I used to play a Sunwell Raiding Shadow Priest. We've all had our QQ's due to our bad scaling and low dps and whatnot so I did something about it. I leveled a Mage to make my main in WotLK. I used to raid as a Rogue right when TBC came out, then I took a break and came back as a Shadow Priest. I guess I miss the pure dps aspect of raiding which is why I chose Mage. I know Mages might not be top dps or whatever, but that's another topic. I really liked my Shadow Priest but their low dps (but excellent utility) just didn't suit me.
I started seeing all these posts the past few weeks about how Shadow Priests damage has substantially increased which gave me hope that maybe I will go back to raiding Shadow if I can keep up (not be on top, but not be 15th either) with the big dogs. Then I read this:
While Dispersion might not drastically increase your raid damage, not all talents are designed as such. We experimented with giving it some added DPS to it, but we had to take it off because the Shadow Priest was exceeding our bench mark for DPS. It was also strange gameplay (what if you got hit while it was channeling? You'd feel really bad. Also its supposed to be your defense mechanism in PvP, but yet now you want to use it for DPS
So apparently Blizzard has a specific spot they want Shadow Priests on the dps scale. Which is cool but Shadow Priests always had an issue with gear scaling. Meaning that if they put Shadow Priests lower than Mages, Locks, Hunters, Warriors now...Just think of how bad it MIGHT be when we're in the higher end game content (remember Shadow Priests were near top dps up until about late t5 content mainly due to The FSW set, who knows if another set like this will become available). Seems like they're digging a hole for themselves by setting a place they want Spriest dps at, because in the long run they are going to have to perfectly tweak Spriest gear to scale them properly. This has me leaning back towards maining my Mage for Wrath.
I was just wondering what other people thought about this 'benchmark'.
(Again, I'm not saying a utility class should be topping the charts or anything. Also, the gear scaling speculation I had about Wotlk is indeed only a speculation.)