I was including Imp. Scorch in that list of all applicable buffs and debuffs.

Most non-Arcane Mages seem to have the Glyph of Improved Scorch (or whatever it's called) which means the 5 stacks are up fairly quickly.
If our mages aren't slacking then usually by the time I'm done building up my 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving there's 5 stacks of Imp. Scorch up on the target.

So,

I'm tinkering around with my gear as of late - tonight I dropped my four piece tier bonus down to 2 so I could wear the Sanctum's Flowing Vestments and some nice gloves I have. I also, as per what shadowpriest.com • Index page says above about the best gear available, have socketed for all +spell power, and am disregarding socket bonuses.

What happened, it seems, is that despite my, perhaps improvement of 100 spell power, I lost a pretty significant amount of dps. What I lost in the re-gemming/reworking of my gear was a bunch of crit, but I'm still hit capped. sp.com seems to suggest crit scales at less then spell power, so I went with Runed Scarlet Rubies everywhere. A few questions:

1. Do I need that 4 set tier bonus? I rarely work my SW: D into anything (except, it seems, right when Gluth decimates) so I can keep MB on CD and VT/DP up at all times, fitting in mind flays inbetween.

2. Should I be ignoring socket bonuses/getting +19 spell power over +16 crit gems?

3. Is sp.com even accurate in terms of its BRGA rankings? I have some trouble justifying their numbers, but I might just be being old fashioned.

After reading some of the new changes, I definitely do seem to need to re-tinker with my opening sequence (VT -> DP -> MB -> MF -> SW: D -> SW:P), since I can just reapply SW: P on 5 stacks now.

Thanks for any comments.

The shadow set bonus are garbage, If you feel something is an upgrade in terms of sp/crit/haste, then use that over either of them.

Edit: I couldnt help but notice that despite the fact that you're a 400+ jewelcrafter, you're not using any runed dragon's eyes, any particular reason for this?

I find it accurate enough for my own uses.

As I've upgraded gear using it's suggestions and weightings I've seen my DPS go up in raids even though my crit rating has fallen a bit.

Have you noticed this loss of DPS on dummies or in raids?

If it's on dummies then maybe at the far lower crit level you have while solo, the loss in crit rating you've taken is more significant than the loss in spellpower you lose from not being fully raid buffed.

In a raid you gain 125+46+280+(some extra for the extra spirit). Or at least 451 spellpower.
However you also gain 18% crit. Which probably doubles the amount of crit you have.

Part of the value of crit has to do with ability procs. Basically, shadow priests have low enough personal crit that if you're running alone, your uptime may be less than 100%. When you're in a raid, you should be critting 30-40% of the time depending on who's with you and what your base crit is, so your uptime of said procs is probably ~100%... added crit becomes less valuable in raids relative to solo both because of relative diminishing returns (i.e. that +1% crit from 0 is 1% added damage, but +1% on 50% crit is only 1/1.5 or 0.66% added damage) and the fact that you've already hit ~100% uptime.

To be honest, I don't think that the precise values are that important right now. As long as you're not using obviously suboptimal gear, you're probably going to plateau in the low-to-mid 4k DPS range (except on really short fights where your DPS will appear inflated by increased time under Bloodlust). Minor lag and reflexes will tend to cause your DPS to vary enough over the course of fights that the effect of +/- 10 pseudopower from inaccurate simulation values will be swamped out.

The reason is that I went from 0 to 400+ JC on Saturday (today being Monday) and I haven't yet earned the Dalaran JCing tokens to buy the pattern yet, but obviously that's one of the first things on my list of things to do.

Edit: Our raid is also lacking some critical (imo) buffs. We carry 3 rogues, but no elemental shamans/moonkins. Well, we had a moonkin, but he's on semi-perm vacation. Ugh.

What's a solid pct% for crit anyways? I'm seeing around 461 crit as a standard value from my digging.

You really only want to use shoulders+gloves from the tier set, rest are mediocre and have better in slot alternatives and like already mentioned the set bonuses are sadly pure garbage.

Im having a hard time trying to come up with a rotation, can somebody post it please ?

I have been reading the forums but I dont see nothing that is offical.

The important thing we have come up with, is that you should start with SW:P to boost following casts, and renew it when you are at 5 stacks.

Then, I personally use SW:P - VT - DP - MB - MF clipped at 2s - SW:P and then normal priorization

Moving stuff around so you can wear the vestments is something I completely sympathize with, as they are quite nice. But what possible gloves could you use to replace the t7 ones (heroic or non-heroic)?

And yes, the tier bonuses are of course quite pointless. Nice to have, but not worth giving up any real damage stats for.

As for crit, I try to keep it above 20% baseline. This plus talents and raid synergies keep my shadow glyph going pretty reliably. Crit is also a stat to prefer if your connection is under par, since I find that it provides a more reliable source of dps than haste when latency is acting up.

The Vestments also have a blue socket, which makes socketing requirements for the crit/crit meta a bit more manageable (for non-Jewelcrafters).

It's also worth keeping in mind that any gear with sockets could be slightly improved in the next content tier, assuming that Blizzard decides to implement epic gem cuts.

The Rotation i Use is VT - MB (chased by SW to reduce GC) - Devouring Plague - MF - SW:P (ill toss a VT in between the Devouring and the MF if its a fight that does a lot of AE DoT.

