DPS rotations and abilities, part 2

On with the second part of my (way too long) post about Shadow Priest DPS rotations and abilities from yesterday. This one focuses on slightly more advanced tactics that are mostly relevant in the middle of boss encounters.

There are 3 main things I want to stress that all shadow priests should keep in mind while DPSing. Following all 3 of these guidelines correctly will cause your DPS to skyrocket. I promise!

1) Presence.

If you've ever seen a WWS report, you might notice the second column reads "Pres.", short for Presence. This term is what WWS uses to describe time spent doing damage of some kind; for instance, dead people do nothing, and someone who died early in an encounter would have a much lower presence than someone who stayed alive to the end. This statement can be flawed somewhat, as DoTs ticking will count towards your Presence as far as WWS is concerned, but for the most part it holds true. Say it once, say it again, repeat it like a mantra in your head during every encounter: dead people do no DPS. Or put it another way: stay alive, pew pew, collect loots. Put your healing potions and Healthstones in an easily accessible location, bandage if you have to (if timed right, you can even bandage on encounters with lots of AoE damage like Sapphiron -- one or two ticks are better than none!), and you stand a good chance of survival if the healers aren't sleeping. And trust me, they most often aren't, it's the lazy DPS that rely on the healers, rather than themselves, to stay alive that keep them wide awake most of the time.

2) DoT Uptime

This point runs a close second to the first one, but its pretty obviously predicated on you staying alive. During your DPS rotations, you're going to want to shoot for 90% uptime on your Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague, compared to Shadow Word: Pain, which ideally should be up 100% of the time. To find your uptime in any given fight, find your most recent WWS report, take the number of ticks of your SWP, and divide that number into the number of ticks of VT. Do the same thing with DP, again dividing the SWP ticks into the number of DP ticks. Ideally, given almost perfect rotations, you will have 90% uptime on both of them. Don't shoot for 100%, as that may compromise your primary focus of casting Mind Blast, but you want it to be as reasonably close as possible.

A corollary to this rule is don't clip Vampiric Touch! You never want to recast Vampiric Touch before its timer runs out, as you lose a significant amount of DPS (up to 20% of the spell's DPS, or 2% of your total DPS) if you do this on a regular basis. And that's just assuming you only regularly clip the last tick. Not to mention clipping DoTs wastes mana. You already "paid" for all of those VT ticks with a mana cost, clipping it just makes sure you get less bang for your buck.

At least DP you don't have to worry about so much as the cooldown on the spell prevents you from clipping it accidentally. Fit a recast of the spell in as soon as possible when the cooldown comes up.

3) Use the spellqueue!

The spellqueue is a player-coined term that describes the "grace period" the server gives communication of your actions, like using spells or abilities, between your game client and the server in order to allow for normal latency levels. Giving you that grace period helps prevent your spells from interrupting each other constantly due to latency that isn't under anyone's control. Essentially, the spellqueue gives you the ability to fake superhuman reflexes and cast spells back to back, one immediately after another, as if you were timing button presses exactly as the current spell finishes casting. All you have to do is start casting the next spell about half a second to one second before your current spell finishes casting.

Anyway, "Use the spellqueue" may not sound like much of a tip, but you have to think about its effect over a few minutes. Someone using the spellqueue properly can easily get off many more casts than someone who waits for the current spell to stop casting before starting a new one.

Lets do some quick, dirty, and probably inaccurate (but still illustrative) theorycrafting: assuming 2 second casts of a hypothetical spell that does 2,500 damage with each cast, that's 75,000 damage possible over 1 minute. Using the spellqueue right will approximate this number. Not using it means you lose up to 0.5 seconds of possible casting time with each spell (assuming 250ms latency, about the limit of what most people consider reasonably "playable"). Adding this loss up over one minute, you've lost 7.5 seconds of casting time... and that's just over 1 minute! Take that the typical boss encounter lasts about six minutes, and you just gave away 45 seconds of face-melting destruction, or twenty-two and a half casts of our "Uber Spell of 1337ness." That's a 12.5% DPS loss.

This means using the spellqueue properly could equal a 10-15% dps increase with very little effort on your part--no gear changes, re-speccing, or re-gemming required! Use it, love it, live it.

• One word of caution: careful when doing this with Mind Flay. You don't want to clip Mind Flay, ever if you can help it, for the same reasons I give in point number two. Just wait till it's done channeling. There is also some evidence that trying to jam Mind Flays in too close together will cause the game to lose track of where the ticks of damage should be, and you end up losing 25% of that damage or so to the game "clipping" Mind Flay when it shouldn't be. Just don't do it, it's not worth it if you're trying to maximize DPS.