@ Frmercury

There is a wonderful post by Griemak over on Sp.com where he did a fair amount of math regarding MB, haste, and when to drop it from the rotation.

shadowpriest.com • View topic - Patch 3.3 Mind Blast, the Definitive Math

While this only applies to having the 4pc set bonus, i think some of this can still apply to the extreme situations like on GV. I recently went back there last week and got to play on that fight. it was an odd night, we had alts and pugs in there, but here is a link to our WMOL.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I ended the fight averaging over 12K dps with peaks up to 20K. I found that w/ that much haste, i could barely keep up w/ dots in between MF spams, and on the previous attempts that night MB seemed like a waste. the final kill was almost pure MF spam w/ keeping dots up.

hopefully this helps.

Change

actions+=/mind_blast

to

actions+=/mind_blast,if=buff.bloodlust.down

For those of you who are new to multidotting, a good way to quickly put VT on each mob is to click Mob A, start casting VT, then while it is casting, click (or tab to) Mob B. Use the Quartz casting bar addon and start your next VT on Mob B at the precise time to account for lag, then click Mob C and repeat. The goal is of course to never stop casting. Once VT is on every mob, mind sear away. I do this whenever I DPS in heroics and raids for trash packs.

It does take some practice. A good place to practice this is on the Anub'arak 25HM encounter. The four adds come in staggered and it works very well to dot them up as they move in. As discussed previously in this thread, putting SW:Pain on your multidot targets doesn't seem as effective, I know that personally I have seen a DPS decrease when trying to use SWP, VT, and then mind searing on large packs.

SW: P on adds is only worth it when they live long enough that you can refresh it with mindflay. I tipically put SW: P / VT on the kobolds from heroic beasts, and refresh the SW: P at least one with mindflay. If people focus them and kill them much faster it might not be worth it though.

I'm curious about what the "standard" is for breaking Mind Flay to re-cast a DoT. For example: Imagine the following situation at 30% Haste.

-Mind Flay channel duration: 2.31 seconds. One tick is *suppossed* to be every 0.77 seconds.
-Time between ticks of Vampiric Touch / Devouring Plague : also 2.31 seconds.
-Cast Time of VT: 1.154 seconds.

Ideally, you would start casting Vampiric Touch 1.2 seconds or so before it expires....but what do you do when your your GCD opens up with like 2 seconds left on Vampiric Touch? Your choices are basically:

a) Mind Flay and try to stop after one tick (0.8 seconds) and then wait a fraction of a second before casting VT. Probably bad, but the first Mind Flay tick is at least somewhat consistent.
b) Wait nearly a second before casting VT. Obviously bad.
c) Mind Flay and try to stop after two ticks (~1.6 seconds) and then cast VT (1.15 seconds). VT isn't on the boss for 0.75 seconds, or 32% of a tick. The problem is that the second Mind Flay tick "seems" to often come 80%+ of the way through the channel, not 66% of the way through the channel like it "should".
d) Mind Flay for the entire duration (2.3 seconds), and then cast VT when your GCD is free (1.15 seconds). VT isn't on the boss for 1.45 seconds, or 64% of a tick.

It seems likely to me that cancelling your Mind Flay after two ticks would be best---but my problem is that I can't reliably time cancelling Mind Flay between ticks. At all. Do most people just generally go through an entire Mind Flay and not bother canceling mid-channel to refresh VT or DP, like I typically do? The difference is fairly small in terms of total dps per incident of this kind of conflict, but it happens enough that the net effect over a fight is probably a few hundred DPS.

Using SW: D as a filler when there is <=1GCD left before you need to start casting VT is a good option. So if your cast time of VT is 1.2, and your GCD is 1.2-1.3, casting SW: D instead of MF2 becomes a reasonable option at around ~2.4s left on VT. Keep in mind this always changes with procs and bloodlust, and you should keep in mind your current VT cast time.

Aside from perhaps Putricide that really isn't an issue at all so far.

If death is on CD for movement, using DP, while mana intensive, does work for added DPS.

Really? Does this depend on how close you are between ticks of Devouring Plague? It would be rather surprising to me if the small upfront damage of Improved Devouring Plague would compensate for a clipped tick right before it would have ticked otherwise.

The initial damage on DP is equal to 30% of the total damage for the entire spell, or ~2.5 ticks. Even if you clip the dot at the worst time in between ticks it is still a dps boost.

Looking at my most current logs the average hit for the imp DP damage was ~3800 which is almost equal to my average crit for a tick. The average crit for the imp DP was over 6K.

While it is very mana inefficient to do this, it is a dps boost if death is on CD and you have to be moving.

In multi-dotting situations that are NOT AOE situations, what is the optimal dots to keep running. Speaking ideally in scenarios in which you have a primary DPS target, however you want to keep dots up on another mob(s). An example would be, but not limited to, the two worms during phase two of the northerend beasts encounter. Should we be running all three dots? Just DP and VT?

Just to reiterate on Xiphid's reply to ensure clarity, you want to use only vampiric touch on adds that will not be alive long enough for you to be able to refresh SW:P via mind flay. SW:P is a very weak dot in itself, and is not worth casting on mobs that will live for only a short period of time. Another example of a situation in which it's most likely advantageous to apply SW:P in addition to VT would be with Snobolds in the Northrend Beasts encounter. On the other hand, on a fight such as Lady Deathwhisper in which the Fanatics should not live for very long, or on Deathbringer Saurfang where the same is true for the blood beasts, you'll want to avoid using SW:P on the adds.

As a tangential question, how long does a burn target need to live before casting SWP pays off? This would apply to oozes and clouds on Putricide, blood beasts if you don't multidot, etc. The threshold would obviously be lower than a multidot target due to Glyph of Mind Flay, but I'm not sure where the break point is.

