So I just started a warrior ... again.
Currently level 4. Having a Bloodied Arcanite Reaper is a nice dose of nostalgia and OP-ness. You don't even know until you try it.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
New Divine Hymn
Okay, so I lied.
Matticus just gave the priest community a heads-up on the new Divine Hymn currently on the PTR. There was a seemingly minor change to the tooltip wording that seems to indicate Divine Hymn will soon be a raid-wide "smart heal." His comparison to Circle of Healing seems pretty much spot on.
This is a potentially raid-saving spell available to ALL priests that gives us shadow priests in particular a little bit more utility in a raid context. I already have it ingrained in me to use Hymn of Hope when necessary from raiding with my fiancee, a healing priest. This new Divine Hymn will just give me another good reason to pop out of Shadowform in crunch time. And don't forget Hymn of Hope is getting a major facelift as well.
Let's hope this change goes live.
Matticus just gave the priest community a heads-up on the new Divine Hymn currently on the PTR. There was a seemingly minor change to the tooltip wording that seems to indicate Divine Hymn will soon be a raid-wide "smart heal." His comparison to Circle of Healing seems pretty much spot on.
This is a potentially raid-saving spell available to ALL priests that gives us shadow priests in particular a little bit more utility in a raid context. I already have it ingrained in me to use Hymn of Hope when necessary from raiding with my fiancee, a healing priest. This new Divine Hymn will just give me another good reason to pop out of Shadowform in crunch time. And don't forget Hymn of Hope is getting a major facelift as well.
Let's hope this change goes live.
DPS rotations and abilities
Hopefully my last post of the day.
In my guild's forums the other day, I struck up a conversation about optimal DPS rotations.
My current DPS rotation, starting from the moment I enter combat, is this:
Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Flay - Mind Blast
I'm aware this is flawed -- bear with me. The late Mind Blast is a holdover from my BC days. I have the habit of DoTing up the target (beginning with VT) before casting a MB in order to get mana regen flowing as fast and furious as possible. Mind Blast used to restore the most mana of any of my spells so I wanted to ensure I had Shadow Weaving stacked to max before casting for the biggest damage. These days, it's still the mana restorer, but with an entirely different role in your rotation.
Shadow Priests have gone from a primary purpose of restoring mana to a dps-centric design. My thought process and habits are still in the last era, and I'm working on changing my thinking away from "I am here to restore mana" to "I am here to melt faces." Waiting to Mind Blast till you've stacked Shadow Weaving to 5 is a waste of mana and potential DPS. Mind Blast is the most important dps ability in a shadow priest's arsenal, and any player concerned with maximizing his or her potential DPS is going to want to center their rotation around it.
Take my current spec as an example of fail. I only have 1 point in Improved Mind Blast. The other shadow priest in our raids who, besides being much better geared, does far more dps than I do does so because of Mind Blast, primarily. That is, doing more of them. According to a recent WWS report on Patchwerk, he cast in the neighborhood of 165 Mind Blasts and averaged about 5100 DPS. I did about 3600 DPS and cast 106 Mind Blasts -- only about 66% as many as he did. While gear explains that DPS gap somewhat, the difference in our rotations explains much more, with a sprinkling of interesting ability mechanics. Here it is paraphrased from his words.
This other priest leads off with Mind Flay. Mind Flay has an interesting bug these days that causes it to stack two Shadow Weaving buffs instead of one. I've only confirmed this happening when I have no existing Shadow Weaving buffs, but it may well occur no matter how many you have when you cast it. This is a good thing, however, letting that Mind Flay run its full duration when you could use that time to cast higher damage spells or DoT up the target is probably not such a good idea. "Clip" it immediately -- that is, cast it and immediately start the next spell as soon as the Global Cooldown allows. There is a secondary benefit to an initial Mind Flay, and that is giving tanks time to "threat up," for which 2.5 seconds is, for better or for worse, plenty of time these days.