The reasoning is that SW:P ticks for the dmg you have when u cast it. So if u cast it when you have 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving the dmg coefficient is increased by 10%.

What do you mean?

I'm personally using SWP/VE/VT/DP/MB/SWD/SWP/MF/MB/keep going

VE after SWP to account for haste to be sure SWP can tick twice before refreshing it...

I have also a second DP hotkey which assist my focus (our unholy DK usually), cast DP, targetlasttarget and whisper him to use pestilence... pretty handy for some fights

Hello i am a little confused with my output DPS on raids i have 2093 SP 289 HR 17.89% Crit 351 haste unbuffed.But i can`t pass 4200 DPS on Patch and 3100 on Sartharion with 2 drakes it`s true thet we play without ele shaman in our raids but i don`t belive that 1 ele shamy will boost my dps so much.Here some WWS links

OS
Naxx

Somewhere i wrong but dunno where when i compare my dps with others there is about 1k dps diference

I just looked at your Patchwerk parse, since that is a lot easier to pull apart. Looks like your DOT uptime was good, 86% VT, 93% SW:P, 91% DP. However you only cast 14 MB's out of a possible 26, that's missing a lot. I'd suggest something like PowerAuras to help remind you when MB is off cooldown.

Make sure you are recasting SW:P when you have 5/5 SW, and all the +crit debuffs are on the mob. Not having a Elemental Shaman is a loss of ~140 spell damage, but you appear to have all the other buff classes/specs in the raid, so it shouldn't make that big of a difference.

Can PowerAuras even monitor cooldowns? I was under the impression it only watched durations.

As far as an initial cast sequence, I've found the best to be DP - VT - MB - MF (clip after 1.5s) - SW:P, MF now applies two stacks of shadow weaving.

Don't be overly concerned. The difference between your DPS and that of other SPs is nowhere near 1k (at least on Patchwerk, I can't remember what the effect on my DPS of maneuvering during Sarth is so I can't comment on that). If you fix the problem Zoroaster mentioned you should gain 100-150 DPS. The elemental shaman probably accounts for more than that. If you can hit 4800 after including the shaman you're doing fine.

When you're looking at those insane Patchwerk parses with the 5100-5400 DPS SPs you need to keep in mind that those raids are stacked down to 2 healers/2 tanks, which increases raid DPS by over 20% just from increased DPS population. The reduced duration of the fight increases the relative importance of Bloodlust and other cooldowns, which inflates their apparent DPS over their actual sustainable DPS.

What priority should I use when choosing stats? I use 4-set T7 (for setbonus) and SW: Death in my rotation. So what prio should I go by in terms of +spellpower, +int, +spirit and +crit?

I just re-specced to shadow after being holy for well over a year and a half. I've never raided as shadow before last night. The gear I logged out in is not my "boss" gear. I'm at 1826 spellpower, 286 hit and approximation 18.5% crit. I'm no where in "ideal" spriest gear, this is the best I could do for just switching over.

I can't seem to get set up on Shadowpriest.com or I would post my question there. But what I want to know is what is the best way to handle trash or pulls where you have maybe 3-4 mobs. I know Mind Sear shines on the big packs, but what about those medium sized groups? Thanks for any tips.

In a 3-4 mob situation, especially in a 25 man, I'd suggest your normal rotation, swapping mind sear where you would normally use mind flay. 5+ is mindsear full time, with a dp thrown so DK's can splash it.

Hey,

I read somewhere that when you Mind Flay with Pain and Suffering at rank 3 it refreshes Shadow Word: Pain on the current target with your current spell power. For example, hitting SW: P with no trinkets procced, then at a later time mind flaying with a trinket procced. Will that SW: P refresh with the trinketed spell power?

Thanks.

Bubullet:
In the previous patch, SW: P used to keep the spell power (or so they say), since you would be unable to refresh the dot without getting a too-strong error message. This issue has been fixed. If you are using a 20 second On-Use trinket, I recommend macroing it in with your VT spell.



Abygail:
macro: /assist DKname /cast Devouring Plague
For medium packs, I will try to setup VT-MB combos just to get replenishment going to help reduce our downtime. Just sear the rest.

By my numbers:
Mind Sear ticks around 1450 (33% crit at 1.5) per second per every close target
VT for around 2320 per 3 seconds per 1.5 cast
pain for 1420 per 3 seconds per 1.5 cast

With 4 mob packs, mindsearing clears 5000 dps
With 15 seconds, VT reaches 7700 dps (per cast)
With 15 seconds, pain only gets 4630 dps (per cast)
In general, avoid casting SW: Pain, Mindflay, and Death on AE targets.



Wargi:
I personally prefer the order: 1-spellpower, 2-hitcap, 3-crit, 4/5 spirit/haste, 6 int. However, you really don't get all that much choice in gear. In general, higher iLvl + no mp5 is usually the determining factor for decent gear.



Akhtal:
You probably shouldn't cast SW: Pain first in your opening sequence on boss targets. The slight bonus gains from having the debuff on for other casts is immediately offset by that fact that you are recasting it and losing a GCD. One GCD is potentially worth about 6000 damage average. Unless of course, you are moving into position, and even then you can often simply use VE, death, or plague in those cases.