Kilee’s “Old Man” Guide to CoP Shadowpriest (PVE, CoP only, 6.2.3)

[Djriff]

The second rotation involves using a dotless Insanity cast style. If you are below about 2200 haste rating, this can get rather clunky. Basically you will have to maintain the debuff using Mind Flay whenever necessary, because you cannot get two DPs off in 10 second intervals. It will take some practice, and there's no set cast sequence I can list because it will vary based on your haste levels. This rotation should beat the Mindbender rotation in all circumstances, and again Mastery will be the best secondary stat.

So my question is... how does this rotation work with insanity? I get 3 orbs, DP, mindflay insanity till I get blast cd up and then MB, or I interrupt mindflay to channel another and get insanity still with that one also and channel it full and cast mindblast when it's over?

Shitty to hear about outrageous gem prices on your server mate.

If you can't reach the haste breakpoint it's actually better to stack mastery and use w/e haste you can elsewhere. If you have to channel mindflay a couple of times to maintain the debuff, it's a better option than letting it drop while waiting for insanity.

You basically never want to delay mind blast. That's always a DPS loss. If you miss your Insanity window then just mind spike. As long as your debuff isn't about to fall off. Personally I would just MB 3 orbs, DP then Insanity for 6 ticks until MB was up again. You'll have to toss in some mind flays to keep the debuff rolling but that's just what you gotta do.

What's interesting i've been noticing a trend in top CoP parses where these priests are going in with ~20% haste and stacking mastery. I'm not sure of their exact rotation, but w/e it is it is paying off in dividends. Something else to consider is if you are going to be in a 2 minute fight, it may be a DPS gain to take Power Infusion (assuming lust on pull) and pop PI as soon as lust wears off. With this setup you could go for a straight mastery gearset and not worry about haste as you'll have at minimum 35% from lust. Ideally i think the sweet spot would be ~15% haste. Once you enter execute phase the value of haste diminishes quite a bit as you're basically filling GCDs with MB, SW: D x2, DP, and Insanity.

[Deleted]

The problem is that I'm like 737 but never needed on mastery or haste gear (left it for locks and druids) so now I got a lot of crit (like 44 raid buffed or something like that) but other 2 stats are low. We also dont do lower hfc anymore so the gear I can get is limited. 2600 haste I could get (with diff gems and enchants), high mastery I doubt it. ;/
Also... maybe it's because I'm so used to AS, but is it just me or a perfect rotation with COP is basically impossible in mythic HFC? There's so much moving around... miss a lot of mindflay insanity, a lot of spike... I'm sure I'll be gettin used more with time and pratice but dunno how some SPs do it. :P

[Deleted]

The problem is that I'm like 737 but never needed on mastery or haste gear (left it for locks and druids) so now I got a lot of crit (like 44 raid buffed or something like that) but other 2 stats are low. We also dont do lower hfc anymore so the gear I can get is limited. 2600 haste I could get (with diff gems and enchants), high mastery I doubt it. ;/
Also... maybe it's because I'm so used to AS, but is it just me or a perfect rotation with COP is basically impossible in mythic HFC? There's so much moving around... miss a lot of mindflay insanity, a lot of spike... I'm sure I'll be gettin used more with time and pratice but dunno how some SPs do it. :P

Apart from tier head and the trinket from council, you won't need any bis pieces from lower hfc.
About the movement - You have a lot of opportunities to move with COP. Mind Blast, Devouring Plague, Shield and lvl90talent (and swd below 20%) are all instant cast abilities. Just plan your movement and do it with those spells. This will get you through 90% of the required movement in hfc.

[Deleted]

you won't need any bis pieces from lower hfc.

Is there a bis list for cop anywhere in this thread? I skimmed through the pages but didn't find one :X
Help would be appreciated

[Djriff]

There's one on howtopriest. here.

