[Priest] A Simple Guide to Improve Your DPS

[Deleted]

Astonishing. Using the methods set out in this guide (it was a struggle to resist the urge to refresh my DoTs after procs), my self-buffed dummy dps seemed to be only around 10% lower than my usual dummy dps - ~18k dps rather than my usual ~20k. I had expected it to be considerably lower than that. The implications of this (if my data can be relied upon) are that this guide is certainly what many shadow priests need. We would be so sweet and set if every player in WoW could play at or above even just 80% of their character's full potential.

That's assuming you play at full potential=).

[mag07]

Please don't quote your WoLs...topping those rankings is a sport for which the whole team has to work for - it is clearly displayed in your Domo video - you are allowed to stand away from the group the whole time, even during a stacking phase, that is additionally stressing the healers as not only do you miss group heals, someone has to go out of their way to heal you individually. The boss is kited away from you to minimize your movement, on the following stacking phase, when you have the seeds debuff, again, you are out of the group, hence no need to move and break your derpsing cycle in any way, the only time you move is when a kitty leaps you. In addition to that, you have a group obviously arranged around you, covering all the crucial caster buffs, DI, 10% spell dmg from shammy, 5% spell crit from lock etc.....It is a brilliant quality video and sincere grats on the achievement for your whole team.

However, this guide, coming from someone like you, that tries to maximize performance like that for whatever reason, is simply to plain.

Warcraft is not a game for 6 year olds, anyone that is old enough to have fully developed coordination skill is perfectly capable to watch few things at once. There is absolutely no reason to break down your dps to such simple levels - following your logic, I should suggest trying to track each dot individually at first, then adding them up one by one ( guess what, this is what leveling time is for ).

Also, made me wonder, what's the point of practicing manually applying SWP ? If you are directing your guide at the "not so bright" audience, assuming they don't realize the mechanic behind their dots, what leads you to think they are aware of how to refresh SWP? There is no mention of incorporating MF into your practicing cycle.... Obvious? Possibly, just as the fact that more dot ticks and continuity = WIN.

Come on, there are some bad players out there idd, but mostly cos they are not motivated enough to even try, the ones seeking help are usually those that are willing to put in sometime and effort into getting better and not just settling for average. While your suggestion is good, it is only one of the many factors involved, have a little more respect for your fellow players, as terrible as they may be, and give them some credit and proper information on how to improve, not an illusion of a miracle once they get their dot uptime sorted, cos for now, given the state of our spec, that just does not cut it.

Astonishing. Using the methods set out in this guide (it was a struggle to resist the urge to refresh my DoTs after procs), my self-buffed dummy dps seemed to be only around 10% lower than my usual dummy dps - ~18k dps rather than my usual ~20k.

Skada/recount break down of both ways, over a 10 min duration at the least please or it is just an empty statement to support your point, not a valid argument. Also, please bear in mind that your dps scales with raid buffs, a 2k difference on a dummy is not a 2k difference in raid.

On a side note, not even the best of players play at the characters full potential, we are not machines, you have to account for human reaction time, as well as latency, however low it may be.

Anyhow, not much point continuing, we seem to strongly disagree with each other Ariadne and you know what, that is perfectly ok Regardless of whether I like what you wrote or not, appreciate the time and effort you've put into it. If someone chooses to follow your suggestions, great, if not, just as well, there are probably many different ways to approach the matter that we would not even think of People's minds never cease to amaze me - in both positive and negative ways.

Cheers

[Veiled]

Ariadne is a pretty intelligent person and also is a great player from what I've seen. That being said, I think that this guide is fantastic and can be a wonderful tool for someone needing help. Thank you for posting it.

[dfives]

dude mag07 what are you getting so worked up about. this is clearly a thread for all those awful spriests who have no clue how to play their class.

they will never be doing heroic content while it is fresh. these are the priests who do 5 mind blasts in a fight that lasts six minutes and just need to learn the basics of dpsing. this isn't a guide on how to maximize dps.

basically what i'm saying is grow up. please.

[Deleted]

Please don't quote your WoLs...topping those rankings is a sport for which the whole team has to work for - it is clearly displayed in your Domo video - you are allowed to stand away from the group the whole time, even during a stacking phase, that is additionally stressing the healers as not only do you miss group heals, someone has to go out of their way to heal you individually. The boss is kited away from you to minimize your movement, on the following stacking phase, when you have the seeds debuff, again, you are out of the group, hence no need to move and break your derpsing cycle in any way, the only time you move is when a kitty leaps you. In addition to that, you have a group obviously arranged around you, covering all the crucial caster buffs, DI, 10% spell dmg from shammy, 5% spell crit from lock etc.....It is a brilliant quality video and sincere grats on the achievement for your whole team.

Of course I will quote my WoLs when my claim is that you can do comptetitive DPS using my methods and you say that it won't. I quoted my PuG Occu'thar WoL rank because there is where I first tested this method. And it worked better than I expected. I had no buff feeding whatsoever because no one knew me in that PuG. All I got was a DI from a lock, which is standard. Nothing else, I didn't flask but I did pre pot and pot during heroism (which didn't line up with my cooldowns). You are again discrediting my play for no reason whatsoever. You don't seem to look at how I play but instead operate under the asssumption that others are helping me out.

I get to stand out all the time on Majordomo because our healers can handle it and it gets the boss down faster. On our first guild kill, where I wasn't there, we had our Mage stand out all the time to get that DPS in, it is not about letting him topping WoL. It is about trying to maximize our raid DPS. Our tactic was from the start to have one outside all the time.

Our first kill, Mage PoV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF-9Ajs8TBc

The boss is not kited away from me, I position myself so it gets kited away from me. Watch Zumzar's video and notice how the move of the boss is the same. Nothing in my video is arranged around me. I played in a way to maximize my DPS, the only thing that was said before the fight was to have me outside all the time. I don't have 5% crit and I do not have Focus Magic. That is usually given by our hunter and mage. You do notice in my video that some players positioned themselves near me so I had to be careful of where to move when dodging leap to avoid running into one. Also, why would I be on orb duty if they wanted to rank me?

You seem to assume stuff as if they are true. It showed pretty well here, claiming that my group was setup around my DPS. This is in no way true. I feel you do the same thing for Shadow Priest DPS, you seem to think that we need to do so much stuff to do competitive DPS, and this is where we disagree. And as you say, that is all right. But my attempts in my previous posts were to try to convince you about my method and that is why I argumented against you. It didn't work, apparently.

@Veiled Thank you=)

[ThrashMetalFtw]

This is indeed a good guide. I don't know why Mag97 keeps posting random shit, since it's pretty obvious that this is a beginners guide / help stuggling SPs see the light (or rather, see the shadow) guide. Using MB on CD and never letting VT fall off is the 2 most important things to do. How to use AA and SF doesn't need to be mentioned in any guide, since it's the same for all classes, plan ahead and chain it with proccs if possible, if not, use on CD (ofc after reapplying dots and when u dont have to move etcetx).

If you use MB on CD, you USUALLY only need to delay your MB 2-4 times (if even that) on a 5min fight to make sure that your VT is refreshed with ES up (assuming that you know how to recast dots 3sec earlier than usual, when this is required)

[Deleted]

What part of this isnt covered in greater detail in the Shadow Guide sticky?

You can come up with whatever analogies you like but at the end of the day this "Keep DoTs up and MB on CD" is far too simplistic to be considered a guide, let alone "improve your dps". If you renamed this Shadow - A guide to the basics of dps, you'd get no complaints but striving to improve peoples dps by instructing them to be very much average just isn't the way to go.

[mag07]

When anyone decides to post whatever on any sort of public forum, they have to take into account that people will express their opinions or argument for or against it. You seem genuinely surprised someone even dared to criticize.

Heh, old and naive, hoping for constructive discussion and argument on an internet forum....

[eErike]

When anyone decides to post whatever on any sort of public forum, they have to take into account that people will express their opinions or argument for or against it. You seem genuinely surprised someone even dared to criticize.

Heh, old and naive, hoping for constructive discussion and argument on an internet forum....

Heh, young and disrespectful, hoping to strive a topic away from it's original intent that you havn't even understood from the beginning.

[mag07]

Lol I was referring to myself But thank you for the compliment.

I am in no way insulting or disrespectful. In fact, if you read through the whole post and all of my answers you'd see I emphasized the appreciation for wanting to do something for the community, that said, i have no obligation to agree with it, just as some may want it to become a sticky, I have a right of voicing my own opinion on that matter, which i did. It's not for me to decide if it will become one or not, but just as Ariadne felt he/she should write down her thoughts, I felt the same. Whatever happens, happens.

[Deleted]

What part of this isnt covered in greater detail in the Shadow Guide sticky?

You can come up with whatever analogies you like but at the end of the day this "Keep DoTs up and MB on CD" is far too simplistic to be considered a guide, let alone "improve your dps". If you renamed this Shadow - A guide to the basics of dps, you'd get no complaints but striving to improve peoples dps by instructing them to be very much average just isn't the way to go.

You misunderstand the goal of this guide. It is to give you a foundation to work upon. This foundation will be very solid and you can use it to further develop your play. Also, I can from looking at threads here on MMO-Champion say that if people who ask for help with DPS were to do the things I mention here well, their DPS would increase.

[Beav]

I kind of have to agree with Mag07.

Ariadne - if you could expand your guide to perhaps have a:

"Complete beginners" section - which is what you have covered.

"Intermediate" section regarding the finer points of things like what you should do with your other spells like SW : D during execute phases, when to pop SF and Archangel etc

"Advanced" section covering MF clips. what procs you refresh dots on, when to cast MB based on your ES buff time left and other finer points which increase your DPS buy small (but important) factors.

What the main concern is that new players may read your guide and blindly think "Great - ShP is an easy class to play....all I do is refresh dots and spam MB"

Also I feel your being a little defensive over constructive criticism over your guide. Try and take other opinions as opinions, not derogatory attacks against you.

[Deleted]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/qoym3eat6v7i0mrt/

Enjoy the logs.

It was of tonight's raid where I only tracked my DoTs and Mind Blast. My AA and Shadowfiend were used on cooldown. I managed pretty fine on Majordomo. On Baleroc I did about 1k lower DPS than last week but I had to run very far once to get a shard. Alysrazor, I was at around 85k DPS in the first nuke phase(she usually dies during the nuke phase or right after) but had to stop because our mage failed to complete his legendary quest so we had to wait for a second phase. I usually peak at around 88k on Alysrazor normally. Rhyolith is shit fight since we nowadays kill the fragments so fast I barely get 2 ticks of Mind Sear in. Beth'tilac the same, Drone dies very quick and spiderlings are killed by Moonkin and Hunter. Shannox, I did farily well. On Ragnaros I played seriously so no test there.

I know this is only one run and the RNG gods could have been very nice to me, I wouldn't know since I didn't see my shadow orb procs etc. but I very much doubt it and I think it shows that you can do pretty good DPS even without all the fancy stuff.

What the main concern is that new players may read your guide and blindly think "Great - ShP is an easy class to play....all I do is refresh dots and spam MB"

Would that be so bad? If all priests who are struggling with their DPS did that, I'd be a happy person.

Many priests seem to think that our class takes so much skill to play at a competitive level and that we need to do all these fancy things to even compete. Good fundamentals alone let's you compete. Adding on trinket buff tracking, optimal AA and Shadowfiend usage, and doing it well will make you pretty amazing relative to most shadow priests. But that is only if you can keep your DoTs up well.

[Bacon Grease]

When anyone decides to post whatever on any sort of public forum, they have to take into account that people will express their opinions or argument for or against it. You seem genuinely surprised someone even dared to criticize.

Heh, old and naive, hoping for constructive discussion and argument on an internet forum....

You jumped in a thread with a guide for beginning spriests teaching them to master the basics, and then complain that it doesn't contain the more advanced nuances of the spec/class. You criticize a guide for being something it's not? You aren't expressing an opinion, you are just wrong.

[mag07]

You jumped in a thread with a guide for beginning spriests teaching them to master the basics, and then complain that it doesn't contain the more advanced nuances of the spec/class. You criticize a guide for being something it's not? You aren't expressing an opinion, you are just wrong.

Heh, do you play a shadow priest? Do you really think ES is a nuance?


The guide is directed at those struggling or entry level priests - there is a statement in there about little importance of gear, let me give you one last example of why I think the basics you suggest are not enough to practice with and address the poster above me at the same time.

Empowered shadow is triggered by MB providing we have at least one orb - orb generation is RNG based, however, given what has a chance of proccing them, it is correct to state that the more haste you have (better gear) the more chances of generating one (the gear generalization statement in the guide is only going to be understood by players that have the skill already, not the once that are frantically looking to improve)

In full Firelands gear set, even just normal, not heroic, watching your empowered shadow is almost a formality. The orb generation is rather fluent, and rarely do you get unlucky enough not to have procced one few secs in to the fight, and then fairly systematically as fight progresses.

Back in the begining of t11, when my gear was obviously nowhere near as good, I would often get terribly frustrated at the orb rng, several times I would go through whole of heroism duration without one single orb. Now, posting results in 380+ gear, where your emp shadow uptime is meant to be relatively high without paying all that much attention to it, having your dots affected by the buff almost always, is hardly a proper demonstration of an average Mr and Mrs Smith dmg values, even if scaled down - cos they are much more likely be affected by crappy RNG due to the fact they have no means of bending it to their favour, means in form of good gear.

Shadow orbs have become our signature ability this expansion, suggesting to learn how to play ignoring the self buff mechanic provided be them is basically crippling people right from the start.

Yes, maximizing dot uptime is crucial and one of the basics of the class, but so is watching your buffs and benefiting from them. I did not discredit the guide completely, I agree with certain statements, I do not agree with the simplification of class mechanics to the point the author is suggesting, based on what I wrote above.

It is the low geared, inexperienced people, targeted in your guide, that have trouble generating orbs at times. This is when they need to be able to help maximize their Emp Shadow uptime by cleverly playing with their MB cd, or refreshing dots a bit early then they would normally, before ES runs out and there is no orb, to gain time to generate one. This is not rocket science, it is also a basic of the class contained in a few helpful guides already out there. This is information crucial to those that are not as familiar with the class as you are.



Once Mr. and Ms Smith are sporting full t12, when their stats are at high levels, when they barely have to acknowledge if their ES buff icon/aura is still there and just glimps at their character/aura or whatever mean they use to spot their orbs, is when, ironically, the game becomes more forgiving in that aspect.

Exactly the same applies to using your fiend/AA - as initially you are using both cds for mana regen, as your gear gets better, when mana is no issue to you in raid, that is when you will start playing with the cooldowns to maximize derps as opposed to managing resources.

You simply can not ignore those mechanics at the start as they horribly limit your perception of the class, that and the fact, that a freshly dinged shadow priest might have issues sustaining a 5 min dummy test without using fiend/aa/dispersion lol.

There is no need to get aggressive, there is a massive amount of guides on these forums, all have positive and negative feedback. I partially agree with your statesment that you can do good dps without "all the fancy stuff" - providing you have the gear for it, as demonstrated above

On Ragnaros I played seriously so no test there.

You have kind of killed your own case there....just stated that your performance prior to Raggy was not considered serious. Bad choice of words.

[mag07]

Your guide is directed at those struggling or entry level priests - you have a statement in there about little importance of gear, let me give you one last example of why I think the basics you suggest are not enough to practice with.

Empowered shadow is triggered by MB providing we have at least one orb - orb generation is RNG based, however, given what has a chance of proccing them, it is correct to state that the more haste you have (better gear) the more chances of generating one.

In full Firelands gear set, even just normal, not heroic, watching your empowered shadow is almost a formality. The orb generation is rather fluent, and rarely do you get unlucky enough not to have procced one few secs in to the fight, and then fairly systematically as fight progresses.

Back in the begining of t11, when my gear was obviously nowhere near as good, I would often get terrribly frustrated at the orb rng, several times I would go through whole of heroism duration without one single orb. Now, posting result in 380+ gear, where your emp shadow uptime is meant to be relatively high without paying all that much attention to it, having your dots affected by the buff almost always, is hardly a proper demonstration of an average Mr and Mrs Smith dmg values.

Shadow orbs have become our signature ability this expansion, suggesting to learn how to play ignoring the self buff mechanic provided be them is basically crippling people right from the start.

Yes, maximizing dot uptime is crucial and one of the basics of the class, but so is watching your buffs and benefiting from them. I did not discredit your guide completely, I agree with certain statements, I do not agree with the simplification of class mechanics to the point you are suggesting, based on what I wrote above.

It is the low geared, unexperienced people, targetted in your guide, that have trouble genereting orbs at times. This is when they need to be able to help maximize their Emp Shadow uptime by cleverly playing with their MB cd, or refreshing dots a bit early then they would normally before ES runs out and there is no orb, to gain time to generate one.

Once they are sporting full t12, when their stats are at high levels, when they barely have to acknowledge if their ES buff icon/aura is still there and just glimps at their character/aura or whatever mean they use to spot their orbs, is when ironically the game becomes more forgiving in that aspect.

[Arlee]

I think the point that seems to have gone amiss here is that in the majority of the "help my dps" threads/posts the issues the person in question seems to have are the exact things that Ariadne covered in her post. No it's not comprehensive and it does leave out some of the finer points; but it does cover rather well the issues most priests who have trouble with their dps fail at. This is only intended as a first stop as a check saying, "ok do you do these basics?" if yes then go ahead and ask for help in other places, if no get the basics down and come back if you need help after that.

For the people talking about Stickies... the whole sticky section is about to be redone. So atm no new stickies are being added. This won't be lost though.

[Deleted]

Back in the begining of t11, when my gear was obviously nowhere near as good, I would often get terribly frustrated at the orb rng, several times I would go through whole of heroism duration without one single orb. Now, posting results in 380+ gear, where your emp shadow uptime is meant to be relatively high without paying all that much attention to it, having your dots affected by the buff almost always, is hardly a proper demonstration of an average Mr and Mrs Smith dmg values, even if scaled down - cos they are much more likely be affected by crappy RNG due to the fact they have no means of bending it to their favour, means in form of good gear.

I assume people entering Firelands, where DPS matters, have at least around 355 item level. Why would you care about being competitive with lower gear than that? You aren't even going to be raiding at that point. And ZA/ZG is not really a test of a shadow priest's DPS. So why not just practise a thing that will be helpful when you actually start raiding?

Just watched one of my old Maloriak normal videos, where I still had some blues, the Shadow Orbs procs seemed pretty decent to me(I didn't see myself holding off Mind Blast once actually) and I don't recall having issues keeping ES up during T11. And remember, Mind Blast got buffed in T12 so missing an ES once in a while doesn't hurt as much as in T11.

Shadow orbs have become our signature ability this expansion, suggesting to learn how to play ignoring the self buff mechanic provided be them is basically crippling people right from the start.

Asking people to watch for ES, trinket procs, hold off AA and Shadowfiend when they are just learning the ropes is crippling them. And I do not tell people to ignore ES for their entire WoW career. I tell them to ignore it until they can keep their DoTs up. I feel like I have said this 100 times already.

This is when they need to be able to help maximize their Emp Shadow uptime by cleverly playing with their MB cd, or refreshing dots a bit early then they would normally, before ES runs out and there is no orb, to gain time to generate one. This is not rocket science, it is also a basic of the class contained in a few helpful guides already out there. This is information crucial to those that are not as familiar with the class as you are.

Yeah, let's teach them to do all these things you mention and see them fail at even keeping the DoTs up in the first place. You either do not read what I've written earlier or you just ignore it. Let's say they do these things you say they should do: "Cleverly" play with their Mind Blast cooldown and refresh DoTs a bit early if their ES is about to fall off e t c. How would they refresh their DoTs a bit early if they don't even know that the DoT is about to fall off? How are they supposed to hold onto Mind Blast if they don't even know it is ready?

You can say all you want about keeping DoTs up and Mind Blast on cooldown is easy but when having to do it while doing a new encounter, very few manage to do it well. As I've said earlier, even priests in top guilds fail at this sometimes.

You have kind of killed your own case there....just stated that your performance prior to Raggy was not considered serious. Bad choice of words.

You are looking for small things to pick on, aren't you? Do you really think I am unable to adapt my DoT refreshes to trinket buffs, heroism and other damage modifiers? Do you really think I play at the level where I have trouble keeping my DoTs up? Do you really think I don't know how to use AA effectively?? I crippeled myself on the first 6 fights, because I do not struggle with DPS. With playing serious, I think it is quite clear that I meant playing to my full potential.