[Priest] PvE Shadow Guide (by Kilee)

[Kaffeefilter]

Hi guys,
i read all the posts above, including the guide but still cant conclude the best way to go for my situation. Im usually a disc-priest but started to gear for shadow now. After some reforging and gemming im at 19% haste. This means, i get only 1 extra VT-tick since im far away from the 30% haste.
Question: Wouldnt it be better to regem/reforge away from haste (down to 10% haste) into mastery and go back once the 30% haste plateau is in reach with better gear ?

greets

[Zuziza]

I would disagree. Haste is still going to sim better than your other stats, and more DoT ticks for VT is not the only reason haste is good for shadow. The plateaus are simply benchmarks to shoot for, and being unable to obtain one should not deter you from stacking haste. Haste also scales much better than mastery.

One other thing: Is your armory showing you at 19% haste, or is that in your character pane? If it's on armory, you're missing your shadowform buff, which puts you at much closer to 30% than you think. If that's in shadowform, you need to be farming haste gear from heroics and saving up for tier with haste. Mastery really sucks for us at lower gear levels just because you won't have much of it at all.

When you get higher amounts of haste, you'll proc orbs faster due to faster tics of both SW: P and MF. This means ES should have a better uptime, and you should have slightly more orbs for MB casts. This results in getting more out of your mastery than you would with low haste. It's slight, but in the long run, haste makes mastery a more attractive stat not just due to the way sim scaling works.

This is all just theory, so take it with a grain of salt. The best advice would be to sim you gear yourself. It's very likely that haste is going to outweigh mastery by a lot.

[Dyra]

I've not played 4.2 yet, but are you allowed both Intellect exalted rep rings at the same time?

[Kaffeefilter]

Thanks zuziza,
so that leads me to: As long as im on the hitcap, reforge everything to haste and gem according to the guide at page 1, right ?

greets

[Kilee25]

Hi Kaffeefilter, thank you for your question.

Question: Wouldnt it be better to regem/reforge away from haste (down to 10% haste) into mastery and go back once the 30% haste plateau is in reach with better gear ?

Zuziza is mostly right. No you shouldn't add mastery over haste at such a low gear level. There will be no benefit to it.

There's a point sometime after 2588 haste, with 378 iLevel gear, that mastery starts to converge on Haste's stat weight. The reason being that there's no significant breakpoint after that for a very long time (the next one is 3202). The problem is that mastery only matches (or exceeds) haste in value whenever ES is up 100% of the time. If a dot is ever applied without ES up within the sim, then haste sims on top again.

In a real world setting, you're going to apply dots occasionally without ES active, and from what I've seen so far there are very few fights where we are not on add duty. 2 out of the 3 fights I see so far we're basically just mind searing and multi-dotting our heads off, so any gear directed at single targetting will be a sort of "one trick pony".

Haste is the safe bet. A mastery build is just a mild curiosity at this point - something to think about in the off-time if you are full BIS and wondering how to top the WoL ranks on one specific fight. I have a feeling one might be able to pull off some crazy dps on a very specific fight by keying their set to the fight. But really it's all just theoretical at this point...

[fords42]

Thanks for a great guide Kilee!

[Brusalk]

I've not played 4.2 yet, but are you allowed both Intellect exalted rep rings at the same time?

Yep. Instant BiS rings when we hit exalted with avengers

[Mammoth]

Yep. Instant BiS rings when we hit exalted with avengers

Sweet something to look forward to the moment the stars align and I get a working internet connection and a home computer at the same time -_-# Oh and an exalted reputation ofc.

[Deleted]

Awesome guide. Excepting the rotation, I still use the old one ( Vampiric > Plague> Mind blast>mind flay> Mind spike>repeat)

[Arlee]

Awesome guide. Excepting the rotation, I still use the old one ( Vampiric > Plague> Mind blast>mind flay> Mind spike>repeat)

Erm, why would you Mind Spike?

[HDPriest]

And where's SW: Pain?

[Kilee25]

Hi Worer, thank you for the feedback.

Awesome guide. Excepting the rotation, I still use the old one ( Vampiric > Plague> Mind blast>mind flay> Mind spike>repeat)

I'm assuming that you're talking about Opening Rotation rather than casting rotation. I'm also assuming the "Mind spike" is meant to be "Mind Blast", and that Shadow Word: Pain goes somewhere before Mind Blast. If you're just talking about normal casting rotation, then there's no difference between my guide and what you are doing.

I've seen a lot of differing opinions on opening rotations but it always boils down to either starting with unbuffed dots, or building buffs and then casting dots. I'm a big proponent of the latter and for what I feel are good, solid reasons. However, over the course of an entire fight, the opening sequence in the end is only about 3% of damage (on a good day), and differences in opening rotations are even smaller, perhaps .03%. Basically we're talking about a miniscule amount of damage, and it's literally to the point where you could do whatever the heck you wanted as long as everything gets up on the target and you get into your normal rotation as quickly as possible.

Anotherwords it doesn't really matter. But I like to be thorough, and I'm a perfectionist at heart, so I've included it in the guide for those who care.

[Karshda]

Was wondering if anybody could give me an estimate of how big a dps increase reaching the 30% haste plateau would be. Im asking because i recently switched guilds and i lost DI and my dps dropped about from 18k down to 16.5k. Was wondering if that was from the 30% haste or the 3% dot damage.

