Shadow Priest - Haste + Mastery.

[Deleted]

just to derail the thread a little.

how do you folks view dropping haste (either through reforging or more likely regearing) for situations where you'll be hitting much higher haste caps (flying on alys for example)?

[Hardwk]

Huh? There is no point to aim for flat mastery values. There are fractions and they work, you know...

IIRC Mastery works off an Integer base. Meaning 14.00 = 14.99 - 16.00 = 16.99 etc.
At least it did at the start of cata and I missed some patch notes.

[Dancing Monkey]

Is it worth dropping 20 intellect to achieve the haste point of 2589? I am at 2570, and if I put in a +40 haste gem, in the place of a 20 haste/intellect gem, I can reach 2590.

[Deleted]

IIRC Mastery works off an Integer base. Meaning 14.00 = 14.99 - 16.00 = 16.99 etc.
At least it did at the start of cata and I missed some patch notes.

They changed MST to work with fractions, this goes for all secondary stats.

Is it worth dropping 20 intellect to achieve the haste point of 2589? I am at 2570, and if I put in a +40 haste gem, in the place of a 20 haste/intellect gem, I can reach 2590.

Without a doubt.

[Deleted]

They changed MST to work with fractions, this goes for all secondary stats.



Without a doubt.

I disagree, intellect is a king and will give a bigger dps boost, you should have di to get more haste.

[Arlee]

That's not true, I have 373 with 2760hst.

Here is one good example of someone stopping at 2nd platue and getting more MST, a top10 WoL priest in t11, and t12 from my server:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ttinu/advanced

Blerg... one of these days I'll remember that posting late at night after raiding is not something I am very good at. I had meant to say that I think the reasoning was that if in your current gear you can't get to the next haste point then staying just above the one before it and stacking mastery until you got enough haste to get to the next one is the theory. Thanks for the clarifications though.

* Smiley Face

[Nymie]

Hmm, thanks for all the replies, still no idea which one to do lol

Everyone is telling you to do the same thing. haste >mastery pre second plateau. Find a sim, like simcraft, and run it- you say you don't know how but if you were able to install addons to the game then you are able to install a sim. It shows you the hard numbers. Haste effects the cast time of MF, MB, and VT, and as you know the ticks of DoTs. The numbers are at shadowpriest.com or any site that does theroycrafting and lots of sim. You asked about which is better, people told you, and you seem to already have it in your head that mastery is better after X amount.

[Kilee25]

To comment on several topics:

Haste scaling

Without being able to reach points where our DPET increases, haste tends to scale poorly compared to mastery. After you reach VT+2 (2589 or 2141 with DI), Haste tends to have eventually scaled over Mastery. So through the process of passing intermediate breakpoints, and from a broad view, haste is better. But from a smaller perspective, looking inbetween each break point, Mastery is potentially better at early levels. It depends on your perspective and how you choose to look at stat interactions.

You also must keep in mind:
- There's a lower threshold where you can't generate Shadow Orbs quickly enough to maintain Empowered Shadows.
- Most any shadow priest that is raiding can easily reach 2141.
- A good percentage of shadow priests get DI in their raids.

All of this to say - most shadow priests can just stack haste, and trust they will pass the VT+2 threshold and ensure that haste will scale above the other stats.

However, the original poster does not get DI, and cannot reach 2589. In his particular case, haste has not yet scaled above mastery, and he cannot reach a threshold where it will. So to answer his question, yes he should see a small bonus by reversing and trading some haste out for mastery.

The problem is that we don't know what the lower threshold for maintaining ES is. Simulationcraft has been bugged and maintaining ES 100% of the time, so there's been virtually no testing and very little research and though behind this. We can guess that the lowest you would ever want to go is about 1700 before the lack of haste starts messing with orb generation. But the point is that, in theory, the OP you should do equal or more DPS with a slight mastery build in his unique situation. Will it work for all priests - no, because they are not all in his situation.

Is it worth it for the OP to bother with this? Possibly not. A lot of this is just theorhetical anyway. And it's pretty hard to to do a test in game, since even the theorhetical difference between a mastery build and a haste build is in the neighborhood of 50-100 DPS, and thus under a margin of error that we would see in World of Logs.

(This is also the reason why you see examples like Wablakin's, where you have a priest reforging in a different way and still ranking on World of Logs. Like many other classes, the reforging of of stats is not the most determining factor in total dps, and that is something we always need to keep in mind.)

All of this to say none of it probably matters in the grand scheme of things. To say haste is ALWAYS better than mastery is not entirely true, but it is a SAFE answer that avoids having to go through the above explanation.

Alysrazor

You can potentially see an increase on fights like Alysrazor by favoring mastery rather than haste. The amount you may see is perhaps 500-1000 dps. Compare this to the fact that you typically do about 50,000 (or more) during the fight. The extra damage is minimal compared to just playing well and making sure you get all the rings. Almost everything else except gear is more influential to your DPS. And the bigger issue is that there's a tremendous gap between the second tornado (ground) phase and the third. So if you can't beat the second ground phase timer, extra DPS in the air (especially such a small amount of it) is largely un-necessary.

Passing Plateaus by sacrificing intellect

Yes, this is worth it. You typically get about 40+ PP for passing a plateau. So sacrificing 10PP to get there would be a net gain. This goes with the knowledge that as soon as you get a new piece of gear that would allow you pass the point, you eventually undo the changes you have made.

Saying you should just get DI instead of that is a bit of an invalid argument if the person in question can't get DI.

Mastery

Yes it works fractionally. So not like Expertise. You get small increases with every addition.

[Afflictid]

Is it worth getting the 2589 if I would have to socket multiple 40 haste gems?

[Solia]

No, if you have to swap more than 50 Int for 50 Haste, it's not worth it (some would even say 40.)

Also, with Gale, 2589 was attainable at 346 gear level (with 359 rep items) not an ideal trinket, but gets the job done with Renew stacking pre-pull.