The problem is that a lot of your gear is really awful for shadow: Nearly every piece has spirit on it. I wrote an analysis of the problem of spirit on shadow priest gear which you can read here if you care. But here's the summary. A piece of gear with spirit is comparable to gear that's two tiers lower that doesn't have spirit. If you compare my armory to yours, you'll see that I have maybe 300 extra spell power from general gear upgrades, but I also have a full 300 less spirit than you. My unbuffed spirit is around 400 while yours is around 700. With alternative pieces of gear, that spirit could be haste or crit instead. You should also get a movement speed enchantment for your boots. It's far more of a DPS increase than ice walker will ever be.

As far as play goes, I didn't see any huge issues. Your DoT uptime was acceptable on the Algalon kill for example. The real problem is that shadow priests have extremely lackluster damage on any single target stand-and-nuke fight, like Algalon, XT, and Hodir. What is your damage like on Yogg-saron? If you're not topping damage on that fight, then you're probably doing something wrong.

I have been reading up on the optimum spell rotation and ive got it down very well im very good about keeping vt and dp up on my targets; in addition i have a pretty good talent set up although i need to get rid of spirit tap. i am not sure how to link my armor but if you would like to check it out i am zoned in the US, my realm is shadowmoon and my characters name is Virian. The most dps i have seen was on the ?? dps dummy in SW and it was about 2.8 k after i used shadow fiend. in any other dungeons my over all dps is stuck at 1500-2k. are there any tips anyone has about my armor? is there a seperate spell rotation i should use on low hp mobs?

just a small correction, Shadow Crash doesn't change your spellpower, it's a percentage-based damage modifier, you need to recast SW: P to take it into account

thumbs up for the very good summary

First time posting on this site. I've been playing spriest for a few months now and although I consider myself quite geared, I can't seem to keep up with the "pure" dps classes in my guild. Whether this is the limitations of the class or my own skill, it has frustrated me greatly and any help you could give me would be extremely appreciated.
My starting rotation is; mind blast, vt, dp, mf(2 ticks), SW:P. After that I aim to reapply dots as efficiently as possible, cast mb as often as I can and mf in between everything.

The World of Warcraft Armory

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

That.
We do well in many fights (Yogg NM & Yogg+2-3, Mimiron HM, Hodir HM, Deconstructor HM & NM, NR Beasts, just some i've in mind), but we can't keep the pressure of a pure dps class who burst out their CDs OR simply do the dps they can.
So, yes, at this time is not so exciting.

That x2. I don't keep up with the pure dps classes in my guild, either, though I do give some of our lackluster 'locks a run for their money. I still need some gear upgrades, but really it just seems to me that spriests are not good at burst damage. We go the slow but steady route, and I am happy breaking 4k on most boss fights.

Many damage meters and analyzers measure DPS as some form of sliding 5second window over damage dealt and take the maximum value. This is kind of burst-max DPS. The window could be any other size. What matters is that it is some value for personal DPS done. If you die 50% into the fight, your DPS value can still be up with the top people that survived the entire time.

Then there is what I personally call encounter DPS (or eDPS) which simply is the total amount of damage dealt divided by the total time the encounter lasted. This is the value you are probably seeking and this is the relevant DPS value over the whole encounter. If you die 50% into the fight, this value will be low, as your contribution stopped at that point.

So often DPS is some burst-value measurement and Shadowpriests aren't really bursty, with our DoTs being more constant and our primary nuke on a CD. You therefore won't make it on the pDPS list, but on the eDPS list, you should be placed in relation to your total damage contribution.

WWS generally used to display the pDPS value, but it sorted according to the eDPS ranking. You could click columns and let it display the eDPS too, which was disabled by default. But then again, few use WWS nowadays and I haven't looked into the alternatives to see wheter there's an option to enable that as well.

Bottom line: pDPS is some relative value that may or may not be indicative if you do everything right iff you are playing a class that is more bursty. Shadowpriests are not bursty however. pDPS is definitly not a value that signifies that you are playing better without any context. Consider opening with a 50'000 damage crit right on time 0, dying immediately due to aggro and thus having 10'000 DPS in a 5 second window in a fight that takes 5 minutes (300 seconds for the rest):

Total Damage dealt: 50'000
Encounter duration: 300 seconds
pDPS = 10'000
eDPS = 167 (50'000 / 300)

You now see clearly which value shows your burst and which value shows your contribution to the encounter in Damage per second.

Just wanted to see if there was anything anyone could point out to me for improvement in this Koralon run (also did Emalon and Archavon but the parsing seems to have combined the two bosses). I haven't raided much since early July and my gear pretty much reflects that. I already know I need to work on a little regemming to get back to the hit cap, obtaining epic gems for gear, and getting the newer version of the Kirin Tor ring. What's a reasonable amount of time between Mind Blast casts? I'm getting 8.8 seconds on average between casts and theoretically should be able to cast it every 7 seconds. I generally don't clip Mind Flay to use Mind Blast when it goes off cooldown and also prioritize reapplying DP/VT over Mind Blast as well.