[Kilee25]

Is there a bis list for cop anywhere in this thread? I skimmed through the pages but didn't find one :X
Help would be appreciated

Hi Turtlefreak,

I do not make BIS lists anymore because of the warforged and socketed system. For the past expansion I've been using Pawn, and importing stat weights into it, to help me determine which items are upgrades.

Now that Valor upgrades have been put in, Pawn is a bit difficult to use, because it compares your upgraded items to non-upgraded drop values. I haven't really found a good solution to this problem yet. My short term fix is to use Ask Mr. Robot and to attempt to build BIS lists from that after importing my stat weights.

I do keep a trinket list at the bottom of the guide, because programs like Pawn cannot evaluate those.

In the future I may bring the BIS lists back. In the past they took a tremendous amount of effort to maintain, and I did not feel they were worth the effort. I am aware however that a lot of people refer to them and rely on them.

[cwlee3]

Djriff, I'm getting a 404 error from that link. I believe the list you were going to link is http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7637

The CoP section is a little outdated/wonky since it was created using dot-weaving. Even the single target list is messed up, because PoF certainly shouldn't beat out DSI in the trinket slot.

Keep in mind you should aim for hitting 31-35% haste and then as much mastery as you can get. Alternatively, at either low gear levels (can't reach 31% haste) or extremely high gear levels (raid kills bosses extremely quickly), you should just stack as much mastery as possible. A CoP "BiS" from strictly the M HFC instance would like something like:

Tier helm (Korm)
Xhul neck
Tier shoulders (Xhul)
Fel Lord cloak
Kilrogg chest
Tyrant bracers
Archi 2h (or Iskar wand + Mannoroth offhand if the wand ilvl is a tier greater than your Archi 2h)
Class trinket (RoW)
Council trinket (DSI, mastery + int proc)
Legendary ring (lol)
Tyrant ring (high mastery) or Socrethar ring (high haste)
Trash drop boots (haste/mastery)
Tier legs (Gore)
Fel Lord belt
Tier gloves (Socrethar)

[Kilee25]

I am sorry for the lack of replies these last few weeks. I'm just now getting around to some of the questions that happened during Thanksgiving.

Wait a sec... I'm confused. :P The rotation you are talking about is the 2600 haste one, right? The one that in the guide is listed as this:

But I dont have 2600 haste... I could get that if i enchanted/gemmed everything haste (but gems on my server is like 7000 each and I would have to pay 35k to go haste with 5 sockets and then 35k more to go back crit if i dont like it, sadly I cant really "test" this rotation). I only can get 2200 haste atm and I was talking about this rotation:

The second rotation involves using a dotless Insanity cast style. If you are below about 2200 haste rating, this can get rather clunky. Basically you will have to maintain the debuff using Mind Flay whenever necessary, because you cannot get two DPs off in 10 second intervals. It will take some practice, and there's no set cast sequence I can list because it will vary based on your haste levels. This rotation should beat the Mindbender rotation in all circumstances, and again Mastery will be the best secondary stat.

So my question is... how does this rotation work with insanity? I get 3 orbs, DP, mindflay insanity till I get blast cd up and then MB, or I interrupt mindflay to channel another and get insanity still with that one also and channel it full and cast mindblast when it's over?

My opinion is to adopt a method of banking and spending orbs. I would start the fight by building up 5 stacks of Mental Anguish with Mind Flay, then refreshing with Mind Flay when necessary, while building up a stack of 5 orbs. At 5 orbs, I would go into a modified dotless Insanity RoW rotation that works similar to the standard dotless Insanity RoW rotation. In which you would begin doing the normal rotation, but casting DP upon the next 2nd GCD after a Mind Blast. In this way you should be able to minimize the amount of un-necessary refreshes you do while maximizing the amount of Insanity you can do.