[Haotududis]

Was wondering if anybody could give me an estimate of how big a dps increase reaching the 30% haste plateau would be. Im asking because i recently switched guilds and i lost DI and my dps dropped about from 18k down to 16.5k. Was wondering if that was from the 30% haste or the 3% dot damage.

I'm curious on this as well. I was at roughly 2600 haste with Book of Binding Will and Incineratus, both on Heroic. I just picked up the staff off of Ragnaros and I dropped below the threshold, but I did gain ~300 spellpower and other stats from doing the switch. Just wondering if it really was an upgrade or not even though I dropped below 2588 haste.

[Zuziza]

You should be able to get the haste through reforging or messing with other gear. It's definitely an upgrade. Int is always better than Haste.

[Deleted]

Actually, you need a pretty good level of haste to get there.
Personally I had haste on every piece as a main stat except for the trinkets, the tier gloves and 1 of my rings (most of it was 372). I reforged into haste where I could, enchanted 50 haste and I still had to swap gems to get to 2588. It's pretty hard to get there, let alone taking 378's that don't have haste.
And even if you do upgrade a 372 haste piece with a 378 haste piece, I still end up with lower or an equal amount of haste :s

[Deleted]

i dont realy like the current gear state im gona loose a lot of haste now

You should be able to get the haste through reforging or messing with other gear. It's definitely an upgrade. Int is always better than Haste.

Intellect is always better then haste yes. but not all Intellect upgrades ar better items for you
like i first had a raid drop wand. but now im using a wand from the Zandalari cause ithad way better stats. (even while i lost some int)

[Zuziza]

If you're that torn about it, sim your gear with the current setup, then with the staff (I'm assuming you didn't give that thing back). See if your DPS dips below on both Patchwerk and HS. I had 2680 haste in all 359 gear with 1 heroic piece (the bracers), so getting 2588 at that item level shouldn't be too hard as long as you're taking whatever upgrades that have haste. The weapons are a notable exception.

[Solia]

Hmm, noticeable shift in the opinions of haste breakpoints since the patch it seems. I wonder if I start calling it haste plateaus would people jump all over me...

Anyway, even if you can't hit 2589, you should still try to stack as much haste as you can without sacrificing Int, unless you are so close to it that a slight gear downgrade or gem/enchant swap will get you there.

IIRC, hitting 2589 is worth about 50 Int in DPS/PP whatever you want to call it. Please someone correct me if this figure is grossly wrong. I'd assume this is only for single target, obviously it's worth more on multi target fights.

@Kilee - Stop using 2588 (it's 2589) as the haste breakpoint for +2 VT ticks (without DI), the math and your char screen may say it's 30.01%, but the way the game truncates you still only get 6 VT ticks at 2588. Granted this will not matter the MAJORITY of the time, but I found out the hard way on one of my previous gear setups.

[Kilee25]

Hi Solia, thank you for the feedback.

Hmm, noticeable shift in the opinions of haste breakpoints since the patch it seems. I wonder if I start calling it haste plateaus would people jump all over me...

Anyway, even if you can't hit 2589, you should still try to stack as much haste as you can without sacrificing Int, unless you are so close to it that a slight gear downgrade or gem/enchant swap will get you there.

Lately my visual thought and description for these are "haste spikes" on what is otherwise a gradually inclining straight line. This picture represents what I think of when I think of our "haste plateaus".



The issue, as the picture shows, is that although mastery starts out below haste, it is slowly catching up to it. And right now unless you are actually capable of reaching one of these spikes or break points at the tier 12 point, the two weights are getting closer and closer in value. There will eventually be a point where you hit one of these break points and there will be no point to getting further haste because the next point will be unobtainable.

This is of course all theoretical, and from what I can see of current gear, although we are close to this point, we are not actually there.

Even if we get to that point, it is "questionable" what we can do with that information. Because the stats are close in value at that point, you get about the same amount of DPS by adding either one past that point. Haste never stops adding dps. This fact makes the entire set of information a bit useless.

(There's a point shortly after 5000 haste where the line would drop down to practically nothing because of the soft cap, but I have not shown it on the graph.)

Anyway, at this moment the only useful information we can walk away from is that these break points are very important to reach as doing so amounts to an abnormally large dps gain per point of that stat compared to normal.

IIRC, hitting 2589 is worth about 50 Int in DPS/PP whatever you want to call it. Please someone correct me if this figure is grossly wrong. I'd assume this is only for single target, obviously it's worth more on multi target fights.

Hm... quick simcraft results with a 368 average iLevel gear.

2588 haste - 25266dps
2589 haste - 25403dps

25403-25266 = 137/3.2 = 42.8 PP

So yeah 50 int sounds about right, considering you get a bit better out of multi-dotting and a higher iLevel gear set.

@Kilee - Stop using 2588 (it's 2589) as the haste breakpoint for +2 VT ticks (without DI), the math and your char screen may say it's 30.01%, but the way the game truncates you still only get 6 VT ticks at 2588. Granted this will not matter the MAJORITY of the time, but I found out the hard way on one of my previous gear setups.

AH, thank you. I actually did not know this, and will correct it immediately. If you see any other errors like this, please let me know.