Surviving 4.0 as Shadow

[Jigawatts]

This is a quick FAQ for Shadow priests in order to raid as PVE at 80 until Cataclysm is released. A lot of information is available all throughout MMO-Champion, Shadowpriest.com and elitistjerks, but it is spread out and is hard to follow. This is not meant to be the bible for shadow or the be all end all, but a quick easy guide to get started.

Abbreviations:
VT ~ Vampiric Touch
VE ~ Vampiric Embrace
MB ~ Mind Blast
MF ~ Mind Flay
DP ~ Devouring Plague
SW:P ~ Shadow Word: Pain
SW: D ~ Shadow Word: Death
SF ~ Shadowfiend

Talents:
With Masochism
Silence and Psychic Horror
I have included both builds at level 80 with Masochism (which gives us 10% mana back when we use SW: D, or take 10% of our health as damage) and the Silence and Psychic Horror build for added fun factor. I find at level 80 in ICC gear masoshism is not really needed to keep your mana up. However there are some that love it and have mana issues. You will notice that there are two "free" points in the masochism build, feel free to place those where you would like. Otherwise all the rest of the talents are pretty much must haves in order to maximize your DPS.

Glyphs:
So there is something new about glyphs now. We have three tiers of glyphs (Prime, Major, and Minor) with three glyph slots for each, a total of nine glyphs can be active at one time. Once you learn a glyph you will not ever have to relearn it even when changing glyphs around. Instead you will need vanishing powder in order to change out learned glyphs. Prime Glyphs are the DPS increasing glyphs and the only mandatory glyphs are placed here. For maximizing your DPS the best glyphs to use in Prime Slots are MF, SW:P, and SW: D. Your Major and Minor glyphs are situational and up to the individual.

Stats:
There have been some changes here. Most of our spellpower now comes from Intellect on a 1 to 1 basis (except for our first 10 intellect). We do get spellpower through enchants and our weapons, however most everything else comes from Intellect. Hit has also changed. We no longer have misery, nor any other way to obtain hit except from gear (unless you are a Draenei and you get 1% extra hit, but that is only the Draenei now and not the party). You now must reach 17% hit (446 hit rating, 420 for Draenei). The good news is we can obtain hit from spirit on our gear (through Twisted Faith) as well as hit rating.

Another change is how haste now effects our DOTs. Haste lowers the duration of the DOT (by decreasing the time inbetween ticks) until it gets to a certain break point and then it goes back to full duration with an added tick. There was some talk of MF being changed to act like a DOT, as of 4.0.1 it does not, the channeled time is just reduced by haste no added ticks. Here is a breakdown of the haste DOT break points with Darkness (3% haste) and Mind Quickening (5% haste):

At 0 haste rating you have 9 ticks of DP
At 6 haste rating you have 7 ticks of SWP
At 57 haste rating you have 6 ticks of VT

At 322 haste rating you have 10 ticks of DP
At 511 haste rating you have 8 ticks of SWP
At 663 haste rating you have 7 ticks of VT
At 701 haste rating you have 11 ticks of DP

At 1016 haste rating you have 9 ticks of SWP
At 1080 haste rating you have 12 ticks of DP
At 1269 haste rating you have 8 ticks of VT, and are GCD capped

At 1459 haste rating you have 13 ticks of DP
At 1522 haste rating you have 10 ticks of SWP

At 1838 haste rating you have 14 ticks of DP
At 1876 haste rating you have 9 ticks of VT

You gain 1 SWP tick every 505 haste, with the first starting at 6 haste
You gain 1 VT tick every 606 haste, with the first starting at 57 haste
You gain 1 DP tick every 379 haste, with the first starting at 322 haste

Mastery has been added to the game and now has been updated to be a better stat if not great for shadow priests. We have a new ability that is called Shadow Orb, this ability stacks up to three times and each orb increases MB or MS by 10%. Also after you MB or MS you increase your periodic damage by 10% (this is a straight 10% and does not increase with the amount of orbs you have). Our mastery is Shadow Orb Power, which increases the damage done by your Shadow Orbs. Each point of Mastery increases damage by an additional 1.3% (for both the stacks of MB/MS and the periodic damage).


As a stat priority with the above information factored in this is what I currently go for at level 80:
Hit/Spirit until capped > Intellect/Spell Power > Haste until soft cap of 1269 > Crit > Mastery (even with the changes mastery comes out slightly behind crit at level 80. Note I have a soft cap of haste at 1269 after that haste is still beneficial, just less so and crit then becomes better than haste (unless you can reach the higher haste ratings plateaus and good for you if you can).