At 5 Orbs:

Mind Blast (5)
Mind Spike
Devouring Plague
Insanity (2 ticks)
Mind Blast (3)
Insanity (4 ticks)
Mind Spike
Mind Blast (4)
Mind Spike
Devouring Plague
Insanity (2 ticks)
Mind Blast (2)
Insanity (4 ticks)
Mind Spike
Mind Blast (3)
Mind Spike
Insanity (2 ticks)
Mind Blast (1)
Insanity (4 ticks)

At this point you would start building back up to 5 orbs, while using 1 GCD of Mind Flay as needed. Then start the sequence over again.

To be continued...

[Djriff]

To add on to what Kilee said, when you can't reach the haste breakpoint you still want to have as much Insanity uptime as possible.

@Kilee I'm not entirely sure waiting till 5 orbs is really worth the squeeze. Personally I prefer to be at 3-4 orbs if I know I'm going to be able to snipe with SW: D. As I stated in another thread, if you can snipe with SW: D quite a bit (mythic iron reaver, killrog, gore, etc) then the value of haste is a moot point as you have alternative means of generating your orbs. That being said I think outside of non mythic Fel Reaver, Kormrok, Fel Lord, and Tyrant it's better to stack mastery and just use w/e haste you have.

[Kilee25]

Sorry for insisting on the same question asked in my 2 previous posts.

Using this APL in simcraft,

<snip>

I get the following scale values:

mastery 0,71
haste 0,59

the catch is that I am at 2349 haste or 32,40% which is below what you said "35% haste"

Am I missing something?

Simcraft assumes that there is no such thing as latency or lag. These "haste soft caps" are not the same as they were in the past where they are triggered automatically once you reach a magic number. Rather, they are just estimated values at which you can reliable get a rotation to work in "real life". There's always been a disconnect between what simcraft says and what happens in game, but this expansion we had one of the more troublesome examples of this.

The simcraft breakpoint for pulling off a dotless Insanity rotation is around 1900 haste rating. This is physically impossible in game because of the nature of playing over the internet. perhaps you could pull the rotation off if you were sitting in the same room as the blizzard servers and had a direct wired connection to the server.

I digress that I feel like you're asking some other question with your posts over the past few days, and I'm not sure which answer you are looking for. I feel like you're fishing for a very specific answer, and that's the reason you are looking for some kind of simcraft evidence?

I have no plans to generate a set of RoW-mastery stat weights for HFC, because I do not feel this is the best way to select CoP gear. I believe that people who are seeking to do this are looking to build a set specifically to overgear a fight with the intention of parsing higher. In my opinion, this falls outside the realm of this guide, which is intended to help players who are in a low-to-mid level progression raid environment, trying to collect gear that will help them complete the raid tier. I feel that the best approach to doing this (while playing CoP) is with a haste-heavy set of gear.

My sims and stat weights are therefore built around non-RoW sim results. All of my research with RoW is built around being able to play both standard CoP and RoW at the same time, with the same set of gear. As such, my advice is to stack haste to 35% and then mastery afterwards, and to select gear based off of the haste stat weights. For trinkets, I suggest getting DSI as the companion to RoW, when playing RoW.

These modifications to the RoW play style do not require an additional guide, nor do I wish to supercede the existing guide with new information. I worry that people who are interested in CoP at this point are only coming into this thread because they want to find a way to use/abuse Repudiation of War. To everyone - please understand that this guide is intended for playing CoP as a whole, with many different sets of gear and trinkets. It is not a "Repudiation of War guide".

..........

Finally, with your attempts to simcraft RoW, I would suggest building a few different sets and testing out different combinations of haste and mastery sets, while using a few different APLs as well. Also vary the fight time as well. Try to pick a gear set, cast rotation, and fight time that most closely resembles your current raid.

This guide is trying to hit a wide rage of generic players with a strategy that will work well for the majority of them. It may not be best for you specifically, and that's okay. I'm okay with that too. I am not trying to account for every single situation and player that exists.

- - - Updated - - -

What's interesting i've been noticing a trend in top CoP parses where these priests are going in with ~20% haste and stacking mastery. I'm not sure of their exact rotation, but w/e it is it is paying off in dividends.

