Shadow in 5.2 and onwards

[actiwe]

well all i can say is that am a shadow pri and i love mu single /aoe damge maybe boost it abit but never far below others and by far i mean more than 1% if am not better than them and am in a hardcore guild with skillcaped ppl more or less

Allow me to laugh.
haha

[snaxattax]

yeah, that is jokes. if you can keep up in single target with your mages and warlocks your mages and warlocks are bads.

[Painfury]

or maybe you are ? oh wait
and there aare no fights yet where u stand and nuke and the better class will win no.. its all movments and stuff if played perfectly shadow can abuse these tackticks for his own good such as (mind spike proc on movment only etc etc ) but i guess u guys just press whats shiny and hope for the best.. na its not like that i agree its not the best on single target but its not far behind not at all

[Deleted]

or maybe you are ? oh wait
and there aare no fights yet where u stand and nuke and the better class will win no.. its all movments and stuff if played perfectly shadow can abuse these tackticks for his own good such as (mind spike proc on movment only etc etc ) but i guess u guys just press whats shiny and hope for the best.. na its not like that i agree its not the best on single target but its not far behind not at all

Mind linking your logs so we can learn from your amazing skills?

[Bonkura]

or maybe you are ? oh wait
and there aare no fights yet where u stand and nuke and the better class will win no.. its all movments and stuff if played perfectly shadow can abuse these tackticks for his own good such as (mind spike proc on movment only etc etc ) but i guess u guys just press whats shiny and hope for the best.. na its not like that i agree its not the best on single target but its not far behind not at all

Are you saying that saving 2x Mind Spike procs for an attenuation on Zor'lok makes up for Warlocks using Kil'jaden's Cunning and Mages spamming Scorche? And that it's not a DPS loss to hold on to procs? I thought single target and movement was the worst possible scenario for Shadow. I have to say this is pretty mindblowing and I'd like to see logs or something to back up your statements.

[Meaks]

The more movement there is the further and further we get behind. We are TERRIBLE in movement. The ONLY thing that keeps us competitive is high ToF uptime and extra orbs from SW:D. We scale terribly, and I'm thinking those of you claiming to do equal or better single target (or cleave really) dps as a mage or a warlock must be in 463 gear or crazy.

Maybe next tier of raiding will have a steady supply of lvl 1 critters in every boss area that we can sw:p for ToF and that's why there are no shadow buffs on PTR.

[Painfury]

well guys i speak for how i feel it and its my opinion on it i never said no its not bad but its not as bad as u guys say not even near the lvl of (badness) u guys are talking about and on movement i feel rely good to move on procs and dp or what ever i have in hand at that time ..
at the end i agree 100% we should get boosted in single target but u guys are not making the most of what u have atm or at least not fully
hope u can understand where am coming from and not taking this as /troll or some thing rude by me cuz this is not my intension

[Alteena]

To answer the OP directly:

1) As has been mentioned, we do have relatively low stat weights on secondary stats, however at least in this tier, I'm not noticing much of a difference in gear scaling. Shadow is likely safe for 5.2 as well in the same spot we are at now - right in the middle. I do feel like FDCL and DI add a bit of a higher skill cap, and like always, an exceptionally skilled/geared Spriest is still going to smack around your "average" caster dps. There are some situations in which you get better DPS without those talents though, at which point Shadow feels very much like it always has. I think you've probably been misled as to exactly how "bad" our situation is.

2) As to utility, I feel like you may have been a little misled as to how "required" we are there, too. Don't get me wrong, we do have fantastic utility. Between glyphed VE, Tranquility (which I get via Symbiosis in my raids), ProM, and Halo/Cascade/DS, I put out a very respectable amount of healing - on demand. There are many fights in both MSV and HOF that will really let that healing utility shine through. Unmitigated Overloads on Dogs, Arcane Velocity on Feng, high stacks of insanity on Meng, final phase of Elegon, Titan Gas on Will, last 20% of Bladelord, those damned double-pheromone-swaps that lead to double crushes on Garalon... The list goes on an on. A well-placed healing cooldown can ease a lot of those mechanics a ton, and can straight up nullify a few of them. In addition to that, our Divine Hymn is fantastic. My raid group 2-heals almost everything, even during progression, so it's rare that I'm *not* called on to hymn. Added to all that, if you're specced into FDCL, you can heal traditionally, with Renew, Flash Heal, and Binding heal, and actually do relatively well at it for a good amount of time. It doesn't make you a healer, but you can certainly keep people alive until your healer re-connects, get Brezzed, or what have you.

