Fresh 85 Shadow Priest and...

[Yoshimiko]

My dps is Trash.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not comparing myself to epic geared people here, I'm not that arrogant. However When my hunter first ticked over to 85, I could pull 12k dps on a target dummy. My mage was pushing a respectable ~11k. Warlock was at 10-12k. My ret was my lowest at 9k.

I just got my spriest to 85, Sitting in avg ilvl 335{chest is 352 pvp gear}, and My dps is depressingly low. all prior numbers, and my spriests numbers were done on the normal training dummy, I'm pushing a massive 7.6k DPS. The rotation isn't sustainable either, I taper off at around 800k damage, and are completely dry at 1M damage. Are these numbers to be expected in the gearing phase..or am I doing something terribly..terribly wrong?

{Basic Priority: SW:P> Evangelismx5> 3x Shadow Orb MBlast > VT > DP > SW(purely for mana) > Mind Flay, Taking SW out is only looking like a ~200-400dps increase, with even worse sustainablity issues} Using Arch Angel on CD, SFiend on CD.

28.4% Mflay, 25.1% VTouch, 13.9% SW:P, 13.7% MBlast, 12.8% DP, 4.2% Imp DP, 1.9% SW

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ar/aoki/simple is my armory...although I don't think it'll help at all since It updated my level, but none of the gear I equipped right when I leveld.. lol.

[Veiled]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...e-(by-Newnoise)

[hikamiro]

With the changes to mind blast and our mastery, it is better to use MB as long as it has atleast 1 orb now. Spec has changed to something more like this: http://wowtal.com/#k=Y-m7Js11.aei.priest.-bltnv

The issues you are running into with mana is probably due to the fact that all shadow priest mana return is %based, and because of the greens and blues (mostly the issue lies in the greens) your intellect is low leading to a lower mana pool which leads to less regen. Also more crit is going to help your mana significantly as mind flay crits lower the CD on Shadow Fiend


For now, while you are having mana issues i'd suggest holding onto your fiend for a little (not very long, maybe 12-15 seconds) and your evangelism until you have a sufficient deficit in your mana pool to allow for full gains.

[Kuddly]

Well even if he's having mana issues as of now he should still go for haste>master>crit as of the patch mastery in most cases is slightly better than crit.

[hikamiro]

Well even if he's having mana issues as of now he should still go for haste>master>crit as of the patch mastery in most cases is slightly better than crit.

Never really said he shouldn't... but yeah. i agree i like mastery a bit better then crit although Shadowpriest.com rates them as equal. (Note, i would try to keep them as equal as possible though because crits = more orbs, which effects mastery. they scale well off each other, so don't avoid crit competely)

[Palebane]

OP, those are about the same numbers I put up (using recount in a normal dungeon) being fairly equally geared to you and using a similar spec and rotation. I'm pretty sure all the Spriest "overpoweredness" that has caused our substantial nerfs is from epic raiding Spriests. Pre-heroic Spriest DPS is very average in my experience.

[Solfire]

Classes don't do even damage on training dummies. My friend's hunter can pull 22k on a training dummy, I can pull 15k, however in a raid or dungeon I smoke them. You have to consider some classes have special executes for mobs above a certain health, some benefit from not moving more than others, things like that. Just compare yourself to other shadow priests of similar gear, not classes, and you'll get a better feel for where you should be.

[Yoshimiko]

Thank you all very much for your assistance, I'll keep working on my gear then and hope to see some bigger numbers later. Cheers!

[Schweddy]

Get Hit capped

8.21% is OK for Melee but not for spell casting

[Yoshimiko]

Get Hit capped

8.21% is OK for Melee but not for spell casting

...that is hit cap for heroics. It's too soon for me to be raiding, I'm not going to gear for it. :3

[poochyena123]

SW: Death (If spec to it) gives mana back as well, great to use when someone is below 25% and get the glyph to use it twice if fail to kill. Easy mana regain there.

[Deleted]

just a question, are you going into pvp? your specc is looking pvp
if not read shit below
reforge everything you can into spirit so you get urself hitcap, after that reforge everything you can into haste cuz its the best stat for spriests
and switch out glyph of dispersion with glyph of shadow word: pain if your not having mana problems
all ilvl 346 should be gemed and such things

also a specc, can move around points from improved mind blast
http://wowtal.com/#k=a5FUSSuR.aei.priest.

[Greendog]

Dont wait for the 3 orbs to cast Mind blast because your Empowered shadows is more than likely falling off hence the reason for the low dps. Use MB at 1 orb to keep it up at all times.

Dont use Archangel unless you are dangerously low on mana. Just keep up the 5 stacks of evangelism as this gives your dots 10% more damage.

