Possible hidden swd change.

[Lostprophet]

but it was fun to have sw:d back into priority list... and sw;d is no lifetab ffs

[Kelesti]

Masochism restores more mana than Dispersion. And at 85, all that beautiful crit will be gone. Kiss your Shadowfiend uptime goodbye as your crit goes to hell and doesn't come back.

[Devanox]

Your telling people to be happy about a useless mechanic on a useless skill reliant on a useless tallent? then telling us to move on to the more pressing matter of "mastery" that wont really come into play until 85 anyway?

Last i checked, mastery is in game right now at 80, and how is it not in play when your main burst/mana replenishment buff provider is balanced around said mastery?

Keep on breaking your keyboard because now you have to account for the stupidity that just came out of your brain with that statement on mastery.

[Annesh]

I dont know what game you are playing. But i dont need shadow word death for mana regen in the slightest bit. Having a super fast shadow fiend handles everything i could ever want for that department.

Your telling people to be happy about a useless mechanic on a useless skill reliant on a useless tallent? then telling us to move on to the more pressing matter of "mastery" that wont really come into play until 85 anyway?

I dont have the macro for facepalm.. but if i did i would have just broken my keyboard using it in reference to what you have just said.

Thank you for demonstrating your ignorance to the current state of the shadowpriest in cataclysm. Saves me the trouble of pointing it out.

[Evaangelina]

Masochism restores more mana than Dispersion. And at 85, all that beautiful crit will be gone. Kiss your Shadowfiend uptime goodbye as your crit goes to hell and doesn't come back.

Now correct me if im wrong. but if memory serves me dispersion restores 6% mana every one second for 6 seconds.

Now thats 36% total mana restored over six seconds.

Masochism restores 8% of your total mana per cast of shadow word death. lets assume you are mid fight and you need mana so you hit shadow word death. Mid fight it would take you 4 shadow word deaths and nearly 40 seconds to restore just 32% of your total mana as opposed to dispersions 36% in six seconds.

Even with spamming swd as much as you can during the 20% phase you will still spend more time getting mana back than what dispersion can provide in six seconds (obviously a huge dps boost though)

So to say that masochism restores more mana than dispersion.. well over the course of an entire fight with many many shadow word death casts wasting globals yes it would. but if we put it in a time frame of any kind it falls short.

Not to mention shadow will not have anything close to that much of a need for mana. Hell for most current fights and nearly all fights seen on the beta you can get buy with simply a dispersion and a fiend.

So im sorry but justifying that shadow word deathing is a good mana return is just silly. HOWEVER, it is a great mana return when the target is below 20% health as its a damage boost and some free mana.

But lets be honest if you have that kinda mana issues now OR in caty you are doing some things wrong. and yes i know mana is much more of an issue in caty. but honestly its not that bad and is completely managable with a dispersion and a shadowfiend.

Not to mention most raid encounters have oprotunities where you are forced to stop dpsing for a few seconds simply because of mechanics of the fight. for example when you are frozen on sindy or when lich king is in a transfer phase. while running out to the edge you have a good 5 seconds freetime.

[Kelesti]

I agree that there are downtimes that do contribute to mana longevity (though less now than before, thanks to Meditation disappearing).

And you are accurate in saying that in the middle of a fight, it takes "longer" to restore that missing mana chunk through Death than it does through six seconds of Dispersion. But that is only a short timeframe. Over actual encounter length, Dispersion gives you six seconds every 2 minutes of zero DPS.

That six seconds restores 36% mana. Masochism, however, would have 5 Shadow Word Deaths take up a "similar" timeframe, except spread out. 5 Shadow Word: Deaths doing damage and restoring 40% of your mana, over the course of one minute, meaning your bar is stable and overall you are contributing more damage done.

Glyphing Dispersion may increase the mana return, but it's still six seconds of zero DPS, when bringing Death into the fold is six seconds of "less than normal" DPS, higher mana returned, and overall more damage done (the only real DPS is total damage/encounter length, not what Recount tells you).

Sure, it means you start watching a little earlier. But being able to delay Dispersion is a damage increase, no matter how you look at it.

[Annesh]

Kelesti is correct.

I'd also like to point out that Evaangelina doesn't seem to know that in cata:

4t10 is going away
crit levels will no longer be absurd
fiend will only provide 3% total mana per hit
etc etc etc

I can see it being standard to use SWD on cooldown from start to finish, using it as kind of a lifetap-that-does-a-little-damage.

Warlocks have to spend the odd GCD lifetapping, after all.

Honestly, once they fix DPS numbers, mastery scaling, apparitions, spike design, and probably make Archangel a better DPS cooldown, and maybe a few other minor things I'm forgetting, I think Shadow will be fine.

[Supernex]

Are you guys honestly surprised that they'd revert such an awesome change? I mean come on, it's blizzard. IT'S WHAT THEY DO! Make something awesome so it draws people back and then nerf it. Doesn't matter if it's as small as a single spell or as large as something like Path of the Titans. They've been doing this dance for 6 years.

They didn't just revert it, but neutered it. It now hits/crits for about HALF of what it did pre-patch. Also, something to note, as per the talent Mind Melt, SWD is only supposed to hit 30% harder during the execute phase, (meaning that SWD is supposed to hit fairly hard normally as well!), but as it sits now, to do the damage it does now means that Mind Melt should read as follows:

"Increases the damage done by your Shadow Word: Death by 400% on targets at or below 25% (20%??) health."

(Otherwise our SWD would only be hitting for about 30% more than 1800-ish during execute phase which would only be about 2300, lol...)

[Hresna]

the problem i`m seeing is that blizz put in a great use for sw:d and gave us a chance to mix up our rotation, get mana back from masochism and have a useful spell to use when you're stuck in that little haste cap for one more gcd and mindflay is not worth the one tick. As it stands, it seems that the interesting mechanic they gaves us is now pretty much useless unless you are going to take a dps hit for the mana return (if you absolutly need it) when i found it was a very smooth way of helping keep our mana in check and changing our playstyle.

I never got a chance to do the spamming sw:d before the 6 second cd on the glyph, but even then, sub-execute range (at least in my raids) are burnt extremely fast... so i get two swd in and then use w/e filler till the boss is dead. I`m just diapointed that sw:d was made interesting again for anything that wasn't in execute range and then taken away and reverted/nerfed to something only usable 2-4 times at best on a boss fight where mobility is ont an issue and you can min/max your dps around using the swd gcd.