tedv

First, she's way over hit cap. She's at almost 14% hit from gear plus 6% from talents, and only needs 17% hit. All the hit gems should get replaced with runed spinels. The gem in the wand should also get switched to something that's at least half red. Actually, pretty much everything that's not a runed spinel should become a spinel.

The talents also need work. It's been discussed to death earlier, but the basic spec you're looking for is 5 points in discipline and 56 in shadow. Just pick any 0/5/56 split used by a regular poster in this thread if you're unsure what that should look like.

However, those changes won't magically gain a ton of damage, although she'll gain a lot of damage going from 2/5 Improved Mind Blast to 5/5. What she really needs is a DoT timer. For example, look at the fight on Nalorakk: Wow Web Stats

In that 2:06 minute fight, there should be 42 Shadow Word: Pain ticks guaranteed (due to pain and suffering) and maybe 38 Vampiric Touch. It's just stand-and-nuke. She lost 8 ticks of pains (24 seconds) and 6 ticks of touch (18 below expectation). She also only had Devouring Plague up for half of the fight. A priest with 5/5 improved mind blast will score 8 Mind Blasts per minute, or 16 over the entire fight. With 2/5 improved blast, she should have 6.5 per minute, or 13 total. She scored 9. She needs to keep mind blast on cooldown, and spec to reduce the cooldown.

Last, if you add up the cast times for everything that's not Mind Flay, the total required cast time is 39 seconds (with no spell haste). She has 36 seconds of Mind Flay, for a total of 75 seconds of cast time. However, it's a 126 second fight. What is she doing for the other 51 seconds? All of that time should be more Mind Flays, Blasts, and DoT refreshes (when necessary). The real problem isn't gear or even talents. Its spending time not casting spells. I didn't delve into the cast sequence, but my suspicion is that she's waiting between a quarter and half of a second between each casts. Does she cast spells using mouse clicks instead of key presses?

 

Fuzzums

I will discuss the things you've mentioned and direct her to this thread. I did note the discrepancy on the boss fights for cast time/gcd use vs available dps time but wanted to check as I am by no means an authority on caster dps. Thank you for moving this to the correct thread, as well as your response.

 

Xtian

If there is an issue of delay between cast times, you might recommend the Quartz Castbar addon (if it's been updated for the new patch). The addon accounts for lag and shows on your cast bar (by turning part of the cast bar a different color) when your current spell is actually finished and you're free to cast a new spell. The visual representation of "this spell is over, now cast a new one" might be helpful.

 

◊ Asgorath

This addon might also be useful in reducing the amount of time spent between casts:

LagInfo - Addons - Curse

It basically tracks the delay from when one spell completes and the next one starts.

 

◊ etrnl

I just picked my spriest up as my main two weeks ago. I started raiding this past Sunday and it seems like I'm doing less DPS than I could for my gear level. On select fights I'm riding between 900 and 1100 DPS, which is 200-500 less than our other spriest runs (1400-1900). This is in BT/MH. I've been using the same rotation I was before the patch, which is looking to be far less optimal than it used to be, mainly because of the change in VT. Yes I am hit capped, and I sit around ~1100 SP unbuffed.

Current initial rotation: [VE] VT SWP DP MB MF MF MB <refresh>

Since Replenishment only procs off of MB and is no longer based on damage done, VT seems like it can be moved towards the end of the rotation because of its cast time. I was playing around last night in ZA, both with my bars and my rotation and came up with a opening rotation somewhat like this...

[VE] MB SWP DP SWD VT MB MF <refresh>

[0s] VE (if the encounter calls for more raid damage)
[1.5s] MB
[3s, 4s cd MB] SWP
[4.5s, 2.5s cd MB] DP
[6s, SWP Tick, 0.5s cd MB] SWD
[7.5s, DP Tick] VT
[9s, SWP Tick, 4s cd MB] MB
[10.5s, DP Tick, 2.5s cd MB] MF

ofc this is assuming perfect timing on GCD's and 0ms lag. but that's what my opening rotation started to look like last night and I generally came out with higher DPS at the end of a boss fight. Only fights I was really low on were Malacross and Zul'jin. I lost my macro's in the patch so I was constantly changing targets to reshackle and changing back, and I got swarmed by tornadoes on ZJ. Eagle was a horrible rotation, I started picking the one listed above between eagle and bear. Here's the report from last night... WWS Report

Any suggestions? More specifically on initial rotation and prioritization?

 

Nurru

Use SWD as you're getting positioned to gain two stacks of Shadow Weaving and never cast it again, unless you're moving. Beyond that I believe most people do VT -> MB -> DP -> SWP. This ensures SWP goes up with 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving and provides time to get CoE and other debuffs on the mob so that the SWP refreshing isn't an issue. It also gets Replenishment going on the raid quickly. Beyond that you should be using a simple priority system with MF as filler.

You should also be using a cast bar (such as Quartz) that allows you to compensate for lag.

Anything more than that and we'll probably need a WWS parse.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

◊ etrnl

I was gathering that two back to back cast time spells was a pretty decent damper on my DPS. And yes I do use SWD some of the time when I'm running. I'm used to using Clique for my paladin, have you, or anyone for that matter, had any experience with it in a DPS role, at least for a few key spells?

I do use Quartz, works wonders for lag compensation. There is a link to the parse at the end of my original post, unless you're talking about one from BT.

 

Spurr

Hello Ej,

I recently joined a new guild and went shadow to try something new. I raided with my ally lock and druid all through mthyj and BT and am making my UD shad priest my main for the exp.

I am very unsatisfied with my raid stats for my first raid and feel as though my dps is very low. My typical rotation is VT>Pain>MB>Flay(x2)>MB>Flay>mb rinse and repeat. I do have a webstats ill be posting at the end of this so hopefully yall can help my up my dps. I did get the t6 chest from illy last night as well as the dps mace from trash in hyj, but those arent on armory yet. Ill be socketing the chest with 3x Runed crimson spinel.

As for mods I am using dotimer to never lose a tick of vt but sometimes it happens, and I know I need to work on this.

What im looking for is some help or suggestions on anything from rotation to spec to gem choices. My armory might show holy spec as I went that briefly for the day to test something out, but I copied one of the basic 3.0 lvl 70 5/x/ talent builds.

Wow Web Stats

Thanks!

 

dyelynn

Spurr, the first, glaringly obvious stat on your WWS is that you're not hit capped. On the Najentus fight, you missed MF 10~% of the time and MB 8%~ of the time. The reason hit cap is so much more important than any other caster stat is when you miss, you're not only wasting the mana from casting that spell, but the cast time it took to cast that spell, and the cast time to cast the follow up (in the case of dots). Since your biggest nuke as a spriest is on a cooldown it's even more important.

The next problem I see is that you have nearly no caster buffs at all. You received a BL, but there are no totems listed... no oomkin buff.... the supremus fight is much better in terms of buffs, and you got a little more lucky with misses on your mind blast, but that's still quite a bit.

You're also not using DP nearly enough. Since you only need to cast SWP once or twice at most in a fight now, you should basically replace it with DP in your queue. VT, VE, MB, SW (to stack SW), SW:P, DP, MF... VT>DP>MB>MF for queue.

Here's a nice hit chart i blatantly stole from Shadowpriest.com:
Fix your hit cap problem, and adjust your casting sequence and you'll probably see quite an improvement in your dps. I'm sorry I can't be more specific, especially with possible easy gear upgrades, but the armory is down for maintenance, so I can't view your character.

 

• Snowy

Closing this one as well. We can open a new one when we get into WotLK raiding, I'd rather not have the first few pages be full of incorrect information here for the person who decides to read from the start.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah