Alternative gemming/reforging shadow Priest PvP

[zhaliax]

Hi,

What i'm wondering for a while now. This season every shadow priest went for full haste gemming to get the 14.9k breakpoint.
But you will miss allot of off stats (crit/mastery). Isn't it better to get the haste breakpoint of 10k and having allot more SP/crit/mastery.
Since shadowpriest dots in pvp are not even close to affliction lock dots.
Since more crit gives you more healing for arena and mastery more proccs in combination with crit.

Did som1 had the same toughts, tried it out or simcrafted some options? what is your opinion about this?

greetings

[Alarinth]

I tried it vs the 8085/10124 breakpoints, and must say I enjoy the difference. Feels a bit more forgiving, and it may just be a placebo effect, but going 14.9k haste>crit>mastery feels like a lot harder burst, especially when paired with Insanity. You don't really miss any offstats, you just miss out on 60 int and about 180 pvp power from not meeting gem socket bonuses.

[Yvaelle]

I wrote up a big post on this at the start of this season actually, where I said:

For RBGs - the 14.9k breakpoint is best because it will provide you the best DoT pressure (highest DPS), sustained mana gains (VT ticks), and procs (DI+FDCL) - which will allow you to maximize pressure, sustain pressure and dispels longer without drinking, and always have procs ready when your team calls for a burst.

For Arenas - I prefer stacking everything into Crit - the reason being that the entirety of our burst cycle ignores haste and mastery, and only scales off crit (if running DI+FDCL, which I do - because in my comp I'm always the kill target for the enemy team).

Our burst cycle usually consists of (ignoring DP for a moment, since it scales pretty well off everything) Mind Blast, FDCL procs, Halo or Star, and SW: Death - all of which ignore haste (slight GCD reduction, but not enough to matter), have zero interaction with mastery - and scale significantly off Crit. Landing kills as Shadow is about getting a string of a few lucky crits mixxed in with your burst cycle - maximizing crit increases the odds of getting that multi-crit cycle.

For an all-around build though, you could certainly aim for a lower haste breakpoint (I think I still have 8085 in my build?) and then go crit from there.

This is also dependent on just how much mana issues you are having - earlier in the expansion when I was Mass Dispelling all the time - I was actually stacking mastery as the highest VT-mana-gain stat - just so I wouldn't go OOM so fast (deadly in arenas, and very bad in RBGs).