Reforging:
This is a new ability added to the game in 4.0.1. You can go to a reforger in any capital and change 40% of any secondary stat (for us the important ones are hit, spirit, haste, crit, and mastery) into another secondary stat that is not on the item. You will want to take the above information about stats into consideration when reforging. Reforge to spirit if you need hit, than go for haste until you reach the soft cap (or if you can reach one of the other plateaus then go for it) after that reforge to crit. Mastery is now much closer to crit and most models have it slightly behind crit, however I would suggest doing some testing on your own and seeing where your at.

Gemming:
You will want to go for more intellect/spell power wherever possible. You should put Brilliant Cardinal Rubies in all red slots; Reckless Ametrine’s in yellow (if socket bonus is 5 SP or more, which most are), Potent Ametrine, if you have reached the haste soft cap; Purified Dreadstones in blue if you need the hit, otherwise go for Brilliant Cardinal Rubies in blue as well. Remember to have enough blue gems in order to activate your meta socket.

Rotation:
We still have a priority system rather than a rigid rotation, however there are a few changes. DOTs now refresh with the next tick that was going to happen than goes to full duration. What does this mean to you? Well now we want to refresh the DOT just before it falls off rather than timing for when it falls off. You should refresh your DOT with 1 sec or so left on the DOT in order to try and keep 100% up time on all DOTs. SW:P now refreshes at whatever your stats are at the moment you refresh it with MF, it no longer carries stats the entire time. However SW:P now also benefits from haste.

With the change to MB and Shadow Orbs there has been a lot of discussion as to whether to wait to cast MB until 3 orbs are up or to cast it on CD. I prefer to cast it on CD in order to not lose orbs (you some times get that third orb while casting MB). However do your homework and test and see what works best for you.

Shadow Word: Death received a major buff than a nerf but in any event it has been added back to our rotation. You will want to use SW: D when the boss or target is below 25% health every chance you get. With the glyph you can spam it twice in a row before it goes on a short CD. Make sure to spam it then wait for the CD then spam it again.

Another small change is with Sin and Punishment MF crits take 10 secs off the CD of SF. With this change you will want to cast SF at the start of the fight (after applying DOTs) and then bring him (or her the jury is out on what gender it is) up everytime the CD is up.

Our Priority should go something like this:
Above 25% health
Vampiric Touch
Shadow Word: Pain
Devouring Plague
Shadowfiend when off CD
Mind Blast
Mind Flay

Below 25% health
Vampiric Touch
Shadow Word: Pain
Devouring Plague
Shadow Word: Death
Shadowfiend when off CD
Mind Blast
Mind Flay

What we bring:
We bring a few buffs to the raid as well. As before we bring Fortitude (yay no candles needed), and Shadow Protection, both brought by all priests. We also bring 5% spell haste through Mind Quickening to the raid as well as replenishment. Blizzard has made a lot of effort to make sure multiple classes bring buffs so you will not have to look for just one class/spec to get a buff, so be aware when one of your buffs are being over ridden by another classes buff (such as a warlocks blood pact from their imp over rides fortitude now) . Also we have lost Divine Spirit, and as mentioned before no longer provide Misery.

Addons:
I just briefly wanted to go over some addons that are beneficial to us shadow types. A DOT tracker is a must have Dotime, Classtimer, EventHorizon_Continued and ForteXorcist are all recommended, try them out and see what works best for you. A cast bar addon that factors in latency and shows you ticks of MF and such is great, I really like Quartz. Needtoknow is another great addon as well as Powerauras.

Hopefully this will help you get started as a shadow priest, I apologize about the length sometimes I can get a bit long winded. If you have any information that I miss or is just dead wrong please let me know or add it to the thread. As changes happen I will try to include them.

---------- Post added 2010-10-30 at 11:14 AM ----------

As an added note I do know I miss spelled the title and feel retarded for doing so. Not sure if I can change it, sorry about that.

[Deralte]

The haste part is really useful, thanks.

[harky]

Might want to include in the stat description that at the Haste values of 57-322, 701-1,016 and 1,269-1,459 that Crit is better than Haste, not just at the soft cap of 1,269. If you're over the previous value, but under the next value it's a DPS gain to reforge Haste to Crit, but it's actually worth using +20 Haste gems if you can reach the next good value.

Also missing something major that it needs; A sticky tag.
Not anymore. -- Kel

[Aiurwyn]

In the add-ons part MFclip is a good DoTimer + cast bar. It doesn't use a whole lot mem and provides the functionality of what would otherwise take a couple add-ons

[Brusalk]

EventHorizon_Continued is a great dot timer addon for cooldowns and dot durations on a single target. I like using Docs Nameplates as an actual dot timer for multiple targets (Puts the durations of your dots on all the nameplates, assuming you have dots on them of course)

[Kelesti]

MFClip is a part of Quartz. Which is on its own a great cast bar and DoT monitor.

MFClip itself isn't a great option, because it encourages you to screw up your gameplay for something that only works for people in the ~50-70 ping range, or on a spreadsheet.