I do not believe there is any secret to it. I think it is just as we have said elsewhere in this thread and on this forum. They are using Heroism and Execute to minimize the number of Mind Flays that need to be cast inbetween.

Something else to consider is if you are going to be in a 2 minute fight, it may be a DPS gain to take Power Infusion (assuming lust on pull) and pop PI as soon as lust wears off.

I agree that this would be very worth exploring, especially if the execute phase does not last long. I said somewhere else in the forums a while back that I've been surprised not to hear people playing around with PI more. I do think it has some untapped potential, and that people tend to underestimate it sometimes.

- - - Updated - - -

Also... maybe it's because I'm so used to AS, but is it just me or a perfect rotation with COP is basically impossible in mythic HFC? There's so much moving around... miss a lot of mindflay insanity, a lot of spike... I'm sure I'll be gettin used more with time and pratice but dunno how some SPs do it. :P

If you are having issues with movement while using RoW, the best action is to stop using RoW. I think that sometimes people are a bit too focused on RoW lately, and that they are underestimating Mindbender CoP for progression purposes. RoW can be very powerful, but it also requires very caeful movement, and it loses a tremendous amount of value when switching targets. As a result of this you can get the same damage with Mindbender and PoF/Sethe on most fights, while also having better mobility and better response to incoming adds. I would not use RoW on most progression fights in HFC, and would only switch to it if it's Fel Lord, or some fight where the raid leader has agreed to let other raiders cover add duty instead. There are a few fights where it can still work well if you have this team-work aspect in place, but I do not think all of your efforts should be spent on RoW only when still progressing through HFC.

- - - Updated - - -

Djriff, I'm getting a 404 error from that link. I believe the list you were going to link is http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7637

The CoP section is a little outdated/wonky since it was created using dot-weaving. Even the single target list is messed up, because PoF certainly shouldn't beat out DSI in the trinket slot.

The single target list is very similar to the stat weights that I have listed in my guide. This is also the same set that Twin is using to evaluate trinkets. As such, the order for trinkets is correct in Twin's single target guide. It also matches my trinket list in this guide as well. Without RoW equiped, PoF is much better than DSI, and that is what this list represents.

As I stated above me, I wouldn't intend to create a guide purely built around RoW - Twintop did not do this either. I doubt you'll find a guide anywhere that is aimed at trying to help "majority" spriests that will only focus on RoW to the exception of non-RoW play styles.

Keep in mind you should aim for hitting 31-35% haste and then as much mastery as you can get. Alternatively, at either low gear levels (can't reach 31% haste) or extremely high gear levels (raid kills bosses extremely quickly), you should just stack as much mastery as possible. A CoP "BiS" from strictly the M HFC instance would like something like:

Tier helm (Korm)
Xhul neck
Tier shoulders (Xhul)
Fel Lord cloak
Kilrogg chest
Tyrant bracers
Archi 2h (or Iskar wand + Mannoroth offhand if the wand ilvl is a tier greater than your Archi 2h)
Class trinket (RoW)
Council trinket (DSI, mastery + int proc)
Legendary ring (lol)
Tyrant ring (high mastery) or Socrethar ring (high haste)
Trash drop boots (haste/mastery)
Tier legs (Gore)
Fel Lord belt
Tier gloves (Socrethar)

If I were trying to build a mastery-heavy build, I'd probably use the Archi helm as my off-piece item instead. The boe boots might overtake the fel lord boots as well (might be iffy). Of course any item with a gem or WF status would throw it off. But anyway. Meh.

- - - Updated - - -

To add on to what Kilee said, when you can't reach the haste breakpoint you still want to have as much Insanity uptime as possible.

@Kilee I'm not entirely sure waiting till 5 orbs is really worth the squeeze. Personally I prefer to be at 3-4 orbs if I know I'm going to be able to snipe with SW: D. As I stated in another thread, if you can snipe with SW: D quite a bit (mythic iron reaver, killrog, gore, etc) then the value of haste is a moot point as you have alternative means of generating your orbs.