Seems okay. There are some small things that I noted as I compared your log to my log: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Your kill took 29seconds longer than my kill but we both got exactly 100 mindflay ticks - that's the biggest "problem" I see. You also didn't use SW: D once (it's nice to use if you have to get out of the fire - it won't kill you, don't worry ). My average time between mindblasts was 8.0625 seconds, a little bit shorter than your time. The last thing I noted is your vt uptime, which was a little bit low.

But as I said, seems pretty solid. But just try to cast more spells, seems a little bit to me like you sometimes lose your last mindflay tick.

Well I actually just started doing shadow the other day since my guild's main shadow priest are MIA and taking a break atm.

So to say my Shadow Gear is not amazing so I am under geared comparatively to the hunter main I was running with form the guild (mostly alt run).

Anyhow I got my rotation down fairly easily and Ony was a decent enough fight to see where my damage was stacking. I ended up doing 20% damage (hunter tied at top with me) which apparently was roughly 4.4k dps (no flask on)

So I more or less was wondering if that is bad dps for starting as a Spriest on a 10 man seeing as I had minimal buffs and no boosting from other classes. (save kings buff) I highly expect to pull more dps during 25 man fights but I wanted to see if that damage is respectable for a 10 man raid; An officer said yes but I'm kinda eh about it. (especially just doing Spriest now)

Edit: I am more or less trying to get a gauge of where I'm sitting at now and where I need to climb, I admit my rotation might be slow and I think I clip Mind Flay often.

My starting rotation is:

VT > DP > MB > SW:P > MF

I toss in VE once I have my rotation up and started.

I rotate between up-keeping my spells and I admit I haven't been re-applying dots based off special dps procs etc which is something I need to do to up my dps.

So between my rotation I toss out SW whenever I can, usually VE takes care of it.

I keep priorities right I just have been reading and think my dps can improve by re-applications and less clipping of spells.

I find that Onyxia is not a great dps meter because of the whelp phase. Their health is high enough for mind sear to take one to the top of the meters every time they spawn.

You want to reach 5 stack of shadow weaving before casting SW:P, which means 5 spells/ticks of mind flay.

Lately our guild has had some issues with poor dps. In an effort to identify the problems we went back to Naxx and killed Patchwerk last night. We're mostly in Ulduar25 / ToC 25 Normal gear. I'm still in the process of evaluating the rest of the guild (many are alarmingly low), but I would like some outside feedback on my own performance.

Spec-wise, I see a lot of people against Spirit Tap/Imp Spirit Tap. I've decided to try it out since I'm only losing or weakening utility that isn't that great to begin with.

(It looks like I have my healing set on in the armory at the moment)
Edit: I should have on the proper gear in the armory now.

Fully raid buffed (w/out procs), my stats were in the ballpark of:

Spellpower: 3000
Crit Percentage: 29% (before talents; with focus magic)
Hit Rating: 300
Haste Rating: 420

I broke my T8 4pc bonus for the Ony25 helm. I do not yet have 2pc T9. (I've been considering burning some badges on the 10man shoulders just for the set bonus).

Patchwerk WoL (6197dps, no bloodlust): World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Fight Duration: 119s. Percentages vary slightly from WoL:

Vampiric Touch: 1:45 (105s; 105/119 = 88.2%)
Devouring Plague: 1:53 (113s; 113/119 = 94.9%)
Shadow Word: Pain: 1:52 (112s; 112/119 = 94.1%)
Mind Blast: 16 hits (5.5 cooldown + 1.5cast time = 7; 119/7 = 17 max hits, 16/17 = 94.1%)

Please keep in mind that we specifically did this without a blood lust, so everyone is low to some degree. We wanted to get an idea of where we stand versus Heroic Beasts/Gormok without a blood lust. If we couldn't hit the numbers on Patchwerk, Gormok was out of the question.

I potted on the pull and then again towards the end. My opening sequence was: VT DP MB MF SWP SWD MB

For the first few cycles of VT, I was pretty close to dead-on with my cast timing. I was starting the VT2 cast before VT1 dropped and landed VT2 right after the last tick of VT1. Admittingly, it does get a little sloppy after a few cycles, but not too bad.

MB uptime was about as good as I could do. With a max of exactly 17 total MBs, I don't think it was really possible to get in that last one due to cooldown collision and latency.

Before ToC gear, I was definitely not at BiS for T8. Perhaps I was close, but we just didn't have the hardmode gear. With the new ToC gear, I think i'm close to T8 BiS in terms of stats (not items). What bothers me is that the T8 simcraft sample output has shadow at 7157; nearly a full 1k dps of where I'm at. Even if I give Bloodlust a dps value of 300 (which seems very generous), I'd still be about 700 dps short.

I'm either missing something very crucial to maximizing dps for my class, or my gear is just much worse than what simcraft is using for it's simulations. (or.. simcraft is way off)

Is anyone hitting the 7.1k that simcraft is giving us?

Simcraft expected dps values are usually inflated beyond what you can hope to reliably achieve. They more or less assume that all the stars align and everything falls perfectly into place during the dps sample; no movement required, no lag, etcetera. That's not to say that you might not experience a fight in which you exceed these values and perform beyond the theoretical "perfect conditions", but that's why simcraft averages thousands of iterations of fights.

