Gourd, I really challenge that perspective. 63sp's PP is based on you being entirely stationary too. If you're moving, you're going to miss out on the full benefits of either enchant.

You might argue that if you're running around, you might miss a Black Magic Proc, and you never miss the 63sp. The modelling of Black Magic in Simcraft mitigates this because the spell is used somewhat sub-optimally. It won't 2 clip a Mind Flay that procs Black Magic (because the haste benefit won't apply to that Flay), or change the priority order to get more DoTs applied. Sometimes the program will miss a BM proc entirely for DoTs. So some of this loss is automatically accounted for as part of the averaging process that is 10000 repetitions of a fight. A real person can judge and deal with the proc or impending proc more intelligently.

On the "Helter Skelter" simulation, where the priest cannot cast for >10% of the time, 63sp only does 4DPS better than Black Magic. In this simulation the computer making sub-optimal decisions is double counted (once as detailed above by not responding to the timing of the proc, and twice for also having to move), so I believe that the 4DPS difference is over-emphasized in favor of 63sp. Furthermore, none of the fights present in ICC require you to stop casting for more than 10% of the fight; I submit you are probably doing it wrong if you feel differently.

Finally, at a 7-10PP difference, you wouldn't expect black magic to generate a 50dps upgrade; the PP we assign to Black Magic (around 70) predicts that it would only produce only a 14-20 DPS upgrade on a stationary fight .

Actually, I do agree with you. I think I was being too closed minded and hadn't taken into consideration that the modelling of Black Magic in simcraft is imperfect in such a way that is not strictly in the favor of the enchant.

This should be offset by the similar chance that you'll get use of a black magic proc, then have to move while it's on ICD, increasing the relative value of it. Needing to move shouldn't intrinsically favor or disfavor either enchant.

I think you have to keep in mind that BM is only 7.5% haste. You wouldn't have to be much less than perfect for anything you gain trying to maximize the proc to be washed away by human reaction times and lag.

In the case of 2 clipping, you're adding 1/3 of the average gap between the 2nd mind flay tick and the start of the next mind flay cast into your rotation, while gaining 1/3 of the difference in cast time between the mind flay with 250 more haste rating and without (same as the difference in the mind flay tick rate with 250 haste rating).

It's easy to make a decent guess about how good you have to be. Taking a spriest with 600 haste rating you've got:

3 * (1/((1+600/3279)(1.03)(1.05)) - 1/((1+850/3279)(1.03)(1.05))) = .1422 seconds

If your mind flay cast isn't registering on the server within .1422 seconds of the last damaging mind flay tick you're losing ground trying to clip. Another way of looking at that would be, the simulator is assuming you're 2 clipping your mind flay, but it's adding in .1422 seconds of dead time to account for not perfectly syncing your next mindflay cast with the last desired tick of the one you're clipping.

I'm not saying you're not better than this, that's fast, but it's not inhuman, I don't think, in general, the simulator is greatly cheating black magic on that account though.


I'm not sure exactly what you mean by changing the priority order to get more dots applied. The only thing I can think of is that it means clipping your dots. If that's the case then you've got a similar calculation related to the greater than 3 second base gap between dot ticks that comes with clipping, in addition to any dps losses that might be associated with reducing the DPET of the clipped dot. That's weighed against the 250 more haste rating on the newly casted dot. I could see there actually being a gain here, especially related to DP (not so much with VT I expect, odds are pretty high you'll be casting one within that 10 second window anyway, which means most BM procs are getting a VT cast during them by the simulator already), but I don't want to try and puzzle it out when I'm not even sure that's what you meant.

Anyway, I don't think the sim is screwing black magic over as much as you do. On the other hand, it's putting them pretty close to eachother anyway, so I think it's fair to say you can go with either one. Super hasted dots are pretty fun.

Would it be wrong to gem for haste? or will SP alwasy triumph over this?

If you spend a large amount of time casting Mind Sear (such as Anub'arak heroic) haste beats the shit out of spellpower gemming. I'm not sure about multidot scenarios as VT scales considerably better than MS with spellpower.

Haste and SP are roughly 1:1 in terms of scaling according to 3.3 simcraft values, but the SP gem awards 23 SP whereas the haste gem only awards 20 haste, 23 SP is the way to go.

If you wanted to make a set specifically for Mind Sear spam fights, I suppose a haste set may be useful, but even then it's probably better to gem 23 SP, since there really such a thing as a 'Mind Sear spam fight': placing VT before Mind Sear is superior to Mind Sear spam in almost any feasible scenario. Certainly the fights in ICC so far that involve adds thus far (Deathwhisper, Gunship) both lend themselves well to multi-dotting and not so much Mind Sear spam.

Bottom line: Gem 23 SP, 12 SP/10 haste if the socket bonus is worth it. Never gem 20 haste.

The Dispersion Glyph is prefered because it is not only a good mana regen but also becomes a relatively short cooldown "Oh Shit!" button.

Assuming your gearset is decent enough, it will already provide you with a reasonable enough amount of haste that the two will be relatively equal to one another. If your priest is dramatically undergeared however, it is possibly that haste will temporarily be a better option for you until your gearset improves.

And @ Neckface: The reason many people are prioritizing Glyph of Dispersion over SW:P is because of it's additional damage reduction component, which certainly has its applications in many fights/situations. And since mana is very seldom an issue on fights, whether or not it's actually worse than SW:P in terms of straight mana regen is primarily irrelevant, especially since Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain has no additional benefits aside from said mana regen.

