SPriest Log Analysis

[Adowin]

Hey guys! So this is my first post here so bear with me please on formatting I will try my best. So my guild and I are progressing through highmaul and I am currently looking through everyones logs (dps wise) beginning with this person and seeing if there is anything noticeable that I can catch to help them improve their dps. I main a hunter and not a spriest so I know very little about them other than it seems their rotation should be:

Clarity of Power
Devouring Plague (with 3+ orbs)
Mind Blast
SWD for execution (back to back)
Insanity (with procs)
Mind Flay (Filler)

If that is wrong please correct me!

I have our logs: worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-sqs75vpj9z6hs7h4/
and am hoping to improve: Whisperwind-Cambueloney (US)
Apologies, I can't post links yet

In regards to what I have noticed, I know he needs to cast Mind Blast on cd (I don't know if the logs are counting multistrikes, I am assuming not) which it appears he is not doing. And he also needs to be casting mind flay less, it appears to be doing 11% of his damage on our H Kargath kill. I have looked at some others logs and have seen it as low as 1% and as high as 7% but never 11%.

I would love if you guys could look through this for me so I can point out what he can improve on before I just call him out on things I know little to nothing about.

Also the person who logs ours kills for us I will have them log our next raid and try to get more consistent logging.
Thanks so much!

[Zych]

Links for you:
Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...loney/advanced
H Kargath: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-sq...?s=5542&e=5881

Since there is no MSp damage at all on that log I can only assume he is playing CoP lite, which is a pretty significant loss on a fight like Kargath. If he is dotweaving (and he should be) there shouldn't be any Mind Flay damage at all, the dotweave filler is either Mind Spike or Insanity (which WoL may not be separating, it's hard to tell, please switch to Warcraft Logs they are so much easier to read and better overall, you'll love the Fight Analysis).

99% of the time poor spriest dps comes from not using MB on cd, which leads to poor Insanity usage (which is not a proc btw, applying DP gives you a 4 sec Insanity buff, should get 6 ticks of Insanity from each application). Logs can & should show these multistrikes, but unfortunately you'll need to use the expression editor to edit them out. If you upload this log to WCL they are clearly labeled.

Could use a neck & weapon enchant + Reflective Shield glyph but these are minor, most of his issues are rotation related (& I'm too lazy to relearn WoL & parse that log for ya :P )

[Jadetea]

Mind Blast 1122370 22.2 % 39 21321.7 831548 6 48470.3 290822 - - - -
Insanity 991481 19.6 % - - 118 7419.7 875527 7 16564.9 115954 01:13 (21.6 %) -
Mind Flay 552960 11.0 % - - 137 3343.6 458069 12 7907.6 94891 01:25 (25.0 %) -
Shadow Word: Pain 504659 10.0 % 16 3136.2 50180 2 7201.0 14402 126 2941.9 370680 11 6308.8 69397 04:29 (79.4 %) -
Devouring Plague 492341 9.8 % 20 20070.8 401415 2 45463.0 90926 - - - -
Devouring Plague 468019 9.3 % - - 109 4293.8 468019 - 01:34 (27.7 %) -
Vampiric Touch 457901 9.1 % - - 102 3623.5 369596 11 8027.7 88305 03:44 (66.1 %) -
Shadow Word: Death 382434 7.6 % 10 23357.8 233578 3 49618.7 148856 - - - -
Shadowy Apparition 38836 0.8 % 12 3236.3 38836 - - - - -
Halo 36224 0.7 % 3 12074.7 36224 - - - - -

Yeah...no mindspike. And looks like playing CoP lite...SWP is 80%. Assume dropping it for execute range. However, VT is 66% uptime though. Regardless, CoP lite isn't very good and the spriest should be doing standard CoP rotation.

[prejonnes]

Yeah I looked at your logs, definitely not doing it correctly. I haven't really checked to see that numbers on different shadow specs, I know there are a lot of options nowadays but as far as I can tell COP(dotweaving) is the best. Maybe some of the recent changes to haste and what not might change this, but COP lite essentially is just being lazy. It took me a long time to get over not Dotting and flaying, till this day even in mythic Ill still catch myself going out of rotation because its like muscle memory to Dot and Flay. Basically you just need to learn to dotweave properly.

[Adowin]

Links for you:

Since there is no MSp damage at all on that log I can only assume he is playing CoP lite, which is a pretty significant loss on a fight like Kargath. If he is dotweaving (and he should be) there shouldn't be any Mind Flay damage at all, the dotweave filler is either Mind Spike or Insanity (which WoL may not be separating, it's hard to tell, please switch to Warcraft Logs they are so much easier to read and better overall, you'll love the Fight Analysis).

99% of the time poor spriest dps comes from not using MB on cd, which leads to poor Insanity usage (which is not a proc btw, applying DP gives you a 4 sec Insanity buff, should get 6 ticks of Insanity from each application). Logs can & should show these multistrikes, but unfortunately you'll need to use the expression editor to edit them out. If you upload this log to WCL they are clearly labeled.

Could use a neck & weapon enchant + Reflective Shield glyph but these are minor, most of his issues are rotation related (& I'm too lazy to relearn WoL & parse that log for ya :P )

Thanks man! I'll take a look at Warcraft logs after this. Is it at all possible you could explain to me what dotweaving is and also the CoP lite? I will pay attention to his MB usage through our next raid and also let him know about mind spike and insanity being fillers and that he shouldn't be using mind flay at all (correct me if I am wrong).

