How are shadow priests doing so much damage?

[pagepro]

How are they able to do a good 20-30 million more damage than every other class on a single target fight?

[Woop Woop]

Surrender to Madness, it's pretty broken. It's also being redesigned along with the two other level 100 talents "soon".

[BadguyNotBadGuy]

Shadow priests have the best execute phase in the game with Twist of Fate and StM, but they gotta be really really good, cos after about 50-60 seconds of StM, literally any mistake will kill you.
There are also other intricacies to using StM correctly, such as using it at the correct time so that you die very close to the death of the boss etc.

And yeah as the guy above me said, its pretty broken, and blizz promissed a lvl100 talent rebalance soon(tm).

[Thaylen]

Are you Feral or Unholy?

[Fleckens]

Honestly I love that I can sim shit on my alts, it's annoying that we have to rely on preset stat values that won't always 100% be correct for our characters due to simming with stm being such a mess.

Also shadowfiend does not give insanity and you don't use mindbender. Casting shadowfiend in late stm is almost certainly a death sentence.

[Ocedic]

Okay, I'll preface this by agreeing with you that the difficulty of S2M is overstated in that even if you do mess up S2M, as long as you get to around 110 stacks (which is the easy part) you will do very good damage. Even if you mess up S2M and die early, as long as you did a decent job you will usually do well (unless you HORRIBLY mistimed and died at like 15% boss HP.) Having said that, I have several points of contention.

The so-called "complexity" of STM as a justification of the ridiculous DPS they do is so highly overstated as to be ridiculous.

Yes, if you mess up you die. Yes, if you mis-time your abilities, you die.

However, you have a fairly rapidly recharging "panic button" in the form of Shadow Word Death, which basically refills your entire Insanity bar in one global, has 2 charges, instant cast on a 9 second recharge. Additionally, there's Shadowfiend/Mindbender, all of your abilities are castable on the move, and multiple targets vastly increase your Insanity generation.

Ah, the old "stating a class's abilities to call it overpowered" argument. Mindbender is not taken in S2M spec, and I don't know why you bring up Shadowfiend. Multiple targets generating more insanity pretty much only relevant on Xavius, as S2M is usually popped during one-target phases of Eye Boss and Cenarius.

You're underselling proper SWD usage on top of maintaining an optimal rotation and being aware of the fight mechanics with the added constraint of having to cast every moment or dying, considering people are dying in raid to much simpler mechanics.

There's many people who don't even know when to properly time a Bloodlust, so properly timing an S2M consistently is definitely beyond most peoples' abilities.

They are ranged, so chances are high that most of the time they will be in range of the boss, or if a mechanic presents itself that causes them to NOT have to be in range of the boss, will whine and complain loudly enough to the raid leader so that the entire raid strat revolves around them being able to ignore that constraint.

Spriests aren't the only ranged class, and saying we 'whine and complain' is quite a generalization. In my own raid I hear way more complaints from melee and we make quite a few positioning and strategic accomodations for melee (and I don't mean that in a bad way - their job is harder enough.) There are times when I suggest ways to maximize Spriest DPS on fights like Xavius (giving us corruption, etc.)

On top of that, their gearing decisions are brainless. Does it have haste? Equip it. Does the item have more haste than your current equip? It's an upgrade. The only thing they have to think about is trinkets, and I'm sure there's a chart out there for those as well.

Compare to something like feral druid (aka John Madden with several bleeds and debuffs to juggle) or Unholy DK (which has 4 different resources to manage as well as various procs to line up) and the fact that almost every other DPS that isn't a fire mage has to run fucking simulations to figure out if a piece of gear is going to increase their output, and suddenly the prima-donna act seems a lot less justified.

Actually, there's haste breakpoints and it's not cut and dry. Shadowpriests are definitely running sims for gear optimization.

If you think Shadowpriests are so easy, I'd be interested to see you get a 130 stack S2M on a target dummy. Then do that on every fight in Heroic EN.

[ysnake]

The so-called "complexity" of STM as a justification of the ridiculous DPS they do is so highly overstated as to be ridiculous.

Yes, if you mess up you die. Yes, if you mis-time your abilities, you die.

However, you have a fairly rapidly recharging "panic button" in the form of Shadow Word Death, which basically refills your entire Insanity bar in one global, has 2 charges, instant cast on a 9 second recharge. Additionally, there's Shadowfiend/Mindbender, all of your abilities are castable on the move, and multiple targets vastly increase your Insanity generation.

They are ranged, so chances are high that most of the time they will be in range of the boss, or if a mechanic presents itself that causes them to NOT have to be in range of the boss, will whine and complain loudly enough to the raid leader so that the entire raid strat revolves around them being able to ignore that constraint.

On top of that, their gearing decisions are brainless. Does it have haste? Equip it. Does the item have more haste than your current equip? It's an upgrade. The only thing they have to think about is trinkets, and I'm sure there's a chart out there for those as well.

Compare to something like feral druid (aka John Madden with several bleeds and debuffs to juggle) or Unholy DK (which has 4 different resources to manage as well as various procs to line up) and the fact that almost every other DPS that isn't a fire mage has to run fucking simulations to figure out if a piece of gear is going to increase their output, and suddenly the prima-donna act seems a lot less justified.

