Thanks for the responses.

Yes, I saw the detailed spell break-downs for each profile. That's where I grabbed the overall crit percentage as well as the percent of total damage that SWD did. However, I didn't see anything that looked like a breakdown of crit percentage on a per-spell basis. Perhaps I simply missed it.

Has anyone figured out for sure the mechanics behind SW:P and the refresh? I originally thought it rolled because of the need for Shadow Weaving and Scorch/Oath, and thought it would be best to get SWP up again when all debuffs + an on-use SP trinket + a SP proc like Hourglass is active. Recently I've seen some posts on SP.com that when you cast MF, SW:P is recalculated based on current debuffs/buffs, meaning just wait for Shadow Weaving and then nothing else matters as its constantly being recalculated. But does this include stuff like Thaddius's Polarity Shift and Loatheb's Spores? I'll probably test this on a Test dummy when I get home later tonight, but does anyone have any surefire information about this beforehand?

As of the last time I did Loatheb/thaddius. You need to cast/recast SW:P after receiving those buffs to see the improvement in SW:P.

SW:P does adjust for spellpower, it does not adjust for % dmg increases like shadow wearing/polarity nor for crit chance increases like Loatheb/scorch.

This was true as of the 11/30 at least.

Yea, self buffs are only taken into account on the initial cast, so recasting after you get loatheb and thaddius buffs and waiting for shadow weaving stacks is necessary

Are you all sure about SW Pain refreshing based on its initial spell power? My typical experience when analyzing my recount damage is that SW Pain ticks vary greatly. I will wait until my trinkets are active when I have over 3000 spell power active. When the fight is over I view recount averages and it will say something like low 1300, average 1600, max 2200 even when SW Pain has only been applied once. I would expect these numbers to all fall much closer to the average, or not deviate at all, if the initial assertion is true.

The assertion is that SW:P *does* change with spellpower changes (once it's been refreshed via Mind Flay), but *doesn't* change with non-spellpower changes. (Except for +dmg% taken debuffs on the mob like CoEl. However +crit% taken debuffs like Totem of Wrath does *not* adjust).

You can also use SWD while up in the air to refresh your shadow weaving stack, I usually time a mind flay right before the vortex cast and it last long enough if I can't get a mind flay in. (I shield before doing it, as mana isn't really a concern anyway since you can use dispersion while you're up in the air (taking less damage AND regening mana)).

Glyphs:

Am I missing something? How is Glyph of Dispel in any way viable? I can't even remember any current bosses which require a magic dispel. This should be handled by healers who will have their UI set up to handle dispels much more quickly than a DPS could.

While Glyph of Mindflay is convinent and certainly viable, I haven't noticed too many situations where I though it would help much (as opposed to Sunwell where it helped on almost every fight).

So for Glyphs I go with Shadow/SWP/SWD. While Glyph of SWD only works at low health, that is really when you want the boss to drop faster and I find I use SWD on vastly more fights than ones where I need a little extra range.

I am puzzled as to why this Glyph is ommited from the OP and would like to see it included as I am certain it is better than Mindflay for pure DPS until we start to reach more complex Sunwell style fights.

Not to discourage you but I'm not in anyway geared out fully at the moment, and I am hit capped and 2238 SP raid buffed. I don't say this to belittle where you are, as we all grew into what we are, but to let you know where you can be. I'm expecting to be somewhere around 2500 SP in raids once I have all the gear I currently have on my wish list. I hope to complete this collection before the next content patch.

The Glyph of Shadow Word: Death is included in the SW using Priest Simcraft profile.

Personally, from my experience, I'm damned glad I chose the Mind Flay glyph over the SW one.

As to your first point, there was a fight in sunwell or 2, namely Felmyst and M'uru where (at least in my guild) spriests were responsible for the mass-dispelling of the raids. In that case the glyph would be very helpful. As an anciliary note, what would you put in it's place? I currently have 1 minor glyph slot taken by glyph of levitate. Nothing else has enough value to put in place.

Mindflay over SW glyph... well, from my own perspective, I use SW maybe twice in any given boss fight. The first time is when I'm stacking SW at the beginning, and generally at least 1 other time when I either need to stick something in waiting for a cooldown, or when I forget it's probably better to cast mind flay anyway. SW just doesn't provide anything that mind flay doesn't to justify the health loss. If they removed the blowback damage, or reduced the cooldown, it might be better again, but given the amount of time they've put into mind flay to change it, and now to fix the tick bug (not sure if they've actually admitted it's a bug yet) I don't see either of those things happening. Obviously SW, in terms of pure dps is slightly better than MF. So I guess it's just personal opinion or Stubborness that keeps me from using it.

And, to make all that long story short, if I don't use SW in my rotation, why would I pick a glyph that benefits it? And in malygos phase2, the mind flay glyph comes in very handy.

Currently, with the content that is out and how things are, Glyph of SW is useless. You'll get to use SW maybe 5 times at max, if you use ever cd, on most the boss fights (again, that scales on how well your guild does on the boss). Glyph of Mind Flay has it's uses, so do all of them, and we can probably pick situations out where X will by viable in Y situation. But looking back at the fights, Glyph of Mind Flay is more of an increase because it affects us 100% of the time in most situations. SW's scaling isn't that great anyways, and this glyph doesn't seem to rectify that significantly.

I'll only apply SW to get my SW stacks up in the beginning or say they fall off because of running, and maybe if we're pushing an enrage timer. Less running and generally more survivability with Glyph of Mind Flay.

When more content comes out, the GoMF > GoSW might change, but we'll have to see.