After the initial MF, the next step is to "start the clock" on your rotation by casting Mind Blast. If you are centering your rotation around Mind Blast, you will want to use it every time the cooldown is up. This is top priority. The rest of the time you will spend keeping DoTs up and Mind Flay-ing when possible. Fully talented, you will have a 5.5 second cooldown on MB, giving you 3 or 4 GCDs, depending on haste, to do other stuff.
Therefore, incorporating this knowledge into a new rotation would look like this:
Mind Flay - Mind Blast - Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Blast
There is another little tidbit everyone should know concerning Shadow Word: Pain. When you apply SWP to the target, its base damage is set from any debuffs on the target. When Mind Flay refreshes SWP on the target via Pain and Suffering, the base damage is not recalculated! Therefore, you might think the key to maximizing DPS means you need to cast SWP twice, once at the beginning and once to reset its base damage value once the rest of the raid unloads on the target. This would be a good guess, but to avoid wasting a GCD doing that, we should instead swap the positions of SWP and DP in our rotation in order to give the raid more time to apply maximum debuffs to the target before casting SWP. The good news here is that SWP is fire and forget, so once its cast, at least in a normal encounter, you can usually drop it from the rotation.
Now that I've thoroughly bored any potential reader to tears, I'm going to cut this post off here and continue it in a second part, probably tomorrow, that mostly concerns mid-encounter dps rotations.
In my guild's forums the other day, I struck up a conversation about optimal DPS rotations.
My current DPS rotation, starting from the moment I enter combat, is this:
Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Flay - Mind Blast
I'm aware this is flawed -- bear with me. The late Mind Blast is a holdover from my BC days. I have the habit of DoTing up the target (beginning with VT) before casting a MB in order to get mana regen flowing as fast and furious as possible. Mind Blast used to restore the most mana of any of my spells so I wanted to ensure I had Shadow Weaving stacked to max before casting for the biggest damage. These days, it's still the mana restorer, but with an entirely different role in your rotation.
Shadow Priests have gone from a primary purpose of restoring mana to a dps-centric design. My thought process and habits are still in the last era, and I'm working on changing my thinking away from "I am here to restore mana" to "I am here to melt faces." Waiting to Mind Blast till you've stacked Shadow Weaving to 5 is a waste of mana and potential DPS. Mind Blast is the most important dps ability in a shadow priest's arsenal, and any player concerned with maximizing his or her potential DPS is going to want to center their rotation around it.
Take my current spec as an example of fail. I only have 1 point in Improved Mind Blast. The other shadow priest in our raids who, besides being much better geared, does far more dps than I do does so because of Mind Blast, primarily. That is, doing more of them. According to a recent WWS report on Patchwerk, he cast in the neighborhood of 165 Mind Blasts and averaged about 5100 DPS. I did about 3600 DPS and cast 106 Mind Blasts -- only about 66% as many as he did. While gear explains that DPS gap somewhat, the difference in our rotations explains much more, with a sprinkling of interesting ability mechanics. Here it is paraphrased from his words.
This other priest leads off with Mind Flay. Mind Flay has an interesting bug these days that causes it to stack two Shadow Weaving buffs instead of one. I've only confirmed this happening when I have no existing Shadow Weaving buffs, but it may well occur no matter how many you have when you cast it. This is a good thing, however, letting that Mind Flay run its full duration when you could use that time to cast higher damage spells or DoT up the target is probably not such a good idea. "Clip" it immediately -- that is, cast it and immediately start the next spell as soon as the Global Cooldown allows. There is a secondary benefit to an initial Mind Flay, and that is giving tanks time to "threat up," for which 2.5 seconds is, for better or for worse, plenty of time these days.
After the initial MF, the next step is to "start the clock" on your rotation by casting Mind Blast. If you are centering your rotation around Mind Blast, you will want to use it every time the cooldown is up. This is top priority. The rest of the time you will spend keeping DoTs up and Mind Flay-ing when possible. Fully talented, you will have a 5.5 second cooldown on MB, giving you 3 or 4 GCDs, depending on haste, to do other stuff.