You can add to that the tiny little utility things we bring as well. Not taking a healer into the totem on Gara'jal, because you can Binding Heal the other DPS and max both of your DPS stacks quickly. LoF'ing someone out of a tornado. Dropping Feathers in key places to help your raid members escape a bad kite, or drop their flames in the proper place, etc. Using Dispersion to allow you to eat Unseen Strike solo (in 10 man). The possibilities are far and wide.

Random Fact, if 2 priests stand 50 yards apart and then run towards one another spamming LoF, they will switch places once they're in range. Neat, huh?

3) The obvious answer here is multi-target fights. The slightly less obvious answer is multi-target fights where multiple targets / adds are present throughout the fight with a relatively small amount of HP, effectively allowing you to maximize Twist of Fate uptime. A few fights that come to mind off the top of my head are Elegon (untouchable on that fight), Will, and Garalon. When you can keep 50, 60, 65% uptime on ToF, your damage is absurd. Cascade is generally used in these cases to help with being able to reach the sub-20% targets that might be out of traditional casting range. In heroics there are even more advanced techniques to getting higher uptime, such as using the PW:S glyph to snipe heals on sub-20% raid members and proc ToF that way.

4) That's personal preference / raid makeup. I play an Spriest, an Aff Lock, and an Arc/Frost Mage. I main my Spriest, as I simply have the most fun with him and he brings the most fun little toys. Will you be able to keep up with an Aff Lock on most fights? No, not if the Lock is relatively close to your gear / skill level. You have to really outplay / outgear a lock to beat them out currently. I'd ask your raid, do they need you strictly for 100% dps? Then you're better off staying Warlock (mmmm, cookies), but if you have another source of Spellpower/Crit, or another Lock with Healthstones, and you don't have any real off-heals / hybrid healing cooldowns to speak of, then yeah, make the change.

Like I said, I personally enjoy shadow more. I enjoy the look, the feel, the rotation, and the utility - but I'm well aware that I'm trading pure brute-force for those traits. I suppose much of it could just be that I'm more comfortable with it. Have been raiding on my Spriest since BC, didn't start messing with Warlocks until late WoTLK. So I am a little more nervous when I raid on my Warlock, and my Arcane Mage's rotation bores me to tears.

How do I feel about them moving forward through 5.2 and beyond? Eh. I played Beta the whole way through, and shortly before release they nerfed the hell out of our DoTs, to curb how much we excelled at multi-target fights and promised increased single-target damage to compensate. That compensation didn't come. I didn't / don't feel like it's absolutely necessary right this minute, but I could absolutely see us falling behind little-by-little as the content keeps coming and stats inflate. Will it cause me to declare a different toon my main? Naw. I dealt with them taking all sorts of stuff I loved about Shadow each expac, I'm a pretty loyal guy =P

Sorry I wrote a book, hope it helps. Cheers.

---------- Post added 2013-01-06 at 08:47 PM ----------

well guys i speak for how i feel it and its my opinion on it i never said no its not bad but its not as bad as u guys say not even near the lvl of (badness) u guys are talking about and on movement i feel rely good to move on procs and dp or what ever i have in hand at that time ..
at the end i agree 100% we should get boosted in single target but u guys are not making the most of what u have atm or at least not fully
hope u can understand where am coming from and not taking this as /troll or some thing rude by me cuz this is not my intension

I do see where you're coming from, 100%, but those procs require a bit of luck, a loss of dps, a short distance to be crossed, or some combination of those 3. What are the chances that you have 2x FDCL proc, a DI proc, AND a 3orb DP right at the moment you have to move? And I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're also using glyph of Mind Flay to ease short movement. The chances are very slim, I'd wager. Not to mention, if you're pooling all those procs, you're hemorrhaging DPS. You could save Halo / Cas / DS, or Sfiend/Mindbender I suppose, but you're again sacrificing a lot of DPS.

This problem increases exponentially as the distance increases. There are lots of times that even if you very luckily catch 2-3 procs, you'll still have 2-3 more GCDs to fill where you're running. With the other options exhausted, we end up spamming SW:P for paltry on-the-move DPS.

Like I said, Shadow isn't a really bad spec, but saying we can "abuse" our procs as a tactic to maintain on the move dps comparable to a mage or warlock is just mind-boggling.

[Meaks]

I'm pretty sure just popping out of shadow and spamming flash heal heals for more than sym tranq. It is embarrassingly weak, and druids have much better options for symbiosis than us.

[Painfury]

agree with what u said Alteena 100 %

[Yvaelle]

Sorry I wrote a book, hope it helps. Cheers.[COLOR="red"]

I approve of book authoring, kids today don't read enough! ^^

(Also good book on the topic!)