@Mearis: There are two glyphs, Glyph of Mass Dispel and Glyph of Dispel Magic, they're both meant for their respective spells. Glyph of Dispel Magic works to help out healers if there's a lot of random single dispels, Glyph of Mass Dispel would be something to use more in a raid wide debuff (Failmyst comes to mind). They're situational but both have their uses.

Correct, dispel magic is not mass dispel.

How much Id love to see SW go back into the DPS rotation! I am not sure how to give it a boost without making it too strong in PvP.. perhaps a Haunt-like component to increase shadow damage by x

I think some people (dyelynn) misunderstood me.

How is the MAJOR glyph of dispel useful for a damage spec?
Yes I used Mass Dispel in Sunwell, but not only does this glyph not effect Mass Dispel, noone is raiding Sunwell anymore. Please enlighten me on which Wrath boss fights this works well with.

I use SWD on every cooldown, I find the complaint about the self damage ridiculous. Either you don't use it in raid damage heavy fights, or VE heals you back up. My point is that in my experience there are far less raid damage fights where you can't use SWD, than there are range sensitive fights where you need a longer MF (all I can think of is maybe P2 Malygos, the rest is just convinience).

I would like to see some more information on a tick of MF doing more damage than a cast of SWD though.

The DPS increase is very VERY minimal, if any at all. I mentioned this a couple posts up, there are two Glyphs, Glyph of Mass Dispel and Glyph of Dispel Magic. Both of which are very situational but either save you mana, or help healers out when you're spending time dispelling.

The damage component of SW shouldnt be an issue, save for Malygos if you time it wrongly. We already take 30% less damage from it. The glyph itself is only useful for 35% of a mobs HP and a 10% bonus and on a 12s cd.

Having the range on MF makes everything even, it helps healers out too, and it requires less running, which makes for just that much more DPS time on the mob.

Sorry for misunderstanding chrisb3, for some silly reason I was thinking the dispell glyph was a minor... and I missed the post where someone said it was good for Spriests.

As for SWD vs. MF...

Just a cursory look at spell coefficients makes most of my case. MF currently has an 81.43% coefficient. SWD has a 42.86% coefficient. At 2000 SP mind flay will tick for 588 + (2000 * 0.8143) / 3 = 738.86 and SWD will hit for 810 (average of low and high) + (2000 * 0.4286) = 857.2.

So, just a cursory glance has swd only 118 damage ahead of mf in this situation... but that's not really fair to MF. Since MF is a 3s channeled spell, and swd is a 1.5s cast spell, you should really average MF over 1.5 seconds to get a more fair estimate of the damage difference... in that case:
(738.86 * 3) / 2 = 1108.29

With that in mind, MF is now ahead of SWD by a much higher margin. I left crit out of the equasions because it effects both MF and SWD equally. Haste actually favors MF more than SWD, because: 1. SWD is a faster cast spell and haste only effects it as much as it does the GCD, and 2.the spell has an inherent 12s CD.

Now, if MF was actually funtioning like it's supposed to, 1tick per second for 3 seconds, it would still be beneficial to kill MF to cast a SWD comming off cooldown, and our rotation or spell priority would be basically the same as it was pre-bc, but that's not the case. MF ticks are very erratic atm, so much so that many people are seeing a tick at the beginning of the cast, then 2 ticks back to back at the very end of the cast... thus having 2+ seconds of channeling with no damage. Since there is no way to reliably select how many ticks of MF you're clipping, clipping is no longer an option.

I think I've shown why I don't use SWD any more, I imagine a case could be made for the 4pc bonus and the glyph combining to make it more useful, especially if you absolutely don't like using the MF glyph, but given the fact that we are in "entry level raiding" and already 2200-2400 buffed SP in raids, 3k in the future is well within reach. And the higher your haste and SP goes, the more value mind flay gains over shadow word death.... it simply scales better.

You forgot to add base damage on SW: D.
2000 * 0.4286 = 857,2. Add the 810 base and you are up at average of 1667,2.
1667.2 damage over 1.5 seconds gives 1111,5 dps, which is 372.6 dps more than what you get from 1 MF tick. (Assuming 2000 spell power and 0 haste rating.)

You're absolutely correct. However it's not really fair to calculate the dps of SWD as if it's a spammable spell. It is obviously of some benefit to use SWD in a rotation, especially if you use the glyph to boost it's damage and have the 4pc bonus.

However, I still maintain, that because:
1. clipping MF is almost always a dps loss in any given gear set, with curent mechanics of the spell and
2. SWD has a 12 second cooldown, scales very poorly with haste and has half the coefficient of MF,

for my rotation/priority, in my gear, with my raid, in my guild, MF and it's glyph is the better choice. I will add the caveat that I've never been a fan of SWD, the mechanics of the spell and the implementation are stupid.

Anyone know what the converted PP on the +21 Crit rating and 3% increased critical strike damage meta gem would be? I was in 10 Man naxx last night with another shadow priest, and I was consistently 10%-12% behind DPS, despite the fact our converted PP on gear was 17 higher in my favour, minus the meta gem. I also suspect I may have been out of range of the totems, although since I wasn't checking for them, and no wws was run, I can't be certain.

Edit: Seems like to me, since spells that can crit is aproximately 55% of my damage, the 3% critical strike damage portion would improve my DPS by 1.65%. Does my math fail here?

Without a WWS or Stasis parse no one can tell you why your dps was subpar compared to the other Priest. But the meta alone is not going to explain a 10-12% dps difference.

Yeah. I really wish I ran a log of it. I believe I'll be back to finish naxx on thursday, including patchwerk. After this abysmal showing last night, I went back to review an old WWS I had from saturday with nearly the same gear but a more pvp orient spec (1/5 Imp mind blast), And it appears I'm using mind blast about 60% the amount I should be.

If interested, here's a link. Archavon 25 man.