[7.2] Legion Shadow Priest Guide and Discussion

[davesignal]

Queue up for LFR Nythendra to practice S2M. Wrist spasms after the second Void Torrent, I lose my targeting somehow, keep trying to mash spells for a second before I realize what happened, and I'm dead. Wrist just fucking hurts now.

Man, I give up. This spec is not for me any more. Blizzard took the class I've been playing for nearly ten years, yanked it out of my hands, and told me to go fuck myself. Can't even be bothered to patch in a band-aid to make other options even remotely competitive; can't even be assed to stick a 5% damage boost on Legacy of the Void.

This fucking sucks, and I have to vent.

[elsus]

I have a naga and have zero problems with wrist being sore or spasms or anything negative ever happening and run stm all day with zero problems. Maybe that would help if you're keyboarding?

[davesignal]

That's the second time somebody's suggested a naga to me today. The idea of doing my rotation on a mouse, after having used a keyboard since.. forever, seems really weird.

I smashed the shit out of my wrist as a kid and broke it pretty bad, it healed a little weird, and this isn't the first time I've had problems with it, but frankly it's never been this bad except during some parts of WoD when COP was prevalent. When AS came back into vogue, I was fine. Hell, playing with Mind Spike or LoTV right now, it's fine.

I dunno, maybe Blizzard only has spry people playing Shadow to test it internally. Either way, shit sucks.

[Relapses]

That's the second time somebody's suggested a naga to me today. The idea of doing my rotation on a mouse, after having used a keyboard since.. forever, seems really weird.

I smashed the shit out of my wrist as a kid and broke it pretty bad, it healed a little weird, and this isn't the first time I've had problems with it, but frankly it's never been this bad except during some parts of WoD when COP was prevalent. When AS came back into vogue, I was fine. Hell, playing with Mind Spike or LoTV right now, it's fine.

I dunno, maybe Blizzard only has spry people playing Shadow to test it internally. Either way, shit sucks.

Practice wrist movements by playing Osu.

[Arachnofiend]

So maybe this is a silly question but... when people say to cast void torrent immediately, how immediate is immediate? Should it always be the first thing you cast in voidform? I understand that using void torrent ASAP is required for the math in S2M to work out, but when not in S2M is it still best to press Void Torrent first thing rather than to wait for your other insanity generators to be on CD?

[elsus]

The idea behind using Void torrent first thing is trying to get to your third torrent. Basically the only way this is possible is by using torrent immediately so your 2nd and 3rd torrent are up as soon as possible.

[Gorsameth]

So maybe this is a silly question but... when people say to cast void torrent immediately, how immediate is immediate? Should it always be the first thing you cast in voidform? I understand that using void torrent ASAP is required for the math in S2M to work out, but when not in S2M is it still best to press Void Torrent first thing rather than to wait for your other insanity generators to be on CD?

Normally after your first void bolt to ensure that dot's do not fall off while channeling.
If you still have plenty of duration left then you can press it truly immediately.

[Thrayne]

I'm trying to find some help in becoming better in mythic+. I have seen some videos of shadowpriests doing 400-600k in AoE (most have legendary rings) but I can barely break 250-300k in most Aoe situations. Most bosses I can do 350-400k pretty consistently so my boss damage isn't an issue but I am having trouble finding groups for mythic 7+ because of other specs can can do similar boss damage but 600-800k on trash pulls.

On my alt I can tank all the way up to 10 without issue at a much lower ilvl, while doing much more AoE as a tank. Becoming more and more frustrated as I miss out on loot simply because I'm not attractive enough dps to bring to a 10. Any advice is appreciated from rotation/talents/gear/etc.

[Djriff]

The idea behind using Void torrent first thing is trying to get to your third torrent. Basically the only way this is possible is by using torrent immediately so your 2nd and 3rd torrent are up as soon as possible.

Well even if you can't get to 3rd torrent, popping it as soon as possible means a longer voidform which is more DPS.

