[Legion] Shadow Priest Discussion

[Deleted]

How does gnome racial work with us? Does it increase mana or insanity or neither? (The 5% increased max resource)

[Isentropy]

Also, thank god for the announced Shadow Word: Death change! The essays have finally paid off!

[Sinistrem]

Also, thank god for the announced Shadow Word: Death change! The essays have finally paid off!

Though i wonder whether 10 insanity at <20% hp is going to make a big difference. But it's a start, yeah, it's a start.

[Deleted]

Though i wonder whether 10 insanity at <20% hp is going to make a big difference. But it's a start, yeah, it's a start.

I think its more like small reward for efford when you fail to kill target with death

[Isentropy]

It makes it so that you're not punished at any time for using Shadow Word: Death, as opposed to what it's like now, where you're basically punished any time you're in Voidform - that led to basically not using it at all when a target was below 20%. It's not going to make a major difference in DPS, but this is more a major QOL change if anything. If you want big Insanity gains from Shadow Word: Death there's Reaper of Souls for you.

[Djriff]

Mind Blast doing more damage baseline is irrelevant for a priority system. Void Bolt has a really short cooldown and can only be used during Void Form, thus maximizing Void Bolts is priority #1. Not to mention its damage is basically on par or better than Mind Blast depending on the amount of mastery you have, and also when multidotting if you don't use Void Bolt first you're pushing back your refreshes way too long.

Yes in a multi target situation that's true. However in a pure ST environment i still think MB is better to get off than a void bolt. I could be mistaken though.

As i climbed higher into the stacks of void form, Void Bolt had about a 2 second CD, and MB a 2.5 second CD. Mind Blast was generating more insanity, however it cost me roughly 1 void bolt every 2 casts. From a math standpoint, i think you're right, it just feels...weird.

[Isentropy]

Void Bolt generates more Insanity, does more DPM (it's your top damage ability on single target) and it gives you Insanity on cast, which is relevant near the end of your Voidforms. There's really not much else to it, Void Bolt is just more important and is the first of your priorities in every situation.

[Djriff]

Void Bolt generates more Insanity, does more DPM (it's your top damage ability on single target) and it gives you Insanity on cast, which is relevant near the end of your Voidforms. There's really not much else to it, Void Bolt is just more important and is the first of your priorities in every situation.

Like I said, i agree with you. Still feels weird considering it's been MB on CD at all times no matter what for 3+ years now.

[Aeriel]

I was thinking about some of our weaker talents, and how they might be more viable when relocated in the tree.

I was thinking to move ToF to RoS's spot, RoS to Shadow Crash, Shadow Crash to LotV, and LotV to ToF.

LotV fits the theme and balance of Tier 1: Insanity generation and entering VF. You then have three choices: lower the threshold, increase base generation, high generation with moderate cooldown.

Placing ToF against Void Ray and Void Lord does not matter. Those two talents are going to be outclassed by almost everything.

The SWD change will make Mindbender versus RoS an actual choice.

Shadow Crash can compete with StM in some scenarios, possibly, with shorter lived adds and a little more OOMPH to the spell.

This would not help some of the DoA talents (Void Lord, Void Ray, PI, MSp), but it could help some of the weaker talents as the options are more equivalent.

[Tanned]

I posted in the Beta thread, but I wanted to reiterate here that our Mastery is currently way too weak:

Mastery is too weak for Shadow because it affects about 30% of our base damage.

• Based on my current Sims (at level 100 with the hotfixed values in), it is the weakest stat for the class single target (behind even Versatility).
• I suggest upping the conversion rate for Mastery.
• My spreadsheet Math shows that at level 100, mastery affected sources count for only about 30% of our damage before Mastery. Here's the spreadsheet in case you care: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
• If 40% of your damage is affected by Mastery (before applying mastery), and your base Mastery is 20%, then to increase your damage by 20% with mastery you need to get to 74% mastery (or you need +54% Mastery). Using level 100 scaling (44 per at 20% base mastery), that's 2376 mastery.
• If 30% of your damage is affected by Mastery (before applying mastery), and your base Mastery is 20%, then to increase your damage by 20% with mastery you need to get to 90.667% mastery (or you need +70.667% Mastery). Using level 100 scaling (44 per 1% at 20% base mastery), that's about 3110 mastery.
• At level 100, casters start with 5% crit. Assuming your class has no bonus mechanic interaction with Crit (such as Spawning Auspicious Spirits which generate Insanity), then to increase your damage by 20% from base Crit you need an additional 21% crit, or at level 100 scaling, 2310 crit

[Kretan]

I posted in the Beta thread, but I wanted to reiterate here that our Mastery is currently way too weak:

Mastery is too weak for Shadow because it affects about 30% of our base damage.

