[6.0] Shadow Priest Discussion

[Zoulis]

The wording on this can be our doom... Depending which takes effect first, we're looking at either a 6second or 12 second mind blast with CoP and Mind Harvest... What I'd like to see is changing the wording to "reduces the cooldown by 3secs" and "increased the cooldown by 3secs" that way these 2 will actually be able to be used together without one of the effects being disregarded completely, making either the talent worse ( Since haste will be affecting MB CD, it's still going to be really good but worse nonetheless) or the glyph really strong.

[Frmercury]

Fwiw - The ways in which we could potentially do damage at this point (even with CoP) at level 100 are so many... I mean do you run GoMH + DI + Insanity and MSp + MB inc adds while using SW: P, VT and DP+Insanity on your main target or would you CoP rotation your main target while SW: P and VTing your off targets and just burning procs on your primary target with DI and SoD.

There's a lot rotational that is going to rely heavily on the individual encounter and your guild's strat as well as final numbers tuning.

[Nestar]

Updated

• Clarity of Power (Shadow) - Your Mind Spike, Mind Sear, and Shadow Word: Death deal 40% additional damage to targets not affected by your Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch. In addition Mind Blast is now instant cast and its base cooldown is lowered to 6 seconds.
  
• Mind Blast’s cooldown is now reduced by haste, but its base cooldown is now 9 seconds (up from 8 seconds).
  
• Devouring Plague now always costs 3 Shadow Orbs
  
• Devouring Plague no longer gains ticks with Haste, instead its duration will be reduced
  
• Glyph of Mind Harvest: The first time you damage an enemy with Mind Blast, you gain 2 additional Orbs. Mind Blast's base cooldown is increased to 12 seconds.

Is it possible to use both Mind Harvest and CoP at the same time? And if so does it end up as a 9 second cooldown or does it still get locked to 12?

Also, that duration reduction on DP doesn't really do any good for us. Makes Insanity stop scaling with haste.

Edit - Or rather makes it stop double scaling (both uptime and flay tick sped) This balances out the increased up-time from orb generation.

[Frmercury]

Forgot to add these changes when I updated earlier:

Mana Regeneration:

• Shadow's base mana regen has been increased by 300%.
• Shadowfiend and Vampiric Touch no longer restore Mana.
• Mindbender now restores .75% Mana per swing, down from 1.75%.

[Frmercury]

God, I forgot completely about Attunements and the addition of Multistrike to Mind Quickening.

Sorry I keep doing this everyone

- - - Updated - - -

Mind Quickening (Shadow Passive) - Now provides 5% increase to Haste and Multistrike for all Party and Raid members.

Stat Attunement:

• New passive abilities granting a 5% bonus to specific secondary stat bonuses received from equipped items have been added for all specializations.
• Priest (Shadow): Haste Attunement - You gain 5% more of the Haste stat from all sources.

- - - Updated - - -

They also reworded periodic damage -> damage over time since I guess technically periods are no longer locked in with Haste being dynamically updated on DoTs.

- - - Updated - - -

Devouring Plague deals 100% of the initial hit as damage over 6 seconds.

^ Should've been put in a while ago, but I'm like 99% sure the post is accurate with all of the changes to date.

PLEASE:

If I missed anything, got it wrong or something is unclear please tell me!

[Deleted]

I wonder, how will Mind Flay work in WoD with DoT changes. Now MF have base 3s chanelled time with 3 ticks and haste makes channel time shorter so MF ticks faster. How will it be in WoD? Will MF be fixated to 3s time with 3ticks + partial tick depending on haste?

Thanks

[Zoulis]

I wonder, how will Mind Flay work in WoD with DoT changes. Now MF have base 3s chanelled time with 3 ticks and haste makes channel time shorter so MF ticks faster. How will it be in WoD? Will MF be fixated to 3s time with 3ticks + partial tick depending on haste?

Thanks

Most likely the same way it is now... There are no MF breakpoints. MF will have 3ticks + 1 tick from the empowered MF perk always. Channel time doesn't matter.

Devouring Plague deals 100% of the initial hit as damage over 6 seconds.

Which I guess means that if my initial DP crits > all of the ticks crit? yey crit is gonna be useful.
It could also mean though that if my initial dp crit for 50k then the rest of the ticks deal a sum of 50k dmg but each tick can crit. Has anyone checked this on alpha?

[Nestar]

Most likely the same way it is now... There are no MF breakpoints. MF will have 3ticks + 1 tick from the empowered MF perk always. Channel time doesn't matter.



Which I guess means that if my initial DP crits > all of the ticks crit? yey crit is gonna be useful.
It could also mean though that if my initial dp crit for 50k then the rest of the ticks deal a sum of 50k dmg but each tick can crit. Has anyone checked this on alpha?

Devouring ticks will be unable to crit and multistrike. The damage they do is entirely based on what the upfront hits for.

[Zoulis]

Ah thx for the clarification. Still this single change on DP makes crit pretty strong for us. It seems that they are actually balancing out the stats as they had said they wanted :P

[Kaesebrezen]

Which I guess means that if my initial DP crits > all of the ticks crit? yey crit is gonna be useful.

The DoT can't crit and can't multistrike. It simple deals whatever damage the direct part did. So if the DD was a crit, the DoT will deal just that damage.

