Shadow priest cataclysm

[Venara]

I'll be interested to see how MSK plays out... considering it's a 1.5sec cast time it won't enjoy the SP coeffecient of MF which says to me that MF will probably be the spell at high gear levels.

I'm also interested in seeing how the new DoT refresh mechanic will work. I know it's only been mentioned for warlocks but I have no doubt it will apply to spriests as well. Depending on how it's implemented you might do nothing but cast VT during trinket procs (assuming there is going to be a decent amount of time left in the encounter). Imagine a BL right off the bat, just cast VT and all of a suddent you have a VT that lasts the entire encounter at 40% more haste...

Either dots are going to have their damage calcs changed regularly or the refresh is only going to work when a dot is sub 5 seconds duration or so.

They clarified that the new refresh mechanic will be applied to all DoT classes.

Also, I'm quite sure that this mechanic will have limitations, like "Can only be refreshed shortly before it expires (3-5 secs)" or "Can not be refreshed to last more than x seconds". They will most certainly not allow you to recast VT or other DoTs to last the entire combat so you can spam MSK while you don't need to refresh anything. ^^

[Nican]

Cant find the blue post from somewhile ago stating that blizzard was aware of the somewhat low raid utility provided by shadowpriests.

It would have been nice to copy paste it above this:

New Talents and Talent Changes
* Misery will no longer affect spell Hit chance. We want players to be able to gear themselves around a Hit cap that isn't variable depending on group composition.

[Abandon]

They clarified that the new refresh mechanic will be applied to all DoT classes.

Also, I'm quite sure that this mechanic will have limitations, like "Can only be refreshed shortly before it expires (3-5 secs)" or "Can not be refreshed to last more than x seconds". They will most certainly not allow you to recast VT or other DoTs to last the entire combat so you can spam MSK while you don't need to refresh anything. ^^

The way I understood it, since the Duration is no longer being reduced by haste, when you refresh a DoT then you would refresh it back to its maximum duration. Recasting SW:P would put it back up to 18 seconds, no matter when you refresh it. This would mean if you refresh DoTs early, you are wasting more GCDs than you need to and so will do lower damage, but you are not punished for refreshing them very close to them running out.

[Worshaka]

The way I understood it, since the Duration is no longer being reduced by haste, when you refresh a DoT then you would refresh it back to its maximum duration. Recasting SW:P would put it back up to 18 seconds, no matter when you refresh it. This would mean if you refresh DoTs early, you are wasting more GCDs than you need to and so will do lower damage, but you are not punished for refreshing them very close to them running out.

Like I said i'll be intersted to see how it's implemented, we are all guessing on how we think it works rather than actually knowing how it's going to work.

If it is the way you propose there is a small penalty for clipping, while the actually next tick isn't clipped over several cycles you are losing a tick for the amount of time spent casting... im finding it hard to explain but basically if a full VT duration is 5 ticks and you cast it slightly early you only get 4 ticks out of the next full duration + 2 seconds or so for you to refresh it again.

However if it adds 15 seconds to the existing time there is 0 penalty for doing it early but if it adds 15 seconds all the time you can abuse short time buffs, whereas if it only works in the last 5 or 3 seconds then you can't abuse that fact.

I think thats a good step, spriests probably suffered from lag more than any other class, dot clipping and the technical aspects of channeled spells make lag particularly nasty for spriests. While I appreciate that class homoginisation is a bad thing I think they should just make MSK replace MF because those technical aspects which hurt poor latency areas (like Australia where I live) is just an unfair penalty that I can do nothing about.

[hezzaba]

aside from mf vt shadowform and dispersion all the shadow priest talents are passive for pve point of view

and if they gut out the entire tree cause truth be told we have alot of passive abilities we might find shadow in a point of unplayibility

[Abandon]

I don't really think playability will come into it. How will removing the talents which do nothing at all interesting hurt Shadow playstyle? We will be getting more utility. I don't see that as a massive downside considering we are not giving anything up for it.