The general rule i tend to follow is if you can refresh SWP to make it last for twice its normal duration, at a minimum, then it is worth casting.

It costs ~800 mana, lasts for 18 seconds, and at my gear level, ticks for an average (crits included in the average) of 2150 per tick. So about 12900 per cast, and 16 dmg per mana.

VT on the other hand costs 580 mana, w/ 2pc t9 lasts 21 seconds, and has an average tick for me of 3380. so per cast its does ~23660 dmg, at ~41 dmg per mana.

Just for reference, DP is about 24 dmg per mana.

By extending the life of SW:P to 2 times its normal life then it at least is becomes worth the mana to use. If it doesn't last at least that long, then imo it isn't worth casting.

Well, using those numbers:

In the GCD you spent casting SWP, you could have got roughly 2 MF ticks. In pure dot damage, that means SWP needs to see approx 3.1ticks to be better DPEt than MF. Add in the 10% extra damage on MB and 20% on MF, and the break point is probably between 2 and 3 ticks.

That implies that if you expect the burn target to live longer than 12 seconds (SWP on the target for 9 seconds), you should definitely SWP. If you expect it to live between 9 and 12 it's probably a tossup.

I like the school of thought but i've yet to experience an occasion in all ICC 10 & 25 raids where I went to use Dispersion and it was on CD... in my experience thus far I fail to see why you would need to cast it twice inside 2 mins and if that does occur it's going to amount to less than 1% of boss attempts.

I'd far prefer to get the smaller amount of mana via SW:P glyph and thus keep more DPS contact time and submit that SW:P therefore is a greater DPS glyph than Dispersion.

I also disagree that current ICC encounters provide good opportunties to use dispersion for pure mana regen, unlike encounters in TotC (Beasts while worms submerge etc). In the current content I can't think of a boss encounter where utilising dispersion doesn't result in a flat 6 second loss of DPS contact and speeding this up to occur every 1min 15sec results in 18 to 24 seconds worth of lost DPS in the average encounter compared to my 0 using the SW:P glyph.

Since neither Glyph of SWP or Glyph of Dispersion generate extra DPS, I think that they should be chalked up to player preference. I personally use Glyph of Dispersion because it allows me to push the envelope. In our Putricide 25 kill last week, I used Dispersion during the transition to phase 3 (no DPS loss) and then I had to use it again within 1.5 minutes to get out of a corner that I was standing in that had not been covered in slime. I was standing there to try and get Putri to throw smile my direction rather in the open side of the room that the tank was moving around in. It worked.

I don't think most of us have mana issues, I know that I don't. So lets just leave our last glyph slot as up player preference and get back to some proper theorycrafting.

I think pretty much everyone would agree that dispersion is not a spell you would cast every 2 minutes normally, and certainly to cast it every 75 sec is unnecessary. The problem is that it is pretty much our only useful 3rd glyph. To call Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain and its ~60 mp5 useful is a little confusing. If you consider a fight like Gunship, where basically your job is to dot everything that moves and coast to top dps, the mana return from dispersion is extremely useful. Obviously all of the plague wing bosses provide great opportunities for dispersion to shine as a defensive CD, particularly Rotface and Putricide. From the looks of it, the new wing bosses will provide additional opportunities for dispersion to shine, as a ranged tank possibly on Blood Princes (during empowered phases), and during Bloodbolt Whirl on Blood Queen.

While shadow priests do excellent dps now, I would argue that one of our greatest assets is our survivability. Probably more than any other class, a shadow priest will have no trouble keeping himself alive while dpsing. Dispersion and Glyph of Dispersion simply add to our survivability. Do yourself a favor and glyph dispersion on the off chance that you'll need it on a fight like Putricide if you get cornered or fixated in a bad spot after a phase transition. The six seconds I'll lose in dps while using dispersion I'm sure I'll make up for when I'm alive and other raid members are dead.

It should be noted that our excellent survivability is an argument against glyphing Dispersion, rather than for it. A shorter survival cooldown would be much more clutch on a class that didn't already have VE/DP/Shield/PoM/Dispels/Fade etc.

That said, I fully agree Dispersion is the best overall third glyph choice now, and nothing we currently know is changing that. It's more a case of the other glyphs being bad, than it is a case of Dispersion being that good.

Glyph of dispersion often serves as a meta damage increase in the sense that it can ensure higher uptime on fights that would usually require repositioning in order to avoid raidwide damage, such as Festergut or Algalon. I consider it a quite significant contribution to the dps, as well as the other benefits mentioned above.

So the conclusion is to carry a stack of each type of useful glyphs for the 3rd slot: Glyph of Mind Sear, Shadow Word: Pain, Dispersion and maybe even Hymn of Hope if any hard mode fight will be very mana intensive for the raid. Instead of discussing which glyph is best, let's be more fight specific.

What is the appropriate use of cooldown stacking for shadow as of 3.3?

My priest is a troll as well as an engineer and I've been looking around as best I can on here and shadowpriest.com to find the most ideal way to use all of my haste cooldowns to gain the most dps.

Does anyone have a link to any relevant information on this? I read the bloodlust post in the think tank, which ultimately told me its ideal to sync all cooldowns with bloodlust. This is what I've been doing, but with the amount of haste we're getting to at this point I'm beginning to feel like there may be a better strategy out there.

The cooldowns I am trying to manage are:

Bloodlust
Hyperspeed Accelerators
Berserking
Potion of Speed
Potion of Wild Magic (Pre-potting with this only if I know bloodlust will come later)
Power Infusion (I can basically get this whenever I ask for it)

Thanks in advance for any work put into this topic.