Mind Sear: here we go again

[DiGG]

The point is, for a fight like heroic Madness, Congealing Bloods need to die FAST (in less than... 5 secs?). We have no time to dot, we absolutely need to Mind Sear, and if I'm not mistaken we are now doing less damage on those than any other class. We used to be in the top 2, down to last... we got the right to QQ.

Now I realise that's a very specific situation. Oh and I did heroic Yors'haj, where I was always on top of the meters... not anymore. A kitty completly destroyed me. But going back to the multi-dotting specification, I destroyed eveyone else on heroic Zon'ozz: dot dot dot OH I raped.

In the end, if you ask me if I'd prefer lesser dots and bigger Mind Sear, I still would prefer that than the new changes. Oh well, I'm adaptable, I need to accept not being on top for a long while now hehe.

[BoysBoysBoys]

Spriest AoE DPS really is a lot more entertaining now though.

Dotting everything and then using a combination of Mind Spike/instant Mind Blast procs along with Mind Sear is a lot more involving than what it was before. VT damage is kind of depressingly low, but I'll wait and see if it really affects performance in the long run. ❤

[Cerbz]

Mind Sear definitely needs a buff. The damage per tick is absolutely pathetic.

[Washuwa]

lol, just go yorjsaj VT all adds, and get free MS, and MB every half second, is so god damn fun, and btw shadowpriest is doing like 4-5k more dps, even with the 4% less haste... and about madness, if u look at ur logs most of the mind sear damage on the last phase was from spellweave procs from mind sear,...not damage from mind sear..

[Yvaelle]

That's pretty much a lie. Our Shadow Priest never did this well in comparison before.

Oh no, Shadow Priests can't just spam Mind Sear on 2 (3?) targets anymore. It's the end of the world. Don't you just wish you had another way to damage multiple targets with significant damage at the same time? Perhaps with damage that doesn't happen all-at-once.. maybe.. over time? Nah, Blizzard would never give you anything like that AND give you extremely competitive single-target damage.

Apart from all the people who already pointed out the problem with using a single fight from a single raid group on the first day after total class redesigns, consider:
- boomkins and locks are both able to At Least keep up with a spriest right now for a dot fight like Boat
- Annesh is a knowledgeable and respected member of the spriest community (which is to say, he's probably a) a better player than most of your raiders, and b) was likely very aware of all the changes to spriests long before Tuesday - so while everyone was just figuring out their new class, he was already comfortable with it)
- Annesh has both heroic cunning and legendary staff which account for more damage together than any other source of his damage (11% visible plus even for Divine Insight talent his Mind Blast damage looks high, when legendary staff duplicates a Mind Blast it gets filed under Mind Blast damage and not staff damage)
- 40% of Annesh's damage is dots, compared to 50-60% on your lock and moonkin, 60% of Annesh's damage is single target spells - albeit likely with Divine Insight, so he was getting slightly more Mind Blast procs than usual (5% chance on pain tick)
- literally every spec gained dps (in some cases, such as fire mages, over 5k single target) going from 4.3 to 5.0, all of you will be doing more now than you did before the patch once your used to it
- if you look at any fight where aoe matters (ie. Yor'sahj) Annesh stuck to multi-dotting (from the looks of it he Sear'd one black phase to test it out, then went back to dotting instead)

Which gets to my original point: our multi-dotting really isn't stronger than before (searing with less than 4-5 targets was a waste), our Mind Sear is very weak, and yet our overall damage is up. It's certainly not the end of the world for us, but complaints about mind sear being weak are totally justified right now (it scales off just 15% of our spellpower per tick). And while Ghostcrawler might have told you that spriests had boring gameplay where we just spammed Mind Sear over and over again before the patch, we didn't - Mind Sear scaled off both Evangelism and Empowered Shadows - two very short-duration single target buffs we had to maintain to AoE effectively - which was probably one of the most involved aoe rotations for any class pre-patch.

[Themos]

Pretty much^

Whether shadow aoe is viable or not any more is another matter, but what's the point of having Mysery on your bar? It's junk as is.

[Reith]

- literally every spec gained dps (in some cases, such as fire mages, over 5k single target) going from 4.3 to 5.0, all of you will be doing more now than you did before the patch once your used to it

I don't really have a problem with what you said before this, but this is absolutely false. I'm already used to mine and I'm not doing better than I did before on average. I've practiced priorities on beta and my Inquisition uptime is really good. 94.4% on Morchok (life gripped at the pull), 99.3% on Yor'sahj, 98.1% on Warlord, 95.4% on Hagara (delaying refreshing Inq until it was safe that it'd be up the whole way when lightning phase finished and ice blocked once), 98.6% on Ultraxion and 96.3% on Warmaster. I even used Prot T11 4-piece on Ultraxion (15 extra seconds on guardian) and switched back just before the pull to get an extra ~11 seconds out of Guardian- which now does more damage with its melee attacks in one use than my Gurthalak procs do across an entire fight - and I still didn't manage to get #1 on our second attempt. I think I barely managed to break even with my pre-patch performance on the second attempt, due to good crit RNG.

- if you look at any fight where aoe matters (ie. Yor'sahj) Annesh stuck to multi-dotting (from the looks of it he Sear'd one black phase to test it out, then went back to dotting instead)

Which gets to my original point: our multi-dotting really isn't stronger than before (searing with less than 4-5 targets was a waste), our Mind Sear is very weak, and yet our overall damage is up. It's certainly not the end of the world for us, but complaints about mind sear being weak are totally justified right now (it scales off just 15% of our spellpower per tick). And while Ghostcrawler might have told you that spriests had boring gameplay where we just spammed Mind Sear over and over again before the patch, we didn't - Mind Sear scaled off both Evangelism and Empowered Shadows - two very short-duration single target buffs we had to maintain to AoE effectively - which was probably one of the most involved aoe rotations for any class pre-patch.

