Gearing Shadow Priest

[Jullyx]

You obviously haven't met any good ones then. SPriests are insane in mythic+. 15+ with fortified? 1-2mil DPS on trash packs. Ofc at a cost of weak DMG vs low hp targets and medicore on pure ST bosses. But 800k+ DPS in average mythic run is NOT a dead weight.

We are not "insane" on any affixes. Sure, we can push like 1m overall in certain dungeons and affix combos, but there are very few classes that can't. We are not dead weight at all, but 90% of classes at same skill level will do more overall damage than a shadow priest. That being said, a lot of the reason we fall slightly behind on overall damage is the packs with low health targets, which really aren't main priority at all. This makes us look better in dungeons that lack these mobs, i.e. DhT and NL.

[Deleted]

We are not "insane" on any affixes. Sure, we can push like 1m overall in certain dungeons and affix combos, but there are very few classes that can't. We are not dead weight at all, but 90% of classes at same skill level will do more overall damage than a shadow priest. That being said, a lot of the reason we fall slightly behind on overall damage is the packs with low health targets, which really aren't main priority at all. This makes us look better in dungeons that lack these mobs, i.e. DhT and NL.

I will agree most classes can achieve 1m overall with advantegous affixes. I will not agree about skill level. There are speccs as hard to master as a SPriests or even harder but with our multidotting, insanity generation, and overall chaos we're far more complicated than most melee classes.
We have plenty of issues. Always falling behind on pure ST fights. But if you want, you WILL destroy meters.

Instead of showing any proof, your rebuttal is mostly unintelligible, would you like to try again?

I don't have to showing you any proof. You're too lazy to learn your specc, and you are too lazy to peek into warcraftlogs as well. Plenty of proofs there.
Anyway it's a moot discussion. Over and out .

[Clrg]

Shadow priest can ez do 5m dps in dungeons , you just need to l2p and gitgud, this is a moot discussion so over and out

[Ailylia]

My DPS stayed relatively the same; up for some fights, down for others.. My average ranking for my ilvl dropped from 71% (52-96 range) to 43% (25 to 63 range) from last week.

First off, trust me when I say, I feel your pain. I really do. It sucks to work so hard to sometimes achieve what look to be mediocre results while other classes are fairly faceroll and they look like the heroes of the day, I get it.

However, I want to caution you against looking at your percentile in warcraft logs as a measure of your individual performance. The problem is twofold: One, I don't like the idea of using "percentile" to rank DPS, its meaningless. If there are 100 parses and 90 of them did 1 million dps and you did 999k dps, you are the 10th percentile. That doesn't mean you did terrible, it just means your score was lower than 90% of the recorded values. Two, the reason why this is a bad way to gauge your performance is because there are a lot of external factors that can influence your DPS, many beyond your control, some are random, and some are due entirely to how your guild approaches the fight. If you were to magically teleport yourself into a different guild that killed bosses 10% faster on average, your DPS score would go up, even if you changed nothing about what you do.

DPS meters are useful tools but they have to be interpreted correctly. There are many fights with damage opportunities that are meaningless, meter padding is pretty easily done, but that doesn't help your guild get the kill. Hopefully, your raid leader is smart enough to interpret your damage meters correctly and knows when you're a valuable asset to the raid. It sounds like you really care to get the best performance out of yourself and that matters a lot, many raid leaders would love to have someone as focused on their own performance, even if their results don't look good on the surface, the fact that you care this much means you're probably paying attention to all the points of the fight.

[Deleted]

Yeah you know what guys, you are all right. Shadow Priests are shit. We are shit and we should all reroll but first we should send a big pile of shit to Blizzard for breaking our specc. We do shit DPS in dungeons, we do shit DPS in raids. We are SHIT! Lets all delete our characters and unsubscribe. And for OP. Don't gear your Priest. Reroll. Everyone here thinks we are useless anyway.
Random retard states wer're a dead weight and instead of denying, everyone starts sucking his dick.
Fucking toxic mmo-champion community. Only crybabies and whinners.

