What happened to shadow?

[Nivrax]

TL.DR : You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Do Thok kiting is same on 10 and 25? From middle to tunnel then back and forth? You can do 5 full fixates and no gate will help you on 6th since it will reach wall. We never needed it to help kiters, I used it only for person running back to stack group (which Priest Leap would do same) and so that our hunter can get through boss and cheese fixate on himself. Healthstones are god-sent though for fixated/nontopped people. I agree on Blackfuse, kinda. We had setup that could stay on belt all time so we didn't need it. On Garrosh, I'm person dealing with engi, I use gate to get more uptime between aoeing sets of adds before dealing with it. I run from engineer to grouping point on feet though (with Sprint) and times I aggroed wolf rider maybe 3 times in hundreds of pulls. Unless 25 man have diffrent aggro radius *shrug*. And we had no way to keep empowered adds off people before Iron Star came so it ended up to RNG wheter or not we pull to next phase w/o losses.

For the lock thingy you would need to know history on Xelnath on warlock forums. Short story, he was dev behind most changes and got fired in mid-MoP. Now they start cutting seemingly random things from locks, mainly Shadowburn mana regen, with tweet from Cel saying 'Cast Time isn't mana regeneration so it's just complication'. Anyone playing Destro lock will tell you how clueless he is as we had no mana return on SB early on until it got hotfixed in as we couldn't use our execute and went oom (making Chaos Bolt always go-to spender). Fel Flame removal is other one (Affli can't deal with totems/mc without it for example).

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Plot twist, dps are in raid to do damage, if you can pick from 2 dps classes that share loot and one of them does much more damage you pick it 100% of times.

I'll tell our ret pala to stop using Devo and BoP on Thok, clearly he doesn't know what he is doing. Dps bring dps to beat enrage timer and utlity to deal with boss mechanics. If you have 2 same dps classes and one bring healing/utility and other doesn't, you take one with extras, always.

Read Celastalon tweet, he recently was discussing utility of different classes. It is important part of dps toolkit. That's why in WoD all dps spec will deal same dps but also they all get cutted down to (or gain, mages and later ww) same utility.

[Deleted]

I was checking out raidbots to see how SP fares, not just in this patch, but over a bigger timeline, and... it's even worse than before.
First of all, why is there a huge gap between the 3 warlock specs and the only DPS spec of a priest?
We're not even middle of the pack, we're right there with the weirder specs, towards the bottom. I chose 60th percentile to account for the average skilled player.

Well, Warlock is insane this exp, especially latest patches. And all can't be best at everything. Priest aren't last at least. Doubt they will do much changes now until WoD anyway.

[Dierdre]

I'll tell our ret pala to stop using Devo and BoP on Thok, clearly he doesn't know what he is doing. Dps bring dps to beat enrage timer and utlity to deal with boss mechanics. If you have 2 same dps classes and one bring healing/utility and other doesn't, you take one with extras, always.

Read Celastalon tweet, he recently was discussing utility of different classes. It is important part of dps toolkit. That's why in WoD all dps spec will deal same dps but also they all get cutted down to (or gain, mages and later ww) same utility.

I'd love to agree with you, it should be that way. But in reality, if you get to choose, you don't bring the ret because prot and holy bring that same utility without losses. In many cases the same applies to shadow. Better offhealing is brought by enh shaman with much better dps; VS, lifegrip, mass dispel, etc. are all brought by holy / disc. The situations where you say "man I wish we had a shadow priest" are way fewer than the ones where you say "why didn't we bring another mage/lock?"

[Deleted]

Well, Warlock is insane this exp, especially latest patches.

Inaccurate; they were 115% of the average in 5.0. They were amazing in 5.0, together with Mage. A class which was meh in 5.0 but good in ToT and SoO is Rogue.

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I'd love to agree with you, it should be that way. But in reality, if you get to choose, you don't bring the ret because prot and holy bring that same utility without losses. In many cases the same applies to shadow. Better offhealing is brought by enh shaman with much better dps; VS, lifegrip, mass dispel, etc. are all brought by holy / disc. The situations where you say "man I wish we had a shadow priest" are way fewer than the ones where you say "why didn't we bring another mage/lock?"

Devo Aura is a valid argument to bring a Retribution Paladin because Protection Paladin is meh and you may have 1. Holy Paladin is terrible, too. We have to compete with the best healer of SoO (HPS + utility wise), Discipline.

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Do Thok kiting is same on 10 and 25? From middle to tunnel then back and forth? You can do 5 full fixates and no gate will help you on 6th since it will reach wall. We never needed it to help kiters, I used it only for person running back to stack group (which Priest Leap would do same) and so that our hunter can get through boss and cheese fixate on himself. Healthstones are god-sent though for fixated/nontopped people. I agree on Blackfuse, kinda. We had setup that could stay on belt all time so we didn't need it. On Garrosh, I'm person dealing with engi, I use gate to get more uptime between aoeing sets of adds before dealing with it. I run from engineer to grouping point on feet though (with Sprint) and times I aggroed wolf rider maybe 3 times in hundreds of pulls. Unless 25 man have diffrent aggro radius *shrug*. And we had no way to keep empowered adds off people before Iron Star came so it ended up to RNG wheter or not we pull to next phase w/o losses.

Ranged lose DPS when kiting and if the Warlock outranged the Demonic Gateway it must be reapplied. Healers can heal themselves while kiting or use CDs like Pain Suppression (not used otherwise). A Demonic Gateway trivializes the kiting to a great extend. They can be chained with a movement speed increase and it allows you to kite longer which is good if you were unable to do a full Deafening Screech cycle.