Use Death on cd to keep mana up and refresh VT and DP only when they are about to fall off or you get a spell power proc.

[hikamiro]

Dont use Archangel unless you are dangerously low on mana. Just keep up the 5 stacks of evangelism as this gives your dots 10% more damage.

It's smarter to use it on CD If and only if you have just refreshed all your dots. You'll see a minor DPS boost from doing this as 5 stacks of evangalsm only takes 2 (more like 1 and 1/3) mind flays, and you can easily get that inbetween dot applications.

[Greendog]

It's smarter to use it on CD If and only if you have just refreshed all your dots. You'll see a minor DPS boost from doing this as 5 stacks of evangalsm only takes 2 (more like 1 and 1/3) mind flays, and you can easily get that inbetween dot applications.

See Learn something new every day ^^ Yeah i didn't realize that the stacks build back up after you use Arch. Thanks for the heads up mate.

[Karei]

You expect to do anything with non-reforged/non-enchanted stuff?
Ok most of your gear is 333 and lower but the things that are 346 aren't even enchanted.
No metagem in a 346 headslot. No blue quality gems in 346 item boots.
You're not hitcapped, ok with that gear and since it's not meant for raids it's not needed but 14 mastery?
Reforge all of it to Haste, if it already has haste reforge to spirit.
You come here with that sort of gear and you wonder why your dps is low?
Unless you start taking this seriously you'll keep on struggling.

[Worshaka]

Well even if he's having mana issues as of now he should still go for haste>master>crit as of the patch mastery in most cases is slightly better than crit.

This is really misleading, the priority on crit vs mastery changes depending on your gear. For example my simcraft profile places crit above mastery, however its not uncommon for someone else to find mastery above crit. Given enough haste you'll even find that crit and mastery catch haste.

If you want to simply things for beginner spriests then you're best to say Int > haste > hit > crit = mastery. And before we get into the hit debate, if the audience is beginne spriests they will benefit a lot more from hit than an advanced player who will have very little spell reaction lag and will react to misses well. If you run some simcraft profiles on helter skelter mode which models lots of movement/target switching or poor spell reaction lag you will notice the value of hit increase dramatically. This more accurately models how a beginner spriest will play.

If you're an advanced player, the tightness of stats these days means you really need to run simcraft data with your gear or if you arent goign to go that far at least research some simcraft data that have stats as close to what you are using to get an understanding of what may be best for you. I'm also not convinced that gear maximisation has as much impact on DPS as it used to, I've run with heavy hit and no hit and not seen a massive difference. I've run with crit over mastery and vice versa and again not really seen any major impact. It would appear to me (with the exception of haste) that most of the other secondary stats play very similar and I'm not convinced the energy in trying to optimise those stats is worth the gain possible.

---------- Post added 2011-02-28 at 10:47 AM ----------

To the OP:

These posts can be rather useless because everyone here can only guess what your issue is. Without study of severak combatlogs there is no information to place an opinion on and everything becomes conjecture. Also the analysis on gear is somewhat misguided, while it will help you there is always a lot more to gain from proper spell selection than any gear upgrade/optimisation. This fact has yet to get through to the majority of people, so much focus goes into gear optimisation but it only really has an effect if you play the class optimally.

Just looking at your % of damage sources it would appear to me that you are missing a lot of MF ticks which in turn will hurt your orb procs and ES uptime. Some common causes of MF tick loss is MF clipping, usually between consecutive MF casts. What this means is when you cast MF to MF you should get 6 ticks but you are only getting 5 because the 2nd MF cast is cast too early.

One way to resolve this is to use a macro that prevents you casting MF while channeling. While some people are going to cry about that type of macro creating reaction lag between casts (and it certainly prevents you being able to spell queue) it is preferable to consistently clipping the 3rd tick of MF. In high latency environments you will gain a lot more DPS using such a macro, in low latency environments you simply need to cast your 2nd MF better. Unfortunetly I live in Australia and thus have horrendus latency and thus I live with the macro.

Another cause of poor MF ticks is not fitting in MF everywhere possible. Spriest dps is a lot about fitting things inbetween CDs and DoT durations. For example you may want to refresh VT but it has just enough duration that casting VT now is overwriting it by too long a duration but casting a full duration MF will have VT drop off your target before refresh. The idea here is to cast MF and clip it at 2 ticks, thus fitting in some more MF damage while still being able to refresh VT on time. Look for opportunties to fit in as many MF ticks as possible.

Lastly it is preferable to overwrite a DoT slightly early than have it fall off. I won't go into why exactly but with new DoT mechanics, overwriting a DoT will not clip it's tick intervals. So if you have a choice between casting a DoT slightly early or refreshing it late, choose the former.