Yeah but you know that if they buff Mind Sear, they'll nerf your DOTs, and then people will be complaining about that. There's no incentive for Blizzard to do that change unless Shadow Priests are begging for an overall nerf.

[blackblade]

it was actually quite fun to Mind Sear while making sure that Evangelism and Empowered Shadow are up.
Maloriak heroic adds mmmm

I really hope they understand what a glaring contradiction it is that it okay for several specs have one aoe spell that they spam and not okay for one other spec to have it.

Yeah.

Blizzard, Earthquake, Rain of fire, Multishot(and barrage) all come to mind.

AOE Is kind of a touch and go topic for a lot of classes. Some classes have an easy AoE rotation, some do not.

On one hand it's good because it makes the classes distinct,
On the other it sucks because class X is running around shitting bricks while class b just keeps blizzard rolling.

I don't know that every class should go one way or the other, but some classes do a lot more work for the same outcome which sucks. overall, MoP has done a lot for many classes to make AoE a bit easier.

[Deleted]

Yeah but you know that if they buff Mind Sear, they'll nerf your DOTs, and then people will be complaining about that. There's no incentive for Blizzard to do that change unless Shadow Priests are begging for an overall nerf.

They did not really increase dotdamage though but more into mindblast and flay. They just did not want us to spam only mindsear but to multidot, and that is what happened in cataclysm that it couldn't fulfill certain roles it was designed for (magmaw etc comes to mind). It was not necessarily the damage that was the deciding factor of the nerf.

About that sp performance in your WoL, the rest of the dps in your raid is well behind their dps with like 5-10k compared to our logs (our warlocks do 53k, mages 48k etc), in a competitive settings where everyone plays their best and same gear sp's are easily beaten by mages and warlocks as of now, so your point of sps cant have good aoe due being the best etc does not float in my eyes. Mind you, my only point Im trying to make is that you should not base that assumption you had earlier about sp's just on few logs alone, in competitive guilds the ones topping are usually rogues/mages/locks (and warriors, especially in mop what ive seen sofar in beta hc raids)

edit: that is with only at certain fights, on yorsha we even have dps going as high as 98k (frost dk), you should only make comparison when everyone has equal gear/skill.

[Venaliter]

We increased the damage of Mind Sear by 30%. Shadow sustained AoE was significantly low. It should still be preferable to multi-DoT on a few targets, but this should make Mind Sear a more attractive option against larger groups.

Wow, that was fixed really fast. Shame on the people who said Mind Sear was okay. It wasn't.

[Wekapedia]

And in the end they just buffed Mind Sear again. I don't expect anything different to happen this time either.

Just to quote myself.

That was fast.

[Celentes]

It seems most of aoe was nerfed in the last little patch.
Ironically, not the rain of fire.

[Kelesti]

It seems most of aoe was nerfed in the last little patch.
Ironically, not the rain of fire.

Fire and Brimstone is Destruction's AoE too, which was nerfed.

[Venaliter]

It seems most of aoe was nerfed in the last little patch.
Ironically, not the rain of fire.

As was Immolation aura; Ro wasn't nerfed directly, but thier AoE WAS definitely nerfed. Which is odd; you'd think they would encourage those "secondary* skills rather then pushing spam, spam, spam one spell.

Maybe GC realized how dead wrong he was when the community mocked him; maybe it was easier this way.

[Celentes]

Fire and Brimstone is Destruction's AoE too, which was nerfed.

I didn't say destro aoe wasn't nerfed, just this one. Seeing how it can be pentupled with the talent, and that it outshines MS on its own. Just a reference to the prior discussion, I myself am fine with destrolocks having better aoe.

Also, I myself think that GC's post about how mind sear was a 'boring' aoe was just a random mishandled post. I am pretty sure the real reason behind it was not to switch to MS during cleave situations. In cata you've lost all of MF utility by doing this, but now we don't have any other reason to cast MF other than just to hit something.

[Whitepepper]

As was Immolation aura; Ro wasn't nerfed directly, but thier AoE WAS definitely nerfed. Which is odd; you'd think they would encourage those "secondary* skills rather then pushing spam, spam, spam one spell.

Maybe GC realized how dead wrong he was when the community mocked him; maybe it was easier this way.

For accuracy's sake, the community didn't mock GC. The malcontents who flock to the forums may have, but they have never been indicative of the community. I see two or three people each day in trade on my server saying the changes are terrible, etc. The hundreds of others logged in at the time are enjoying the new patch. While a very small sample size, this is much closer to the community's reaction to the game design than the forums.

[Venaliter]

For accuracy's sake, the community didn't mock GC. The malcontents who flock to the forums may have <snip>While a very small sample size, this is much closer to the community's reaction to the game design than the forums.

The community soundly criticized GC's post on how spamming mind sear was not fun, and rightly so, despite what you seem to believe. For the majority (maybe even the VAST majority) of people playing this game, seeing a WHOLE WHACKLOAD of damage numbers all over the screen is very, very fun.

I also object to you characterizing forum posters as "malcontents." Obviously, there are some of those, especially after a major nerf, but the average forum poster is normally exactly average, neither particularly smart or particularly stupid. Most of them share a genuine love of at least their class, if not the game. In addition, some of the players who post on the forums would be fantastic developers, even perhaps more capable then the ones who get paid to do it.

Lastly, I even choose to overlook the obvious hypocrisy of you yourself posting on forums. Well, almost.

[Sipep]

Was the 30% buff on live also or just beta.

[Jervaise]

Was the 30% buff on live also or just beta.

I also wonder about this? anyone have any info?

[Yvaelle]

I also wonder about this? anyone have any info?

I think it was just a beta fix so far.