[6.0] Shadow Priest Discussion

[Frmercury]

Warlords of Draenor is the next expansion for World of Warcraft due out sometime this Fall. While in this stage of game testing a limited (unknown) number of people have access to the playable game. However through the release of Patch Notes and datamining the following mechanics changes are planned for Shadow Priests.

All of this is completely subject to change at any time.

Mastery:

• Shadowy Recall has been replaced with a new Mastery: Mental Anguish.
• Mastery: Mental Anguish: Increases the damage of Mind Blast, Mind Spike and Mind Flay by 20%.

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.

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%.

DoTs:

• Damage over Time spells no longer 'snapshot' the caster's stats when cast, instead DoTs will calculate per tick of damage. Each time a DoT ticks it uses the stats present at that time on the caster to determine its damage.
• As such there are no longer DoT Haste Break Points. Instead DoTs will now do partial damage based on the time between the penultimate tick and the expiration of the DoT.
• All DoTs can now be extended beyond their baseline duration up to a maximum of 130%. Ex: An 15 second DoT can be extended to a maximum of 19.5 seconds.

Level 100 Talents:

• 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. Also reduces the cooldown on Mind Blast by 3 sec and makes it instant cast.
  
• Void Entropy (Shadow) - Consumes 3 Shadow Orbs to deal up to XXXX Shadow damage over 60 sec. Devouring Plague will refresh this effect to its full 60 sec duration.
  
• Auspicious Spirits (Shadow) - Your Shadowy Apparitions grant you 1 Shadow Orb instead of dealing damage.

Talent Changes:

• Dominate Mind now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Mesmerize effects.
• Psychic Scream is now a level-15 talent, replacing Psyfiend, and has a 45-second cooldown (up from 30 seconds).
• Void Tendrils’ Root effect now has a chance to break if the target takes sufficient damage.
• Void Tendrils now have 10% of the Priest’s health (down from 20%), and damage dealt to the rooted target is now also dealt to the Void Tendril itself.
  
• Angelic Feathers, if cast on players, will always prefer the casting priest over others, then pick the player closest to the targeted location. If there are no players where it is targeted, it will still create a feather that can be picked up, as before. Additionally, when collecting multiple feathers, the duration will be extended, instead of replaced.
• Angelic Feathers have been reduced to 60% movement speed increase, down from 80%.
  
• From Darkness, Comes Light renamed to Surge of Darkness
• Surge of Darkness - Periodic damage from your Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague has a 10% chance to grant you Surge of Darkness, causing your next Mind Spike to not consume your damage-over-time effects, become instant cast, cost no mana, and deal 50% additional damage. Limit 3 charges.
• Insanity - Consuming Shadow Orbs transforms your Mind Flay into Insanity for 2 sec per Shadow Orb consumed. Insanity deals 100% additional damage.
  
• Divine Insight has been renamed to Shadowy Insight for Shadow specialization.
• Divine Insight - Periodic damage from your Shadow Word: Pain and damage from your Mind Spike has a 5% chance to reset the cooldown on Mind Blast and cause your next Mind Blast within 12 sec to be instant cast and cost no mana.
• Twist of Fate - After damaging a target below 35% health, you deal 15% increased damage and healing for 10 sec.
• Power Infusion - Infuses the Priest with power for 20 sec, increasing haste by 25%.
  
• Cascade, Divine Star, and Halo no longer heal allies but are instant cast for Shadow Priests.

Spell Changes:

• Psychic Horror now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Mesmerize effects.
  
• Mind Quickening (Shadow Passive) - Now provides 5% increase to Haste and Multistrike for all Party and Raid members.
  
• Mind Blast's cooldown is now reduced by Haste, but its base cooldown is now 9 seconds (up from 8 seconds).
  
• Power Word: Shield now has a chance for a critical effect based on critical strike chance and can Multistrike based on Multistrike chance for all specializations.
  
• Halo and Divine Star now follow standard AoE capping rules.
  
• Devouring Plague now always costs 3 Shadow Orbs.
• Devouring Plague no longer gains ticks with Haste, instead its duration will be reduced.
• Devouring Plague deals 100% of the initial hit as damage over 6 seconds.
• Devouring Plague - Now heals the Priest for 100% of direct damage and 100% of each tick.
  
• Shadowform - Prayer of Mending can no longer be cast in Shadowform.
  
• Shadow Word: Pain's initial damage is now considered direct damage, not periodic damage.
• Shadow Word: Pain's initial hit can no longer trigger Shadowy Apparitions or Shadowy Insight.