The rotation that I presented was intended for single target only. It was not intended to account for every possible situation. Also, if your plan is to keep sniping Deaths - this is unpredictable, and would interfere with Insanity uptime, so then you basically have a conflict of interest. I agree that Hitting any Deaths instead will be a DPS increase, but once you are falling outside the ST rotation, you would automatically need to be flexible and quick on your feet and think outside the box. If a person can do this, I doubt they would be asking the question of how to handle it in the first place. You and I are approaching a slight difference of opinion here on how to "help people" based on the loaded assumption that everyone can play as well as you. Remember that this is not always the case, and just saying it to people may not mean they can re-create it in game.

That being said I think outside of non mythic Fel Reaver, Kormrok, Fel Lord, and Tyrant it's better to stack mastery and just use w/e haste you have.

You're implying a play style built around letting other members in your raid switching to and killing adds. This won't always be the case. Again, we're starting to diverge in our thoughts as to how to gear and play CoP based on two different mindsets and goals for the spec. Please bear in mind that my goal for the spec is to be able to also play without RoW, because there will be players who either do not have the trinket, or do not have the luxury of relying on their raid members to take care of priority targets, or they do not have the skill to handle such complex situations that fall outside of pure single target scenerios.

Apart from that, I agree with the intent of going full mastery after hitting Mythic raid levels, and only using other targets as tools to proc ToF and to increase orb generation.

- - - Updated - - -

Hi Kreeshak, this is my strategy for dungeons.

I have two sets of gear, a non-RoW set and a RoW set. My non-RoW set uses the trinkets Prophecy of Fear and Unblinking Gaze of Sethe. This set also follows the stat weights from the earlier section of my guide quite rigidly (so in general higher iLevel trumps lower iLevel, and it leans strictly towards haste-mastery items).

The second set of gear, a "RoW set" uses Repudiation of War and Desecrated Shadowmoon Insignia as its core trinkets. My gear uses couple alternate pieces to bring my haste to 35%, and also has a bit more mastery than the non-RoW set.

For talents, I use Insanity the entire dungeon, regardless of which set I'm in. Until we get to the boss, I'm in the non-RoW set. Whenever PoF procs, I go into an orb-building phase, where I play as though I were doing a Mindbender-CoP Rotation, except that I bank orbs and don't spend them on DP. After the PoF proc is over, I use orbs to cast Devouring Plague, proc Insanity, and use that for Searing Insanity. Basically I treat this like it was a Hellfire Assault or a Xhul'Horac fight.

Just before I get to a boss in a 5-man, I quickly switch my gear to my RoW set. For about a minute, I play RoW-CoP (DoTless Insanity rotation) on the boss, then as soon as he's dead I switch gearsets again and continue on.

The entire dungeon is done with the same set of talents but just alternating back and forth between gearsets like that. I use this same strategy for LFR as well.

Just a followup to this. I've noticed after about a week of messing around with this, that swapping trinkets in and out triggers some kind of ICD or RPPM in such a way that the trinkets will not proc once you swap them out. As a result of this, although I occasionally still use this strategy, I've been doing 5-mans more and more lately with just PoF+Sethe+Insanity for the entire dungeon.

[Djriff]

I get that it's intended for ST only, and I respect that you have a different goal. People turn to guides to learn how to play their class better. If you are running RoW you probably shouldn't swap to adds. There are exceptions to this but if you find your self swapping targets a lot, then it's probably better to take another trinket such as UGS instead. All I'm saying is from personal experience through guild raiding and pugging alike the adds mostly get burnt down pretty quickly if people are on their game. It's a total DPS loss to swap to the adds at that point and it's better for the raid group as a whole to SW: D them when you can.

