Is Mind Sear useless now?

[notsoholy]

Ok the purpose of this thread was to find out what your guys opinions are on this spell now that it has gotten nerfed.

I was raiding the other night in ICC where there's a group of mobs such as the gauntlet before Sindy.. and I was starting to realize that just running around throwing SW:P on every possible target, with a few VT and some Mind Flays actually did more dps than I would have gotten from AOEing.

Before the patch Mind Sear would have definitely been the best choice because it was easy to get ~20K dps with it. Now when I Mind Sear I get around ~11-12K.

I was getting around ~20-22K doing what I described above, running around too to create massive trails of shadow apparitions, and mind flaying every once in a while to reduce my cooldown on Shadowfiend since this strat will eat a chunk of your mana.

The only time now I can think of that mind sear would come in handy is while killing the Core Hounds in MC. So it's coming off my action bars for now.

What are you guys opinions on this AoE now and is anyone actually using it?

[Flamewar]

Mind Sear isnt useless, but you will use it less often, that is for sure..

[Deleted]

Yes it's useless.


Ony for example, whilst a joke of a raid makes a good case study.

I do less DPS AoEing the whelps than I do just staying on ony.
I'm fairly sure that's not how it should be.

[notsoholy]

Yes it's useless.


Ony for example, whilst a joke of a raid makes a good case study.

I do less DPS AoEing the whelps than I do just staying on ony.
I'm fairly sure that's not how it should be.

I agree with you. It's not the way it SHOULD be, but I believe Blizzard is trying to change it so AoE doesn't increase your damage, which pretty much destroys the purpose of it IMO unless you want everything to die at the same exact time.

[Deleted]

I agree mindsear was a little too powerful and was often the 'go to' ability for anything that wasn't a single target nuke boss.
however i think mindsear still needs to be useful sometimes, either on very large trash packs (it's just trash after all right?) or on small groups of say 3/4/5 mobs in a sort of 'cleave'. the latter would be fairly simple to implement with a 'does x amount of damage shared between targets'

[Glatiz]

read before you post. How much AoE will you be doing in Cata compared to WotLK? They are trying to make it so you AoE maybe twice or so on an entire raid, so its not going to be used alot. And considering that priest already had a crappy AoE, i think blizzard did a good job on ours just because it makes us focus targets now. If your wanting to AoE, use holy nova as it does more dmg and also heals which isn't bad. 2 for 1

[lammypie]

with a bit of tuning and the scalling at 85 MS will be a decent spell for the right situation. Little point in evaluating its dps at 80. Everybody will be doing less aoe in cata, which is good imo.

[Xexer]

I prefer SW:P and Devouring Plague while running around to proc shadowy apparitions and using SW: D when applicable. Seems to do the trick quite nicely while still allowing for crowd control.

[notsoholy]

read before you post. How much AoE will you be doing in Cata compared to WotLK? They are trying to make it so you AoE maybe twice or so on an entire raid, so its not going to be used alot. And considering that priest already had a crappy AoE, i think blizzard did a good job on ours just because it makes us focus targets now. If your wanting to AoE, use holy nova as it does more dmg and also heals which isn't bad. 2 for 1

Actually I have been reading a lot. Like I said above the purpose of this thread was to see if anyone was actually still using this spell since it seems that throwing up DoTs does more dmg now. I'd much rather do that than AoE if it means my numbers are going to be bigger which results in the mobs dying quicker.

[harky]

Warlocks are in a similar situation where it's better to DoT everything and only AOE once everything has a DoT on it. Except Demo... which is hilariously broken on AOE.

Blizz over-nerfed a lot of AOE abilities and the result is that on things which should be AOE'd... it's better not to AOE. That's why some classes stand out a lot on 'AOE' right now. Survival Hunters are the really big one. Imp SrS and SrS are their main source of AOE and these are all single-target abilities. So it simply gives them a 1 GCD cast with an infinite DPS potential. Shadowflame has a long cooldown, but behaves similarly. A single cast of Shadowflame will out-damage 5-6 casts of Seed on the same group.

Anyway, the main use of Mind Sear right now is on medium sized pulls. VT+SW:P on 5 mobs, then use Mind Sear as filler until DoTs need to be reapplied. It will still beat your normal filler nukes on around 4-5 targets. So I guess it's 'working as intended'. My issue with that is that on 7 or more targets you never cast it. You just constantly tab-DoT.

[Karei]

Mind Sear is nerfed yet I see Ele shamans run about doing 25k and more with Earthquake.
DK's still do retarded damage with one GCD on Pestilence.
If they want to nerf AoE, so be it but nerf it for everyone then instead of certain classes.

[Kelesti]

Mind Sear is nerfed yet I see Ele shamans run about doing 25k and more with Earthquake.
DK's still do retarded damage with one GCD on Pestilence.
If they want to nerf AoE, so be it but nerf it for everyone then instead of certain classes.

First, Pestilence does pretty pathetic damage. You may want to directly compare it to Howling Blast, instead.

Second, what are they doing between those abilities? Single targetting down for the Death Knights, and Shaman? Absolutely nothing. What does a Shadow Priest do? Have Vampiric Touch ticking as much as possible, with a Devouring Plague and a Pain in there too.

It's not Area Effect damage that they're balancing, it's trying to be multi-target damage as a whole. Look at the entire package before you say "but theirs does more".

[Ultima]

Basically, I don't use Mind Sear because it is so fun to DoT them all with just Shadow Word: Pain and run around in a circle.

[Kaesebrezen]

Basically, I don't use Mind Sear because it is so fun to DoT them all with just Shadow Word: Pain and run around in a circle.

That got nerfed by apparitions having a cap of 4.

[Jimusmc]

lol I waited forever to get mind sear on my Priest.. then a month later aoe is bout useless.

[Ultima]

That got nerfed by apparitions having a cap of 4.

Must be on beta, otherwise I am playing on God mode.

And going by the OP's post and numbers, he's talking about Wrath, not Cata.

[Deleted]

Spriest in beta are doing the least AoE DPS of all. Mind Sear is the only AoE in the game that got nerfed to the ground pretty badly. I'm costantly on top single-target DPS on my Spriest but when it comes to AoE I fall at the bottom
And to who said SW:P and running in circles, i'm sorry but Apparitions now have a cap of 4.

This isn't QQ, it's merely a fact.

[DomBomb1]

Spriest in beta are doing the least AoE DPS of all. Mind Sear is the only AoE in the game that got nerfed to the ground pretty badly. I'm costantly on top single-target DPS on my Spriest but when it comes to AoE I fall at the bottom
And to who said SW:P and running in circles, i'm sorry but Apparitions now have a cap of 4.

This isn't QQ, it's merely a fact.

Have you tried running around in melee range of the mobs? won't the apparitions hit as soon as they spawn, thus preventing you from hitting the cap?

[Velran]

That got nerfed by apparitions having a cap of 4.

I'm guessing that's on beta, haven't seen any blue posts on it. If it is the case, I can only ask why?

It's not like they're overpowered, or (as far as I know) being abused in some way. They barely make up 30% of my dps spamming SW:P on everything on large packs with DP and SW: D below 25%. Was it a different story on beta?

[Ultima]

If we're seriously going to QQ about this, I feel the need to ask why AoE DPS is so important in Cataclysm?

Do rampant waves of mobs dive into us during boss fights on every fight? In 5 mans, at least the first tier and maybe second, we won't be AoE spamming every pack, or at least we shouldn't feel the need to.

What's up?

And hey, Velran, I like your UI. Planning to update the pack to work in Cata?