BTW, if you do notice any problems with the Priest module in SimCraft let me know as I'm the person that mostly looks after it.

In a few days/weeks, there will be a thread appearing asking for priest input, questions, and comments on the priest class. I'm planning to ask for a buff for single target DPS, since ours is low compared to other classes on most fights.

Here's what I plan to ask for. I'm seriously doubt we'll get more then two, and only then if we are lucky. If anyone has any thoughts on the following ideas, which are a compilation of priest suggests on the US Dps forums, let me know. I'd rather have you guys say "that's probably not enough" then for a Dev to come back later and say "We gave you what you asked for, if that's not enough you'll have to wait for the next PTR" sort of deal.

1) Make Haste convert into Spellpower; which is a unique talent. roughly 1 sp = 1 haste for mages, I don't think 1 haste = .30 SP is too much to ask. That would translate into 100 extra spell power for the average priest, perhaps more. Base mind sear damage would probably have to be lowered, to prevent our AoE damage, which is already high, from going off the chart.

2)Give us a button to push for burst Spriest DPS on Demand; I can't see them doing this, but it would fix a lot of our PvP and PvE complaints about lack of burst. A spell, on a 3 minute CD, that boosted Mindflay and Mind Blast damage by 25% or something would be ideal. Again, it can't be +% to shadow damage due to AoE concerns.

3)Fix the Inner focus/SW:P bug; Pretty self explanatory, and is likely one of the things Blizzard will fix, should they decide to buff our single target damage. +25% crit on SW:Pain with casted with Inner Focus. Pretty reasonable, since this should already be in effect.

4) Change our Tier 8 4 piece set bonus: I'm going to go on the record and saying the current implementation is bad design. Mindflay clipping, although effective, is annoying and very luck-based to do correctly. No other class/spec combination is required to clip casting a channeled spell to do better DPS. I'd like to see the Haste rating changed to crit rating, and if this is too vanilla, I'd like an interesting set bonus, perhaps something like "After casting Dispersion, you gain 15% more spellpower for 15 seconds. Or something.

5) Increase our benefit from Spirit, most likely via spellpower. Boring, but effective. Bumping up our 10% spirit to 25-30% spirit is an additional 100 spellpower gained, assuming ~500 spirit on your average raiding Shadowpriest.

I'd like your input on these changes before suggesting them on the official thread.

Thoughts?

I think your perceived notion of where Shadow Priests lay on the overall dps charts is pretty far off base. We may not necessarily be the top dps on single target fights, but I can't think of a fight besides Razorscale/Ignis where we don't shine in one way or another. We take less damage via Shadowform, heal outselves significantly via Imp VE and have other little bits like PW:S and Dispersion on hand as well. We're also a great AOE class, though we've been toned down with the removal of Devouring Plague spreading. A minor dps tweak might be acceptable and it would be wonderful if Mind Flay's ticks were less subject to lag, but anything more than that is going to just tip the scales too much in our favor.

Addressing your points directly:
1: Haste presently is roughly equivalent to .6-.7 spellpower per point. This change would be ridiculous, especially when combined with stackable haste / sp procs.

2: We already have burst on demand via Mind Blast / Shadow Word: Death. Why do we need to be a cooldown/burst class? Mages exist already.

3: While the interaction between Inner Focus and SW:P is non-intuitive, asking for it to be fixed is just wishful thinking. You would be asking them to buff SW:P's base by approximately 25% and it would result in them balancing this by offseting the damage somewhere else. They aren't going to just say "Sure, take 25% SW:P damage. Oh, and have a pony too"

4: Errr, I think your understanding of Mind Flay dps and mechanics at 80 are sorely out of date. Perhaps you should read the last couple of pages in this very thread? As for the bonus itself, it's fine as it is. The bonus is already a playstyle altering dps boost that allows for increases flexibility with our spell priorities. That's exactly what we should want out of it.

5: This is another case of you being shortsighted about scaling. Take a look at your own Armory. Before any raid buffs you're at 570 Spirit. Add in Divine Spirit and Kings and it's over 700. Add in spirit procs and it gets even higher. Right now all spirit does for us is provide 10% spellpower, and increasing that slightly would change nothing insofar as stat priorities. We still want to avoid it like the plague if possible and only will begrudgingly take it if the item is still an upgrade somehow.

Keep in mind, these suggestions are not only mine, they are a compilation. First and foremost, I disagree with you on most points. Shadowpriest single target DPS is low compared to other DPS classes. our AoE is high, but that shouldn't be a trade off for single target DPS, as per Ghostcrawler. I agree with him.

My Shadow priest can hit approximately 5.5k DPS on Patchwerk. A Mage or Warlock or Rogue can easily hit 7k. Perhaps 8k, if they are fortunate with RNG. There's a pretty huge difference between 5.5k DPS and 7.5k DPS. I'm pretty sure it's greater then 5%.

On Hard modes, it becomes detrimental to bring excess amounts, read, more then one, Shadowpriest; High end guilds, like Ensidia, are already restricting Shadowpriests to one a raid.