Hmm, the gearing part is completely untrue. When you're gearing up, you want the main stat on pretty much any class. At 33%+ haste, you kinda want to get some Crit as a SPriest as Crit is very valuable. Most SPriests aim for 30-35% haste and 20%+ Crit.

The skill floor required for SPriest outside of S2M is relatively low/medium, it is not as complex/annoying to deal with as a Feral or Unholy DK. However, the SPriest "retard" damage does not come until 90+ stacks of S2M - and whatever you say, that is the hardest thing to do in the game at this point, while also being the most punishable thing in regards what happens if you mess up, meaning that you die and cannot be rezzed. Everyone everywhere stated that SPriests are dumb on Xavius and most of the dumb percentages comes from that fight (if I recall the "numbers" thread correctly, SPriests are 47% above everyone else on that fight, while they are in acceptable OP state on some other fights, while being lackluster on others).
On the side note, Shadowfiend does not generate Insanity, so there's that.

Playing a SPriest sometimes feels extremely rewarding, while most of the time (on progression fights), it does not...since you're down there, looking at how much wiggle room you have to be in-between the tanks. Then you have the last 30% which feels satisfying, and the numbers that can be pulled off are pretty dumb and imbalanced.

The problem that SPriests are pointing out is that if you take away S2M, there is no reason to bring a SPriest to any fight other than council/cleave type of fights, and SPriests do not have an alternative DPS spec to fall back to. But please do not state that playing a DK or Feral takes immense amount of skill.
Does playing a melee require more skill? No.
Is playing a melee more frustrating than playing a ranged? Definitely.

[Zephirdd]

The so-called "complexity" of STM as a justification of the ridiculous DPS they do is so highly overstated as to be ridiculous.

Yes, if you mess up you die. Yes, if you mis-time your abilities, you die.

However, you have a fairly rapidly recharging "panic button" in the form of Shadow Word Death, which basically refills your entire Insanity bar in one global, has 2 charges, instant cast on a 9 second recharge. Additionally, there's Shadowfiend/Mindbender, all of your abilities are castable on the move, and multiple targets vastly increase your Insanity generation.

They are ranged, so chances are high that most of the time they will be in range of the boss, or if a mechanic presents itself that causes them to NOT have to be in range of the boss, will whine and complain loudly enough to the raid leader so that the entire raid strat revolves around them being able to ignore that constraint.

On top of that, their gearing decisions are brainless. Does it have haste? Equip it. Does the item have more haste than your current equip? It's an upgrade. The only thing they have to think about is trinkets, and I'm sure there's a chart out there for those as well.

Compare to something like feral druid (aka John Madden with several bleeds and debuffs to juggle) or Unholy DK (which has 4 different resources to manage as well as various procs to line up) and the fact that almost every other DPS that isn't a fire mage has to run fucking simulations to figure out if a piece of gear is going to increase their output, and suddenly the prima-donna act seems a lot less justified.

it has recently been noted that "haste > all" is untrue; At about 11700 haste you start valueing Mastery and Crit much more.

Also "haste > all" is only true for S2M situations. Fights like Dragons(with its fear mechanic), Ilgynoth(where you dont have time to make use of it) and pretty much every single dungeon there is(maybe with a few exceptions on high M+); On other situations where we use Mind Spike or Lotv, the priority is Crit > Haste.

Also SWD is NOT a panic button at all. It is literally part of the S2M rotation and if you can't use it properly(or if you use it as a panic button) you'll definitely NOT getting the most out of S2M. Shadowfiend is on GCD and you probably don't want to cast it on higher S2M stacks, and Power Infusion is a better talent than Mindbender for S2M(although it's probably better on other situations, I do like my PI though).

Oh and despite all of this, Shadow Priests are by far the worst dungeon spec in the game for M2-7, while being mildly situational for M8+, and only if affixes are good for you - if there's Teeming you might as well skip the dungeon week.

Yes, Shadow Priests are godly on damage on execute phase of raid bosses when the mechanics favor them - but they are also pretty bad outside of that one situation. It looks great on logs - especially since the end boss is a shadow priest's wet dream - but it also is a really narrow situation. We have no burst damage on pull(which is a Feral's forte IIRC), our AoE is laughable(which is a UH DK/Frost DK strong point), our mobility even more so(barring of course the cast-on-move S2M).



S2M damage isn't justified only by it's complexity, it is justified because one mess up means you die, and because we suck balls in every other area in the game.

[kalaratic]

b-but i have 4 different resources

[SafariDiscoLion]

The funny thing is if you look at WCL and take out Xavius, where double S2M is possible and Blizz doesn't seem to care enough to remove it, and Cenarius, where a lot of top people were abusing a double-S2M bug, from the average DPS rankings per spec in Mythic 90th+ percentile, Spriest falls down to about 6th-7th~ place right around the same as Assassination Rogue and Enhancement Shaman. Not only are we only good because of S2M, we're only so high on logs because of bugs/exploits.

[darklogrus]

Our Grps Shadow Priest hovers around 7-10th on the Dps meters until they S2M and then they jump everyone to first.

[SafariDiscoLion]

Good for him? I'm talking about the average DPS of the top players for every spec in the whole of Mythic EN, dude.