[dmfg]

I'm not that guy. But must be you missed my point that my real-world dps didn't go up consistently. It went up for some fights and down for others. Overall it was probably a wash.

And while I agree that real-world dps is more important and logs shouldn't matter, when your dps is nearing the bottom of the pack, many guilds will then go to the rankings to see if is you or the class. Thankfully mine is not one of those guilds, but they exist. Point being is that parse rankings are more than just for stroking ones ego.

Yeah like all things it can be abused, but most guilds have an understanding of what their raiders are capable of far beyond what ranking % on logs can say. Of course if you're planning on changing guilds, that's another matter.

For small upgrades, you have to just take what Pawn says with a bit of faith. I equip 1k DPS upgrades, but my DPS can vary by 60k from pull to pull. You're never gonna see the effect of small (e.g. 15 ilvl on a single slot) upgrades from raid to raid. You just have to trust that in the long run, upgrades will improve your DPS (plus, even if the DPS is a wash, higher ilvl = more stamina = slightly more survivability).

[Thaylen]

@Hipopotamo (aka Nicerguy) - Wow. The irony is real as you have a rage meltdown accusing everyone else of being crybabies and whiners.... I'd look in the mirror if you are seeking the toxicity of this thread.
<p>
@Ailyara - Agree with everything you are saying and acknowledge the fact that there are many variables which impact the personal rankings. And part of my complaint is that the current itemization injects more variables with things like the arcanocrystal and imbalance of artifacts. While personal rankings will never be a perfect one-to-one comparison because of these variables, it is the best we have and there are things that can be done to mitigate that error of margin. With the Compare functionality of WCL for example, you can find similar parses to yours in time, ilvl, group comp, etc. It mitigates the risk of many of the variables you point out. Plus I have a mage and warlock on our raid team that consistently parse 95+ for their ilvl, so shouldn't be a situation where the environment restricted me from doing so as well.

And you are assuming correctly, it isn't the raid lead that has issue with it, I'm bringing this on myself. And it is a personal goal to perform to the best of my ability for my class. That's why I value the personal rankings so much more than just seeing where I ended up in overall dmg amongst the raid group. What caused me to vent at the start of this thread is that I've started to NOT care. And that's the bad thing. Because of the gearing/secondary stats environment we find ourselves in, it leaves me frustrated to the point of just not caring. Not trying. Not changing talents on fights that I know I should. Etc. I don't want to be that person. Or have a bad attitude. But that is the road I've been on lately.

[Deleted]

DPS meters are useful tools but they have to be interpreted correctly. There are many fights with damage opportunities that are meaningless, meter padding is pretty easily done, but that doesn't help your guild get the kill. Hopefully, your raid leader is smart enough to interpret your damage meters correctly and knows when you're a valuable asset to the raid. It sounds like you really care to get the best performance out of yourself and that matters a lot, many raid leaders would love to have someone as focused on their own performance, even if their results don't look good on the surface, the fact that you care this much means you're probably paying attention to all the points of the fight.

On what fights do you think it is easy to pad the meters? Except Skorpyron maybe? While I agree that there sometimes are more important things than DPS, i think warcraftlogs in particular to be an incredibly useful site to see how you are doing, especially if you have more than 1 of your spec in your own raiding team. Top 10% lies within the range of procs, setup and gear compostition, if you fall under that, there is always a reason and in 99% of the time it is making mistakes. (I would maybe exclude firstkills on that because they are somewhat messy most of the time)

[Jullyx]

I will agree most classes can achieve 1m overall with advantegous affixes. I will not agree about skill level [....] But if you want, you WILL destroy meters.

What do you disagree with exactly? I said that another class at same skill level, i.e. a top 1% sp vs a top 1% ww monk/fury war/mm hunter/boomkin/dh/frost dk/outlaw rogue etc. will beat the sp on overall damage. You disagree with this?

There is no "destroying" meters when you play with other good players. SP is not a dead weight spec, but it's not comparable to the best ones. I've done my share of dungeons with good players to see this very clearly. Falling 10-20%+ behind on overall dmg is standard. As I said previously, this is mostly due to low prio targets that we can't really "pad" (god, i hate that word) on.