I also understand that your goal is to play CoP without RoW. In the situation where someone does not have RoW or aren't using it they should go Mind Bender. Insanity should really only be used outside of RoW for searing insanity and slowing adds on killrog so you don't have to flay.

[Kilee25]

I've had a mixed bag of experiences.

I ran a pug Archi just this past weekend where I decided to go RoW for the fight just to see how it went. My thought at this time was that I will try this and if we wipe, because adds don't die, I'll change it up. However I didn't switch to an add the entire fight, and only attacked a few adds just to get ToF up. It was one of the fastest and smoothest kills I've ever been to, and that was great. I didn't even help kill Infernals except to throw out a cascade.

However, just a week prior to this, I went in with my guild and we worked on the exact same fight and wiped for almost an hour because adds weren't dying fast enough. I tried using RoW for the first half hour, but eventually I was having to help kill adds so much that my DPS was exactly the same as it was using Mindbender.

While I agree the first type of raid is the one I always want to be in, I'm not comfortable telling people that are in the latter type of raid that the problem is their guild/raid sucks, and that's the end of it. People don't always have the option to just change the people they raid with so that they can play a certain way. As a result of this I've always got one foot in another place whenever we start having these RoW conversations. Personally I feel that investing in a full-on mastery-RoW set is only viable if you a) have a backup set for different situations and b) you are raiding with a strong group of players who can allow you to do it.

This leaves in a difficult position when it comes to the guide as to which type of players I want to cater towards. My feeling has always been that the "elite" players will figure out how they want to play anyway, and that they wouldn't need or refer to the guide for help. The people coming to this guide looking for advice would more often be in the second group, in a non-ideal team, struggling with mechanics, having to cover other people's jobs, etc... I guess that's always going to be my PoV on this issue.

[Djriff]

There's nothing wrong with having both versions out there. Maybe their raid/guild is in a position where they need the ST dps from a priest so they would need to know how to play RoW. Alternatively if they don't need to do that and end up in your second scenario ,then yes they should drop RoW and play differently. While yes the elite player might know that, guides are useful at all levels as it's always good to check to see what other people are doing, you can always learn something from anyone.

Personally I feel you can write a guide that appeals to new priests as well as the old veterans who know the class at the same time. Look at the shadow guide on howtopriest as an example. It has several beginner things on there, such as enchants, what our skills do, CD's, as well as some general tricks of the trade. There is still plenty of info there for experienced players as well so it's not a waste of someone's time.

On the full mastery set, as I stated earlier, it's for unique situations and it's also a bit of an advanced play style for your average casual player. I would honestly keep my 35% haste set and parses be damned, but I've lucked out on coin rolls and stuff so I can afford to swap some gear around based on the fight.

[Kilee25]

Personally I feel you can write a guide that appeals to new priests as well as the old veterans who know the class at the same time. Look at the shadow guide on howtopriest as an example. It has several beginner things on there, such as enchants, what our skills do, CD's, as well as some general tricks of the trade. There is still plenty of info there for experienced players as well so it's not a waste of someone's time.

This guide hasn't been updated since 6.1, and only ever talked about dotweaving, and has no information at all on t18 (apart from an AS BIS list) or using RoW. Also, I've never considered putting the tooltips for spells in a guide a justification for something like "Appealing to beginners." I appreciate the sentiment of what you're saying though, and I agree there should be some effort to strive to cater to both groups.

[Djriff]

Well the only reason i brought it up is you mentioned awhile ago that us veterans take a lot of knowledge for granted, like multi dotting as an example. I understand the howtopriest guide is out of date, but the BiS lists are up to date, i think the links are messed up though.

[Kilee25]

I waffled over this decision of whether or not to add spell/glyph/talent info in the guide, but my feeling on this is that it is a section that many people will skip and not read, regardless of experience. Rather, I chose to just focus on the most-used ones and to try to offer a "jump right in with this" approach. I've thought about changing it or expanding it, but at the same time, I will probably never-ever just list the entire spellbook and talent/glyph directory in a guide.

