SW: D Change. Buff or Nerf?

[Yoshimiko]

Was Vampiric Embrace removed? IF not this could be seen as very strong raid healing (25k deals 15k damage back when she's healed for 4k of it instantly, and also heals a 25 man raid for 750 each, making it ~19k in total)

If it's removed then.... I think they should honestly just remove this glyph all together. With the new queueing, 2 high-end crits and you could global yourself based on RNG.

[Supernex]

guys... the Mind Melt talent still exists...
so: >25% SW hits for 100% of the dmg it can do
<25% SW hits for 125% of the dmg it can do
That was before the buff... The way i see the sentence in the blue post it doesn't say that it's 3 times as hard as above 25%
so atm it should be: >25% SW hits for 100% of the dmg it can do
<25% SW hits for 375% of the dmg it can do
I know it sounds mad but this is what derives from what they wrote.
So if it is actually like that.. it's a heck of a buff.
Cheers
Zoulis

That how SWD acted BEFORE the series of nerfs. Before this most recent change SWD was hitting for about 450% under 25%, so now that it is saying that it will hit for 300% under 25% it looks like another very noticeable nerf.

I will log in and check out the damage and report my findings.

[llDemonll]

Unless you suck it's impossible to kill yourself with SWD except bloodqueen. I don't know why Blizzard are retards saying that it's too taxing on healers, they're not the ones who are pressing SWD, they aren't obliged to heal someone who is stupid enough to kill themselves with it.

[Xorina]

i was hitting 25k with sw:d lastweek now im doing much less

[Kelesti]

As far as 85 content goes, yes you would be taxing healers. Because it would be seen as the "top way to shadow dps", and guaranteed the top guilds in the world would have 2 shadowpriests to race for those kills.

That would trickle down to the rest of the community trying to emulate what won't work in most setups. To say that it's not taxing the healers is crap in Descent, because everything is taxing at that point, and it's more about what you can do to lessen the load (see Rogues taking +healing taken talents).

Plus, if Shadow was balanced around that, what would happen when boss abilities prevented your using of the spell, like say regularily spewing fire all over the ground, bringing the raid to 35% health regularily, Shadow's damage would suffer because of it.

This isn't Wrath where you can justify it as "not taxing healers".

The health bar isn't a resource bar to be spent and replenished.

[Kesia]

As a main spec healer, the SWD spam does not bother me, in fact it gives me something to do, plus the fight ends sooner and my HPS looks pretty. Now if this was cata and a progression fight and mana was an issue, then I would let them die but if this is taxing on anyhealer they are probably under geared.

Same here. I haven't had any problems with SWD so I'm not sure where they're getting the idea that it's making things hard for healers. I do expect Spriests to pay attention to what they're doing though (just like I expect every other class to pay attention to what's going on around them). If they're spamming SWD and I'm healing them, then suddenly they're not getting heals anymore, they better be looking to make sure I have enough mana or the tank's health isn't dropping quickly or something.

Then if they keep using the spell anyway, I don't want to hear any QQ about them dying.

[pickley]

Healers aren't obligated to heal people doing something stupid. If somebody stands in fire, they get one heal from me so they can finish their cast or whatever. After that, they'll stand there and burn.

Seems the same could be said for this. If the priest is using SW: D to the point where they take a ton of dmg and it's stressing the healer, the healer can stop healing them and force the priest to stop using the spell. If the healer keeps healing, they've obviously not stressed.

"Wahh i dont want to do my job, stop using a high damage spell!"

[Cyno]

As others have already figured out this is more likely to be their way of clarifying how the damage jumps so abruptly when you enter the execution phase instead of an actual change.

[jangkun]

Blizz doesn't want this kind of high dmg ability to be spam. Ret paladin were at same point in early WotLK with Martyr and blizz removed it.
It's not surprising that they change SW: D to be an high dmg ability only on target under 25% (it's an execute after all)

[harky]

The health bar isn't a resource bar to be spent and replenished.

Didn't you used to be a Warlock? I'm ashamed.