- - - Updated - - -

Also H2P pushed out some new stat weights for StM with an 8k, 10k, and 12k haste set of stat weights. I know there will be some confusion regarding that and they're working on updating their original post to explain it a bit.

[Ocedic]

I'm trying to find some help in becoming better in mythic+. I have seen some videos of shadowpriests doing 400-600k in AoE (most have legendary rings) but I can barely break 250-300k in most Aoe situations. Most bosses I can do 350-400k pretty consistently so my boss damage isn't an issue but I am having trouble finding groups for mythic 7+ because of other specs can can do similar boss damage but 600-800k on trash pulls.

On my alt I can tank all the way up to 10 without issue at a much lower ilvl, while doing much more AoE as a tank. Becoming more and more frustrated as I miss out on loot simply because I'm not attractive enough dps to bring to a 10. Any advice is appreciated from rotation/talents/gear/etc.

Legendary ring is good for aoe damage, but regardless just multidot and then Mind Sear. One other thing is you may have mastery heavy gear, which does little for AoE compared to Crit. Also, if you're going to a trash heavy instance like BRH, or your group badly needs more AOE damage, I would go Void Ray/LotV instead of S2M.

Also, no matter what your AOE DPS is, what matters for finding groups in LFG is peoples' perception of the spec. There's a PUG mentality that Shadowpriests are bad at Mythic+, so people will reject you. I easily do M10 and beyond and put out 400-600k AOE as you mentioned, but I pretty much have to go with friends or guild groups.

[davesignal]

So minor thought: when I check Simulationcraft's front page, and my own simcraft reports, seems to list Shadowform as having a 100% uptime-- it's a 'constant buff' on the report. But Shadowform isn't constant; it drops on and off in accordance with Voidform, so it's uptime should be the inverse of Voidform's.

Accordingly, I seem to be simming much higher than I should be. Usually I'm within ~90% of what I sim (using LoTV, mind you), but since Shadowform's been re-implemented I'm much further off when, really, nothing should have changed significantly (because the 7.1 changes were tuned to be no net gain or loss)-- and my actual observed DPS doesn't seem to have gone down any based on where I was in 7.0.

So.. is Simcraft inflating our DPS due to improperly modeling Shadowform?

[2Dee]

I'm trying to find some help in becoming better in mythic+. I have seen some videos of shadowpriests doing 400-600k in AoE (most have legendary rings) but I can barely break 250-300k in most Aoe situations. Most bosses I can do 350-400k pretty consistently so my boss damage isn't an issue but I am having trouble finding groups for mythic 7+ because of other specs can can do similar boss damage but 600-800k on trash pulls.

On my alt I can tank all the way up to 10 without issue at a much lower ilvl, while doing much more AoE as a tank. Becoming more and more frustrated as I miss out on loot simply because I'm not attractive enough dps to bring to a 10. Any advice is appreciated from rotation/talents/gear/etc.

It depends on what specific dungeon your doing. We can all agree in mythic + the trash is the most difficult part so having good AoE will save overall time. For an Spriest you would have to look at getting Void Ray and LotV, certain dungeons these talents are a better pick compared to RoS and S2M.

I do 8+ as a spriest with guild mates and have no problem pulling those numbers or higher. Its usually SWP everything, mind sear into VF. You also have to get out of the mentality of saving CDs for bosses. I use Power Infusion during trash pulls and dispersion if the next group is nearby while still in VF.

[Deleted]

Also, no matter what your AOE DPS is, what matters for finding groups in LFG is peoples' perception of the spec. There's a PUG mentality that Shadowpriests are bad at Mythic+, so people will reject you. I easily do M10 and beyond and put out 400-600k AOE as you mentioned, but I pretty much have to go with friends or guild groups.

This is pretty much it. Most pug's opinions are formed when they've been doing 4/5/6ish dungeons when it just starts to get hard, and if you get a good group then stuff still dies too quickly for shadow to seem good. They almost never see shadow in the situations when its good, and I surprise quite a few pugs when we need a couple of our guild runs/its my keystone.