[Deleted]

Wait...why are you mentioning haste for extra ticks everywhere ? As far as I know if you have for example enough haste for 7.5 ticks of a dot, it will do 7 ticks at regular times influenced by haste, and another tick that happens twice as fast and hits for half damage. Is this not true, in which case it really doesn't matter when u get full extra ticks, and 20% haste means 20% extra damage for your dots while 21% haste means 21% extra damage etc ?

[Aiurwyn]

MFClip is a part of Quartz. Which is on its own a great cast bar and DoT monitor.

MFClip itself isn't a great option, because it encourages you to screw up your gameplay for something that only works for people in the ~50-70 ping range, or on a spreadsheet.

When I respecced shadow I didn't have a whole lot of time to set-up anything and it was there and worked well and I noticed a HUGE difference in my DoT uptime. How exactly does it screw up gameplay? I

[Jigawatts]

Wait...why are you mentioning haste for extra ticks everywhere ? As far as I know if you have for example enough haste for 7.5 ticks of a dot, it will do 7 ticks at regular times influenced by haste, and another tick that happens twice as fast and hits for half damage. Is this not true, in which case it really doesn't matter when u get full extra ticks, and 20% haste means 20% extra damage for your dots while 21% haste means 21% extra damage etc ?

From what I can tell haste only gives you another tick at certain values. If I am wrong please show me the spreadsheet or something that I am missing where you get what you are describing.

[harky]

That is completely wrong, Ovideozn. The important part is that when you are not getting a new tick the duration of the DoT is shortening. This means you must recast the DoT more often. So while your DPS from that DoT will increase linearly you will actually lose DPS from other parts of your rotation, so the DPS gain is greatly diminished. When you get a new tick the DoT is then lengthened, but the ticks per second stay the same. This means the damage per cast is greatly increased, while also having to refresh the DoT less often. And no, you do not get 'half ticks'. What happens is haste reduces the duration of the DoT until it is more than 1/2 the tick duration beneath the base cast time. As soon as this happens the DoT's duration is extended instead of being shortened.

For example at the GCD cap you get 8 ticks over 16 seconds on a 15 second DoT, while at .01% under it you would instead get 7 ticks over 14 seconds. It's very important to get those extra ticks.

[Jigawatts]

Might want to include in the stat description that at the Haste values of 57-322, 701-1,016 and 1,269-1,459 that Crit is better than Haste, not just at the soft cap of 1,269. If you're over the previous value, but under the next value it's a DPS gain to reforge Haste to Crit, but it's actually worth using +20 Haste gems if you can reach the next good value.

Also missing something major that it needs; A sticky tag.
Not anymore. -- Kel

You must also remember that below 1269 any haste you get is still reducing the cast time of MB, getting you to the GCD cap and it still effects MF the way it did before. I have not done the napkin math yet to test whether crit is better below 1269 in the "in between" plateaus, if anyone has anything on this please let me know.

[Deleted]

From what I can tell haste only gives you another tick at certain values. If I am wrong please show me the spreadsheet or something that I am missing where you get what you are describing.

Ok I just tested on one of my alts and this is how it works: If you have enough haste to get another full tick, you will get that extra tick in the same duration.
If however you have enough haste for another half of a tick, you will not get the damage from that tick from the dot, but the dot will be with half a tick shorter. Basically unless you have a perfect ammount of haste, you will waste a bit more GCDs and thus also mana during a fight, but that's probably unavoidable with priests having so many dots
The last thing I'd like to know however is how are you able to get another full dot for one of your dots with just 6 haste rating.

edit: Harky above explained it in more detail

[Jigawatts]

Ok I just tested on one of my alts and this is how it works: If you have enough haste to get another full tick, you will get that extra tick in the same duration.
If however you have enough haste for another half of a tick, you will not get the damage from that tick from the dot, but the dot will be with half a tick shorter. Basically unless you have a perfect ammount of haste, you will waste a bit more GCDs and thus also mana during a fight, but that's probably unavoidable with priests having so many dots
The last thing I'd like to know however is how are you able to get another full dot for one of your dots with just 6 haste rating.

This is probably due to the 3% and 5% haste that shadow has from talents. I have not done the work on where the break points are without the buffs.

[harky]

With no buffs it's like 204 haste for DP, 274 for SW:P and 328 for VT. The GCD cap becomes 1,640. Kind of moot for Shadow though. Important to Locks mostly, though they go with 1406 (5% buff only). Just be glad you don't have to deal with Bane of Agony, which ticks every 2 seconds instead of 3 and lasts 28 seconds. 21 ticks at GCD cap? Yeesh.

[Kelesti]

When I respecced shadow I didn't have a whole lot of time to set-up anything and it was there and worked well and I noticed a HUGE difference in my DoT uptime. How exactly does it screw up gameplay? I

That's the advantage of Quartz.