Anyway, this was a tooltip clarification.

[Kelesti]

Didn't you used to be a Warlock? I'm ashamed.

A Warlock, that despite being SM/Ruin, relied heavily on Drain Life to reliably keep myself up, instead of saying "that's a healer's job".

Except for those fights where I was trading healthstones in combat

[zenkai]

For the record I wish people would stop talking about 4.03 mechanics in 4.01 post, it's two diff things! Like comparing apples to oranges. Even blizzard said that when Cata comes out some re-balancing will need to be done when the bigger health pools come into play

[Constantino]

Not sure why everyone is all about the increase under 25% and ignoring this

Priest (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Shadow
Shadow Word: Death base damage has been reduced by 75%.

It doesn't do 16k hits now it does 5k in regular rotation and is buffed back to 15k-ish at execute stage.

[Popesickle]

We are forgetting that we do not have mind spike, I'm thinking that since mind spike does not cause high threat but removes dots, our execute rotation might be SWD, SWD, MSx3, MB Repeat, meaning we will vampiric embrace heal any damage that SWD has done to us.

[Kelesti]

For the record I wish people would stop talking about 4.03 mechanics in 4.01 post, it's two diff things! Like comparing apples to oranges. Even blizzard said that when Cata comes out some re-balancing will need to be done when the bigger health pools come into play

Well, the class mechanics don't change, only the context they're under. I'd rather update and correct people, as they think it may not be a problem currently, it was a definite flaw in beta. Personally, to err n the side of caution in giving a headsup outweighs any "but I can do X in <currently outdated content> with no problems!"

That's not just shadow, that's not just DPS. It's everyone. As far as it standing currently? Numbers don't really need to be readjusted, Death doesn't need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Just minor tweaks, that's all.

And for the record, "4.0.3" isn't Cataclysm either, that's just the 1-58 content patch.

[Constantino]

We are forgetting that we do not have mind spike, I'm thinking that since mind spike does not cause high threat but removes dots, our execute rotation might be SWD, SWD, MSx3, MB Repeat, meaning we will vampiric embrace heal any damage that SWD has done to us.

Simply put, I can't see mind spike entering any normal rotation long as it wipes rebuffs. Rather it is a tool for fight mechanics that require CC and we need to clear dots. Same for boss fight phase changes, say like pp if he's close to transition and there's an add up, cast mind spike to stop lingering dps.

[Sharaki]

Forget whole health-portion of the spell. I found it ridiculous that 50% of our dps came from execute phase. Rather nerf the execute and buff overall, while keeping some increase to execute range.

Overall: Buff.

[Rizzoti]

As others have already figured out this is more likely to be their way of clarifying how the damage jumps so abruptly when you enter the execution phase instead of an actual change.

Plus nerfing the damage even more.

[Deyus]

Plus, if Shadow was balanced around that, what would happen when boss abilities prevented your using of the spell, like say regularily spewing fire all over the ground, bringing the raid to 35% health regularily, Shadow's damage would suffer because of it.

I think the health bar as resource was pretty neat and am disappointed in the glyph change from that regard. It was definitely unique, and I'm sure that in any reasonable guild the priests would back off in circumstances where the healers were having trouble keeping up or were taxed on mana. After all, we currently use Divine Hymn / Hymn of Hope as tools to assist our healers.

The much bigger concern is what you hit upon above. I remember being completely gimped on RoS during Burning Crusade. It's straight up no fun to be uncompetitive because a major damage source is rendered unusable by encounter mechanics. Far better to have the damage distribution be fairly balanced across all of our abilities.

[llDemonll]

We are forgetting that we do not have mind spike, I'm thinking that since mind spike does not cause high threat but removes dots, our execute rotation might be SWD, SWD, MSx3, MB Repeat, meaning we will vampiric embrace heal any damage that SWD has done to us.

lol...no way in hell 3 casts of a "filler" spell will do more than 2+ ticks (plus ticks during swd spam) of 3 sets of dots