It's definitely possible but I probably won't be cutting it that close again.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

In 10man and 25man this week, after the change, I found that only once could I manage to refresh instability just long enough for unchained to be recast in time to keep instability up. To be honest, I don't think it is a good idea to bet on it. Lately, I am finding it is just easier to do light dps (mostly just MF to keep SWP up and misery) if I get the first wave of unchained, eat the backlash, then all out dps through the next wave (assuming I get the second wave) that way I have dispersion on hand when unchained falls during the P1/P2 transition without ruining my dps too much. In the cases where I don't catch unchained in the first wave, I can all out dps for all of P1 knowing I have little to worry about.

I did Sindragosa tonight after the hot fix/nerfs and the instability debuff now only last for 5 seconds. I think it is almost impossible to keep the stacks going through 2 UMs anymore.

One of the times i did disperse at the last second only to have UM on me again part way through the dispersion

I might be missing something, but shouldn't Arcane Empowerment (Damage Buff) and Wrath of Air Totem (Spell Haste) be included in the list of relevant buffs?

Regarding Improved Mind Blast:

I ran Simcraft on my gear (which has only a couple 264 pieces and has a few items from my main healing set) and got a difference of 52 dps between taking and not taking Improved Mind Blast. That less than 1% dps increase for five talent points, or about 0.15% per point.

If Mind Blast does 1000 more DPET than Mind Flay and you have around 30% haste then you are getting that 1000 more DPET for 1.15 seconds out of every 6.65 seconds if you talent for it and 1.15 seconds out of every 9.15 seconds if you don't talent for it.

So if K was the damage you do just Mind Flaying then with the talent you could do K + 173 (by increasing your DPET by 1000 1.15/6.65 of the time). Without the talent you could do K + 126 damage. That's only about 47 extra dps if you are just flawlessly standing and nuking with only Mind Blast and Mind Flay.

In reality, movement, refreshing DoTs and more haste all reduce the benefit you gain from the talent. My higher benefit as calculated by SimCraft likely results from my rather low haste value.

You don't have to be even close to the point of dropping Mind Blast from your rotation to drop these talent points. With the four piece tier 10 I don't think it's even a question that you should dump them and get something else.

Regarding imp Mind Blast this issues has been brought up to previously and i'll state the same conclusive argument. What are you giong to use these freed up points on?

This is a repeated topic and if you have not already read the previous posts on here in relation to that you should. Both Griemak's words and Myopic's Spreadsheet should be taken into account when contemplating dropping MB and / or specing (at least partially) out of it.

One highlight being:
I personally have taken some points out of Imp MB for FM (MS heavy fights ie LK) and SA for a personal convenience factor since it has become fairly common to fit MB into convenient gaps in rotation rather than on CD. I just found after a couple weeks of 4pc T10 that those gaps were at least seconds longer than the CD with 5/5 Imp MB. Mileage may vary of course due to your level of haste and presence of WoA and SR / Imp Moonkin. I will probably take another point out in favor of 3/3 FM when we're seriously working on H LK (25).

I uploaded a newer version of the spreadsheet to my post where I released it. This version has a bug fix or two, and has updated stats on the Phylactery.

re:spreadsheet

Just making sure I'm not being a numpty; as an alchemist with mixology i'm adding the 47 point bonus I get to my flask into my base Bonus Damage (skills like JC show it passively in the Bonus Damage as it is always active), maybe a further tickbox to your sheet for alchemy would prevent people not realising to add it in? (If i may be so bold)

Nvm

Well there are actually places you can place the points from mb talent, with higher end raiding gear spriest start to quite abit of threat u can spec fully or partially into Shadow Affinity and Improved VE is also a great talent for several encounters. Both of those talents take up the 5 points or you could spec 2 points in SA and take Inner Focus.

From the OP:

Does this still hold true? With my admittedly crappy gear, I appear to get more from Major Spirit. (5 Spi > 10 Int + 10 Stam)

Am I missing something obvious?



Edit: the link in the sidebar should be to Kob, an SPriest on Madoran

In my gear, the difference between 15 Spirit and 10 stats is 8 DPS. 8 DPS vs. 10 stamina is more a question of personal preference than min-maxing. It would make sense to list both enchants in the OP.

