I am almost positive that's incorrect, are you sure? If that's the case, troll priests become the undisputed master race of PvE priests by a fair margin.

Just checked this out (atleast Bloodlust/Berserking) and they do stack.

http://i33.tinypic.com/105vbx5.jpg - only Bloodlust, 1.9 sec GHeal

http://i37.tinypic.com/4r517a.jpg - Bloodlust and Berserking, 1.5 sec GHeal

The math doesn't support this. Improved Spirit Tap will have a near 100% uptime, but it's still just a 10% gain on spirit. So you gain 5.5% of your raid buffed spirit as spell power. Generously speaking you will have 600 spirit (and that's if you have suboptimal gear, as even crit provides better returns). That works out to 33 spell power for 5 talent points, or 6.6 per point. That's just terrible. Improved Shadow Form adds more raid utility than this, and the talent isn't that good either.

If you are having trouble with mana, then you aren't using Dispersion or Shadowfiend. Anub'arak has many, MANY opportunities to use dispersion without any real DPS loss: if there are 0 burrowers alive, you can dispersion. If mana is really tight, you can always Shadowfiend + Hymn. It should be a full mana bar.

Also Hymn of Hope will become more interesting to support the raid (and yourself) with mana, since the mana-cost of Shadowform is going to be reduced to 13% of base mana (from 32%). Right now if you only get one tick of it, you normally lose mana because you have to recast Shadowform (if I recall correctly, haven't used it in a while)

Of course Hymn should still only be used if you have nothing better to do (like between two phases) and want to support your raid (which shouldn't need it), or when your mana is really low and dispersion and shadowfiend have cd (which happens in very few situations). So it's still a spell used rarely, but should be somewhere in the interface you can reach it during a fight.

Berserking stacks with pretty much everything (even Icy Veins for mages, which PI won't stack with).

Cras already beat me to it with the Bloodlust example, here it is with Power Infusion (1.8 to 1.5 second GHeal).

The problem with Dispersion on Anub is that it needs to be up in the burrow phase for 6 seconds of invaluable extra kiting time, and even saves raids when a pally dies or you have forbearance. If you use it while Anub is up, you're potentially screwing yourself. Yeah I rarely have mana problems on him, but at the same time, imp ST is useful in an "every little bit counts" and ST has a decent uptime with scarab and even burrower kills.

Oh I know, I went Silence without Focused Mind as my build until we had everyone but Anub on farm. And I'm not saying to depend on Dispersion, but rather that when a spriest does get selected, 6 seconds can be a very big deal since on a typical burrow phase where no engineers or spriests get selected, Anub has ~10 seconds after the last ice patch which can end poorly. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I have mana problems on Anub (disperse for the last 6 seconds of burrow phase generally does it for me), but Focused Mind works passively and makes DPSing in a chaotic fight easier when you've just gotta get Insanity down (after 2 heartbreaking low% wipes). I've always argued for silence over manareg talents when doing progression content, and have considered cutting IST but always found it more useful than focused mind, psychic horror, etc. at the least. Yes it's a small amount of spellpower, but every little bit counts when you're maximizing your dps. Utlitity is nice, but VE is crap utility and Silence is only really necessary for 10-mans and progression fights when you need every interrupt you can get.

Going to have to disagree here, especially when VE can keep a group up by itself post-30% on Anub. On all other content, VE is a big reason (combined with shadowform) why we're sturdy and a good candidate for things like soaking on Steelbreaker-last etc.

I want to second that. It's clearly not that VE is as overpowered as it was in TBC, but it's still very useful for most of the boss fights. Personally I went with 2/2 imp. VE + 1/3 FM a long time ago and I haven't regret this so far because of the non-issue which mana is for shadowpriests today.

For example some months ago I ended up with ~2,000 hps on a fight like Council HM. Some might argue that you probably don't need this healing and I agree, but remember that it's more or less free healing and why would you want to take a mana talent instead if you don't have mana issues? Seeing how the first IC bosses are, we can be pretty sure that most of the other fights contain a lot of ae damage as well. Keeping in mind the change to VE and the buffs to our dps, I'm pretty sure imp. VE will become a lot more common once IC hits.

