Shadow Priest Breakpoints

[Haith]

I don't know if any of the theorycrafters have been able to make a list of a Haste breakpoints for Shadow Word:Pain and Vampiric Touch yet i haven't been able to find anything of it yet.

[Deleted]

SW: P doesn't have a breakpoint that really matters since it's refreshed with mind flay.

The VT points that are really obtainable are 2589 or 2141(with DI) - 30%.

[Deleted]

SW: P doesn't have a breakpoint that really matters since it's refreshed with mind flay.

The VT points that are really obtainable are 2589 or 2141(with DI) - 30%.

Just to make it clear, this is for Live.

If youre looking for BETA data then hold your breath because changes are still being made.

[Bremmon]

3202 is the third haste plateau and can be reached fairly easy with heroic gear. If you cant get to 3202 then you are better off reforging back down to mastery/crit. Use simulation craft to figure out which would be better for you.

[tobben]

Some people should seriously start consider getting lessons in reading.

edit: I seem to have failed quite a bit here, my apologies.

[Deleted]

3202 is the third haste plateau and can be reached fairly easy with heroic gear. If you cant get to 3202 then you are better off reforging back down to mastery/crit. Use simulation craft to figure out which would be better for you.

Just to clarify. 3202 is the break point to gain the extra damage from imp DP, which has nothing to do with the original request for VT or SW: P ticks

[Drye]

I highly doubt he is talking about live due to the fact that information is everywhere. The answer is no people are still doing the math and they keep changing the numbers required to gain 1%, so we need to wait for that to stop and once we get closer to MoP, we will have an answer.

[Yvaelle]

On the beta our VT and Pain are so weak that we likely won't be bothering to build around haste breakpoints anymore. Devouring Plague will have relevant haste breakpoints however - but because the ticks are so very fast, it will have a ton of small breakpoints (every few percent haste gain or so), and not big haste breakpoints like VT+2 and etc that people will be as concerned about building their reforges around in the same way that we do now.

[Celentes]

SWP and VT will still remain high DPET, extra tick from a breakpoint benefits not the dot itself but rather the filler, since we'll have to recast it less, freeing up the time for more mindflays. As long as haste is still a competitive stat, I don't see breakpoints losing their value.

Does DP actually scale with haste at all? Does it give more ticks if you get sufficient haste? I'm not quite sure about it at all, I thought it's tick-based, not duration-based.

[Deleted]

look at this

Vampiric TouchWithout Dark Intent With Dark Intent
Ticks Rating Goblin Ticks Rating Goblin
+1 218 90 +1 0 0
+2 2589 2437 +2 2141 1993
+3 4951 4776 +3 4431 4264
+4 7326 7127 +4 6740 6546
+5 9698 9476 +5 9043 8827

Devouring PlagueWithout Dark Intent With Dark Intent
Ticks Rating Goblin Ticks Rating Goblin
+1 0 0 +1 0 0
+2 1255 1115 +2 845 710
+3 2737 2583 +3 2284 2135
+4 4220 4051 +4 3724 3560
+5 5691 5508 +5 5152 4975
+6 7179 6981 +6 6597 6405

Shadow Word: PainWithout Dark Intent With Dark Intent
Ticks Rating Goblin Ticks Rating Goblin
+1 21 0 +1 0 0
+2 1993 1846 +2 1562 1419
+3 3970 3804 +3 3482 3320
+4 5945 5759 +4 5399 5219
+5 7913 7913 +5 7310 7111

[Yvaelle]

SWP and VT will still remain high DPET, extra tick from a breakpoint benefits not the dot itself but rather the filler, since we'll have to recast it less, freeing up the time for more mindflays. As long as haste is still a competitive stat, I don't see breakpoints losing their value.

Does DP actually scale with haste at all? Does it give more ticks if you get sufficient haste? I'm not quite sure about it at all, I thought it's tick-based, not duration-based.

DoT duration is (mostly) the same regardless of haste, what changes is how many ticks are inside the duration, this is different than it was in wotlk and prior (but was true for cataclysm and will be true in mop).

Prior to cataclysm: Let's say your DoT has an 18 second duration, in which it ticks 6 times (once every 3 seconds). If you have 0% haste, then this would occur over 18 seconds. If you had 30% haste, then this would occur over just 12 seconds - meaning you had to reapply your dots far more often as your gear got better and your haste got higher - the time between each tick got 30% shorter, and the subsequent dot length got 30% shorter - but you still had 6 ticks.

After Cataclysm: Same 18 second DoT ticks 6 times with 0% haste. With 30% haste, your dot ticks occur 30% faster, but now - the duration of the dot is still as close to 18 seconds as possible. This means that breakpoints occur when suddenly you gain an additional tick inside the same 18 second application, up to that break point, you had 6 ticks, but as soon as you cross that breakpoint, you have a 7th tick: causing a spike in dps. In between these breakpoints though, you see a dip in dot duration because the final tick occurs slightly sooner - but not soon enough to provide another tick (so the duration is not precisely 18 seconds, its kind of wonky).