1) I'm pretty sure there are trinkets that pop for 450 haste. Using my conversion, that's converted into about 135 spellpower on use + haste. Perhaps that's too high, but considering we don't scale, not like other classes do, with haste, not entirely unreasonable. This number, as far as I know, was just pulled out of the air. Could be more, could be less. It's a unique idea, something that hasn't been done before. It completely fixes our scaling issues, and we DO have those.

2) Bring the player, not the class. Some encounters REQUIRE burst DPS. We don't have it. We should. Somehow. Mindblast+SW isn't burst DPS.

3) 25% additional crit for inner focus is approximately 12.5% more shadow word pain damage, not 25%. considering, on average, my shadow word Pain accounts for about 15% of my total raid damage. This change would translate into an extra 2% more DPS on a single target mob.

4) I don't like clipping mindflay. I find it rather cumbersome and antiquated, based on luck and lag. I think it's bad design. I'd like it changed to something else. This is my opinion, but I'm not particularly excited about my 4 piece tier 8.

5) Even 700 spirit, that's currently an extra 70 spellpower. Buffed to 30% spellpower converted into spirit, that's an extra 140 spellpower. Spirit is a stat we designed to want. It's built in to most of our gear. Currently, we couldn't care less about Spirit. We take it because we have too. It would be better if we took it because it did make a noticeable difference, like mages, boomkins, and warlocks. Your free to disagree, of course.

To address the three posts above, while I had something larger prepared, I'd like to point out that the actual spell power gained from spirit is actually closer to 18-22%, not 10%.

As you can see from the link, my current talent spec is a bit of a mess. After reading whats been said here I intend to drop both points from improved spirit tap, and move them into improved mindblast.

After that, I am considering rejigging my talent points to take:

Shadow reached
Imp. VE

Candidates for donor talents as I see it are:

Imp. Psychic Scream, Silence and psychic horror

Or

A combination of Spirit Tap/Focussed Mind

Personally I feel that Silence and Psychic horror add a great deal of situation utility allowing greater control of some trash, and that the number of Spirit tap procs that can be generated during a fight is under estimated. (A well timed mind sear on groups of adds almost always procs a spirit tap) A more likely source of points at the moment would be focussed mind, as mana isn't too much of an issue at the moment.

Do you feel that this loss of utility and potential source of mana regen is a worthwhile trade off for the additional range and Imp VE?

This is true. Good point.

And perhaps abysmal was an overly dramatic choice of words, I'll amend it to low single target DPS.

And Ensidia, in 3.1, uses one shadowpriest now, to the very best of my knowledge, due to the lack of single target DPS for hard mode raiding. I read they said our AoE was highest, which is again, absolutely true.

Shadow priests are fine for casual raiding. We're nowhere near bad our DPS was in TBC. It just could be, and should be, higher then it is currently.



Edit: Spelling and grammar.

Taken from Mek's Blog on Ensidia.com

There is 3 Shadow Priests in their YS world first movie (placing 1-2-3 on recount, btw), and I'm assuming to see 3 again in their Mimiron movie (that is currently downloading)

I'm personally doing top5 damage in every fight right now, including a XT-deconstructor last night where I finished first without casting a single AoE spell. Any fight where we can multi-dot or AoE we absolutely rape the charts (think Mimiron, Kologarn, Thorim P1, Freya, YS, Auriaya, Razorscale P1, XT depending on assignement)

While I'd be happy with a buff, I don't see it happening without nerfing something else in our damage

Yogg-Saron is a special fight, based on the mechanics. It's not your average ulduar fight. It's very exceptional for a Shadow priest, the one fight where we absolutely excel on.

I would also say never use Ensidia as your bellweather case for advocating changing something. Understand that they min-max to the extreme, and the game isn't balanced around that.

Lets try to stay away from wishlisting ideas here too. This is really more about current content and questions about to play in it, not pondering ways to change us.

Well, if you have a chance check out their World First Hard-Mode Mimiron kill. 3 Shadow Priests. All within top 6 I believe. 1 of which is #1. Kind of goes against your statement that Ensidia refuses to bring more than 1 Shadow Priest to Hard Modes.

I have heard a lot of posts regarding shadow priests being very strong at multi-dotting, but it seems I have not gotten this down as of yet. Doing Kologarn last night, I am a bit more confused on priorities - should I make sure I have VT/SW: P refreshed on the arms and the body the entire fight? I was keeping DOTs refreshed on the body as much as possible, however I was very focused on helping burst the right arm.

I ended up around sixth on DPS, but it seemed melee beat the ranged by quite a bit on that fight.

Kologarn is an interesting encounter for DPS checks and isn't one you should use as a "multidotting" benchmark. All 3 of his body parts have a hitbox in the same spot, so every melee class can hit all 3 with melee aoe. In Ulduar you should look at Mimiron, Yogg'Saron and Freya to a lesser extent for good encounters where you can dot multiple mobs in a situation where you wouldn't be AOEing.