[elsus]

Mythic+ dungeons are very frustrating as a shadow priest for multiple reasons. Every shadow priest gets lumped in with bad shadow priests so people tend to think SP is bad. People think that stm is bad in dungeons which is downright wrong ( you can watch very good SP players destroy mythic+ dungeons all day on live feeds). I recently had a mythic+6 with another shadow priest in neltharions lair where after the first boss I was told how dumb I was for being stm (after destroying him on boss), then waiting because I know dungeon mechanics and that you Rez at the end of the creek. I smashed him the entire rest of the way even though "stm is bad in dungeons" and he out geared me by a fair amount. It's pretty unhelpful to our class when our own players don't even know what they're talking about, and are willing to go out of their way to bring it up.

[Djriff]

So minor thought: when I check Simulationcraft's front page, and my own simcraft reports, seems to list Shadowform as having a 100% uptime-- it's a 'constant buff' on the report. But Shadowform isn't constant; it drops on and off in accordance with Voidform, so it's uptime should be the inverse of Voidform's.

Accordingly, I seem to be simming much higher than I should be. Usually I'm within ~90% of what I sim (using LoTV, mind you), but since Shadowform's been re-implemented I'm much further off when, really, nothing should have changed significantly (because the 7.1 changes were tuned to be no net gain or loss)-- and my actual observed DPS doesn't seem to have gone down any based on where I was in 7.0.

So.. is Simcraft inflating our DPS due to improperly modeling Shadowform?

I can look into that, they may have just kept shadowform up all the time and kept voidform the same. SimC had some problems with the dynamic state of voidform anyways.

On a side note it is very frsturating to imitate dungeon pulls via SimC.

[davesignal]

I can look into that, they may have just kept shadowform up all the time and kept voidform the same. SimC had some problems with the dynamic state of voidform anyways.

On a side note it is very frsturating to imitate dungeon pulls via SimC.

Well, bit more on this: I swapped out all my gear and talents that could randomly increase my Void Bolt damage (so only stat sticks/no mastery procs, no Twist of Fate), jumped into Voidform, and beat on a target dummy. My Void Bolt hits for 111770.

I load that gear set into Simcraft, ensure everything is still set up to ensure nothing will boost my Void Bolt's damage at random, turn off flasks, food, potions, and augment runes and sim that. It reports back that my Void Bolt's non-critical damage is 122930.. which is awful close to 10% more than what my in-game damage number was.

So yeah, I think there might be a decently sized problem here.

[Dawnrage]

Why do people still use SimC? Serious question. You are at the mercy of making sure the people who maintain it do a good job on it, and no offense, but even during the Twintop era it wasn't even accurate most of the time.

I certainly appreciate the work people put into it but to use it as the bible as a lot of people do is just stupid. How many gear sets have spriests gone through just this tier alone because SimC has fucked up our stat weights over and over? I don't even trust the current values.

Unless the people working on it use real world data and make sure it matches what SimC is putting out, besides just blindly inputting data into it and hoping there isn't some error somewhere in the model, SimC will always be worthless (like one of the currently discovered bugs was that mindblast had a far longer cooldown than normal...really? How do you miss that if you actually go take a look at the logs of what SimC is doing and match it with just a 1 minute session on the dummy?). I know that they are doing the best they can and I'm just sitting on my ass complaining, but sorry, I think if you take on the task of putting out a tool that 95% of the community blindly trusts (and despite what they say, they know damn well that's true), you kind of have a huge responsibility to make it as accurate as possible to make sure you don't mislead people.

[davesignal]

Because Blizzard makes the interaction between class mechanics and secondary stats so fucking arcane as to necessitate complex statistical modeling to understand it, and this is the best we've got.

[Ocedic]

Why do people still use SimC? Serious question. You are at the mercy of making sure the people who maintain it do a good job on it, and no offense, but even during the Twintop era it wasn't even accurate most of the time.

I certainly appreciate the work people put into it but to use it as the bible as a lot of people do is just stupid. How many gear sets have spriests gone through just this tier alone because SimC has fucked up our stat weights over and over? I don't even trust the current values.

