Imp Shadowform

[harky]

In that case I can agree. Hodir in particular SA can be useful. Though it really only comes up on hardmode and only with a Warrior tank generally, it can come up. The same can be said of a few other Ulduar fights, though the gain overall is still questionable it may be worthwhile to respec for certain hard modes.

[Abandon]

I think your full of shit and shouldnt be handing out advice.

Constructive. Stop posting.

[Worshaka]

Sometimes being open minded is not the correct decision. You're essentially saying '15 SP is meaningless',

There is a world of distinction between 1 gem slot and 5 talent points... comparing the 2 is ludicrous at the best of times. In terms of 5 talent points 15sp when evaluated in raid dps terms is so insignificantly small that you have to question the value of those 5 talent points. In this circumstance you spend 3 talent points that do absolutely nothing and then 2 talent points that provide 15sp and regen that is unnecessary.

I also suggested that in the previous teir of content that picking up shadow affinity and imp VE provided higher long term dps because imp VE more than likely kept me alive when I would have otherwise died and you dps more alive than dead. Shadow affinity had the abiilty to throw dps onto adds quicker and not pull superficial aggro and move mobs out of the AoE zone. Of course these things can't really be measured, they're a subjective aspect to raiding. I can't prove these points but it's my belief that these particular aspects add up to far more raid DPS than 15sp. Not to mention that when I orginally dropped ST/IST the talent was worse than it is now and it was lucky to be worth 7 or 8 sp.

I have also said that this dicussion is rather irrelevant because it's increasingly obvious that IST will be a required talent in 3.3 due to a need for more mana regen and the fact that spirit will be higher valued and the glyph of shadow being buffed from 10% to 30% spirit.

What you can't let go is that you think in terms of right and wrong with nothing inbetween. You're not prepared to say you feel your opinion is more justified you need to say your opinion is the only correct opinion and anything else is simply wrong. That's the stance of someone who has the inability to look at discussions from different angles. I never said your argument was wrong in fact I said it held merit but I thought the value for 5 talent points was rather poor, particularly for the Uld teir of content.

As it turns out I now use IST because shadow affinity isn't as useful in ToGC due to 0 trash and no real add switching where aggro is an issue. I also made this change very recently because it's likely to be a mandatory talent in 3.3 as previously mentioned so I wanted to play with the spec to get a feel for it. See, being open minded is a good thing.

[Srsbznss]

L2 Shadowpriest.com

if you come to MMO for Spriest advice, your going to get the wrong info.

but then again, if you didnt know that, then you desirve the wrong info

[harky]

What you can't let go is that you think in terms of right and wrong with nothing inbetween. You're not prepared to say you feel your opinion is more justified you need to say your opinion is the only correct opinion and anything else is simply wrong. That's the stance of someone who has the inability to look at discussions from different angles. I never said your argument was wrong in fact I said it held merit but I thought the value for 5 talent points was rather poor, particularly for the Uld teir of content.

Interesting after I agreed there was some use on Hodir, huh? This isn't a case of vague numbers where no one is quite sure. It is a case just like switching gems. Taking points out of IST drops your SP the same as losing the gems would. Taking the other talents then gives you nothing to compensate except on one or two very specific fights in older content and even then only if you have a certain class tanking as the others still easily out threat non-SA builds. Also considering that ToC non-HM content is easier than Ulduar HM content and provides better gear it's actually unlikely that even Warriors would need you to have SA to not pull aggro. There was already no chance with a DK/Druid/Paladin tank. That's what this is, you want to believe I'm being hard headed when what we're looking at is mana returns + SP vs just mana returns. It doesn't matter how many talent points you 'waste' if the result is higher than the alternative.

[Worshaka]

Sorry 5 talent points for 15-17sp is probably the worst return on a DPS talent ever. While I can't prove shadow affinity & imp VE are worth more DPS in terms of a calculation you equally can't disprove it. It's what's called a subjective statement.

IMO (which i'll say again that you can't disprove) shadow affinity added far more raid dps than an individual 15-17sp. It did this particularly while clearing trash which made up 70% of Ulduar by allowing me to instant mind sear and not rip things out of AoE range.

Imp VE kept myself and others alive longer to cast more spells, without that talent I have no doubt there would have been more deaths and you can't dps while dead.

I'll also reiterate that when I first removed IST from my talent spec it was worth 7sp at best, twisted faith wasn't always 20% spirit conversion to sp.