Spell Removals:

• Spiritual Precision has been removed.
• Binding Heal is no longer available to Shadow Priests.
• Hymn of Hope has been removed.
• Renew is now available only to Holy Priests.
• Shadow Word: Death is now available only to Shadow Priests.
• Void Shift has been removed.
• Inner Fire has been removed.
• Inner Will has been removed.

Warlords Leveling Perks:

• Enhanced Power Word: Shield - Reduces the duration of Weakened Soul caused by your Power Word: Shield by 5 sec.
• Improved Flash Heal - Increases the healing from your Flash Heal by 20%.
• Enhanced Shadow Orbs - You may have a maximum of 5 Shadow Orbs. No spell or ability will consume more than 3 orbs.
• Enhanced Shadow Word: Death - When Shadow Word: Death's cooldown is reset due to not killing a target, the resulting Shadow Word: Death cast can generate a Shadow Orb.
• Improved Vampiric Touch - Your Vampiric Touch deals 20% additional damage.
• Improved Mind Spike - Increases Mind Spike damage by 20%.
• (removed)Empowered Psychic Horror - Your Psychic Horror lasts an additional 20 sec.(removed)
• Improved Shadow Word: Pain - Your Shadow Word: Pain deals 20% additional damage.
• Enhanced Mind Flay - Your Mind Flay deals damage 1 additional time while its duration remains unchanged.

Glyphs:

• Glyph of Free Action: While Dispersion is active, you move 30% faster.
• Glyph of Delayed Coalescence: Dispersion lasts 3 sec longer, but when it has 2 sec remaining, its damage reduction reduces by 30% per sec.
• Glyph of Restored Faith: Leap of Faith pulls you to your target instead of pulling your target to you.
• Glyph of Miraculous Dispelling: Reduces the mana cost of Mass Dispel by 50%.
• Glyph of Silence: Reduces the cooldown on your Silence spell by 25 sec, but also reduces its duration by 2 sec.
• Glyph of Mind Harvest: The first time you damage an enemy with Mind Blast, you gain 2 additional Orbs. Mind Blasts base cooldown is increased by 4 seconds.
  
• Glyph of Vampiric Embrace: Your Vampiric Embrace converts an additional 75% (up from 50%) of the damage you deal into healing, but the duration is reduced by 5 sec.

Exclusive Glyphs:

• Dispersion: Glyph of Dispersion, Glyph of Free Action, and Glyph of Delayed Coalescence
• Leap of Faith: Glyph of Leap of Faith and Glyph of Restored Faith

Why aren't the damage values from the datamined information here?

The answer to that is simple: They do not matter at this stage. Damage values absolutely matter to us as a DPS class but the goal of Alphas (especially) and the majority of Beta is simply to get the game functioning properly. The development team focuses more on mechanics, rotations, playability, feel and bugs than worrying that all of the numbers are balanced. Serious number tuning occurs much later in the Beta version of the game. So until then we can focus our discussions on the same things they are: Mechanics.

[Shahad]

Overall, I like the changes. Couple of things though:

If the new Mastery is supposed to be our best single target stat (so it can fix our single target damage), it implies we are going to need two (partial) sets of gear to switch between purely single target encounters and multidot/aoe encounters. I do not like this at all, especially since the other dps cloth wearers won't need (as far as I can tell) two sets of gear to function properly. If we're going to need more loot focus to be competitive in all areas, we better be damn good and I do not believe that is a good thing for the game as a whole. It also appears to synergies really well with Clarity of Power, Divine Insight, Insanity and Surge of Darkness. This leaves me a bit dubious about the position of Twist of Fate, Power Infusion and Mindbender on single target.

The T90 talents also should be looked at, as if they don't provide healing anymore it greatly reduces their usefulness overall and makes choosing Divine Star a bit pointless.

[Deleted]

I would like to see the mind sear base damag uneffected by talent choice like clarity of power. As a second note i understand the button blurry but is it possible to provide a orb spending aoe ability?

How about adding it into devouring plague?
Easyiest way to implement it by adding a flat % increase to mind sear damag while DP is ticking.
It would be our orb spender by situation. So we could decide if we want the aoe use or single target burst.

I hope we get a lot of interesting changes in alpha/beta.

[Shamypriest]

Does anyone know if Blizzard has plans to adjust spirit on current cloth pieces for non healers? I know after 6.0, raiding won't really be important, but with all of the spirit we have on current tier items, it would kind of suck if we didn't get a useful secondary in place of it like hit/exp users will. It would definitely make leveling quite a bit faster as well.