Because of the above model, you don't really see an increase in filler because you have to recast dots less (or more) - its very slight - but because the filler themselves cast faster (Mind Flay with 30% means you can fit 30% more Mind Flays into the same Time To Fill before a higher DPET spell is ready). Breakpoints are particularly valuable when our rotation is full of spells that benefit significantly from haste (dots and mind flay), with the nerf to dot damage however - the value of these breakpoints declines because they represent a smaller portion of our overall damage.

Devouring Plague does scale with haste - and depending on what percent of our damage the DP-DoT makes - haste breakpoints for DP will be the thing we consider if anything for haste breakpoints, but they will occur three times more frequently than vt or pain breakpoints (because the time between base ticks is 1 second instead of 3 seconds). So the damage spike from an additional tick will be lower than we are used to from current breakpoints. In fact, we could approximate the gain from a DP breakpoint right now, let's try that out of curiousity:

Assumptions:
- A DP tick hits for 15k non-crit, non-mastery proc
- We apply DP once per ~30 seconds (28.5 seconds for mb cooldowns+casts, + additional gcd for the dp hit itself) not taking Divine Insight

Then we gain 15,000 damage every 30 seconds from a DP breakpoint, or 500 DPS. That's a pretty small benefit for level 90, it's not nothing - top end spriests will obviously be considering and calculating it, but unlike where guides in Cataclysm told spriests to go for specific haste values for vt or dp breakpoints, I don't think it's going to be as cut and dry in mop.

The reason is that with such a small dps increase per breakpoint, just telling people to go for a specific breakpoint would oversimplify the trade off and scaling between mastery/crit/haste when they are all so close - it would be wrong more often than right to say "go for 30% haste for the DP+2" breakpoint - because without actually simming their toons haste/crit/mastery/hit - its very likely that they would have actually neglected mastery or crit to their detriment by doing so more than they would gain by making the breakpoint.

[Celentes]

As far as the current beta shadow model goes, haste is still slightly above everything in value, and as long as we'll keep stacking it, breakpoints will still be very, very good.
Stats are close now, and are close in full t14H, as I understand it. But that doesn't mean breakpoints will be diminished by that, the only case when they'll get worse is if crit/mastery will jump in value really this high because you've sacrificed them this much. I don't really see that happening, especially that they don't have their own breakpoints, nor DR. In extra dot tick breakpoint proximity, haste value jumps above intellect at the moment, and I don't see any real reason for that to change with the current beta stat weights.
I'd love to get some sim data on this, though.

[smokeajay]

As far as the current beta shadow model goes, haste is still slightly above everything in value, and as long as we'll keep stacking it, breakpoints will still be very, very good.
Stats are close now, and are close in full t14H, as I understand it. But that doesn't mean breakpoints will be diminished by that, the only case when they'll get worse is if crit/mastery will jump in value really this high because you've sacrificed them this much. I don't really see that happening, especially that they don't have their own breakpoints, nor DR. In extra dot tick breakpoint proximity, haste value jumps above intellect at the moment, and I don't see any real reason for that to change with the current beta stat weights.
I'd love to get some sim data on this, though.

Crit > Mastery > Haste on the latest beta build with the 8% nerfs and buffs to FDCL/SW:I.

[Brusalk]

Crit > Mastery > Haste on the latest beta build with the 8% nerfs and buffs to FDCL/SW:I.

Technically it's situations it's Crit>=Mastery > Haste. There's quite a few situations where mastery is for all intents and purposes equal, and only one or two where crit is higher.

[Celentes]

Oh, there we go. How far is haste behind? If still close, it may make sense to get to a breakpoint if you're close to it.

[Yvaelle]

Oh, there we go. How far is haste behind? If still close, it may make sense to get to a breakpoint if you're close to it.

It will make sense to reforge to the nearest breakpoint for haste even with haste diminished, my point is only that you will need to sim your character in your current gear to determine whether to go up to the next haste breakpoint or down to the one below it - based on whether you are over-invested in crit or mastery. With the current build, it's most likely we'll often truncate our haste to the lower haste breakpoint to maximize the better stats. (if haste goes up with the changes in the next build or two, we may end up rounding up - but again that will depend on all secondary stats for each toon, and won't be the right call for everyone like it was in cata).

Edit: That said, that's based on my current understanding of the current model - but since I expect some decent sized changes to shadow still after thinking about the last patch - I think things by MoP launch may be so different that this won't be true by the time it matters.

I'd really like to see haste be our best stat once again!

[Celentes]

I don't think haste will be bad. I mean it is still the best stat if you go mindbender instead of FDCL (meh, can't run simcraft at work to check this :/ but they didn't change scalings if you don't go FDCL, right?)
And with stats being so close together, it's probably just a little worse, which still makes you consider breakpoints. In a certain way, breakpoints are not even related to haste scaling.

Although I think I like the idea of stacking crit for a change.