My spec is a bit of a mish-mash, and I argued slightly with Tedv about it. I am not really interested in performing the best in trivial content, but I'd rather sacrifice a slight amount to have better 'oh shit' buttons.

Having inner focus + divine hymn is excellent, and a raid saver, for example, after a bad breath on heroic beasts during P2, or using it when the infernals are up during Grand Warlock.

Looking at improved spirit tap though:

Even assuming a 100% uptime on the debuff, you are looking at an 10% extra spirit, which works out to be 70 or 80 spirit or so. That works out to be 16 spell damage for 5 talent points. I am not really sure how you calculated 16 spell damage per point, it seems as though you are getting 16 spell damage per 5 points? That's also assuming 100% uptime which seems very very high.

Assuming you are correct about the mana regeneration though, it seems as though:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Might be superior, as you keep inner focus and just give up a few fillers like psychic horror. Silence or faster fear are rather nice on the Arena encounter, but that's rather trivial and probably not worth gearing up for.

I will also add that I am currently experimenting with using the glyph of dispersion a lot, and I really like the extra flexibility. I carry both glyph of shadow and glyph of disperson and switch them around - being able to multi dot like crazy and use dispersion whenever to just reduce random damage is very nice.

We all agree that Spirit Tap + Imp Spirit tap are garbage dps talents, however they do add some dmg albiet not much.
I'm not sure how you can ignore it if you're talking pure theoretical max dps, at most you only give up utility talents to get it.


Personally, I pick it up, but yeah its just mediocre talent. I prefer to drop points in Focused Mind to pick up the utility talents. With that set up and the 3 minute shadow fiend I never even really have to use Dispersion to keep mana going. We have so much mana regen now Focused Mind isn't that necessary. (HM Vezax exception).


As for the recent buff, its nice to finally see a Shadow priest buff but the nature of it makes me /facepalm a bit.

I also prefer to drop Focused Mind in favor of utility talents (also, since the nerfs to the encounter went live I haven't found focused mind to be necessary for HM Vezax anyway), although recently I've been considering taking out the last point I have in it in favor of Inner Focus. Situational as it may be, I'm a fan of its use in conjuncture with Divine Hymn as an "oh shit" button.

Prior to the announcement of any sort of buffs, I was at least (perhaps blindly) hopeful that Blizzard might recognize the maximum potential damage output disparity between classes and make changes accordingly. Basically, I figured that we (and the other classes who have very sub-par damage) would eventually receive the buffs we needed, but that it would likely take a while. For these changes to be their only attempt thus far at resolving this issue is somewhat disheartening.

That's my reasoning as well - I wonder if shadowpriests that PvP as disc use innerfire/hymn a shitload in Arena and are too leary to give it up in PvE ;p



While our single target damage is pretty pathetic, on multi-target fights our damage is good enough for a spot in the top 10 usually, which is good enough. I would love a damage buff, but Blizzard giveth, and Blizzard taketh away. Personallly I'd settle for a very small damage boost if they renormalized our damage by nerfing our SP scaling but improving our spirit scaling a shitload, which would allow us to change our gear selection a fair bit.

Ghostcrawler did have a pretty good post about scaling though, arguing that what matters is that parity is reached in the top tier content, since if classes lag behind, they will just adjust them. In hindsight, that's an excellent philosophy, since trying to balance all coefficients to make classes equal at all tier is a nightmare from an optimization point of view.

Depends, 25 or 10 man? Usually I don't find mindsear to be worth it, so I just put VT/pain/plague on the boss, VT/pain both adds, mind blast the add we are killing, and refresh dots on every mob. I don't have any good Anub parses though since we 'double' our raid in 25 man and split the mains with alts to get twice the loot.

Use a mod to keep track of dots on multiple targets. Basically, in ToTC:

- P1-2 beasts is excellent for multi dotting
- Grand Warlock (on easy mode) is OK for multi dotting, especially the infernals
- Arena (on easy mode, don't do it on hard mode for the love of god) is OK for mobs you are going to kite with taunt/chains of ice
- Ikaruga is terrible for multi dotting
- Anub is excellent for multi dotting and AoE



I should add that on Grand Warlock and Arena you can multi dot, but taking down one target fast is the absolute priority, and as such, I recccomand against multi-dotting and just burning down something ASAP. For example, I'll gladly let dots fall off the main target when killing mistresses/infernals/portals because they have to die now, especially on heroic. The same is true for Arena, with the caveat that if you don't CC on heroic, you are going to die, so dotting sheeps will make your mages wish death upon you and your family.