MFClip, on the other hand, is nothing more than an addon to Quartz, that puts in a little red bar for when it's "okay" to clip Mind Flay. This is very inaccurate, as it goes off your latency from the start of the cast, not able to update for "real time latency" when the intended clip is supposed to take place.

To answer the question: MFClip promotes clipping Mind Flay, which for at least 96% of players turns out to be a DPS loss, no matter what it looks like on the spreadsheet. Quartz in and of itself is fantastic, though.

[krysak]

I borrowed a Spriest from a friend of mine and wanted some advice.

First of all let me just say that i loved this rotation really enjoyed the class , probably ill lvl a Spriest on cata.

Ok First question , gear.

I focused all on haste meaning that i reforged the exceeded hit/spirit to haste and even crit in some cases to haste.

Im sitting on 1129 haste now, was that correct or should i have focused more on crit?

My crit rating is 771 atm.


Second question , rotation.

This is my rotation> VT-->DP-->SW:P , spam mind flay until 3 SHadow orbs and mind blast to use them , refreshing dots when needed. At 25% use SW anytime its off CD. Also in a long fight use SW to recover mana when needed.

IS it correct?


Last Question , Trinkets.


My friend was using these ones

Muradin's spyglass(normal not H)
Abyssal Rune


I wonder if Talisman of Resurgence(128 int) would be better then abyssal. or even Nevermelting Ice Crystal(int plus crit on use)


Thx in advance!

[Aiurwyn]

I borrowed a Spriest from a friend of mine and wanted some advice.

First of all let me just say that i loved this rotation really enjoyed the class , probably ill lvl a Spriest on cata.

Ok First question , gear.

I focused all on haste meaning that i reforged the exceeded hit/spirit to haste and even crit in some cases to haste.

Im sitting on 1129 haste now, was that correct or should i have focused more on crit?

My crit rating is 771 atm.


Second question , rotation.

This is my rotation> VT-->DP-->SW:P , spam mind flay until 3 SHadow orbs and mind blast to use them , refreshing dots when needed. At 25% use SW anytime its off CD. Also in a long fight use SW to recover mana when needed.

IS it correct?


Last Question , Trinkets.


My friend was using these ones

Muradin's spyglass(normal not H)
Abyssal Rune


I wonder if Talisman of Resurgence(128 int) would be better then abyssal. or even Nevermelting Ice Crystal(int plus crit on use)


Thx in advance!

Not to be rude but Jigawatts specificaly went over both of those answers in the original post. MB on CD and Int>Haste (Generally speaking)

[Jigawatts]

What was said above. About trinkets I have not done the work on all the trinkets, Blackmorgin had some work done on his and I will put it here for you.

Trinkets (approx. PP estimates):
277 PotNL...283.11
277 DFO...262.34
284 CTS...258.01
264 PotNL...250.48
264 Muradin's Spyglass...237.16
264 DFO...232.18
271 CTS...227.89
251 Muradin's Spyglass...210.38
264 Talisman of resurgence...201.16
200 Greatness (Int)...199
277 Althor's Abacus...180
264 Althor's Abacus...153
258 Reign of the Dead/Unliving... 143+Proc (only procs from SWD, MB, Imp DP)
245 Reign of the Dead/Unliving... 128+Proc (only procs from SWD, MB, Imp DP)
(Note these are all based on the PP numbers on Simcraft's last test run, and the current PP values)

Abyssal Rune is not on there but I am willing to bet Talisman of Resurgence is better than Rune.

---------- Post added 2010-11-03 at 02:19 PM ----------

•Mastery: Shadow Orb has been renamed to Mastery: Shadow Orb Power - Increases the damage done by your Shadow Orbs. Each point of Mastery increases damage by an additional 1.25%
•Shadow Orbs *New* - You have a 10% chance for your Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Flay spells to grant you a Shadow Orb each time they deal damage. Casting your Mind Blast or Mind Spike spell consumes all Shadow Orbs, increasing damage of that spell by 0% per Shadow Orb, and granting 0% increased damage on your periodic Shadow spells for until cancelled. You can have up to a maximum of 3 orbs.

Obviously they haven't implemented the rate at which it will increase our damage, however this looks like mastery might become appealing to shadow. That is great news considering mastery is on like everything in cata. If it gets implemented in 4.0.3 or before cata comes out I will be sure to update guide.

[Spning]

Tyvm for this post. I hasn't played my Spriest very much since patch.This post helped a ton.

[Deleted]

Ok, I'd like to know how exactly are the "additional DoT tick breakdown points" important at all. With new dot mechanics you refresh them right before they run out, instead of right after, anyway so whether the DoT would have additional tick if it were to run the whole duration or not is completely irrelevant. DP ticks with nearly exactly the same speed whether you have 1459 or 1458 rating after all - so the DPS is unaffected by the breakdown.