[Spicymemer]

I don't have to showing you any proof. You're too lazy to learn your specc, and you are too lazy to peek into warcraftlogs as well. Plenty of proofs there.
Anyway it's a moot discussion. Over and out .

Im using warcraft logs as the basis for my points.

I agree, the discussion is over, you've conceded and most importantly you have no relevance to skill.

You're behind my curve, you have higher itemlevel and my logs which you can search for on warcraft logs are better than yours, and my logs are terrible.

The only time spriest experiences the top of the damage meter is when every other player is horrible or the fight presents very long duration multidotting/padding.

[ThePhantombox]

One, I don't like the idea of using "percentile" to rank DPS, its meaningless. If there are 100 parses and 90 of them did 1 million dps and you did 999k dps, you are the 10th percentile. That doesn't mean you did terrible, it just means your score was lower than 90% of the recorded values.

I don't like this logic at all. If I did 999k dps to 90% of the players doing 1 million, then I AM underperforming. While it's true that shorter kill times skew percentile rankings, not every single other person playing your spec is in a group doing speed kills. And even if they were, that doesn't push you out of the 95+ percent range. I still was able to parse high at the end of HFC in a pretty mediocre guild, and that was with all the crazy 10 second speed kill shenanigans. While it's true you can't just blanket your performance with percentile rankings, they serve to be a lot more useful than you're giving them credit for. Just because you can skew rankings by kill times and cheesing with lust usage doesn't mean they're 100% of what sets players apart from each other. If I'm parsing low, then there's almost always 2+ things I can change to improve.

TL;DR Don't blame other people's strats if you're underperforming.

[Koramy]

I completely feel your pain, I spend half my time changing my build based on the legendaries I have equipped.

[Ailylia]

I don't like this logic at all. If I did 999k dps to 90% of the players doing 1 million, then I AM underperforming. While it's true that shorter kill times skew percentile rankings, not every single other person playing your spec is in a group doing speed kills. And even if they were, that doesn't push you out of the 95+ percent range. I still was able to parse high at the end of HFC in a pretty mediocre guild, and that was with all the crazy 10 second speed kill shenanigans. While it's true you can't just blanket your performance with percentile rankings, they serve to be a lot more useful than you're giving them credit for. Just because you can skew rankings by kill times and cheesing with lust usage doesn't mean they're 100% of what sets players apart from each other. If I'm parsing low, then there's almost always 2+ things I can change to improve.

TL;DR Don't blame other people's strats if you're underperforming.

I was using an extreme example to illustrate the differences between percent and percentile. In fact, I don't like that WCL uses % to denote percenitle because the two things are not equivalent. Consider a fight with a very low range between the 75th and 25th percentile (commonly called interquartile range or IQR) then there's a low amount of variability and small factors can greatly influence your "percentile" score while not automatically making your parse "bad". If, as in the case I illustrated, you were merely 1k dps away from the 75th parse and you parsed 25th, then that's an extreme example of low variability where something as simple as a fight that lasted 1 fewer seconds because the other person's guild had better DPS was the major difference.

Point is the difference between 75th and 25th percentile may in fact be as little as 10% overall dps which can be accounted for by a wide variety of things.

Lets examine a couple fights here (all stats pulled from Warcraftlogs on 3/21).

Mythic Trilliax: The 75th percentile for shadow priests is 607k, the 25th is 471k. The range of scores is approximately 136k, about 22.5% dps.
Mythic Krosus: The 75th percentile for shadow priests is 625k, the 25th is 558k. The range of scores is approximately 67k, about 10% dps.

So dig the Mythic Trilliax fight, this is a fight with a lot of movement with mechanics that can pull you far away from the boss at times which causes your insanity stacks to drop. If you've got to move out of the raid to go eat that bad cake, you are surely going to parse lower than someone who did not need to outrange the boss to handle a mechanic, are you not? Now, that doesn't mean you're a worse player than the other one, but it will result in lower dps. If your shadow priest parses low here, yes, dig into it, see what happened, but don't automatically say SpriestA is bad because they are 25th percentile. SpriestA may have saved your raid's life by jumping on an exploding scrubber that no one else was close enough to.

