Indeed, but it works out to more than that in multi-dotting situations and is a nerf to our manareg via glyph of shadow. And I would think that if they nerf something because of technical reasons that they would compensate the nerf with a buff somewhere else, unless they're just playing balance Whack-A-Mole and don't care if we're on-par with or 10% behind everyone else so long as the QQ stops.

Except I think they put the changes in without even considering the implication of stacking haste at the time of sw: p casting. Once those implications became clear, 'nerfing' SW: P and haste was, according to their maths, a relatively small nerf, since the huge numbers that we saw in sims stacking all the haste consumables/cooldowns was completely unintended.

I wouldn't mind a buff to mindblast at all, but I wouldn't hold out for one.

Given just how fast SWP was ticking with the haste lock in we were never going to see those extreme numbers suggested by the sims except on stationary fights. Changing from a 15 sec window to refresh with MF to a ~8 second window (implication of 100% haste suggested earlier) makes it damn near impossible to refresh the stack in a movement fight. Just ask fire mages about how easy it is to loose a hot streak proc to movement / phase changes. This means that for most fights the dps loss would be little more than that represented by how much raid buffed haste you have or as Mearis pointed out ~ 2% of the intended dps.

They may be going to keep an eye on shadow dps on the test realm and may buff somthing else but I strongly suspect that we will be considered "good enough" now and between the Tier set bonuses and the buffs that have not been removed I suspect that we will still be in a good, though maybe not great, place.

When I checked a few builds ago, SW:P was always refreshing to full (unhasted) duration, but with hasted ticks. Either way, it seems like just that possibility for exploitation made them scrap the whole idea. And I'm not holding out for another buff, I just think it's ridiculous the way they're going about this. And I just rerolled engy, too.

Although, thinking about it further, if SP and Haste are 1:1 PP now (and haste might be slightly lower, but at 1.15:1 that seems like a ballpark estimate where removing SWP scaling would drop it), engy is still 62 PP (27 - 23 for chest, 68 - 28 for hands, 24*.75 for boots) to the standard 46 PP (although this assumes that the nitro boost and minor run speed are equivalent which they won't be on a per-fight basis, though anecdotally it seems to me nitro boosts are far more valuable overall. I won't model nitro boosts vs icewalker as no raiding spriest should be using icewalker as memory serves) so I'd still call it best in slot, and that ignores the opportunities where you could save your glove enchants for burn phases for that little extra edge.

Also, looking at the mage and balance druid tier on mmo-champion, there isn't a single piece of spirit on it. It looks well-itemized with 3 crit/haste pieces so if the trend continues we'll only be forced to use 1 hit tier and have greater flexibility in gearing with hit/haste pieces.

With glyph of shadow in its current state, scaling with spirit, damage, haste, crit instead of just damage, haste, crit is a large bonus on very high ilevel gear.

Items - World of Warcraft

Not what i meant. Where did you find hints that Blizzard is changing
his stat distribution on gear? Won't it be just more of the 3 stats instead
of 4?

You can only stack so much hit, being able to use spirit/crit/haste/spell power makes us a lot more flexible in gear choices.

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updated earlier today, big nurf :-(

It puts the numbers right where they should be, I think. Druids and Pallies are still too high, and Rogues too low (updated for Murder? Using ideal weapon-swapping? Because that mut build would be ~600 dps higher with just weapon swapping), but assuming a Patchwerk fight that looks about right. We're behind the pures and ahead of the other hybrids, though we lack burst capabilities they do.

I just went back on the ptr since this SWP change. Was doing about 500DPS less than I had before. This does stink but we are still in a good place in 3.3 compared to live 3.2 right now. Just gotta stay positive.

It is updated for the Murder changes but no, we don't support weapon swapping at present. Will be a little difficult to establish easily auto-generated profiles for a 3rd weapon but if necessary we could just have it use one a copy of an existing weapon. I will probably have to read up more on the weapon swapping thing for Mut rogues.

In my target dummy tests from the last PTR build vs. this PTR build, the difference was something like 10 dps over 2.5 minutes, which might actually have been caused by a lag spike I got that caused me to miss 1 GCD.

In neither test was I using any tricks to maximize my haste on SW:P then lock it in (I wanted a baseline not a theoretical maximum). Just 5 stacks of weaving then normal rotation, and no shadow fiend.

In any case, it was still about 15% higher DPS than live, which I think should be enough to put me in competition with the better DPSers in the raid, which is enough to make me happy. While I'm still hopeful for an eventual fix in Cataclysm for the lock-in, for now I'd rather they cut haste from SW:P than feel forced to level up engineering, hoard old haste clickie trinkets, and beg for PI.

So with the reverting of SW:P back to not scaling with haste and having crit being one of the only modifiers that doesn't get refreshed, would using a weapon swapping macro/mod be a viable thing to beef up our now weakest dot?

Yes, i know that this a very gimmicky way of getting more dps, and Blizz themselves have spoken out against it in the case of rogues and poisons. But if we are going to be pushing for max dps to stay competitive would this be something that we want to look into?

Considering almost any weapon we use will be haste/crit; the loss of a GCD is almost certainly not worth it.

You can swap weapon right after casting SW: D or DP and only trigger a 1.5 sec GCD which overrides the GCD from the instant spell. For example you start with a weapon with high crit and put SW:P and use this macro:

/cast Shadow Word: Death
/equip Weapon of über Spell Power

Well the devs have spoken and as we suspected they feel our damage is fine without the SWP haste scaling. Specifically they say that our dps was too high with a hasted swp outside of the fact that the haste issue is a nasty bug to fix. Given the combination of these two facts it is no surprise that pain was the obvious choice to be removed as it fixes both issues simultaneously. At this stage I doubt we should expect any buffs/changes before Cataclysm which will naturally shake up every spec to a significant degree.

I'd expect a new concept for the Glyph of SWP given that it's lost its haste synergy and is almost wholly behind the Glyph of Dispersion now, but beyond that I agree 100%.

What would be the big deal to just make the SWP glyph something like "Your Shadow Word: Pain damage is now increased by 75% of your haste rating"

I just threw 75% out there so that it's not a 1:1 ratio to spell power. Obviously they aren't going to fix the bug until Cata, so this would at least be a bandaid, plus bring us up a tad more to make up for the haste loss we suffer from right now.

You're asking the wrong people, as I'm fairly certain nobody posting in this thread is on the dev team. But from my perspective, haste already scales more than well enough for shadow. Something like that would push us back into the "overpowered" realm.

Just have to wait and see, don't really want go into the realm of wishlisting.

Anyhow, it was painfully obvious that there was no way that haste would interact with SWP in that broken way, so it's not a surprise to just see it yanked out completely. We're still going to be in a better spot than we were, and SWP is still the weakest of our 3 dots so yanking it from that one isn't as detrimental as the others.

This. Ghostcrawler recently made a pretty interesting post on the Blizzard forums and stated that haste scaling was removed from Pain due to shadow's DPS being too high, and not because of technical reasons relating to Mind Flay refreshes.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> SW:P and haste in 3.3

Thus expecting any sort of compensation in the form of DPS buffs elsewhere is going to be pointless. They nerfed us because they felt our DPS needed a nerf.

Edit: Also, I'm blind.