I've said this before, but I actually feel that my guide is far too long, and I would prefer to shrink the content down to about 1/3 of what it is. I do think that is possible.

[Djriff]

I do agree it's a bit on the lengthy side. I really like how the aff guide is laid out. Explains generally how to play the class, short BiS list and what talents/glyphs to play per fight. I did something similar back in BRF for disc and shadow, but there is so much you can do as a shadow priest with AS and CoP both being viable that a guide like that isn't entirely feasible. You don't have to list the whole spell book, but CoP really only uses 6 spells, 7 if you want to include PW: S. I think an indepth explination of why those spells matter and the best way to use them would be great for everyone.

[Sxq]

I did pretty much the same thing today with an Archimonde pug. Literally ignored adds except to snipe shadow word death and cascades and maintain ToF uptime. Managed like 15k dps higher than what I do in my guild group which forces me to attack adds and go into banish at the worst time. Actually the pug group had a strat that I really liked - have ALL dps go into first banish and insta kill the add, then come up and just focus down the boss until its dead. Second banish is a sacrifice group. Third banish shouldn't happen.

I think the real takeaway is that we have a lot of flexibility. Shadow has flexibility similar to how a mage can change specs. It's not the easiest thing to explain in a guide, and the people that just want a guide to tell them exactly what to do may not be satisfied with that, but that's what a simplified or all around build suggestion section is for. Or instead the guide can focus on one aspect such as "how to play CoP on all fights" or "how to maximize single target damage" and that's fine too.

The kind of decisions involved in adjusting your playstyle on the fly are, ultimately, beyond the scope of normal guides.

[Seriv]

My opinion is to adopt a method of banking and spending orbs.

You can swap from a orb neutral rotation at say 2300 haste to a slightly orb consuming one at around 1100 haste:

MB5 - MS - DP - Ins - MB3 - Ins - Ins - SF - MB4 - MS - MS - DP - MB2 - Ins - Ins - Ins - MB3 - MS - MS - MS -
MB4 - MS - DP - Ins - MB2 - Ins - Ins - SF - MB3 - MS - MS - DP - MB1 - Ins - Ins - Ins - MB2 - MS - MS - MS -
MB3 - MS - MS - MF - MB4 - SF - MS - MS -

On the second round SF is placed after the even Insanities instead of the odd ones. With this rotation SF will be used every 25 seconds which is fine enough since in most fights this will not result in less uptime. The whole rotation itself lasts for around a minute, at the end of the fight you can extend it a little by using two additional DP (the following replaces the third line):
MB3 - MS - DP - Ins - MB1 - Ins - Ins - SF - MB2 - MS - MS - MS - MB3 - DP - Ins - Ins - MB1 - MS - MS - MS - MB2
RoW will run out the moment the last MB hits.

If you can get some SW:D the rotation will extend even longer (one orb is worth 25 seconds in this regard) so with some practice you probably won't have to flay at all, even on longer fights.

During Bloodlust/Heroism you will just keep your old orb neutral rotation but you try to leave with 5 orbs (which works out if you start the fight with 5 aswell, otherwise you will have to flay a little more). So in the end you can survive longer than 1:40 of a bossfight without having to flay with just 1100 haste (less works aswell, but it's the same issue as trying to go for orb neutral with just 2000) as long as one starts with 5 orbs and there is lust on pull. For every 20 seconds longer one should look for one additional SW:D, keeping in mind that SW:D deals less damage than MS (since you do not stack haste you probably will have reached the mastery threshold) so you do not want to use it more often than necessary.

[Kilee25]

Hey Seriv,

Oddly, I started experimenting with this last night after our conversations yesterday. You are correct, and it is possible to sequence the spells in such a way that you can extend a Mind Flay-less rotation for quite a long period of time. DJRiff, you were asking how some people were managing with a high mastery set, and I think this is what they are doing.