) A mage without a shadow priest on this fight will absolutely run bone dry on mana, costing the raid tons of damage. It's well worth swapping one DPS class for a priest that deals 800 DPS less if that means the raid as a whole deals 2000 DPS more.
Ideally your two soak groups will look like this:
Resto or Elem Shaman, Mage, Mage, Mage/Warlock, Shadow Priest
Resto shaman, Paladin, Paladin, Druid/Priest, Shadow Priest
If your raid leader insists on only bringing one shadow priest though, you should still be with the mages over the healers.
I won't go into the math, but trust me that this is a bad idea. Use mind blast first and then death, and trust that your general vampiric embrace healing will keep you mostly topped off. A druid can toss you a HoT once every 20 seconds.
I'd seen a few other posts where people suggest doing them in reverse order to help negate the kickback. I'll trust that I'll be able to heal myself.
Originally Posted by tedv:804445
When you said "I'm not in the soak group" I originally thought you meant "I'm not taking burns like the rest of my group is", but it sounds like no one in your group is taking burns. That's a flat out mistake on a number of levels.
What I meant is "I'm not taking meteor slashes like the rest of my group is".
Just to clarify, Our groups are pretty much like you've got them, The only people who are not in the soak groups are a shadow priest and the melee. We have two groups of 9-10 soaking which include healers. I normally stand with the melee but close enough to my group so that they are getting hit with VE and VT.
I'm not saying the entire group isn't getting burned because it's completely random as to who gets it. What I meant was that the only incoming damage to me on a typical fight is the kickback damage from SWD and burn damage. (IF I get burned)
Originally Posted by tedv
When we bring 2 tanks, 14 pure DPS, 7 healers and 2 shadow priests to Brutallus, we're actually bringing 15.5 DPS and 9 healers. Combined with the 2 tanks, that's like bringing 26.5 people to a 25 man raid. Your problem is that you're still bringing 25 people instead of 26.5.
We have to bring more healers than most guilds seem to. We bring in 8 healers (4 tank healers, 2 shaman for soak group healing, and a shaman/druid for burns), 2 tanks, 14 pure DPS and one shadow priest. Going back and looking at the WWS, the only healer I outhealed was the shaman on burns. With how healing typically goes in our raids, I'd be afraid to even attempt to drop a healer at this point in time.
Originally Posted by tedv
A mage without a shadow priest on this fight will absolutely run bone dry on mana, costing the raid tons of damage. It's well worth swapping one DPS class for a priest that deals 800 DPS less if that means the raid as a whole deals 2000 DPS more.
We combat mages going OOM with innervates normally. Since one of the druids is in my group getting VT he doesn't need it for himself, The feral tank is responsible for another innervate and the third druid is the burn healer. I'm not sure if mages get better benefit from innervate or from VT. It could be that we're just using a sub-optimal raid set-up because of our healing inadequacies. I will bring this up tonight for sure.
I need some shadow priest help. Let me preface this by saying I am the GM of this guild and the raid leader so I do at times have to focus on the raid and others more than myself but I have really, really, really been trying to just focus on me and my DPS and they have taken any responsibilities off me during this fight as possible.
This is our WWS Report of our 8.6m damage Brutallus attempt last night.
Oh for this 8.6m dmg I was in a soaker group (only for our last attempt of the night was I not in a soaker group - just to try it and see - it seemed to help)
I know I'm not casting Mind Blast and Shadow Word Death as often as possible and I know I didn't keep VT up as much as it should been but honestly, just receiving a ton of haste gear in the last 2-3 weeks it has completely screwed over my spell rotation I used to use (read: mindless button pushing while leading raids). Just looking for some tips. =) Thanks.
EDIT: my group make up was a warlock (only one warlock in raid last night so didn't have CoS), mage, boomkin, ele shaman and myself. Waiting for < 20% for heroism for mage - so I never got a heroism.
Ok, I'm trying to prove to my friend (who is a shadow priest) that spell hit rating has a quantifiable effect on DPS. His argument is that since it is percent based, there is no way of getting a static value of dps increase out of it.