Does anyone know of a good place to MC DKs like in the Insp Raz fight to get use to the bar that pops with Taunt and Bone Shield.

Would like to practice so better aware how to do that.

Thanks!

Not to mention it would cause our DPS to vary wildly from fight to fight based solely on how easy/difficult/impossible it would be to roll the same SW:P from start to finish due to phase changes or random bad luck.

The number one (and possibly only?) change I'd want is for them to just finally and completely fix the way Mindflay refreshes SW:P to work with crit % buffs and % based damage buffs. Yeah it's cool to roll that 100% damage bonus between phases or whatever when you're able to, but in the end I'd rather it just plain work the way you'd expect.

I'd like shadowpriests to get a slightly higher coefficient for spirit, even if we need a nerf in other places to make up for it.

Cloth items all get:

Stamina
Intellect
Spell Damage

then we get to pick 2 of:

Haste
Crit
Hit
Mana/5
Spirit

It is really stupid how much better the crit/haste items are than every single other alternative, and it means that every single well-itemized piece of cloth is insanely contested. Just buff spirit to a level similar to haste and crit so we are not quite as badly pigeonholed into fighting over the few scraps of non-shit gear.

I noticed this while fighting the Iron Council; Improved Devouring Plague can miss at 17% hit

Spell miss at 290 hit rating (11.08%) with Misery up

The misses were completely throwing me off, because I thought that the whole spell was failing as it appeared on MSBT. I'm not sure if it is simply ignoring hit talents or gear rating, but my limited time on the heroic dummy had gotten far worse than 3% misses. It's probably not worth gearing beyond your normal hit cap, but it's there.

Imp Devouring Plague can miss on a critter with 1000 hit rating. That bug has been reported numerous times, forum threads been chain bump'ed, but nothing seems to be done about it. It's been around ever since the new talent and I fail to see how hard can it be to fix.

My guild has been working on the 3 minute Hodir kill. I'm curious as to the exact mechanics of Toasty Fire and the Singed debuff. Singed - Spell - World of Warcraft is the debuff, which has a 33% chance of being applied by Toasty Fire - Spell - World of Warcraft. My question is whether or not DoT ticks can proc Singed. From looking at my WWS from last night I determined that the initial cast of a DoT plus all of our direct damage spells can proc Singed. What I'm not so sure about is DoT ticks. I can't rule it out entirely due to seeing Singed procs when a DoT isn't being refreshed and there aren't any Mind Blast/Mind Flay casts, but the timestamps in the combat log could be off.

For example:
The first Singed above occurs at the same time as a Devouring Plague tick, but I had just reapplied VT that same second. The second Singed occurs at the same time as the Vampiric Touch crit, but I had just used Mind Flay. The third Singed almost certainly has to belong to that Mind Flay, which would mean that the VT tick would be the most likely source to proc the second Singed.

I'm apologizing in advance for my ignorance but how is the YS fight good for spriests? Specifically what I mean by that is what assignment should be given to a spriest? For the record I am a holy priest. But I've had a spriest in my guild come to me for help. His dps is quite low on YS. He's struggling to improve his dps and I unfortunately am unable to point out where he's going wrong. So I'm reading through these forums looking for some answers. I've been looking for those magical "sweet spot" numbers for haste and crit but it appears as though there isn't one.

Here is a WoL link for a YS wipe night (which were our first, very bad, attempts on this boss). He came in last, just above the tanks. I have to mention he was assigned to help with dispelling in the first phase. I'm at a loss to provide any valuable feedback. I'm not asking for a "how do you dps" manual. I'm just at a loss to explain what's going on. Any help is appreciated.

WoL

Phase 1 Yogg'Saron is a very bad time to gauge dps. The guardians have so little hp that everyone basically gets in a spell or two then stops and waits for the next one. But for the overall fight he should be dotting corruptors while dpsing crushers and constrictors. In phase 3 it's easy to keep dots on Yogg while dpsing Immortal Guardians as well. Some guilds keep their ranged on Yogg full time in that phase though, so it really depends on what your guild is doing. For phase 1 I typically help with dispels as I see them (don't all dispellers?) and it doesn't really impact my dps much overall because phase 1 dps is in such short bursts unless your guild is falling behind on guardians.

In general though, looking for gear sweet spots is not going to make up his dps if he's missing fundamentals like maintaining good dot uptime, ability usage, standing out of fire, etc. From a quick glance it looks like he's just plain not doing much compared to your other shadow priest.

Compare the usage numbers for: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis to World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis. It looks like Satrissian is doing what most people do and putting a full set of dots on each guardian while Lockai is just randomly using vt, dp and sometimes mind flay. On the few attempts where you made it to phase 2 it looks like Lockai is either dying or doing nothing because his presence is ridiculously low and I rarely see any damage done by him on tentacles.

Is there some type of multi-dotting guide out there or how to? People talk about multi-dotting in Yogg...but to me it seems like it would take so much time to dot 4 mobs w/ SW:P that you'd lose out on throwing up all your other dots on the main target. Also are people just using SW:P for multi-dotting?