Again likening 5 talent points to 1 gem slot is absurd. For starters 1 gem slot provides more SP than the 5 talent points in ST/IST... for this 1 gem slot I can't choose to improve my imp VE spell nor can I choose to gain additional threat reduction. If that were possible, if I could change one of my 23sp gems and gain the proportionate effect to both VE and threat reduction I quite possibly would.

I actually challenge you to run 5min parses with and without the talent and post the results anonymously and if you did enough parses I guarantee we wouldn't be able to pick which parses included IST and which didn't in terms of your aggregate DPS. And for 5 talent points you're telling me that's a wise investment because it simply raises SP. Lets say it increased SP by 1, is it still worth it? If not where is the line... 5sp? 7sp? 9sp? You're entire argument is laughable i'm sorry to say, it's the sort of black & white mentality of a majority of WoW players that gets them into trouble. If you actually sat down to evaluate things without a bias you might actually see how futile this entire line of argument really is.

[harky]

This is why you can't grasp what I'm saying. Why did Imp. VE come up? It's taken in IST builds. The only talent that even comes close to a DPS gain is Shadow Affinity, bringing up any other talent is silly. What you posted originally took SA and FM instead of IST.

This means you were trading ST/IST for SA/FM. With ST/IST the 3 in ST are 100% filler. With my stats the points in IST provides ~170 mp/5 self buffed (no kings, mark). For FM reduces MF mana by 52 and MB mana by 98. Unbuffed I have 15.6% haste and get better DPS out of MB>MF>MF>MF while interrupting the third cast on the second tick. That saves 254 mana and takes a total of 8.2 seconds. Raid buffed my DPS goes down to 7.6 seconds. That means raid buffed it's 167 mp/5 and unbuffed it's 154 mp/5. At 7.4 seconds they would be equal. However, this assumes I am not casting DP, or VT at all. That's approximately 5 casts per minute. That reduces the mp/5 gain by roughly 22.5. You would need to drop your MB rotations into the 6 second range for it to even out. This is again comparing purely to self buffed stats.

This leaves Shadow Affinity. Your primary example for this has been being able to start earlier on AOE. Let's assume your Mind Sear ticks for 2.6k average. You're producing 25% less threat, so if you would have pulled aggro starting immediately without SA you should be able to start about a second earlier. Note that this is not a DPS gain in any way, but it does increase damage done. For SA to be a DPS gain you need to stop casting due to a risk of going 130% on threat. Okay, so once again you get to DPS one second early in this hypothetical situation. You'll get 1+haste% additional ticks. Let's go with 1.25 ticks since those are my raid buffed stats. That means 2600*1.25*targets extra damage. With 8 targets hit (9 total) that's an extra 26k damage done. Not bad! With these numbers we can also see that you're doing 26k dps. So if the group is up for three casts you'll do 312k damage. Without SA you'd have done ~285k damage. So you're looking at an ~8.3% increase in damage. The longer you AOE the less it will be.

All right, now what are you comparing to? Tanks, right? In Ulduar gear Consecration produces approximately 4.5k TPS per target. Thunder Clap + Shockwave produces slightly less, but still much more than 2.6k (closer to 3.8). Unholy and Frost DKs produce upwards of 6k TPS per target, with Frost having a large spike of 12-14k right at the beginning. The only tanks who can't produce at least 110% more threat right off the bat are Druids and Blood DKs. The other classes you can start before them and they will cause enough threat not only to equal you on threat, but to take threat from you by jumping over the threshold.

Now looking at the only boss fights it might help: General and Hodir. On Hodir the highest I've been able to find was 13k DPS. Compare this to tank threat and you'll find the only tank that struggles with this on Hodir is Warrior, however they are less than 15% behind this which means that while you would pass their threat you would be safe as long as you did not move into melee range. The other tanks pass this mark on Hodir. The same is true of Vezaxx and the median DPS is actually much lower. 7-9k on 10 man and 8-12k on 25 man. Here even good Warriors keep up, especially in 10 man. Remember, a tank only need to produce 6-7k threat on 10 man and 8-9k to hold aggro from you on those fights assuming you are not pulling that DPS immediately and stay at range. There's no reason to be in melee range on that fight and there's no way for you to pull max threat right from the start as Shadow. You would need to pull over 15k DPS on General and at least 14k on Hodir with a Warrior tank to need SA.

Are you pulling those kinds of numbers? If so, then sure take SA. Do you have a bad AOE tank? Go for it. Do you have a bad tank in general? Find a better guild already.