Therefore, incorporating this knowledge into a new rotation would look like this:
Mind Flay - Mind Blast - Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Blast
There is another little tidbit everyone should know concerning Shadow Word: Pain. When you apply SWP to the target, its base damage is set from any debuffs on the target. When Mind Flay refreshes SWP on the target via Pain and Suffering, the base damage is not recalculated! Therefore, you might think the key to maximizing DPS means you need to cast SWP twice, once at the beginning and once to reset its base damage value once the rest of the raid unloads on the target. This would be a good guess, but to avoid wasting a GCD doing that, we should instead swap the positions of SWP and DP in our rotation in order to give the raid more time to apply maximum debuffs to the target before casting SWP. The good news here is that SWP is fire and forget, so once its cast, at least in a normal encounter, you can usually drop it from the rotation.
Now that I've thoroughly bored any potential reader to tears, I'm going to cut this post off here and continue it in a second part, probably tomorrow, that mostly concerns mid-encounter dps rotations.
State of a shadow priest
I suppose my first actual post should be a summary of some kind of where I feel shadow priests stand in relation to other classes and roles in WoW, as well as a biography of my own experience as a priest. Should be easy, right?
Shadow priests have come a long way since vanilla. Even though I was primarily a healer throughout pre-BC content, and almost all shadow spec throughout BC, I have some cross-spec experience in both eras. In vanilla, summarizing shadow priests is fairly easy: we were a diet warlock. One calorie, no carbs. Our best use was stacking Shadow Weaving on targets to boost the damage of the warlocks in the raid. Damage, even in decent gear (which I actually had, surprisingly enough), was abysmal. Vampiric Touch didn't exist, and Vampiric Embrace was a sub-par ability. If you were a shadow specced level 60, most people would call you a noob and tell you to go heal. Of course, this was also the period during which Discipline was an awesome healing tree and Holy, in comparison, was woefully underpowered until Priests finally got their second talent review.
In Burning Crusade, the addition of Vampiric Touch to our arsenal was a huge hook in the opposite direction. Suddenly healing priests were hard to find in the upper echelons of raids. Some top-end guilds completely lacked healing priests of any kind. Shadow priests were the indispensible mana-batteries of the raid. Our damage still sucked, but at least we could do more than a trickle of healing. Instead, we were needed solely to give caster-dps classes and healers the longevity they needed for boss encounters. Our damage abilities were just gravy. It wasn't even until later on in BC, when gear improved, that shadow priests began to do respectable damage. The fantastic scaling abilities of Vampiric Embrace all but guaranteed a raid spot for well-geared shadow priests. I would estimate I spent 90-95% of my raiding time as shadow spec, speccing holy for brief periods for a refreshing change of pace. And then patch 3.0.1 happened.
Everything changed. Shadow priests were finally a dps class, at the cost of our wonderful ability to restore mana. Instead of mana return, gear levels were measured in dps. Mind Flay could crit. Mind Blast no longer drew tremendous amounts of aggro, finally making it the primary dps ability it wanted to be throughout BC. Devouring Plague was no longer the horrendously overpowered racial class ability of undead priests (*tear*). In many respects, we were much more like warlocks.
At first, I found this confusing, and annoying. "What good is 0.25% mana per second?" I asked. Replenishment seemed a pale shadow of Vampiric Touch, a woefully inadequate bone thrown to what I saw as a spec gutted to the core. I could see my raid spot fading away as I competed with pure dps classes now instead of having a niche of my own. Wrath of the Lich King came out and I started a Death Knight, spending most of the first months of the expansion levelling the Flavor of the Month and making half-hearted attempts to return to my priest. I lamented the loss of our indispensibility and waxed nostalgic about our halcyon days of yore.