Edit: To clarify what I mean, Blizzard has stated that spirit will become greyed out for non-healers and we will no longer benefit from it, while hit and exp will simply turn into another secondary stat. This means that, relative to hit and expertise users, we are going to receive a huge nerf in terms of secondary stat budgeting because all of the spirit we are currently using to hit cap will become totally useless.

[Gisen]

Does anyone know if Blizzard has plans to adjust spirit on current cloth pieces for non healers? I know after 6.0, raiding won't really be important, but with all of the spirit we have on current tier items, it would kind of suck if we didn't get a useful secondary in place of it like hit/exp users will. It would definitely make leveling quite a bit faster as well.

Noticed a tweet way back saying spirit on current gear is going away from everything but rings/amu weapons trinkets (the pieces that will have spirit in WoD) not sure how it will be converted though.

[Shamypriest]

Noticed a tweet way back saying spirit on current gear is going away from everything but rings/amu weapons trinkets (the pieces that will have spirit in WoD) not sure how it will be converted though.

I edited my original post because I figured it would be kind of unclear. I'm just worried it is an indirect nerf because of stat budgeting.

[Gisen]

I edited my original post because I figured it would be kind of unclear. I'm just worried it is an indirect nerf because of stat budgeting.

Either way spirit is limted to very few pieces mainly rings and amu trinket and weapon any spirit on other pieces will be converted into another stat if thats what you're worried about.

[Dierdre]

Noticed a tweet way back saying spirit on current gear is going away from everything but rings/amu weapons trinkets (the pieces that will have spirit in WoD) not sure how it will be converted though.

That was regarding plate and mail gear. I suppose, it would make sense, and I hope the same will apply to cloth gear. Nothing on that specific case yet though.

[Frmercury]

Added Leveling Perks

The non-Spirit/Hit versions of items are up on Wowhead.com
You can toggle a setting to see what they will be come 6.0
Spirit stays on Rings, Necks, Trinkets and iirc Weapons.

- - - Updated - - -

Added in everything that wasn't damage tuning.

[kpii]

oh dear please no clarity of power

[Deleted]

oh dear please no clarity of power

Well i think it can be fun to use CoP. I hope it might get some depth but at least its not a 1 button spam.

Mostly like 3-4 mind spike
Followed by an mind blast
Continue until 3 orbs
And use Mindflay during DP duration
In addition other adds next to the main target will need a DoT managment + SW: D + mind harvest.

[Shahad]

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.

[eErike]

Problem I have with CoP:

00% haste: casting MB and then begining to cast Mind Spike directly after will result in 3 mind spikes and 0.5s cooldown left on MB (wasted time).

20% haste: MB-> 4x MS -> Mindblast of CD, last MS cooldownreduction will be wasted.
or : MB-> 3x MS -> 1.25 (one global) CD left on MB. Not cool.

20-50% haste: This is where you will minimize the waste of the 4th Mind SPikes cooldown reduction, at 50% haste you will have a perfect 4x MS with the MB comming of cooldown directly, the closer to 20% haste you get on the other hand you lose more and more potential from your MS spam.

Formula for MB cooldown remaining:
MB Cooldown = 8-(Number of MS*(1,5/(1+(Haste%/100)))+Number of MS).

Maybe it's a stupid thing to complain about, but there is no "sweetspot" anywhere exect at 50% and it really annoys me :P

[Kaesebrezen]

Maybe it's a stupid thing to complain about, but there is no "sweetspot" anywhere exect at 50% and it really annoys me :P

It's a pretty important topic for CoP.

You start at 0.5 cooldown left, and adding haste will increase that number. Question here is at what amount of CD is it better to wait for Mind Blast instead of casting Mind Spike. By default adding haste will force you to delay Mind Blast until you can reach 50% at which point you have 0 delay.

You can do the same for the Mind Spike Glyph. At 20% haste you then have the perfect fit of 3 Mind Spikes between your instant cast Mind Blasts. At 50% haste you're then back again to a 1.0 slot of doing nothing.

Psychic Scream is now a level-15 talent, replacing Psyfiend, and has a 45-second cooldown (up from 30 seconds).

CC talents are moved to level 60, surviveability to level 15.

[eErike]

It's a pretty important topic for CoP.

You start at 0.5 cooldown left, and adding haste will increase that number. Question here is at what amount of CD is it better to wait for Mind Blast instead of casting Mind Spike. By default adding haste will force you to delay Mind Blast until you can reach 50% at which point you have 0 delay.