I would not bust someone's balls for having +10 all stats over +15 spirit, but it's hard to argue that 10 stamina beats 8 DPS. I mean, none of the other gearing arguments made about priests even consider the impact of stamina. There certainly exists a trade off point at which I'd rather have stamina, but it's much higher than 10 stam : 3 spell power, or roughly 3 to 1. I suspect it's in the 10:1 to 30:1 to range.

Interesting, when I run simcraft 10k times through each enchant on my current profile, I got the exact same DPS number -- 11659. (and yes, I double checked to make sure I actually was not running the exact same stats twice) Yet the stat weighting would still suggest that the +5 spirit would be worth very slightly more than the +10 int. If you're truly interested in maximizing every last drop of DPS, then 15 spirit is the way to go.

According to the scale factors for spirit and intellect used by shadowpriest.com's BIS list (which obviously won't be 100% accurate for everybody) the difference between the two is 0.75 pseudopower. DPS parses for my character with SimulationCraft gave me results that agree with this. So, the comparison is probably much lower than 8 DPS and in most cases closer to 1 or 2. Of course, the only way to really be sure is to run SimulationCraft for your own character.

I have found that while simcrafting various gear setup's, when I increase my crit rate by 3% or higher, my spirit scaling increases. Could your sims be giving you a generous dps boost from improved spirit+glyph of shadow? With no raid buffs your profile is sitting at 281 spirit. 30% of that spirit would be about 93 equivalent spellpower. If you are using Patchwerk mode, you may have had a high up-time on Glyph of shadow, resulting in higher dps for the duration of the fight.

I have seen the same instances in similar sims I have conducted, though my increases were only 2 to 3. I attribute that to my lower overall spirit.

With that logic though the value of Spirit would increase so the difference between +15 Spirit and +10 Stats would be greater. If that were the case we should see a more consistent DPS increase in the profiles.

There is an alternative Alliance BiS list that has more Spirit in it that might have a difference.

/shrug. I do find it odd that it doesn't seem to be a DPS increase across the board in the Sims I've done.

Could it be due to only compare +/- 5spirit? As in, on it's own. even before GoShadow, or imp spirit tap you will only get 1 spellpower. the difference (as I suspect the reason for varied results) would be when you include GoShadow and imp spirit tap (you really won't gain from ISP though since the game doesn't calculate spellpower in fractions if I remember correctly, only whole numbers like 1 instead of 1.3).

I think the original math and conclusions are solid enough to be "written in stone" as it were. +10 to stats on chest being the superior enchant. Even if somehow spirit scaled linearly with crit...the combination of 10 spirit+10intellect+10stam(as a survival dps increase) would still over shadow the tiny gain of a mere 5 spirit.

Well thing is in the Sims I did of Izolight's BiS Setup with no Professions I tested with Purifieds in +5 SP sockets and Runed in +5 SP sockets. I got a 4 DPS difference in favor of Purifieds.

Edit: When I get the urge, I'll go back and run some longer fight lengths with the different setups at 40k iterations to see if I can flush out more distinction between +10 Stats, +15 Spirit, Purifieds, Runeds, and the Alliance Spirit BiS set.

If you do run the longer fights, see if there's something about the tailoring enchants that tip the balance toward +15 Spi over +10 all stats. Your post a bit further up suggests that substituting tailoring for engineering or JC slightly increases the value of Spirit, which would help explain my results. (My Spriest is a tailor.)

Except that Tailoring gives no bonus to spirit. I am starting to think there might be a slight bug in SC that is causing this. Or, it may be due to spirit still being listed as a principle dps gain (due to pain and suffering), while priests in general are actually reducing their spirit in favor of crit and haste (which the sim would then use to tell you that having more spirit would give more dps...slightly erroneous). Is there a way to test or bug-check SC?

My Spriest is an engineer/JC, and running a self-buffed only (IF,DS, no food, no flask) patchwerk sim, I am showing spirit as my highest scaling stat.

for reference: sim test stats were 3474sp, 1172haste, 30.80% crit, 458 spirit, 294 hit rating. 5 tests at 10,000 interations. I will edit this post with the sim report when I get home, I have it saved because of how off it seemed.