I was doing some thinking over the past couple weeks with the new patch out. Alot of people claim you should wait for 5 stacks up prior to casting SWP. Well, after 2 weeks of trial and error, that idea is dead. Here's my PoV on this. If you have the same trinkets as me (or something similar, it also adds to my case). I have Ilustration and the Spyglass. If you wait to cast SWP til way later on, your losing stacks on both trinks and Shadow weaving for your other spells, not to mention your mind flay is much much weaker w/o SWP being up. Hands down all that loss of DPS makes that opening rotation futile and dead. Do yourself a favor in the up coming 2 raid weeks and take some notes on your DPS, try the standard rotation that you guys claim to be obsolete, then try VT, SWP, DP, MB, MF, MF, etc etc and tell me what is better. Your in for a surprise.

So the shadow word pain glyph claims to be using "base mana" and the dispersion tooltip refers to mana. Are they really the same scaling factors? My quick tests say no.

I gained 38 mana per tick of Shadow Word: Pain.
I gained 1337 mana for each dispersion "tick".

I had 22273 mana when I did this so Shadow Word: Pain glyph was returning 760 mana per minute or approximately 3% of my actual mana per minute.

Dispersion is offering up close to 8k mana when used, so by lowering the cooldown, someone can do the math accurate, but it's roughly an extra 1500 mana per minute to use the glyph.

These are without raid buffs like kings and AI and GotW which would skew the numbers on Dispersion's return, but should make no difference for the Shadow Word: Pain glyph.

From what ive read, for a staff the Might Spellpower enchant would be a greater dps boost than say black magic enchant. However if you have the engineer enchant and black magic then you use the Hyperspeed Accelerators when black magic procs, would this result in a large dps boost than the spell power enchant?

Im not sure if that can be simulated or not?

My bad, was intoxicated enough last night that I just responded based on the figures the other poster provided as opposed to actually taking the validity of those figures into consideration. "Base mana" is indeed highly different from the "max mana" percentage that Dispersion returns. Base mana refers to how much mana each class has before talents, int, etc are included. For a level 80 priest, our base mana is 3863, meaning that each tick of the Shadow Word: Pain glyph would indeed return only 38-39 mana.

I reconsidered the math a bit, too. It appears to me that dispersion's reduced cooldown is worth up to ~2500+ mana per minute. Obviously, the return is much less when you can't cast the nth dispersion. But the power of the mana should it ever be required is immense.

Small correction: CoE-type debuffs (generally speaking: % damage taken buffs/debuffs on the target) do not require a recast of SW:P.

Woah, really? This is new afaik.

It's a %-based damage buff/debuff on the boss. It's always worked this way. You only have to worry about %-based damage increases/decreases on yourself, and the total crit of all modifiers on yourself + debuffs/buffs on the boss.

"Caster's percent damage dealt" and "caster's total current crit percent on the target" are only checked at cast time of a spell, while "target's percent damage taken" modifiers are checked when the damage is actually dealt (not when the spell is cast).

This is why this bug/"feature" annoys me so much.

Hello all,

On the multidot/mindsear subject, has anyone actually put this into good real wow application? I have tried for example on the trash pulls in ICC10 and can only manage about 7k dps vt'ing all the mobs then rotating mind sear, keeping vt up with the aid of dottimers. But if i just spam mindsear I pull about 11-12k dps

Is this just a learn to play thing or a theory vs real wow application hiccup

I've tried both and can say from experience that placing VT on mobs is almost certainly worth it, especially if you can do it while mobs are still being gathered (you have Fade, use it!!). If you're seeing lower dps, especially by 4-5k, then you are probably doing it wrong. You're most likely redotting the same mobs needlessly (thus clipping VT ticks), taking too long to target mobs for VT applications, or perhaps dotting mobs that are about to die and wasting a few ticks of a would-be VT.

By multidotting and then Mind Searing, my trash dps is routinely around 15k, with about 30% due to VT. Try to refine your techniques and you should see better results.

EDIT: As mentioned by Hegen in the following post, 2 pc T9 is a huge bonus to multi-dotting with VT. I was assuming Sylekta had it when perhaps I shouldn't have.

Well, I can report about the same. However (and that's a large however), I do not have 2pc T9 as I only recently starting DPSing and mostly using healing gear. The second thing is that VT performance of course depends on how long the adds live. If you run ICC10 with high raid DPS, not all mobs live long enough to see the end of VT. If you start VTing the mobs and the last one to get VT only gets 2 ticks before dying, then that's a wasted VT, of course. The math will depend on the number of mobs and your stats, but VT needs a minimum number of ticks to pull ahead of mind sear.

VT vs mind sear may also scale differently with debuffs on target. If your raid has a main dps target instead of just letting everyone AoE, many mobs won't be fully debuffed, especially in 10 man, where an unholy DK is not a given. In that case, put a VT on the main damage target first - this has made a difference for me (still needing lots of practice, however).

Obviously VTing adds requires a degree of... Consciousness, as you obviously aren't going to want to VT an add that's at 10%. However, assuming your spell choice/rotation is ideal, I'm very much with Sinusoid on this one in that you should absolutely be seeing a dps increase with using VT. However yes, it obviously requires more effort in order to be worthwhile as opposed to simply mashing mind sear.

Are there really fights where one absolutely needs that "oh crap" button every 1m15s rather than 2m? I don't see survivability as being a huge issue for shadow priests anymore. If the other fellow's math is right, SWP does seem more efficient.

There was actually a good question brought up on the priest forums today and I was wondering if I could get some help in solving it.

For a high Haste situation such as General V where you have the Shadowcrash buff, Mind Blast is taken out of the rotation. Would the same apply to Heroism beginning at some level of Haste?

Would there be a way to tell SimCraft to not use Mind Blast while the Heroism buff is active?