[6.2.3] Shadow PvE Guide and Discussion

[velinart]

The logs dont.

Atm we are decent. The real problem will appear in 1-2 weeks, once everybody have their Legendary Ring. We will look beyond ridiculous imo :c

[Setheria]

Atm we are decent. The real problem will appear in 1-2 weeks, once everybody have their Legendary Ring. We will look beyond ridiculous imo :c

I think we're pretty decent atm, with a couple of fights we're crap at, and a couple we're really strong on. That's quite fine all things considered.

We will get hurt (relatively) by buffs to other classes.

Hopefully it doesn't end up like HM 2.0 where we started strong and ended up fading as almost every other class got buffed around us.

[buffalowbie]

Hopefully it doesn't end up like HM 2.0 where we started strong and ended up fading as almost every other class got buffed around us.

Already happening.

Name the buffs shadow has gotten this xpac.

Compare it to buffs other specs have gotten.

Unless I'm mistaken, we've been nerfed more than we've been buffed, and our only buffs were fixing AS to not suck ass, and letting cascade hit the same target twice (I think there may have been a VEnt buff, but lol, like anyone uses it).

[Djriff]

Unless I'm mistaken, we've been nerfed more than we've been buffed, and our only buffs were fixing AS to not suck ass, and letting cascade hit the same target twice (I think there may have been a VEnt buff, but lol, like anyone uses it).

iirc, you are correct. As for no one running VEnt, we had a serious app to my guild from an spriest that swore by a VEnt Haste build. It wasn't terrible DPS but fell woefully behind AS.

When does diminishing returns kick in for shadow AS and CoP? I'm sitting at 31.27%

I'm assuming your talking about crit. You can never have to much crit. For AS the more targets there are the more valuable crit becomes. To the point of when there are 5+ targets crit moves ahead of int. For CoP, basically you don't really need crit, however its not really worth it to build a seperate CoP set.

[Keosen]

I think we're pretty decent atm, with a couple of fights we're crap at, and a couple we're really strong on. That's quite fine all things considered.

We will get hurt (relatively) by buffs to other classes.

Hopefully it doesn't end up like HM 2.0 where we started strong and ended up fading as almost every other class got buffed around us.

The thing is once more it's not about being strong or weak is the effort you have to make as a Shadowpriest to be descent, every tier the same scheme work your ass out to be descent and have magse, locks, hunters trolling you, same shit different tier.

[Setheria]

The thing is once more it's not about being strong or weak is the effort you have to make as a Shadowpriest to be descent, every tier the same scheme work your ass out to be descent and have magse, locks, hunters trolling you, same shit different tier.

Well yes, but this is Blizzard we're talking about here.

Look at arms warriors - stupidly easy rotation and massive damage. And when they now nerf them, they don't nerf them where they're needed (execute damage) but rather a tier set that made less their pre execute 'rotation' slightly less soul crushingly boring. Time and time again, they make decisions that even a modest knowledge of their own classes would show is simply bonkers. Think of that slated mastery nerf to tone down our multi-dot AS damage. It got changed to a relevant DP nerf, but the initial change demonstrates a failure of class knowledge from those creating & maintaining the class.

Still, our class trinket buff that didn't actually go live has been hotfixed, so that's a small aid.

The issue we have imo is not damage per se, it's as you allude to, what we have to do to get that damage.

It's not particularly tricky for the most experienced players, but the concern I have is that for new players, carrying out a dotweave-class trinket flay buff stack rotation is simply beyond the abilities of the demographic blizzard appears to balance content for - the kind of 50% percentile LFR raiders. They'll be attempting to follow a 'superior' rotation and failing. Dots will be clipped or spiked off, trinket stacks will fall off, and they will be punished much more than the hunter who focus caps or the warrior who lets rend fall off.

We're a long way from complexity equaling superior damage potential - if anything it's the reverse. But it's been like this for long enough that really, we should all now know that if you do want the big numbers AND have the simple easy to execute rotation, you should play certain classes. Shadow isn't one of them.

[GameFX]

^ I sorta disagree and agree with the last part about Shadow and it's complexity, Seth....The rules for all classes are the same: Perform ABC rotation and do decent damage - There is no mystery about Shadow's rotation: CoP=MB- Spikex3 repeat (and with T182pc you don't even have to dotweave if you don't want to with Mind Bender being up every 20 sec) same goes with AS= MBlast on cool down, Pain and VT your main target - Pain anything else or if it's single target you just Blast, Pain VT, Flay....I mean there is nothing overly complex about either of them IMO

I'll say it once more the biggest issues with Shadow are it's far too punishing to 'miss' anything in your rotation. If you can't fit those 3 spikes in between your Mind Blasts, your dps tanks hard (Drye and Twin both said it in their guides: The key to CoP being played well lies between those Mind Blasts) Like you said a Hunter Rogue or Warrior capping out on their resource is like meh towards their dps, its lost damage but nowhere near missing a MBlast or letting a DoT fall off.

[Haikus]

Looking at his logs, that combo is op lol. Wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard makes dps hybrids unable to use Intuition's Gift

[cwlee3]

Looks like Hanno is using PI now, might just be testing of course. Any thoughts on this with the legendary ring lining up with it?

Edit: Looks like Intuition's gift too. That lineup!

Whether or not PI is helping him parse well, it still pisses me off how lazy Blizzard's approach to that spell for shadow is. Why do we get the same Power Infusion that healing priests get? They could easily turn it into "Shadow Infusion" and make it so that (in addition to the current 25% haste) as AS, every AS does 150% damage, and as CoP, Mind Spike now hits 3 targets within a 10-yard radius during the duration. These are just quick examples off the top of my head, but the fact that spriests only benefit from the haste portion of PI (but our spells cost less mana!!!!!) leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.