I still consider silence and psychic horror as mainly pvp talents that aren't really useful in raids. At least not as useful as imp. VE is. The cooldown on silence is just way too long to use it as a reliable interrupt in boss fights and I don't think there will be a new Faction Champions fight or Yogg Saron p2 fight in IC, which you can use as examples where picking up silence is probably a good idea. Yes, it's probably useful for trash too, but meh, I don't take talents for trash.

But let's see, maybe we can soon drop 5 points from imp. mindblast with our new t10 set bonus and take it all.

is mind blast still worth being cast instead of mindflay when the cooldown is up? or only to refresh replenish buff?

I could've sworn I saw this mentioned already but since I can't find it now -- Devouring Plague now works more like VT and SWP on the PTR, i.e. its duration will depend on your haste at cast time.

I'm presuming it wasn't fixed before because it wasn't a big deal. It's not like it was gamebreaking either way. It's inconvenient and not intuitive at all, but there was no reason for them to focus on fixing that over other things.

Now they're going to have to fix it. There is absolutely no way they can let this go live. I just hope it isn't too technical to fix and end up yanking the haste changes out as a result.

Agreed, but they have made no attempt to even acknowledge that a problem exists.

The SW:P issue is the very reason i stopped playing shadow when i tried raiding Naxx 25, along other obvious DPS issues shadow has. Its gimmicky and just not fun to try to maximize SW:P in these ways.

I didn't mean to imply that VE wasn't a good spell, just that it's often too situational to gain any noticeable use out of it, and that when it IS useful (such as on Anub), talenting into it isn't necessary to get the full benefit of the spell (and in fact would backfire in that case, contributing directly to healing on Anub). My other post should have read "Improved VE".

Anub is the only fight in game where VE isn't very good.

Unless you build your strategy around it, why would you use VE? Healers get healing stream totem. Everyone else is healed by JoL and Improved Leader of the Pack. Further healing is bad and will lead to you falling behind. If you had zero healing stream totems, you could use a shadowpriest in the healer group, but that's a very limited situation.

I think raid utility is sort of a confusing term that does not really help at all. Imp VE + improved shadow form + dispersion glyph mean that we are probably the most resilient DPS caster, although in practice this isn't very useful, since up until 3.3 our DPS is absolutely pants.

Imp LOTP doesn't affect casters, and it's better to be redundant than risk RNG deaths due to a dearth of JoL and Imp LotP (and our first kill, we had no feral). We would run with a healing stream or spriest in every group + a second one in non-melee groups, no problem.

And yes, the self-healing is good, but redundant in most situations as it can't heal you through anything that would kill you regardless (anub excluded) and if it wouldn't kill you, it won't be a big deal.

Frankly, I can see it being far more useful in 3.3 with synergizing with multi-dotting, but still in that limbo between situationally useful and useless with no clear goal. It will rarely even buy you a fraction of a second and runs redundancies with Dispersion. And as far as "most resilient" goes, I wouldn't go so far as to say we're really up there.

Why would you want anything more than JoL. Keeping people super low on HP is your goal, any extra healing on top of that is horrendous. People will still die from a tick of biting cold without heals, the extra healing is actively harmful.

There are plenty of fights where the self healing is fantastic - firefighter, twin valks, algalon, etc.

Which ranged DPS is more resilient? I wouldn't say that being the most resilient DPS is anything to write home about, since it just means we have a larger margin of fuck up than other classes, but it is pretty hard to deny that we are.

JoL isn't always enough to keep up caster DPS, especially if they're still on AoE duty. Mages applying new Living Bombs then Blizzarding won't be hitting Anub enough to keep them up, etc. We use VE for our 3rd ranged party.

Mearis, VE is perfectly viable and we use it to keep a group up. In my case I'm in group with random casters and melee who use big slow weapons -- i.e. ret pals and DKs. Treat it exactly like another resto shaman healing totem, and that's 5 people who need absolutely no healing outside of Penetrating Cold.

It is perfectly viable, it just keeps the shadowpriest's own HP up too high. I guess if you took no points in improved VE and spent all your time doing mindsear, that would be OK, but the shadowpriest will be healing anub for a shitload.