Oh and since you misrepresented what I said 3-4 times in your post: I never said it was worth a gem slot. I said it's worth the difference between Epic/Superior gems on 3-4 gem slots. Your position seems to be caused by misunderstandings of both how much threat tanks put out and how threat works as a whole. No, passing a tank on threat does not pull aggro. You have to pass a threat threshold. If you're both pulling consistent TPS then you can produce more TPS than a tank and sustain that without pulling threat up to a threshold of 130%. It can be dangerous on a couple fights, yes, but none of those fights involve large boosts to your DPS. Without those boosts you have no chance at beating a good tank on threat. So again, why would you be taking SA? Bad tank experiences, or poor threat understanding? Just misinformed? Why are you concerned with damage done on AOE packs instead of AOE DPS anyway? Epeen? Do you think those extra 1 seconds to start up is going to significantly speed up clear time?

If you'd actually read what I've said I already mentioned that in old content (see: Ulduar) there are a few reasons to look into SA. I know a lot of what you're saying is based on the precondition that I'm being closed minded, but you may want to look into what I mentioned earlier; Arguing to moderation. Sometimes a middle ground is acceptable, sometimes multiple solutions are equally useful. This isn't one of those cases. This is a case where the only potential gain is an extra tick or two of Mind Sear and an implausible DPS gain on two hard mode fights in old content. In both cases you lose mana returns, but as Shadow does not have mana problems anyway we can dismiss that. So I'll reiterate; If you want to respec to SA for Hodir and General because you feel unsafe then you should, but in current known content there is no other reason to do so unless you have poor tanks.

[draticus]

Worshaka is kind of right. SA will lead to more dps on trash than IST. I just dont know why he cares. IST isn't really a measurable dps gain but on bosses SA is 0 dps gain. ST/IST also gives more mana than FM. I'd go with the following build for better mana returns. Or you could take that last point out of FM and put it in SA if you really want. Mana and threat are both equally non issues.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...ONBXD66,,10623

[CaseyTheRetard]

I'm not sure what the point is of having a religious war over ST+IST vs. SA+FM: I think we all agree that ST+IST is negligibly less worthless than SA+FM. We're arguing over investing 5 talent points to get either 25% threat reduction or an extra gem's worth of spellpower. Neither choice will affect your average damage output enough to be statistically significant given the background noise of normal variation in link latency. Even ST vs. Blackout was a more interesting choice to debate.

[Srsbznss]

Worshaka is kind of right. SA will lead to more dps on trash than IST.

cause DPS on trash is where it's at! i know i constantly linky recount on AoE trash pulls so my epeen is bigger then the mages.

[Worshaka]

This is why you can't grasp what I'm saying. Why did Imp. VE come up? It's taken in IST builds. The only talent that even comes close to a DPS gain is Shadow Affinity, bringing up any other talent is silly. What you posted originally took SA and FM instead of IST.

Not it isn't... the 5 points from ST/IST were given to shadow affinity & Imp VE, the accepted cookie cutter build includes focused mind.

From tests the MP/5 value of Focused Mind is very similar to ST/IST, in which case the mp/5 value per talent point is better for Focused Mind. There was a very good argument that the mp/5 value of ST/IST scales with raid buffs, i'm not convinced it's significant enough to make the mp/5 per talent point greater. I am currently running with ST/IST instead of Focused Mind and my mana situation is extremely similar.

The value of ST/IST is that it gives 17sp which again is worth basically nothing when evaluated in terms of raid DPS which is the only DPS figure that actually means anything. I challenge you to show me how an additional 17sp makes a significant impact to a raid. It would be lucky to be worth 10 personal DPS which over a 10min fight (which are quite rare today) is worth 6000 total damage... a good raid DPS is in the vicinity of 11K per second... wow you just made a 10min encounter 0.5 seconds quicker.

Shadow affinity had particular uses in Uld for the gimmick fights, if you couldn't pull aggro on Vezax you were just plain bad. Considering the -20% melee haste tanks had a negative threat modifier and casters did 100% more damage for a vast majority of their DPS time. Shadow priests in particular due to their good DPM effeciency could keep up a 100% DPS time (non hard mode) and if you weren't pushing threat as previously stated you were just bad.

In addition due to the massive amount of trash, MS was probably cast 80% of the time in trash clearing and threat reduction is always an asset for quick clearing. Again you are probably one of the bads who think that clearing trash is irrelevant, probably in one of those guilds who spend 80% of their time dwadling through trash and not spending significant time on bosses.