[snaxattax]

I'm pretty sure just popping out of shadow and spamming flash heal heals for more than sym tranq. It is embarrassingly weak, and druids have much better options for symbiosis than us.

even spamming renews on people is more healing than a symbiosis tranq - and it doesn't require you to stand still and channel. symbiosis tranq is the dumbest joke of MOP for spriests - especially considering they took away divine hymn for this. honestly, the best emergency raid healing i've found as a spriest is to just cascade on yourself or a tank. used that trick early on for elegon and garalon to great effect.

or maybe you are ? oh wait

link your logs, then

[veiledy0]

I do feel like FDCL and DI add a bit of a higher skill cap

You, sir, feel terribly wrong. They add nothing but RNG, and RNG is what we've all hated when playing our fire mage / moonkin alts in DS.

[deviantcultist]

I believe that the Warlock/Shadowpriest comparison is all too cloudy. Either in terms of roleplaying or gameplay there is rarely a clear distinction and that has to be resolved someday.

[Yvaelle]

I believe that the Warlock/Shadowpriest comparison is all too cloudy. Either in terms of roleplaying or gameplay there is rarely a clear distinction and that has to be resolved someday.

I vehemently disagree, and will cite myself as evidence

Related to Sha-Touched Weapons but also distinguishes between Warlock / Shadow themes pretty well

[Frmercury]

Don't link it anymore Yvaelle, you'll make me tear up again =(

[Purpleisbetter]

Raiding with both as i'm helping two raids at once (both beeing 10m lately); you've to face much lower numbers as shadow.

Lets say this, warlock can provide huge raid healing cd, bigger SELF heal and the gap is ridicolous when i get symbitiozied as lock, with the rej beeing so ridicully strong. And it is mostly passive and thus costing no gcd and no distraction with your main role.

As shadow, you've VE wich is good maybe (actually, because in both raids i'm running with rather smart disc priests in both raids, there's hardly anything left to heal when something heavy is incoming, so my VE is pretty much overheals). The spot heals are strong, Void Shift is golden sometimes. Damage is low.

In the end i splitted my time between my lock and my shadow because i guess i'm too sentimentally bound with my priest and i couldn't really bench it for good.It satisfying me so much in pvp fine, but pvp is not something that it takes so much time, there were almost entire weeks where, given the conquest cap and the bit of pvp rating, i hardly logged him on.

I say you shouldn't bother with it, even less if you consider switching main. Fun wise, i find the shadow very flat, the usual watch-for-equip-procs and nothing else. Its not even, lol pun intended, the shadow of what it was during past expac; where shadowpriest was more then simply competitive spec,it was funny,addictive,fast and with a good chunk of depth and complexity.

[Bonkura]

Wow, really good post Alteena. It's hard to say you're not biased but you bring up some really good points about the spec. I can see that you're well aware of what playing a hybrid DPS is really about and I hope the people you play with realize this.

Thank you and everyone else for the input. Much appreciated.

[Drye]

I agree with a lot of what you said, alteena. Although, I think there are some very easy changes that could make shadows dps very strong. I do agree that we are in the middle of the pack and I'm personally fine with that. I believe that people need to stop comparing is to locks/mages because they are also destroying every other class. I think if they nerfed those and made everyone within 10k of each other that everything would be realitively fine. Different classes would excel on their respective fights, which is perfectly okay with me.

I do think that the easy changes could be made to shadow are:

- reducing MBlasts CD to 6.5 seconds, this might devalue DI too much tho.
- making vt do a little bit more dmg, vt is a cast. It used to be one of our largest dmg dealing spell. Now it barely does anything. I would just like to see it do a little more dmg than an instant cast.
- change the mf glyph to being able to cast on the moce. some ability other than spamming sw would be nice.
- revert the change to sw:d, like it was on beta where it gave two orbs for each hit. Havin it be more responsive would be nice too.
-make pi and sw:I viable would be nice too. I believe they are already doing this tho from the looks of the 5.2 path notes.

[Frmercury]

- making vt do a little bit more dmg, vt is a cast. It used to be one of our largest dmg dealing spell. Now it barely does anything. I would just like to see it do a little more dmg than an instant cast.
- change the mf glyph to being able to cast on the moce. some ability other than spamming sw would be nice.
- revert the change to sw:d, like it was on beta where it gave two orbs for each hit. Havin it be more responsive would be nice too.
- make pi and sw:I viable would be nice too. I believe they are already doing this tho from the looks of the 5.2 path notes.

I'm with these 100%. Especially both SWs giving a SO. The execute rotation was so damned smooth on Beta and this current execute rotation is the exact opposite.