The dot uptimes could be slightly higher, but not to a degree where it would bring you a significant amount of dps increase and your mb count is good so your personal performance certainly ain't holding your guild back in terms of raid dps.
I checked your last totc25 clear and your raid dps on beasts does seem a bit low. World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis is our last raid and has beasts normal and heroic kill in it. Our raid dps is really borderline for the encounter and like you can see some of our players are underperforming quite a bit aswel.

So I'm new to SPriests having played a hunter of all specs and a resto druid.

I have to say that I am a big fan of SW: D and actually use it quite frequently once all of my major debuffs are applied to the target/targets and of course not using it when a debuff should be reapplied.

I have been perusing the forums slowly for quite some time now and am not seeing a clear debate on this debuff. Being an instant cast, I'm not seeing much wrong with throwing it on a mob reguardless of the current HP. If it's a healing intensive fight (and having a healer I'm pretty familiar with what is and isn't) I always VE my target to assist the healers. If it's getting rough and I happen to crit I have a backup with Lifeblood.

Am I wasting a significant amount of time doing this that could be spent beginning to cast another spell?

SW:D just doesn't scale well, being instant and not having too many talents and what is considered a weak glyph supporting it. Most people only cast it on the move. I personally tend to use it as a 1 gcd length filler, doing a 3 tick MF and a SW:D when someone else might do two 2 tick MF's instead. SW:D on cooldown just wasn't a significant DPS increase the last time I saw it simulated (something on the order of like 10 DPS) and might make it unavailable when you had to move (which would make it a DPS loss as soon as you moved and it wasn't up, seeing as most fights aren't the patchwerk-style simulators/models/spreadsheets usually treat them as).

To summarize: two tick mind flay is almost identical damage, with the side benefit of leaving the SW:D cooldown available for when you have to move or can't do a cast time spell for whatever reason (flame jets, freya with trees up, etc.) with the downside of requiring a cast bar mod and decent ping to execute well.

You are average for the raid, but that raid is pretty bad. Our shadow priests are pushing around 6k on fights like that, which would put them in the top 3 of that raid group. But in reality they place near the bottom of damage meters.

Here's a shadow priest on heroic Jaraxxus from this week:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

You can count up 447 seconds (7 minutes, 27 seconds) of dot time. Actual fight duration? 5 minutes, 13 seconds. That's 143% dot uptime. So yes, people hit 90% all the time.

One of many Heroic Beasts wipes (split for gormok only): World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

6.3k Was the highest output I saw for the night (on Gormok). Most attempts were between 5.5-6k. I feel pretty good about those numbers in my current gear, but my uptimes are still somewhat low. (86%-90% on the link above). Are people clipping mind flay again to achieve 95%+ uptimes? I've also been TAB-MFing to refresh SWP, which is probably also contributing to missed MBs and low uptimes.

Looking for some feedback for a long-time holy/disc priest, trying to figure out shadow.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Things I am thinking about, but could use confirmation and/or advice to resolve:

I have a feeling my gear is holding me back somewhat, it has a lot of spirit on it.

I have a bad habit of overusing Mind Flay, particularly when I should be using MB.

I am still getting a feel for how to keep good uptime on dots. I hesitate for an instant when waiting for that last tick of Devouring Plague. I am getting better about casting a SW during those times, but I still have not figured out how to keep good DPS while clipping MF. Sometimes I also start recasting the wrong dot, particularly when I am trying to figure out where to move out of fire/poison/whatnot.

Any advice is appreciated.

First time poster but avid reader. I am posting this on behalf of our SP in the 10 man group i run with. I only have the last few attempts on H Anub as of right now but any advice i can pass along his way would be appreciated. His gear is a decent mix of badge and 10 man ToC. We are very close to downing Heroic Anub and we are trying to raise his dps a bit..

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay

1, he needs to stop dying. His presence is unacceptably low.
2, he doesn't seem to understand a number of fundamentals of the class. Here are a few things I've noticed going over it:

a) He is ~230 hit over cap. That's... ridiculous.
b) His MH isn't socketed.
c) He's awful at keeping DoTs up. His VT uptime is below 50% for many attempts, and this is on a boss where you have 3 targets. He should be throwing up VT and SW:P on the scarabs, too, instead of mind flaying. He doesn't keep DP on Anub

Honestly, the more I look at this, the more I suspect that he bought his account or his little brother was playing that day or something. He has no concept of DoT uptime. Compare the DP ticks to Imp DP hits. On one attempt he has an Imp DP hit for every 2 DP ticks. I... really don't know what else to say. Once he gems his MH and gets rid of a LOT of the hit rating he'll be fine for that, but he seriously needs to do his research on DoT uptimes, multi-dotting, priorities, not clipping DoTs, and understanding that DP can only be up on one target (and on this fight, that should be Anub 100% of the time).

Also tell him to get his hands on [Bejeweled Wizard's Bracers] and the two rings he can buy with Emblems of Triumph, so he can drop some of his hit while pushing other stats up.