Unless the people working on it use real world data and make sure it matches what SimC is putting out, besides just blindly inputting data into it and hoping there isn't some error somewhere in the model, SimC will always be worthless (like one of the currently discovered bugs was that mindblast had a far longer cooldown than normal...really? How do you miss that if you actually go take a look at the logs of what SimC is doing and match it with just a 1 minute session on the dummy?). I know that they are doing the best they can and I'm just sitting on my ass complaining, but sorry, I think if you take on the task of putting out a tool that 95% of the community blindly trusts (and despite what they say, they know damn well that's true), you kind of have a huge responsibility to make it as accurate as possible to make sure you don't mislead people.

It's a tool like everything else. You are right that things should be taken with a grain of salt, and you shouldn't trust it as the absolute word of god. People want a magical tool to tune their character, but the fact remains that you have to actually play your character at some point. Having said that, SimCraft definitely still has some uses.

[Djriff]

Well, bit more on this: I swapped out all my gear and talents that could randomly increase my Void Bolt damage (so only stat sticks/no mastery procs, no Twist of Fate), jumped into Voidform, and beat on a target dummy. My Void Bolt hits for 111770.

I load that gear set into Simcraft, ensure everything is still set up to ensure nothing will boost my Void Bolt's damage at random, turn off flasks, food, potions, and augment runes and sim that. It reports back that my Void Bolt's non-critical damage is 122930.. which is awful close to 10% more than what my in-game damage number was.

So yeah, I think there might be a decently sized problem here.

That's a bit alarming. I mean since it's a universal 10% buff it's not going to effect stat weights or anything like that thankfully. I'll definitely get that fixed.

Why do people still use SimC? Serious question. You are at the mercy of making sure the people who maintain it do a good job on it, and no offense, but even during the Twintop era it wasn't even accurate most of the time.

Twintop was one of the main maintainers for shadow for SiMC, since he retired plenty of people have stepped up to fill the gap. SiMC is the best way to get stat weights and if you have an issue in simc like @davesignal just pointed out, I gurentee you it'll be fixed within 8 -16 hours of being submitted. SiMC also provides a good way to test out multiple talents and gearsets as well as find stat plateus while removing human input error during cast sequences. AMR's simulator essentially does the same thing, it's just not as robust.

I certainly appreciate the work people put into it but to use it as the bible as a lot of people do is just stupid. How many gear sets have spriests gone through just this tier alone because SimC has fucked up our stat weights over and over? I don't even trust the current values.

Well to answer your first sentence, SimC is a tool developed to be utilized by TC'ers, not the general masses. As for why gear sets have changed, nothing really changed in regards to the obvious stat priorities of haste > crit > Int. SimC also had a huge problem with dynamic stats + StM and twintop decided he wanted to retire than to devote a lot of his time to fixing it, I honestly don't blame him. I know at least 2 people at H2P that are working tirelessly on it to get it to be correct and give even more accurate results. Then we have stuff like @Isentrophy posting up 160s voidforms something we didn't even think was possible. It all ties together and helps tighten up the APL to provide better results.

Unless the people working on it use real world data and make sure it matches what SimC is putting out, besides just blindly inputting data into it and hoping there isn't some error somewhere in the model, SimC will always be worthless (like one of the currently discovered bugs was that mindblast had a far longer cooldown than normal...really? How do you miss that if you actually go take a look at the logs of what SimC is doing and match it with just a 1 minute session on the dummy?). I know that they are doing the best they can and I'm just sitting on my ass complaining, but sorry, I think if you take on the task of putting out a tool that 95% of the community blindly trusts (and despite what they say, they know damn well that's true), you kind of have a huge responsibility to make it as accurate as possible to make sure you don't mislead people.

That is an on going thing, like the thing I mentioned above IRT isen's findings. The problem is that you don't really expect basic spells like MB to be messed up, and when it's noticed people freak out about it, rightfully so as it's a hit to SimC's credibility. Also 1 minute on a dummy is meaningless and 2m would be a better idea, but honestly I think the reason it wasn't done is just trust in the devs.