The root problem here is I'm trying to convince him that even without gem slots in it, spellstrike pants are more DPS than his green "Of shadow wrath" pants that give him +74 shadow damage.
his argument is that he takes an initial drop in the spell damage stat before he puts the red gems in, and that spell hit and spell crit have a negligible affect on his damage output.
I'm really confused after trying to think about it for hours now, I can't wrap my head around the math and I can't find it anywhere, so I really need someone to explain with the math how we know basically that 22 spell hit rating is > 22 spell damage until the spell hit cap.
He's really really thick headed about seeing the math and facts in front of him before he will believe anything, and I take things on a little more faith that the math has all been done and the conclusions have been drawn already, so I never went and memorized everything.
Please help me out, even just linking to the specific posts with all the nitty gritty math we get all our conclusions from would work I think, I'm just clueless how I would even begin to try to search for that.
We have to bring more healers than most guilds seem to. We bring in 8 healers (4 tank healers, 2 shaman for soak group healing, and a shaman/druid for burns), 2 tanks, 14 pure DPS and one shadow priest. Going back and looking at the WWS, the only healer I outhealed was the shaman on burns. With how healing typically goes in our raids, I'd be afraid to even attempt to drop a healer at this point in time.
We combat mages going OOM with innervates normally. Since one of the druids is in my group getting VT he doesn't need it for himself, The feral tank is responsible for another innervate and the third druid is the burn healer. I'm not sure if mages get better benefit from innervate or from VT. It could be that we're just using a sub-optimal raid set-up because of our healing inadequacies. I will bring this up tonight for sure.
It's really inefficient to use one innervate to mana support one mage when instead you can use one priest to mana support 3 mages (and a shaman too). An innervate will provide 8k to 10k mana, tops. Last Brutallus kill, I regenerated 28k mana to EACH party member. That's 112k mana to the four others, making a shadow priest 12 times as good as an innervate. Besides, on Brutallus, our mages can still use innervates even when I'm supporting them. One innervate is simply not enough.
If you can't convince them to bring 7 healers and 2 shadow priests, bring 8 healers and 2 shadow priests instead. Then you'll see how much easier the healing is and how you're not reaching the enrage timer, so it's best to cut a healer. But at least you'll make it to the enrage timer.
I am not sure you really need math to explain why spell hit is so important to shadowpriests. The math on it is affected by the amount below the cap you are at. The farther below the cap, the more valueable spell hit is.
First of all, unlike other spellcasters, our DD spells are on long cooldowns. This means that every spell miss means that all of that dmg is resisted and we lose tremendous dps. Even if the spell miss occurs on, say, SWP, where we can just reapply it, it costs us a ton of mana for every spell miss. (and a GCD) That isn't to say that there isn't a value of +spell dmg that can overcome the loss of spell hit, but that will vary on how far below the cap you are etc etc. Besides, for me personally, I don't think i can handle the screwing up the spell rotations.
It's really inefficient to use one innervate to mana support one mage when instead you can use one priest to mana support 3 mages (and a shaman too). An innervate will provide 8k to 10k mana, tops. Last Brutallus kill, I regenerated 28k mana to EACH party member. That's 112k mana to the four others, making a shadow priest 12 times as good as an innervate. Besides, on Brutallus, our mages can still use innervates even when I'm supporting them. One innervate is simply not enough.
If you can't convince them to bring 7 healers and 2 shadow priests, bring 8 healers and 2 shadow priests instead. Then you'll see how much easier the healing is and how you're not reaching the enrage timer, so it's best to cut a healer. But at least you'll make it to the enrage timer.
We actually brought in another shadow priest instead of a third mage. The mages that were getting VT got to use molten armor rather than mage armor so their dps was actually increased. However, due to some mt healer issues we didn't do as well as we did the night before. Thanks for the input though.
As for my dps goes, I was concentrating on landing more Mind Blasts over SWDs and I definitely saw an increase in dps. I also had a Wrath of Air last night where as in previous attempts, I didn't. The combination of the two I was only able to do ~46 more dps. (Granted, each of our attempts from last night were considerably shorter than the night before.) And I also started using Berserking after a trinketed SWD so I'd get extra bonus from the racial.
06/23/08, 6:22 PM
s within the trinket's duration, and at least some of those with the potion. If in doubt, pop your trinket right away, when it's up again, and then when you get lust.
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.
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