So a "healing throughput cooldown" plus a "healing throughput trinket" is the best for Shadow parses right now? /scoff Please.

[Keiyra]

Whether or not PI is helping him parse well, it still pisses me off how lazy Blizzard's approach to that spell for shadow is. Why do we get the same Power Infusion that healing priests get? They could easily turn it into "Shadow Infusion" and make it so that (in addition to the current 25% haste) as AS, every AS does 150% damage, and as CoP, Mind Spike now hits 3 targets within a 10-yard radius during the duration. These are just quick examples off the top of my head, but the fact that spriests only benefit from the haste portion of PI (but our spells cost less mana!!!!!) leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.

So a "healing throughput cooldown" plus a "healing throughput trinket" is the best for Shadow parses right now? /scoff Please.

Saying PI is a "healing throughput CD" only is like saying Heroism/Lust is a healing throughput cd only.
A Haste CD IS a dps CD, the mana cost reduction was added to make it more attractive to the healing specs.

Now, is it an interesting way they could've made a dps CD talent...no. But don't dismiss it as "just" a healing cd. It does provide increased dps on a cd.

The healing trinket being the only source of a good /on use however is an obnoxious oversight on blizzards part.

[snaxattax]

the real question is whether blizzard disables intuition's gift for shadow, or if they go for the more complete solution of nerfing intuitions gift & devouring plague, and then then buffing warlocks

[bicycle]

the real question is whether blizzard disables intuition's gift for shadow, or if they go for the more complete solution of nerfing intuitions gift & devouring plague, and then then buffing warlocks

The obvious solution is to make spirit give +hit to shadow priests again, so spirit trinkets are good for us!

[Yvaelle]

The obvious solution is to make spirit give +hit to shadow priests again, so spirit trinkets are good for us!

First they would need to reduce our hit by 17%, so we had a reason to need +Hit

[threehunnamillion]

Looks like Hanno is using PI now, might just be testing of course. Any thoughts on this with the legendary ring lining up with it?

Edit: Looks like Intuition's gift too. That lineup!

I tried findin those logs and failed, mind helping me out? I am really interested in looking them over. Thanks!

[cwlee3]

Saying PI is a "healing throughput CD" only is like saying Heroism/Lust is a healing throughput cd only.
A Haste CD IS a dps CD, the mana cost reduction was added to make it more attractive to the healing specs.

Now, is it an interesting way they could've made a dps CD talent...no. But don't dismiss it as "just" a healing cd. It does provide increased dps on a cd.

The healing trinket being the only source of a good /on use however is an obnoxious oversight on blizzards part.

I put the "healing throughput cooldown" in quotes because it's a spell which has its power split into two parts. The mana reduction component (healer benefit) reduces the haste boost (dps benefit) by quite a large margin. Your analogy to Heroism/Lust isn't quite fair because that's PURE haste. Yes, haste can boost the amount of healing that healers can do, but it's not *only* good for healing, like the reduced mana cost on our spells.

If you want to defend Blizzard/priest cooldowns with literal definitions of "Is it a cooldown? Yes. Does it boost DPS for a period of time? Yes." then go ahead, but the fact remains it's very lackluster compared to all other caster cooldowns that are similar to it, and doesn't feel satisfying to use because of that.
Edit: Why try to have PI work for all 3 specs instead of adding a new talent for Shadow?

[Caladia]

I tried findin those logs and failed, mind helping me out? I am really interested in looking them over. Thanks!

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...done&source=14

He used it on Iron Reaver. I don't know shit about Mythic fights in HfC, but there he lined up PI and IG together 3 times in the fight.

[Kilee25]

There is a tactic that can be used on any fight where a boss becomes an invalid target for a time. The theory goes like this.

I can save PI for the boss only, and consider the intermediate phase a "don't care" as long as we get past it. PI is used/saved only for the boss, in such a way that my uptime on said buff becomes greater than it would be on a standard fight (against the boss only). This will place more priority DPS against the boss, and allow you to hit certain DPS goals. For example, if you want to reduce the number of bomb phases that you get - then you would look for ways to increase boss damage at the expense of bomb damage, assuming your raid can get past the bombs regardless of your personal DPS.

I've used this tactic on a number of fights over the past few expansions. It is still valid, and always will be. It's one of the best (and in this expansion, perhaps only) uses for PI.

Oregorger was a similar boss where this tactic could be used, to try to limit the number of rolling phases you would get.

After you overgear the fight, there's very little point to doing this, as overall it probably won't result in the best DPS. This is purely a glass chew technique. But IMO should be considered fairly standard and well-known.

It's also possible that this person was just farting around, and happened to get a kill with it. Never rule out the most simple explanation.

[snaxattax]

The theory goes like this...

http://www.wowhead.com/item=124635

[Kilee25]

I know what we are talking about. >_>

[Granyala]

The thing is once more it's not about being strong or weak is the effort you have to make as a Shadowpriest to be descent, every tier the same scheme work your ass out to be descent and have magse, locks, hunters trolling you, same shit different tier.

Yeah I'm getting sick and tired of Blizzards incompetence when it comes to balancing shadow.

It's okay when Blue and purple are all the way up, but oh noes a white bar is encroaching, quickly, we need a nerf!
Seriously, what is the point in playing a DPS if you close to never have the chance to shine?