VE needs a change

[Worshaka]

After analysing VE in its current format (when talented you receive 25% of your dps as healing but your party receive 5%) I think it really needs to be revisted and changed.

I understand that allowing 25% healing to your party would lead to spriest raid stacking... obviously a bad thing to promote. But on the other hand, 5% healing is so trivial that it borders on useless. In it's current incarnation it's only useful for healing the spriest.

In some patchwerk encounters I managed to provide a total of 10K effective healing to my tanks in 3mins... like I said it borders on useless. Admitadly a change is comming where the duration will be increased to 5mins on PvE targets, so we dont need to waste GCDs to maintain it but i'm almost convinced that if i'm not going to take damage then I wont bother losing even 1 GCD.

I suggest we get it back to 25% but somehow limit the effect so it can't be stacked. Not entirely sure how to physically do that... perhaps there are some other ideas out there?

[redfly]

what about

Afflicts your target with Shadow energy that causes you and one hurt party member (singular) to be healed for 15% of any Shadow spell damage you deal for 5 min.

like all the heal which is split by 4 is directed to one party member needing it the most.

[Nalloa]

Well, first off, i think you pretty much hit the nail on the head....as far as the purpose of VE anyway. For the most part, VE's primary purpose is to heal ourselves so we can justify cycling SW into our rotation without healers complaining too much. Also, as you mentioned, they aren't likely to buff it as it would cause stacking issues. Blizz has been working hard to have as many buffs overlap as possible (Moonkin and SP +hit is the first to mind) to minimize stacking and maximize 'bring the player.' As such, if it got much more powerful, they would most likely make it overlap with additional VE's as well as perhaps even Judgement of Light, etc.

Additionally, a huge buff to the +healing of this spell would cause threat issues and they would have to most likely buff Shadow Affinity and/or decrease our damage. Perhaps thinking too far ahead, if they buffed Affinity, then an SP could essentially generate little to no threat by simply not casting VE at all on any given fight as the talent would overcompensate.

More healing from VE falls very far into the 'utility' category, which is the spot we used to hold along with a few other hybrids. Sadly, we were deemed a tad too useful and had a bit too much DPS on top of that, though only really in Tier 4 as our scaling sucked back then. Blizz moved us out of that spot upon 3.0 of course as utility classes were the most commonly abused, stacked, and 'special.'


NOTE: I reread your post and noticed you mentioned using VE on Patch. I pity your melee DPS and their many sojourns back-and-forth into the green goo.

[Nezoia]

What about we return it to 3.0.0 status?

With the Imp. VE. talent I outhealed 4 shamans and a holy priest on our first Brutallus kill post patch.

At least I'd like to see the coefficiency to go a bit up, currently it's hardly worth the points from a raiding perspective. And with the 3.1 talent changes, I'm not going to take the 2 points in Imp. VE. any more.

[Nnmana]

NOTE: I reread your post and noticed you mentioned using VE on Patch. I pity your melee DPS and their many sojourns back-and-forth into the green goo.

Seriously, why does melee keep going in the slime? It's an absolutely useless factor, and you're only going to lose DPS by doing it.

[Venara]

What about we return it to 3.0.0 status?

With the Imp. VE. talent I outhealed 4 shamans and a holy priest on our first Brutallus kill post patch.

At least I'd like to see the coefficiency to go a bit up, currently it's hardly worth the points from a raiding perspective. And with the 3.1 talent changes, I'm not going to take the 2 points in Imp. VE. any more.

*cough* http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.ph...4649#msg754649

Also VE will last 5 minutes in PvE now, i think that's a nice change.

[Nezoia]

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm only going to put the point there if the mana-regeneration otherwise allows it, as a personal preference.

But if you look at the technical perspective of it, it's actually a DPS loss due to spirit increasing spell power as well (while marginal, still a loss).

I'm still very fond of VE as a spell. I think it bring some uniqueness to the shadowpriest as the "shadowy healer".

[Worshaka]

NOTE: I reread your post and noticed you mentioned using VE on Patch. I pity your melee DPS and their many sojourns back-and-forth into the green goo.

For the record, i'm normally put in the tank party so I decided to cast VE on patch just to see how much effective healing it could do. As you can imagine I no longer bother wasting any GCD's on VE, unless I feel I may get a large amount of incomming damage, such as 3 drake Sarth.

[rhiannan]

i'm with nezoia on imp VE, we currently raid with 2-3 shadow priests in our raid, probably the only fight i really the spell on is Sapphiron currently. looking at the changes to shadow tree i most likely will not be taking imp VE anymore either. i'm gonna see what else happens before i decide though.

i usually get put in the group with other casters or with a group of hunters depending on how many shadow priests are in the raid.