I think I saw that exact post. That's the one where he says, "If you and your friend both start an instance doing 5k DPS and at the end, he's doing 7k and you're doing 6k, then we'll buff you". I was really tempted to say "so since shadow priests are now doing 6k and everyone else is at 7k, you're going to buff us?" Since the numbers he gave are almost exactly the discrepancy we're experiencing. But given the changes Blizzard has announced, I don't think they believe there's a problem with shadow priest damage.

I don't see a problem with making changes in hindsight. The real issue with their methodology is how long it takes them to realize there is a problem. A common situation is that raiders warn them that there will be a scaling problem in 3 months, then it happens, and then it takes another 3 months for the numbers to get skewed enough that Blizzard agrees there is a problem, and then another 2 months before the patch that fixes it. The plan works well in theory but lags in practice. I'm not sure what we as players can do to assist in the situation. They've chosen their methodology and we get to work with it, so we might as well accept it and move on.

Our SP scaling isn't as good as you might be thinking compared to the other classes.

Fire Mages have very good SP scaling. Moonkin in T9 are around 5% ahead of Shadow Priests. Destro Locks are a bit higher (at the T8 level anyway. Haven't run it for T9 yet). Ele Shammy's in T8 are lower, although that may be changed with the buffs they're getting in 3.2.2.

Yes, Mind Sear scales very nicely with +spellpower, but for all of our talents with multipliers, we're very much in line (or a bit behind) the other casters in single target DPS SP scaling with the exception of Ele Shammies.

There are a few stats that we scale worse than the other classes with.

Moonkin to my mind are a good comparison with a Shadow Priest. We both DPS in forms that cut off our healing spells, but the gear we wear allows us, if we do drop forms to at least be able to throw some random heals around. I do believe that the Moonkin brings more useful buffs to the raid (especially Rebirth and Innervate) and maybe a Shadow Priest can survive better than one, but I think in balance they're fairly similar in what the niche they fill.

And yet, a Moonkin has an +intellect to +spell power scaling talent which means they scale with +intellect 86% better than we do. Gear will always have +intellect on it. And more each tier.

A Moonkin's base spirit -> spell power talent gives the idealised amount that a Glyphed 3.2.2 Shadow Priest gets assuming a 100% uptime on the Glyph. In practise, a Moonkin will probably scale around 8% better than a Shadow Priest with Spirit.

A Moonkin scales better with crit rating than a Shadow Priest by around 10%.

A Moonkin scales better with haste rating than a Shadow Priest by around 14%.

And finally, they scale around 5% better than us with Spell Power.

I really don't think that Shadow Priests need any sort of nerf in our single target DPS scaling be it with spell power or another stat.

Yes, there are some fights where our ability to multi-dot stands us in good stead, and on these fights our scaling with Spell Power might seem higher. In most cases however from what I've seen, the bottleneck of fights with fairly tight enrage timers is usually concentrated on burning down a single target ASAP rather than doing maxmium DPS to a number of targets at once. At least, in the area between single target DPS and full-on AoE.

Yes, you can multi-dot on Iron Council, but you're just padding your meters. Yes, you can multi-dot on Kologarn, but how much it helps the raid rather than again padding your meters is up for debate.

The same could maybe be said for Gormok and his snobolds. Yes, the snobolds do have to die eventually, but, at least the way my guild does it, we'd rather get Gormok down low and prioritise getting Snobolds off healers and then other casters than worry about killing Snobolds on melee at the same time.

I think most priests are just spending more time as discipline and holy these days, as those specs are genuinely good. So Blizzard wouldn't notice it as a "reroll".

Since spirit is going to be pretty much strictly for healers soon, I doubt this will happen.

There is an entire tier between now and 4.0, I hope at least for icecrown we can be competitive with the good hybrids (DKs, ferals, etc)

I have recently joined a new guild and am at a slight disadvantage gear wise. Im currently in mostly 232 gear and the rest of the guild im running with is sitting at a minimum 3 peice 245. I understand My dps would naturally be lower but in most cases im between 30-35% lower. I read one post saying SP's generally do 25-30% less dps than a pure dps class. Is this true?The guild im in complain when i cant push 5k dps and that is all the time unless its a multy-mob pull.
We are currently on Northrend Beasts 25 man Hardmode and i hit what i think to be a respectable 4.5k dps. Are they right to think i should hit +5k dps or am I at a disavantage Class wise as well as gear wise.