shadow affinity...

[VisualX]

So with the innate 30% threat reduction introduced to shadowform, is shadow affinity useless? Considering 30% is more threat reduction than what shadow priests are running around with now. Or are SP's going to run around with 55% threat reduction? (like some did before the silent resolve change.)
Will Blizzard change this talent? Perhaps they don't realize that they "added" the 30% and that shadow affinity is kind of redundent.

[lsfreak]

Keep in mind two things:
1 - No salv. Tank's threat was buffed, yes, to compensate for this. Even if they got the full 30% buff, there's still fights I can ride the tank for threat (Prince, Bear boss, Supremus, and Bloodboil come to mind). Especially healing-heavy fights where VE can do a ton. Which leads to...
2 - The ability to safely use VE more often. There's a ton of fights I have to hold back specifically because of VE if I use it; Nightbane, Void Reaver, Tidewalker, Bloodboil are some. The extra 30% threat reduction will help a ton on healing-intensive fights where VE can really help.

[Worshaka]

Keep in mind two things:
1 - No salv. Tank's threat was buffed, yes, to compensate for this. Even if they got the full 30% buff, there's still fights I can ride the tank for threat (Prince, Bear boss, Supremus, and Bloodboil come to mind). Especially healing-heavy fights where VE can do a ton. Which leads to...
2 - The ability to safely use VE more often. There's a ton of fights I have to hold back specifically because of VE if I use it; Nightbane, Void Reaver, Tidewalker, Bloodboil are some. The extra 30% threat reduction will help a ton on healing-intensive fights where VE can really help.

Apart from a few encounters such as Bloodboil & Void Reaver which are aggro sensitive encounters due to the fact those bosses directly reduce tank threat, i'd suggest you get a better tank or have them work on their threat generation. As for Prince & Nightbane, if you're geared to do BT you are quite obviously overgeared for those encounters and in all likelihood the person tanking for you is not. Not to mention Warrior threat gen gets worse as they overgear themselves for encounters due to the rage mechanism. So i'm not quite sure they are good examples.

Still for the most part good tanks outstrip spriest threat quite easily, mainly because spriest dps doesn't scale particularly well and the other sources of your threat being VE & VT become minor in nature (to begin with VE in particular was hard to utilise but by SWP you can pretty much IMP VE to your hearts content). Just for example, the Eredar Twins is a highly aggro sensitive encounter due to confounding blow and VE heals for a bucketload with the vast amounts of raid damage and i've never been threat capped on that encounter. All our DPS are, even to the point that hunters opt for Salv on that encounter (the only time they utilise Salv in any encounter in TBC).

Having said that I don't feel that Shadow Affinity will necessarily be redundant but I will definitely toe the line in seeing how many points I can do with out. Some reports from WotLK Beta is that spriest threat is a non-issue but until you start doing some end game raids at level 80 and start squeezing as much DPS as you can you're not really going to know.