[Shadow] Secondary Stats in PvP

[Yvaelle]

Anyone found some math on the trade-offs of secondary stats in shadow arenas?

Thoughts:

Haste - probably the highest DPS gain by a good margin

Crit - probably the best burst stat (Halo, Mind Blast, Devouring Plague initial hit, Shadow Word: Death - all benefit the most from crit)

Mastery - probably the best mana and Divine Insight / From Darkness stat


Obviously high pressure is important, but from my arena experiences in the mop beta and so far this week - I seem to run OOM after a few minutes after which my contribution to the team drops dramatically. It does feel worse than on the beta, and I suspect this is because I don't have 4 piece yet, so my VTs are getting dispelled more often than they probably will - but currently I go OOM like 2-3 minutes in. The problem is we lost Archangel, Masochism, Replenishment, Spirit Tap - and even with all of those we'd go OOM pretty fast pre-5.0 - now we just have VT ticks, Dispersion, and Shadowfiend/Mindbender - of which VT ticks account for ~2/3rds of our mana return, and are dispellable - and if you sit on the spriest - tricky to keep good uptime on.

I don't really feel like my damage is a problem, but crit would help me score kills or get cooldowns more often - and Mastery would help my mana problem - so I'm almost debating here between the weaker of the two stats. Plus, my first buy is the conquest pvp trinket which you only have a choice of crit, mastery or spirit - so I'll need to choose one of them regardless for that.

Haste would help my VTs tick faster, resulting in more mana, but Mastery would result in more ticks - so I'm not quite sure which to emphasize yet.

[AvaEve]

-pvp power is technically the highest dps secondary stat. Haste is otherwise.

- you can't control crit when bursting. Crit is also bad because some of its dps value for spriests is built into shadow apps, which is bad. Crit no longer reduces cd of shadowfiend.

- If you're looking to get the most mana return from vt refer to this thread: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ot-ticks-procs. Be aware that haste will oom you faster simply because of casts/time.

- You mention mana felt worse than when you played on beta. This is most likely you not being geared, as our mana return scales with haste/mastery.

- hopefully you're not just spamming swp when you're getting pressured by melee, because that will oom you very fast. Play with a frost mage.