[Nezoia]

The thing about Sapphiron and Sartharion with 3 drakes is that you mainly use it for your own healing.
What would be nice is some more group utilize from it.

I mean, I absolutely love that I can ignore Twilight Torment *entirely* due to Improved Vampiric Embrace. It took me ages to realize that we got a debuff that made dps equal damage.

Combined with Devouring Plague it's a really nice combo. But a slight coefficiency buff in terms of group healing would be nice.

[AetherMcLoud]

I'd be happy if they would just have VE always active when in shadowform. So you don't have to spend a GCD to apply it, and it would be automatically applied to all enemies you attack. Just like they changed shadowweaving to be a buff on us instead of a debuff on the enemy.

They already removed the CD so you can theoretically allready use it on 10 enemies and aoe them down with mindsear while healing yourself for some sweet HP. But you'd have to spend an aweful lot of GCDs to do so.

[MaritnR]

I'd be happy if they would just have VE always active when in shadowform. So you don't have to spend a GCD to apply it, and it would be automatically applied to all enemies you attack. Just like they changed shadowweaving to be a buff on us instead of a debuff on the enemy.

They already removed the CD so you can theoretically allready use it on 10 enemies and aoe them down with mindsear while healing yourself for some sweet HP. But you'd have to spend an aweful lot of GCDs to do so.

and you nailed why it'll never work like that, Mind seer + 10 auto VE's is farrrrrr to good.

[AetherMcLoud]

and you nailed why it'll never work like that, Mind seer + 10 auto VE's is farrrrrr to good.

Simple solution: Don't let mindsear "proc" the VE healing effect, voila.

[syanid]

If they made VE so that any shadow damage heals the party for 5% - that would be better since locks / dks would contribute a bit.

[Raptorg]

It just has to be removed or removed from shadowform.

[syanid]

It just has to be removed or removed from shadowform.

You might try adding this to your sentences, after obtaining this. Happy to help.

[Fenixdown]

I distinctly remember seeing one shadow priest in my raids in vanilla days. He ended each raid we did with him in the top 3 in damage. And the top 3 in healing.

As far as I can tell, Blizzard probably saw that and went "uh, we fubarred".

Vampiric Embrace isn't intended to be a healing spell. If it were, it would trigger Egg of Mortal Essence. Which would be insanely overpowered. 505 haste for VE ticks? Holy crap on a stick.

The talent isn't meant to heal the raid. It's meant to, basically, give some extra health to people. Basically think of it as a healing stream totem. Those don't tick for great amounts, either. But they restore a little bit here and a little bit there, which certainly doesn't hurt.

[beanfinnalblow]

in karazahan i was number 1 healling in shadow form for the raid it was fun to teaze the heallers

[Worshaka]

I distinctly remember seeing one shadow priest in my raids in vanilla days. He ended each raid we did with him in the top 3 in damage. And the top 3 in healing.

As far as I can tell, Blizzard probably saw that and went "uh, we fubarred".

Vampiric Embrace isn't intended to be a healing spell. If it were, it would trigger Egg of Mortal Essence. Which would be insanely overpowered. 505 haste for VE ticks? Holy crap on a stick.

The talent isn't meant to heal the raid. It's meant to, basically, give some extra health to people. Basically think of it as a healing stream totem. Those don't tick for great amounts, either. But they restore a little bit here and a little bit there, which certainly doesn't hurt.

This made little sense...

1. VE is an aura heal, of course it's not a healing spell... you don't actually cast VE to heal, you cast VE to provide a debuff that triggers when something else occurs. So it's pretty easy to work out that VE won't trigger the egg of mortal essence.

2. Embrace of the spider will proc a haste buff... are you saying that trinket makes VE overpowered? Of course not, that entire statement about 505 haste makes 0 sense.

My problem with VE at the moment is the 5% (when talented) effect on your party members is far too low. I understand why it needs to be atm but something needs to change to make the group healing component of the spell useful. Otherwise I vote remove that effect all together, remove the imp VE talent and just have VE heal the spriest in question for 25% of their dps.

[MaritnR]

This made little sense...

My problem with VE at the moment is the 5% (when talented) effect on your party members is far too low.

if you've ever been in a hard prog raid and seen your dps group drop to 5% health as the healers are putting out fires all over the place that 5% is proberly the 5% you gave them,

VE blows for easy farm content.

In prog where every % counts it can make a world of difference.

in my eyes i tihnk thats enough for it.