Looking at the average player, They most likely won't get high DPS utilizing StM. Sure the potential combination of Mass Hysteria and Surrender to Madness is staggering in the right hands, but the majority of the player base doesn't raid. For those that do raid 50% of spriests will be decent with StM. So 50% of of 1 spec has the capability/drive to min/max their spec. That 50% may be higher or lower, but there are a lot of casual raiders out there, they won't use StM most likely because it is so punishing or they just don't like the playstyle, as many people have expressed here. So from a dev staind point how do you balance something that only 5%(best guess at raid participation) of the playerbase will see, and of that 5% only 50% of shadow priests will be able to utilize to their advantage?
This is the biggest truth and I'm honestly surprised we didn't see more nerfs to StM from the get go. The nerf from 200% to 150% was nice and nipped some stuff in the bud but blizz really backed themselves into a corner when they introduced this skill to the game.I doubt if you can conclude much from a beta audience that often has other things on their mind other than raiding and raid instances that are only open for short periods of time for testing. Then eliminate everyone not a shadow priest and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think that the sample was too small to really draw conclusions. I don't know if the pre-patch was long enough to surface specifics or not but would likely lean toward not.
Ah yes, I don't think i'll forget about Void Entropy and the waste of code that it was for quite some time. People will always threaten to quit/jump classes when their playstyle is threatened. Hell if those nerfs would have gone live, I would have benched my priest myself as I definitely wouldn't be seeing mythic EN as shadow and we didn't need a healer.It's certainly not the first time that something like this has happened over the years. And yes, they stay with their design often enough past the point of sensibility but changes made often don't play like you think they should when mixed with 30+ other specs. And their initial steps often are greeted with fainting spells from players who say they'll quit or immediately re-roll without seeing how the changes will actually play out. So they go slow. I would too I think.
I'd check the version of SimC you're using. I download the beta version of it they post every few days as it usually has the latest round of hotfixes. That could be the difference as well. Also with Twintop retired beotorch is no longer a resource you should use since he runs/owns it and said he's done maintaining it.
As I've stated before countless times you can't just toss your character in, pull stat weights, and expect coherent results. You need to do 30+ sims with different gear/talents and find the relationship between all the different stat weights that produces. Using a single sim of your toon is going to give you skewed results like that.Furthermore I'm a bit confused by the normalized stat weights I get from either tool. Especially what should I make of negative numbers? Either weight would suggest that I should really, really stack up on Crit. Currently I'm at 29% Haste, 16% Crit, 47% Mastery.
For Beotorch: 1.38 Crit, 1.00 Int, 0.88 Mastery, 0.76 Versatility, -1.03 Haste
For SimC: 1.57 Crit, 1.00 Int, 1.18 Mastery, 1.18 Versatility, 0.28 Haste
I'm interested in understanding those numbers while I'm already well aware that I need to work on my skills. For NHC I've been more around 100-150k for the fights.
The combined weights are also in the first post of this thread.
For those 3 relics I would us VT SA chance and SW: P damage. Those scale well with mastery + Mass Hysteria while Mind Blast does not.
I think you'd be safe just sticking with the combined weights since you swap between t100 talents so often. And since the boss is dying so quickly I'd just swap to a LotV or MS build with Void Ray.
Personally I don't trust the MS/Void Ray as it's simming pretty high for me on AMR. I've also beaten the DPS AMR gives me for StM in the Single Target boss (Patchwerkk essentially) everytime I use StM, so take that for what it's worth.
If you want to get an accurate estimate of your StM DPS, make a custom boss fight by copying the Single Target one then change the fight length to 180s. That's a 3m boss fight and while it's not entirely realistic in a raiding sense, the numbers it produces are much more accurate for StM DPS imo.