Now that the current tier of content has 0 trash and there arent any dps gimmick fights there is less of a need. But to say catagorically that threat reduction is unnecssary and to simply blame tanks outrightly is ludicrous. Maybe you dont tank at all but there are some encounters where bosses hit so hard tanks have to drop their threat gear and talents in favour for pure mitigation. Again your DPS probably is very bad in that you can't get close to pulling threat... i'm not in that situation. I do decent DPS in the last heroic kill of 25man beasts where I was 2nd on DPS I had to have pallys salvation me because I no longer had shadow affinity. Im sure you'll just decide our MT is poor but you'll do so on no basis of fact and considering i've had more experience with my MT than you I think it a bit more credible when I say he is one of the best tanks on the sever. He is a highly regarded tank within our guild since the MC days and when he went missing half way through TBC to do his PHD our guild really felt his loss.

Again it's you who has the inability to think outside the square. You think your own personal circumstances are the only ones that could possibly occur and room to expand that view is non-existent. TBH I don't really care, its your loss and the inability to see more than just your own point of view is one of the main reasons why so many people in WoW are so very mediocre.

[Worshaka]

Actually Rawr values IST at 29 dps for a 10min fight with the usual raid buffs I get for my gear and configuration. 17,400 total damage... so 1.5 sec less boss fight duration... pretty useful.

IMO for the Uld content extra threat reduction was far more useful than 29dps and it wouldn't have been 29dps for the Uld content due to me having inferior gear and the fact that twisted faith was only 10% of spirit to sp conversion. That fact alone would have halved the dps effect.

[harky]

Not it isn't... the 5 points from ST/IST were given to shadow affinity & Imp VE, the accepted cookie cutter build includes focused mind.

Accepted by whom? The 'accepted cookie cutter' is just a core 50 talents in Shadow, with the standard 13 in Disc, which looks like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#bVcbhZZGxfVRcz0fqczA:qha. That's every talent that directly increases DPS in Shadow. You could technically raid as 13/0/50. If you then take the best survivability and utility talents it looks like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#bVcbh...RfzbfqfzAo:qha. The 'standard' 13/0/57 +1 spec. The cookie cutter can include Focused Mind though, you're right. One point in it to be exact. It's not a core part of the build though in the least. Why are you bringing up older patches anyway? This was obviously in regards to current raiding. It doesn't matter if it's Ulduar, or not, live is 3.2.2, not 3.2.

The rest of your rant is just a random personal attack. I could care less. See my previous post for my opinion on the use of SA. Other classes produce more AOE threat than you would be without SA and aren't pulling aggro. Other classes are putting out more threat than Shadow on Vezax when looking at their threat ratio and DPS and aren't pulling aggro. TL;DR: If you have bad tanks take SA, otherwise it's useless except on two gimmick fights.

[Deyus]

The issue surrounding the 'accepted cookie cutter build' is that IST had a significant change to it's mechanics in 3.2. The pre and post 3.2 'cookie cutter' builds really shouldn't look the same.

Worshaka is correct that IST was not worth the investment for most priests, and was very much optional pre 3.2. At that time it was worth about 6 spell power and significantly less regen than 3/3 Focused Mind. Nearly all priests had this spec as the basis for their build. The five unused points could either be put into SA/IVE or ST/IST. There were arguments for each course of action at that time. Personally I chose to use the ST/IST build as our guild had an exceptional pally main tank (huge threat) and very strong healers. Also, I found the additional mana from IST to be useful in many encounters (one could even argue Spirit Tap increased my uptime while clearing trash more than Shadow Affinity would have due to almost never having to stop and drink! ). Typical IST uptime pre 3.2 was around 15-25%.

Whichever course you found most effective at that time is now fairly irrelevant as the worth of IST changed drastically once MF crits were given a 50% chance to proc it in patch 3.2. At this point IST started providing greater regen than Focused Mind in raid situations as the uptime improved to about 65%. Post 3.2, ST/IST should be considered part of a solid shadow priest raiding build. There are a few different approaches that can be used to pick these points up, but dropping Focused Mind is normally a good start. Typically this spec is a good choice which allows you to pick up imp VE as a utility talent.


@ Worshaka: 17,000 damage over the course of a fight may not seem like much, but on many of the hard mode fights (and especially first kills for a guild) that small bit of damage multiplied across the raid can make the difference between success and coming back to continue attempts next week. Three in particular stand out to me. On our first firefighter kill we snuck in about 3 sec under the enrage timer, obviously we were cutting it close and seemingly minor amounts of damage done made the difference! Algalon is another good example from that tier of content. A final case is Anub'arak in 25 man hard mode. On our best attempt this past Thursday we had him to 200,000 HP and hit the enrage timer. Had all 16 dps in the raid managed to put out an extra ~15,000 damage over the course of the fight we would have had a top 300 world kill.