Help our Spriest

[ebarkans]

Hello everyone -

Was just looking to see if anyone could spot some areas for our spriest to work on, we all feel his DPS is a little low but we don't have any other shadow priests in the group to help him out so any help you fine folks could provide would be amazing.

Character: Rosslyn

Log: warcraftlogs com/reports/XGyRpHJwkKfthD4Y#type=damage-done

Profile: us.battle net/wow/en/character/dalaran/Rosslyn/simple

I can't post links so I had to take out the period between warcraftlogs and com and again between battle and net let me know if there is another format I can use to post links until I get my post count up.

[Kilee25]

Gear looks fine. Could use some more specialized items. Hope they have a better trinket for non-demon encounters.

Can't see warcraftlogs at work, so I got nothing else.

[ebarkans]

Gear looks fine. Could use some more specialized items. Hope they have a better trinket for non-demon encounters.

Can't see warcraftlogs at work, so I got nothing else.

Thanks for taking a look, he does have another trinket, dont recall what it is off hand but we were on archi last night. We were able to at least look up stat priority for him and get him down that path but he swings from 40k to 60k without any rhyme or reason and he sims substantially higher than his output we just want to see if he is missing out on something.

[Sxq]

Doesn't look as bad as I was expecting from the post. Gear seems fine. General playstyle is okay. He's top or close to top on some of the fights you linked.

He's making some mistakes like delaying mind blast in order to channel insanity longer, due to casting mind blast -> devouring plague back to back when there should be a filler between them. Wastes GCDs on cascading in single target. Dps seems to fall off at a few points in the middle of fights, possibly dealing with mechanics and not dpsing efficiently on the move? For example on Xhul I see a window of like 9 seconds where he does 0 damage. Looking closer, he could also do a better job of lining up his 2nd potion with the legendary ring.

[ebarkans]

Yeah I suppose it does sound worse than it is! Like I said he is usually only little on the low side and we just dont have anyone else in the guild who can give him a hand with shadow, sometimes he is hanging out with the tanks with his dps and sometimes he is doing fine just seems like with his gear we should be getting more out of him. Maybe its more of a fight mechanics thing and not his rotation or gearing.

[Kilee25]

I will say that he should be low to mid 80s most every fight, with high 80s reachable on fights like Fel Lord, so yes 40-60 is quite low and indicative of some deeper issue. But it could be literally anything - bad PC, bad internet, bad rotation... without getting some more details, it's generally really difficult to pinpoint issues that would affect someone's DPS.

[Sxq]

I will say that he should be low to mid 80s most every fight, with high 80s reachable on fights like Fel Lord, so yes 40-60 is quite low and indicative of some deeper issue. But it could be literally anything - bad PC, bad internet, bad rotation... without getting some more details, it's generally really difficult to pinpoint issues that would affect someone's DPS.

The player in question did 80k ish+ on all of the linked fights aside from Xhul where he did 63k (which is why I suggest that high movement/mechanics fights might be part of his issue). I'm not saying he's the best player ever, but from the logs provided he is above average within OP's raid team. Looking even deeper, I see that these logs are from a couple weeks ago. For the last week and a half they've been working on heroic manny/archimonde with plenty of wipes just outside of execute range which makes any shadow priest look bad. Could be part of the issue.

[Deleted]

like Sxq already pointed out, he could improve his dps during movement (9sec doing 0 dps is a no-go when he could have done 2mindblasts and one cascade minimum...maybe sw:d adds). There is also never really any point in using the 2nd potion without the legendary ring and without having the Twist of Fate buff up.
Which brings us to the next issue(?): one of the most important things for a shadowpriest is optimizing Twist of Fate uptime by dotting/sw:d off-targets.
As shadow you do not want to switch targets due the classtrinket (debuff has to stack up to 5 stacks, and you need to build up 5 stacks on the new target and will risk letting those stacks fall off on the main target).
Timing cascades on Manny/Archi and Xhul is also a great way to push dps

[ebarkans]

The player in question did 80k ish+ on all of the linked fights aside from Xhul where he did 63k (which is why I suggest that high movement/mechanics fights might be part of his issue). I'm not saying he's the best player ever, but from the logs provided he is above average within OP's raid team. Looking even deeper, I see that these logs are from a couple weeks ago. For the last week and a half they've been working on heroic manny/archimonde with plenty of wipes just outside of execute range which makes any shadow priest look bad. Could be part of the issue.

Could be the fact that we aren't downing archi as well so no execute yet, we aren't going after him cause we think he is bad by any means. He came to us looking for help we simmed him and looked up his stat priorities but thats about where our knowledge tapped out, just trying to see if anything jumped out to the more experienced folks here. We were having some issues with logs so the last few weeks have been kinda screwy with only 1 or 2 nights a week showing up. But we have been spending most of our time on (not) killing h archi.