Multistrike also adds damage to the DoT - plus right now it also adds an additional 15% heal per multistrike. As a DP multistrike currently works like ignite, it will split the damage/healing over 7 ticks instead of 6 (1 more chance to proc FDCL), plus at 0% haste the duration will be ~6.7 seconds. (a multistrike is registered ~0.3 sec after the DD and then triggers the ignite effect)

[Deleted]

Ah thx for the clarification. Still this single change on DP makes crit pretty strong for us.

I'm not too sure if this change alone will make crit stronger or weaker since what we gain in crit damage we also lose i.e. on live, initial can crit or not crit, dot has independent chance of criting or not and on alpha initial has same chance to crit or not with dot following suit. It evens out to be the exact same.

[Zoulis]

I'm not too sure if this change alone will make crit stronger or weaker since what we gain in crit damage we also lose i.e. on live, initial can crit or not crit, dot has independent chance of criting or not and on alpha initial has same chance to crit or not with dot following suit. It evens out to be the exact same.

They way I see it is: If e.g DP has 3 ticks ( fictional number ofc )
On live: Your initial hit can crit or not crit and then each consecutive tick can crit or not crit. That gives 16 different combinations only one of which is 4 crits ( regardless of crit % )
On alpha: Your initial hit can crit or not crit and then the ticks either deal double damage of what they would if you hadn't crit ( as a figure of speech they crit ) or they don't. This gives only 2 possible combinations, out of which 1 is 4 "crits"

So I feel that the more ticks ( since DP doesn't have 3 only ) you have and the higher the crit chance , then the better the alpha version is since it's better to have to roll the dice only once.
Without having done the graphs and extra math yet I believe that the damage mean is the same between the 2 versions up to a certain point and then the alpha version spikes and becomes better.
Now those crit levels are probably going to be out of reach so most likely crit is going to be a 2nd tier secondary stat still behind mastery and haste ( depending on the chosen lvl100 talent )

This is all written on 2 hours of sleep :P I'll get some more math done and edit if I'm actually mistaken :P just putting this out here early as food for thought :P

[Deleted]

Imagine 25% crit chance. If you cast DP 1 million times and then compare how this scenario plays out on live and alpha:

Live: 1 million DP casts --> 250,000 initial hits likely to be crits and 250,000 ticks likely to be crits.

Alpha: 1 million DP casts ---> 250,000 initial hits likely to be crits and hence 250,000 ticks will be crits.

The difference is 1 dice roll instead of many for each cast but the outcome overall will likely be the same.

[Zoulis]

Imagine 25% crit chance. If you cast DP 1 million times and then compare how this scenario plays out on live and alpha:

Live: 1 million DP casts --> 250,000 initial hits likely to be crits and 250,000 ticks likely to be crits.

Alpha: 1 million DP casts ---> 250,000 initial hits likely to be crits and hence 250,000 ticks will be crits.

The difference is 1 dice roll instead of many for each cast but the outcome overall will likely be the same.

I agree that on a strict math level you are correct. What I'm debating though is the difference between "likely" and "will" if I reach an absurd amount of crit ( when I crit more than I normally hit ). At that point 1 dice roll is more efficient than multiple ones. Since more rolls actually give a "higher chance" of failure. Since up to that point every time I roll I'm looking at failures (normal hit) leading up to a success (a crit) but above that point i'm looking at successes leading up to a failure.
As I said we're prolly not getting up to those levels of crit so it doesn't really matter, it's just nice to see that crit won't be completely irrelevant

[Aica]

The change allows you to continue to snapshot crit and spellpower procs onto DP.

[Calamari]

WoD's Devouring Plague looks like it's shaping up to be an SP's version of a Chaos Bolt big truck spell, except awesome.

[Frmercury]

Another one I forgot

Shadowform - Leap of Faith and Prayer of Mending can no longer be cast in Shadowform.

[Deleted]

I quite like the idea of Clarity of Power as an optional gameplay, but I'm not a fan of it as the go to single target option. We'll just have to see how they tune it.

I imagine it will be tuned so that it's a great choice for fights with adds that need to be killed quickly, but not as strong as the other two talents for single target.

Think Ragnaros hammer adds, Immerseus oozes, the oozes on the last part of Deathwing Heroic.

Thinking about it, that talent would've been amazing for Mind Searing the oozes on Deathwing Heroic.

[Zoulis]

I imagine it will be tuned so that it's a great choice for fights with adds that need to be killed quickly, but not as strong as the other two talents for single target.

Think Ragnaros hammer adds, Immerseus oozes, the oozes on the last part of Deathwing Heroic.

Thinking about it, that talent would've been amazing for Mind Searing the oozes on Deathwing Heroic.

Problem is that if it's not good enough for single target as 2 talents that seem really strong on multiple targets, there won't really be many uses for it besides maybe a deathwing type fight as you said. But to me it seems like our single target and cleave talent with the other 2 talents being for council type fights and multi target fights.

[BobAwesome]

"Devouring Plague now always costs 3 Shadow Orbs." What is the point of shadow orbs again? Just put DP on a CD.
That'd be significantly different. (Celestalon)

It would be the superior method. You try so hard to make shadow orbs work but they offer no real advantage over just a CD.
Hyperbole gets you nowhere. It *obviously* offers significant real advantage. (Celestalon)

You could just slap a longer cd on plague then reduce it through haste or MB casts or apparitions or w/e. Objectively superior.
I think you have a different concept of "objectively" than I do, and also ignored what I just said. (Celestalon)

Like really, I feel the only reason why they're so set on keeping shadow orbs is because they'd have to rework talents if they were removed...