You can do the sfor the Mind Spike Glyph. At 20% haste you then have the perfect fit of 3 Mind Spikes between your instant cast Mind Blasts. At 50% haste you're then back again to a 1.0 slot of doing nothing.

Didn't actually take the instant MB into calculations, good point. However I think it is a win/lose combination because for every point of haste over 20% you will increase the idle time up to 1s at 50% as you mentioned.

What do we think about 25% (24.92 if you'r very good at reforge) haste with the glyph in order to reach DP breakpoint? Depending on the acutal scaling later, DP timeperiod will still be a very important period of damage.
It would also leave 0.2s for latency :P

*MB CD left = (8-(1,5/(1+(HASTE/100)))-(# of MS*(1,5/(1+(HASTE/100)))+ # of MS))*

[Kaesebrezen]

What do we think about 25% (24.92 if you'r very good at reforge) haste with the glyph in order to reach DP breakpoint?

DP breakpoints do no longer exists with the WoD haste changed (== partial DoT ticks).

Breakpoints are only be interesting when specced FDCL, as when you have a full new tick, you get 0.2 additional FDCL procs per DP. At 20% you have DP at 7 ticks that last 5.83 and a partial tick of 0.17 seconds worth of damage. That's already pretty good for FDCL procs

@Woaden: Maybe add the Snapshotting and DoT changes to the OP?

[eErike]

DP breakpoints do no longer exists with the WoD haste changed (== partial DoT ticks).

Breakpoints are only be interesting when specced FDCL, as when you have a full new tick, you get 0.2 additional FDCL procs per DP. At 20% you have DP at 7 ticks that last 5.83 and a partial tick of 0.17 seconds worth of damage. That's already pretty good for FDCL procs

Man, I really have missed a lot and need to do some reading on all these changes I seemed to have missed everywhere...

[Deleted]

It's a pretty important topic for CoP.You start at 0.5 cooldown left, and adding haste will increase that number. Question here is at what amount of CD is it better to wait for Mind Blast instead of casting Mind Spike. By default adding haste will force you to delay Mind Blast until you can reach 50% at which point you have 0 delay.You can do the same for the Mind Spike Glyph. At 20% haste you then have the perfect fit of 3 Mind Spikes between your instant cast Mind Blasts. At 50% haste you're then back again to a 1.0 slot of doing nothing.

Why cant they change the passiv cd-reduction to something else? Like each MB gives your next MB a extra 5% for a multistrike/crit up to a maximum of 40%. If we get other benefits we dont have to worry about our changing haste with gear.on the positiv side we would basically also get a mini bust cd.

Btw would be also okay if each MS increases the periodic damag from DP by lets say 10%. With this passiv we would reduce the possibility of continous MS MS spaming after DP. But DP might get to bursty.

[eErike]

Why cant they change the passiv cd-reduction to something else? Like each MB gives your next MB a extra 5% for a multistrike/crit up to a maximum of 40%. If we get other benefits we dont have to worry about our changing haste with gear.on the positiv side we would basically also get a mini bust cd.

I don't really understand how you ment, but the way I understood it we would end up in a MSx3(4)-> MB rotation that would never be worth breaking ever due to DP+MF damage falling too far behind.
Also, having an extra eye on haste has always been "our thing". Removing that would end up in some other stat beeing the "Bring this up to X" stat anyway.

Btw would be also okay if each MS increases the periodic damag from DP by lets say 10%. With this passiv we would reduce the possibility of continous MS MS spaming after DP. But DP might get to bursty.

I don't understand how a stronger DP periodic damage would affect our MS sequence? The MS casts is in order to be able to cast MB faster which leads to more DPs.

If you ment that we would replace the cooldown reduce with something else (eg your sugestions above) that would mean that we would cast 5 mind spikes, even more with more haste (up to 8 at 50%) which would be pretty boring imo plus that the damage from Mind Spike would have to be huge to compensate the long time between our DPs (because you can't increase DPs damage too much for PvP reasons) which in turn would mean that the DP+MF damage would have to be increased to be worth casting at all and it all would result in a crazy burst that would be way too much.
(TL: DR; the further between burstmoments the bigger the burst, too long between them = too big burst).

[Frmercury]

@Woaden: Maybe add the Snapshotting and DoT changes to the OP?

About to jet to work, but can when I get home.

Btw - CoP rotation consists of MS, MB, DP, MF, T90, SWD AND SWP and VT on off targets. I'm not saying it will be good by any means but it's not 3 buttons like people are saying. That's just not true.