• Based on my current Sims (at level 100 with the hotfixed values in), it is the weakest stat for the class single target (behind even Versatility).
• I suggest upping the conversion rate for Mastery.
• My spreadsheet Math shows that at level 100, mastery affected sources count for only about 30% of our damage before Mastery. Here's the spreadsheet in case you care: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
• If 40% of your damage is affected by Mastery (before applying mastery), and your base Mastery is 20%, then to increase your damage by 20% with mastery you need to get to 74% mastery (or you need +54% Mastery). Using level 100 scaling (44 per at 20% base mastery), that's 2376 mastery.
• If 30% of your damage is affected by Mastery (before applying mastery), and your base Mastery is 20%, then to increase your damage by 20% with mastery you need to get to 90.667% mastery (or you need +70.667% Mastery). Using level 100 scaling (44 per 1% at 20% base mastery), that's about 3110 mastery.
• At level 100, casters start with 5% crit. Assuming your class has no bonus mechanic interaction with Crit (such as Spawning Auspicious Spirits which generate Insanity), then to increase your damage by 20% from base Crit you need an additional 21% crit, or at level 100 scaling, 2310 crit

I do hope they fix this. Thanks for posting this; I really like seeing this type of stuff.

[Smothered Hope]

Can anyone tell me what the SP coefficient for Vampiric Touch's tick is? Sadly, I did not get Beta access. Wowhead's tooltip just says 6 damage over 18 seconds, lol.

[Ilir]

those of you who aren't in the beta : you don't really miss much... it's a mess. dc dc dc dc dc dc dc

[l33t]

those of you who aren't in the beta : you don't really miss much... it's a mess. dc dc dc dc dc dc dc

Yeah well, that's the very reason for all these new invites by the way - stress testing

Also, I find Beta legion client for some reason heating my video card way more than live one does - while sitting at the same graphic settings.

[Seriv]

@Tanned: Your damage breakdown does not match anything I observed on alpha. Every test suggested that Mind Flay will end up doing around 5% to 10% of our damage below VT, SWP, VB, MB. Could you elaborate why you think it will be this strong?
@Isentropy: Apart from high stack StM where you just spam VB I had better results prioritizing MB over VB when using SI.

[Kaesebrezen]

@Tanned: Your damage breakdown does not match anything I observed on alpha. Every test suggested that Mind Flay will end up doing around 5% to 10% of our damage below VT, SWP, VB, MB. Could you elaborate why you think it will be this strong?

1) He's using level 100, i.e. several stuff that buffs no Mind Flay damage or change breakdown is not active (TB, Torrent and MH).
2) It was 5-10% pre nerf to VT, SWP, VB and MB. So it should be (by a noticeable bit) after the nerfs happened.

[Tanned]

@Tanned: Your damage breakdown does not match anything I observed on alpha. Could elaborate why you think Mind Flay will end up as number one damaging ability while every test suggested that it will end up doing around 5%-10% of our damage below VT, SWP, VB, MB?

A few things:
1) This is single target at level 100. Void Ray (people are severely underestimating this talent single target) and Fortress of the Mind together perform very well on the stack rankings. Considering you're spending more than half your time casting Mind Flay, it's significant. In multiple targets, you'll cast more DoTs, but I'm not sure that the proportion of damage affected by mastery will shift.
2) I just did another Sim where I took talents to emphasize DoT Damage. I uploaded it to the same spot on GoogleDocs. Even in that circumstance, DoTs + Void Bolt account for about 32% of our Pre-Mastery damage.
3) Recent logs do not show the nerfs to Shadow after the first pass of tuning.
4) Another weird thing is that as Haste goes up, relative damage from Mastery sources goes down.

[Deleted]

How does gnome racial work with us? Does it increase mana or insanity or neither? (The 5% increased max resource)

Since i can test myself now, this affects mana rather than insanity.

[Seriv]

It was around 5% pre nerf, so 10% is nearly doubled already.

Maybe I am misinterpreting his intentions, but I thought he was advocating that mastery is too weak in a raid environment and there one will be level 110 and one will use its artifact weapon.

This is not to devalue his work, I remember Tanned as someone who knows what he is doing and therefore I am just curious why he thinks his numbers are close enough to be considered useful.

[Isentropy]

I do not believe people are underestimating Void Ray, the entire row isn't incredible for your overall damage. The biggest problem with Void Ray is that the duration of it is too short. Void Torrent guarantees the stacks falling off. Getting to execute guarantees stacks falling off unless you alter your rotation. I've done a ton of tests at level 110 comparing all the talents on the row (no logs, sadly) and Void Lord performed better on single target for me. This was a while back, and the recent tuning pass will have affected things, but I do not believe that a talent that is so restrictive in what it can do for you should be close to a talent with no restrictions. If Void Ray is supposed to be the best single target option, it's not succeeding at doing so very well. Heavy movement is also quite punishing for it.

There's also the fact that Void Ray provides its biggest benefit outside of Voidform, which could be argued doesn't make a lot of sense when looking at what the goal of the spec is.