[hezzaba]

shadow focus and misery's tooltip 3% to spell hit and increases the benefit from spell power gained by your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by 15%.

also does this mean haste will finally affect sw

[Mstone2005]

They already replied with a few clarifications, saying that of course clipping dots is going away for EVERY class, not just warlocks. I think this also implies clipping Mindflay will be a thing of the past, seeing as MF has always been handled (close to) as if it were a dot.

The Problem I see with Mind Spike, as cool as it is, is the following:

PVE: When it does around the same damage as Mindflay (3 second channel) with SWP on the enemy, then why not just cast 2 Mindspikes instead of 1 Mindflay - which would mean the second mindspike does more damage than the first (and the first is supposed to already do the damage mindflay does in half the casttime) - meaning 2 Mindspikes do double the damage of 1 Mindflay in the same amount of time. Of course if they meant it does the same damage as MF over 3 seconds, 1 cast of spike will only do half the damage of MF. But still... why not just cast MF to refresh SWP and use the spike all the other time when you don't have to dot or MB?

PVP: Seeing as they didn't mention a frost snare on Mindspike, this means we still won't be able to try to kite melees, meaning we still have to tank them...

I have alot of the same concerns. Mindspike will end up either replacing mindflay or used like a second mind blast. The main problem i have is that they dont seem to be really cleaning up our spell rotation, but instead they could be complicating it.

[fabian]

PVE: When it does around the same damage as Mindflay (3 second channel) with SWP on the enemy, then why not just cast 2 Mindspikes instead of 1 Mindflay - which would mean the second mindspike does more damage than the first (and the first is supposed to already do the damage mindflay does in half the casttime) - meaning 2 Mindspikes do double the damage of 1 Mindflay in the same amount of time. Of course if they meant it does the same damage as MF over 3 seconds, 1 cast of spike will only do half the damage of MF. But still... why not just cast MF to refresh SWP and use the spike all the other time when you don't have to dot or MB?

They said spamming MSp will do the same damage as spamming MF, so the second part. MF will probably still have the higher DPET because it can crit 3 times in the time MSp can crit twice.

shadow focus and misery's tooltip 3% to spell hit and increases the benefit from spell power gained by your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by 15%.

also does this mean haste will finally affect sw

Yes, SW:P will be affected by haste.

[Abandon]

They mentioned on the Priest forum that if the target dies within 15 seconds then MSP will do more damage than Mind Flay and DoTs.

[Xelaeno]

They mentioned on the Priest forum that if the target dies within 15 seconds then MSP will do more damage than Mind Flay and DoTs.

Would it be possible that there's a mechanics set up such that Spike does more damage as target decreases in health? Possibly at 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25%? After the target enters each level of health, the caster gains a short duration buff (5 seconds or less) that enables better damage. This would justify why it only works on quick kills, as the buff will disappear after 5 seconds if the target doesn't enter the next health level within 5 seconds.

[Windspast]

I do find it annoying that every healer will be able to dispel in Cata. A large portion of our damage comes from dots and I've always hated them getting dispelled.

Even if blizzard increases the mana cost of defensive dispel, I still have a feeling that it will not stop our dots from being dispelled. Having to constantly renew our dots is ultimately more annoying then healers losing some mana to cancel out a huge part of our damage.

Having every healer being able to dispel is just going to further hurt shadow priests in pvp. So many class already have talents that make their abilities harder to dispel. (Rogues, hunters, warlocks) Why can't priests have a talent that makes it harder to dispell their dots.

[Oajng]

Why would you want a dps CD? The way I see it is that shadow priests do a lot of consistent damage without the need of CDs.

[Frmercury]

Why would you want a dps CD? The way I see it is that shadow priests do a lot of consistent damage without the need of CDs.

For on demand burst such as burn phases or to combine with Speed Pots / PIs. Every other DPS class in the game has some kind of DPS CD, it's only right (and about god damned time) we get one too.

[Eternal Champion]

Shadow Priests using frost spells? lolwut?
I get it they want to do something about school lock, but it's kinda lame :P

[Hipnex]

Since alot of dmg increasing spells will go away i can imagine that we will get like when you cast a shadow spell you have a chance for your next mind spike or mind blast to be instant cast.