[masterprtzl]

On Zakuun he had a 88% up time on class trinket, should be over 95% on that fight. Looks like he let it fall off 3 times and at the start of the fight it took 15 seconds to get it started it looks like, not sure what the issue was there. Velhari he only had a 77.8% up time on class trinket, again could be closer to 90 on this fight. Looks like it fell off many times, sometimes for extended periods of times.

Movement can be tricky for CoP and he likely needs more practice at Xhul to keep up class trinket or probably shouldnt use it at all. Class trinket is 64% up time on Xhul, very low though if hes swapping targets a lot I could see why. This is a hard fight in general for CoP imo though.

- - - Updated - - -

Could be the fact that we aren't downing archi as well so no execute yet, we aren't going after him cause we think he is bad by any means. He came to us looking for help we simmed him and looked up his stat priorities but thats about where our knowledge tapped out, just trying to see if anything jumped out to the more experienced folks here. We were having some issues with logs so the last few weeks have been kinda screwy with only 1 or 2 nights a week showing up. But we have been spending most of our time on (not) killing h archi.

Last I checked, the Action priority list for shadow did not include the current ideal rotation as it was defaulting to dot weaving and not the haste mindflayless build that he appears to be going for (hes just about 35% haste on the dot). I havent played shadow in a couple months as I have swapped to my mage but I wouldnt compare to sims too much unless you customize simcraft quite a bit.

[Xraychicken]

As others have pointed out his class trinket uptime is pretty low.
Just some quick things I noticed from glancing at his armory (ill check back with his logs later when I have a moment!)

1) He is at exactly 35% haste which is "correct" but in reality hes gonna have HUGE issues keeping up his class trinket with that if he has to move or gets more than like 60ms at any point during the raid. This is what I think is causing him to have such low uptime on fights like zakkun and tyrant where he should be having 100% uptime if he doesnt get f*cked by seeds etc. Not much he can do to fix this besides getting better gear? Give him the tier chest at your earliest convenience and that should fix that.

2) Reading some of the other comments for his low dps on xhul. If hes using the class trinket on xhul and you guys arent getting overwhelmed by the void fiends just tell him to tunnel the boss. By tunnel I mean 95% of his dmg should just be on xhul- he should cast cascade everytime a new set up fiends spawn and thats about it. If you need his damage on the adds or you cant afford to have him just tunnel the boss tell him to unequip the trinket and play mindbender cop. His dps will still be lower on that fight as cop if youre doing it "correctly" and having adds live long but not much else you can do about that.

(also as master said above archi trinket cop sims are not to be trusted atm so take those numbers with a grain of salt)

[Kilee25]

He can just eat haste food if his current gear isn't enough. I keep haste and mastery food in my bags, and I just swap back and forth depending on where my gear lands.

[Sxq]

Regardless, he shouldn't let class trinket fall off unless he literally has to run out of range or something... whether or not his haste is high enough is irrelevant. If it's going to drop off, then refresh the stacks early. Blindly continuing the rotation is obviously the wrong anwer.

[Xraychicken]

Regardless, he shouldn't let class trinket fall off unless he literally has to run out of range or something... whether or not his haste is high enough is irrelevant. If it's going to drop off, then refresh the stacks early. Blindly continuing the rotation is obviously the wrong anwer.

I meant if hes trying to do the insanity only rotation then his haste is very relevant. If hes on the cusp of 35% there are points when hes going to refresh his class trinket and if he gets even a tiny lag spike or just isnt spamming his key hard enough he will miss it BARELY. The little bit of extra haste will solve that issue.

[masterprtzl]

I meant if hes trying to do the insanity only rotation then his haste is very relevant. If hes on the cusp of 35% there are points when hes going to refresh his class trinket and if he gets even a tiny lag spike or just isnt spamming his key hard enough he will miss it BARELY. The little bit of extra haste will solve that issue.

I dunno, you dont really need 35% to hit the rotation. 35% is when shadowfiend starts lining up with your mind spike slots in the rotation perfectly every time and you never have to delay using it for an insanity. You can pull the rotation off, though its more punishing, with less haste. My GMs alt shadow priest he was able to get it down at 31% haste while learning it. This of course is dependent on your FPS and Latency. He is making a mistake somewhere in the rotation if he is letting it drop off with 35% haste.

Something that I personally did was after the full insanity channel, I would interrupt it for a mind spike SLIGHTLY too early and it would only tic 3 times and not the 4th time. This caused a half a second less of class trinket up time and then It would run out right before my next insanity. Similarly waiting too long to cast mind spike at that same point delays your mind blast and again you might not have your orbs for the next insanity right on time.