Shadow Priest: New Mastery

[Thrayne]

•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.


They implemented a new way our mastery works, it will effect all of our spells and personally I believe it was much needed and good simple fix to a broken synergy.

It now gives a bit of ramp time but with a functional mastery I can't complain. It has a bit of synergy with Evangalism + Dark Archangel in choice between high consistant damage via DoTs and hard quick damage with DAA + 3 orb MB.

They have yet to release %s of damage increase per orb for MB/MS and DoTs but I believe there is enough information to discuss the new mechanic and its possibility as a viable stat.

[Mem]

"and granting 0% increased damage on your periodic Shadow spells for until cancelled"

that's the part that confuses me. Does that phrasing mean until the orbs are consumed or until we click off of a new buff that will grant us that +periodic dmg?

[Thrayne]

From how I interpreted it, I take it to increase your DoT damage until you Mindblast.

[Kaesebrezen]

How i interpret the whole thing:


1) Shadow Orbs is gained for speccing Shadow at level 10 and has a Base Value
2) The Mastery increases those base values further.
3) Casting Mindblast/Mindspikes gives two Bonuses.
3-a) Increases the of MB/MSp based on number of active orbs, up to 3.
3-b) After a Mindblast cast, regardless of Orbs, you gain a buff to your DoT damage for X seconds.
If 3 is wrong.
4) The MB/Msp Bonus is as now and the DoT Bonus is completely passive.

[Thrayne]

How i interpret the whole thing:


1) Shadow Orbs is gained for speccing Shadow at level 10 and has a Base Value
2) The Mastery increases those base values further.
3) Casting Mindblast/Mindspikes gives two Bonuses.
3-a) Increases the of MB/MSp based on number of active orbs, up to 3.
3-b) After a Mindblast cast, regardless of Orbs, you gain a buff to your DoT damage for X seconds.
If 3 is wrong.
4) The MB/Msp Bonus is as now and the DoT Bonus is completely passive.

Completely passive? or Passive with Shadow Orbs?

Which scenario would you think would be better for the spec?

[Aiurwyn]

The wording is pretty confusing. It seems like it says consuming the orbs increases your DoT damage until they are canceled, and that is why they didn't but a "X seconds" since out DoTs are different lengths and they will change given our haste

[Kaesebrezen]

Which scenario would you think would be better for the spec?

I'd actually like passive with the bonus active all the time better.
If it's a temporary buff tied to casting MB, it's more like shadowweaving which i don't want have 2 types of.

Edit:
http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/95799/empowered-shadow/

After consuming a Shadow Orb, for 15 sec your periodic shadow damage spells deal increased damage.

It's a 15 sec buff after consuming a Orb with the base value of 20%.

[Alenoria]

sounds to me..... each shadow orb you get increases your mindblast/mindspike a %, as well as your shadow damage. you cast mindblast/mindspike you lose your orbs.... thus canceling your buff to shadow damage.

[Deleted]

Well, at least now it affects more then only one spell. Better then nothing.

[Kaesebrezen]

sounds to me..... each shadow orb you get increases your mindblast/mindspike a %, as well as your shadow damage. you cast mindblast/mindspike you lose your orbs.... thus canceling your buff to shadow damage.

Casting MB with any number of Orbs active (1-3) increases the MB damage by number of Orbs and gives a damage buff to your dots for 15 sec with 20%.

[Dunee]

what confuses me atm is if the dmg buff to dots is scaling with 1/2/3 orbs or consistent so same dmg if we have 1/2/3 orbs.. if the first I reckon we will only cast MB at 3stacks (or if our buff is about to run out)

I would like that tbh makes the rotation a bit more fun..

[Deleted]

I really hope this new interresting mastery stat will in general have a higher dps value than crit will have. Other than reducing the cooldown of shadow fiend, crit is a relatively boring stat (was even worse pre 4.01). In comparison this new mastery stat will add even more dynamic to the 'rotaion' (priority w/e), since it would make the spec proc based, and force some sort of synchronization with the archangel mechanic (which I can't wait for either come level 85).

[Kelesti]

Placeholder:

"Until Cancelled" has been tossed around beta and PTR at least 100 times.

It's always a placeholder, while they figure out a decent duration. It'd suck for them to say "15 seconds" and then nerf it down to 8. The entire community would be up in arms. But if it's completely vague, and then revealed to be something like 8, everyone's like "Oh. Okay" and the rage is non existant.

"Until cancelled" is nothing more than a placeholder.

[Kaesebrezen]

Placeholder:

And again read the tooltip i posted before:
http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/95799/empowered-shadow/

It is 15 seconds for 20% baseline value. It's just that either the tools cannot read it or that the tooltip is not properly linked.
But it currently has a value which is 15 seconds, supposed to be changed in balancing process.
But i'd say the damage boost is the value that will get changed, not the duration.

It was the same back then with T8 bonus, the set did have "for until cancelled", while the spell itself did have the actual duration already.
Gc even did a post on that back than with the correct values (which were the ones from the buff tooltip)

Edit - active on Beta:

- The DoT Buff gets active on a Mindblast/Mindspike cast while at least one Orb is active. More Orbs don't stack a better buff
- The DoT Buff has a 15 sec duration
- One point of mastery increases both values by 1.3%.

[Mindfreakz]

Sweet, about time our mastery gets upgraded to more then just MB. :P

[Omnus]

Definitely an improvement. Hard to say how much.

[Abandon]

I'm glad to see that they managed to keep it more interesting than a simple % increase to periodic damage, but that it looks like it is going to be attractive for more than one of our spells.

[Kelesti]

Sorry about that, I was on the train when I made that post, and I have a harder time validating people's links through the piece of garbage that is my phone, so I tend not to.

Depending on the math of this, it may not be worth it to cast a Mind Blast below 2 orbs, now at a nerfed spawn rate of 10%. Hmmm... A mastery that can potentially change how you play the game instead of just higher numbers? Yes please.

[Simca]

Placeholder:

"Until Cancelled" has been tossed around beta and PTR at least 100 times.

It's always a placeholder, while they figure out a decent duration. It'd suck for them to say "15 seconds" and then nerf it down to 8. The entire community would be up in arms. But if it's completely vague, and then revealed to be something like 8, everyone's like "Oh. Okay" and the rage is non existant.

"Until cancelled" is nothing more than a placeholder.

This is usually the case, but it also occurs when Boub's datamining tools aren't lining up the spell values with the talents properly.

You have to cross-reference two different DBC files together to get the spell values into the talent tooltips (because Blizzard likes to be absurdly confusing), and he usually does it perfectly (WTB his tools, seriously), but this seems like an error.

[Kaesebrezen]

Depending on the math of this, it may not be worth it to cast a Mind Blast below 2 orbs, now at a nerfed spawn rate of 10%. Hmmm... A mastery that can potentially change how you play the game instead of just higher numbers? Yes please.

The Mastery always had the 10% base spawnrate. Harnessed Shadow put it at 18%.

What i just noticed is, mastery now is a passive for shadow at level 10. Yet it gives a incredible 0(zero)% increase until level 80.
Seems like the base value has yet to be decided.