Krosus however has lower variability because most of the mechanics here can be adequately handled without sacrificing too much dps. Sure, if you have to run out of the raid with the orb and your disperse is on cooldown, you're going to drop some insanity. But as the stats prove out, there is much lower variance in parses for this fight.

But that being said, when you examine how heavily certain pieces of gear can heavily influence a person's dps, well, that variability becomes much more difficult to interpret. Someone who lucked into a titanforged Archanocrystal will generally parse higher scores than someone who is struggling to find good trinkets. Someone who has the legendary bracers right now will out perform someone who doesn't by around 4%. Things like that can easily account for the difference between 75th and 25th percentile.

All I'm trying to say, is at the end of the day, looking at just the percentile of a raider needs to be taken with a measure of context. There are many reasons why a player could parse low. If you look at parses over time, that becomes more meaningful, but there can also be gear reasons why they are where they are. In other words, a low percentile doesn't mean they are under performing, it just means their damage was lower. Someone at the 25th percentile on a fight like Krosus isn't 50% worse than someone at 75th percentile, their score is only 10% lower. That's why I don't like using percentile to discuss quality of raiders, for by itself, examining no other variables, its value is very limited.

[ThePhantombox]

All I'm trying to say, is at the end of the day, looking at just the percentile of a raider needs to be taken with a measure of context. There are many reasons why a player could parse low. If you look at parses over time, that becomes more meaningful, but there can also be gear reasons why they are where they are. In other words, a low percentile doesn't mean they are under performing, it just means their damage was lower. Someone at the 25th percentile on a fight like Krosus isn't 50% worse than someone at 75th percentile, their score is only 10% lower. That's why I don't like using percentile to discuss quality of raiders, for by itself, examining no other variables, its value is very limited.

I agree yes, you can't just look at percentile to judge a raider, but one who consistently parses to a low average over what's assumedly several kills probably is doing something wrong. While things like mechanics and legendaries represent small influences to shift someone's ranking lower or higher, (which add up quickly to push you into different brackets, as you mentioned) you can still reliably push yourself into pretty high brackets by refining your stats and playstyle. That's the point of someone's WCL score, it's not meant as a be all end all stamp for the quality of a raider, but rather something you could reference quickly to get a rough idea of how someone performs.

[Grannos]

Here is my bag, where I have all those lovely green arrows you mention...


Here is my character sheet, where I have 4,875 crit, 12,718 haste, and 8981 mastery unbuffed. My numbers are still craptastic. I also have a gear tab that takes me to like 3.6k crit, 10.2k haste and 10k mastery, but again I am craptastic on the meters.


And here are my logs from last night on our spellblade progression. This was our best pull, we died to tank deaths, not enrage timers.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...done&source=48

[Deleted]

Here is my bag, where I have all those lovely green arrows you mention...


Here is my character sheet, where I have 4,875 crit, 12,718 haste, and 8981 mastery unbuffed. My numbers are still craptastic. I also have a gear tab that takes me to like 3.6k crit, 10.2k haste and 10k mastery, but again I am craptastic on the meters.


And here are my logs from last night on our spellblade progression. This was our best pull, we died to tank deaths, not enrage timers.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...done&source=48

your trinkets are nhe... use metronome and whispers then you get one

About legendaries you dont like to use belt instead of ring? the ring its only usefull in some fights/Mythic plus.

[Deleted]

not sure if ot or not. but looking at my armory my crit is higher then mastery(in rating) 25% crit and 43% mastery. am i better just runing AS instead of SL. i do know SL is normaly better but seeing as my crit is higher.

[Clrg]

how do you have 43% mastery, what is your ilvl?

[Deleted]

how do you have 43% mastery, what is your ilvl?

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...arina/advanced should say though that i swaped some items yesterday.

[Ilir]

Dear god that's why I stopped playing my SP. Not because I didn't like it... but just because I kept getting gear with no or lower haste than my current one. I'm still waiting for the day where gul dan will finally drop his fucking trinket.