Apparently the quote having links in it causes me to not be able to post a reply so I removed them! Haha

- - - Updated - - -

So I am understanding that the rotation should be:

Devouring Plague (3+ orbs)
Mind Blast (on CD)
SWD (on CD during execution)
Insanity or Mind Spike (as fillers)

Is there a priority for insanity > mind spike or vice versa and is there anything else I am missing? Also as of now I do not know what dotweaving is but I am going to look it up right now! Apologies if its wrong due to me not knowing dotweaving!

Edited: Ok so I looked up dotweaving on howtopriest and it seems that basically it is a way to get dot uptime in between your MB and SWD cd's so not to lose the extra 40% due to no dots. The rotation listed is (direct copy & paste):


MB 4th orb > spike > pain > vt > mb > dp > insanity > mb > dp > insanity > mb > spike

Does this seem like a good rotation for dotweaving? Is there maybe a less complicated rotation to get him started with?

[Zych]

CoP lite would be the old style of spriest play, where you keep your dots up all the time, MB > DP > Insanity. This wastes much of the potential for Clarity of Power since that talent boosts our Mind Spike damage by enough to make it the superior filler spell.

Dotweaving is basically 2 rotations - first you build orbs with MB and MSp, then you apply dots and spend your orbs on DP + Insanity, by the time your orbs are gone your dots have fallen off & you begin building again.

I would send your friend to H2P, specifically Dryes Shadow Guide. It's a lot of reading but if he/she wants to get better there's no better place to go.

Edit: That rotation is a little off, since you need to do some clipping to get the max # of insanity ticks. It looks (and is) complicated, but anyone who is at all comfortable playing spriest should find it at least somewhat intuitive. Rather than try and explain it myself, I defer to Piousflea who made the best post I've seen so far on the subject: http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php...art=160#p56174

[GGA1759]

Besides the Dot weaving, his trinks are atrocious. Versa is just bad bad bad for us spriests. Also why the gems choices? If he was in my guild, he would not be raiding until he cleaned up his act. It doesn't look like he knows what he is doing with shadow or DPS in general. No weapon enchant.

howtopriest.com
icy-veins.com

[Anonymous Coward]

The "easy way" to Dotweave

1.) Mind blast -> 3x Mind Spike until you have 4 orbs
2.) 1x Mind Spike, Vampiric Touch, SW:P
3.) Mind Blast (puts you at 5 orbs), Devouring Plague, Insanity (1 channel)
4.) Mind Blast (puts you at 3 orbs), Devouring Plague, Insanity (1 channel, it is possible to get 2 channels in here but you have to be really perfect on your casts)
5.) Go back to step 1.

Once you have that down you can start shuffling PW:S and Cascade/Halo in place of Mind Spike at different points.

[Adowin]

Thanks so much for the link! I will definitely direct him to it and also read through it myself. I know his gear level is 639 so what do you guys think would be a decent amount of dps for him at his ilvl provided he picks up his rotation and starts dotweaving? I realize it varies based on fights but just a roundabout number should do.

[prejonnes]

If you look at the priest forums here, a couple threads down there is a vid on how to dotweave. I dont know how good it is, I would def practice it though. It feels really odd at first, atleast for someone who has been playing spriest for a long time, but once you get it down its not hard, and when you learn to use it properly on fights you can put up some serious numbers

[zenkai]

Thanks so much for the link! I will definitely direct him to it and also read through it myself. I know his gear level is 639 so what do you guys think would be a decent amount of dps for him at his ilvl provided he picks up his rotation and starts dotweaving? I realize it varies based on fights but just a roundabout number should do.

Well its not just item level but also enchants etc but I see no reason he couldn't pull 18k+ on single targets

[Adowin]

Yes he needs to fix some of his gems and enchants and in general gear up more. But I am hoping for him to increase his dps from what it is now otherwise we will have to start benching him, which I don't like to do but will have to if he can't show any improvement in his dps. And I will take a look at that video.

[Zych]

Well its not just item level but also enchants etc but I see no reason he couldn't pull 18k+ on single targets

This or higher. Our very first night in Highmaul I did 19.6k dps on Kargath with 2 more item levels, and I had no friggin idea what I was doing, stumbling through a dotweave rotation and falling into tiger cages.

[Dawnrage]

Kinda off-topic but if you could use WCL that would be great. It's hard to get in-depth in WoL to see what's going on since it counts multi-strike hits instead of separating them like WCL. It would be easier to tell if there's a fundamental issue with his ability usage besides the fact he's doing CoPLite instead of dotweaving.

[Sxq]

The short answer is that he's doing a non-optimal rotation, and also executing it poorly (poor vt uptime, assuming he is intentionally dropping dots entirely at 20% and below, and also very very bad usage of mind blast - on that H kargath fight he used mind blast every 8.7 seconds or so, rather than ~5.5 or whatever it is with CoP/haste reductions).

As others have noted, dotweaving is the best way to do damage. The 'easy' dotweave rotation will work fine. It's not as confusing as it looks once you start doing it. There are more complicated ways to do it, which result in more insanity ticks and less mind spikes but the difference in dps is very, very small.

Essentially follow the dotweave rotation, but replace mind spikes with other stuff when needed. If you need to move, cast a power word shield or halo or shadowfiend or something instead of a mind spike. Ideally plan ahead so you only move during mind blast/DP/swp so you don't lose dps. If you know you will take ~30k damage in the next 15 seconds, power word shield with reflective shield glyph is actually better than mind spike for damage. If you need to multi dot, again, do it in place of mind spikes.