When I finally returned to my poor, neglected shadow priest (after a brief flirtation with levelling as Holy) I found something shocking--doing damage was fun. All I needed was a fresh perspective. Once I got my head out of the past and wrapped my brain around the new, improved shadow priest, I found myself actually enjoying it. Now, you couldn't tell me different. I finally saw the incredible improvements made to the spec, including the Shadow Weaving change (it never really made sense as a debuff on the target), a phenomenal AoE ability in the form of Mind Sear, the threat reduction while in shadowform, the talent to reduce and virtually eliminate spell pushback (one of my major complaints in BC), and many others I won't bother to continue to list. I cut my Death Knight out of my regular play experience, only hopping on to tank heroics and raids when desperately needed, and haven't looked back since.
Now, here I am almost fully Naxx-25 geared, averaging 3300 dps in a sub-optimal spec. I frequently outdamage mages (mages!) and never pull aggro, a common experience in BC. I can still restore your mana, and pew pew while doing it.
We've come a long, long, way baby.
Shadow priests have come a long way since vanilla. Even though I was primarily a healer throughout pre-BC content, and almost all shadow spec throughout BC, I have some cross-spec experience in both eras. In vanilla, summarizing shadow priests is fairly easy: we were a diet warlock. One calorie, no carbs. Our best use was stacking Shadow Weaving on targets to boost the damage of the warlocks in the raid. Damage, even in decent gear (which I actually had, surprisingly enough), was abysmal. Vampiric Touch didn't exist, and Vampiric Embrace was a sub-par ability. If you were a shadow specced level 60, most people would call you a noob and tell you to go heal. Of course, this was also the period during which Discipline was an awesome healing tree and Holy, in comparison, was woefully underpowered until Priests finally got their second talent review.
In Burning Crusade, the addition of Vampiric Touch to our arsenal was a huge hook in the opposite direction. Suddenly healing priests were hard to find in the upper echelons of raids. Some top-end guilds completely lacked healing priests of any kind. Shadow priests were the indispensible mana-batteries of the raid. Our damage still sucked, but at least we could do more than a trickle of healing. Instead, we were needed solely to give caster-dps classes and healers the longevity they needed for boss encounters. Our damage abilities were just gravy. It wasn't even until later on in BC, when gear improved, that shadow priests began to do respectable damage. The fantastic scaling abilities of Vampiric Embrace all but guaranteed a raid spot for well-geared shadow priests. I would estimate I spent 90-95% of my raiding time as shadow spec, speccing holy for brief periods for a refreshing change of pace. And then patch 3.0.1 happened.
Everything changed. Shadow priests were finally a dps class, at the cost of our wonderful ability to restore mana. Instead of mana return, gear levels were measured in dps. Mind Flay could crit. Mind Blast no longer drew tremendous amounts of aggro, finally making it the primary dps ability it wanted to be throughout BC. Devouring Plague was no longer the horrendously overpowered racial class ability of undead priests (*tear*). In many respects, we were much more like warlocks.
At first, I found this confusing, and annoying. "What good is 0.25% mana per second?" I asked. Replenishment seemed a pale shadow of Vampiric Touch, a woefully inadequate bone thrown to what I saw as a spec gutted to the core. I could see my raid spot fading away as I competed with pure dps classes now instead of having a niche of my own. Wrath of the Lich King came out and I started a Death Knight, spending most of the first months of the expansion levelling the Flavor of the Month and making half-hearted attempts to return to my priest. I lamented the loss of our indispensibility and waxed nostalgic about our halcyon days of yore.
When I finally returned to my poor, neglected shadow priest (after a brief flirtation with levelling as Holy) I found something shocking--doing damage was fun. All I needed was a fresh perspective. Once I got my head out of the past and wrapped my brain around the new, improved shadow priest, I found myself actually enjoying it. Now, you couldn't tell me different. I finally saw the incredible improvements made to the spec, including the Shadow Weaving change (it never really made sense as a debuff on the target), a phenomenal AoE ability in the form of Mind Sear, the threat reduction while in shadowform, the talent to reduce and virtually eliminate spell pushback (one of my major complaints in BC), and many others I won't bother to continue to list. I cut my Death Knight out of my regular play experience, only hopping on to tank heroics and raids when desperately needed, and haven't looked back since.
Now, here I am almost fully Naxx-25 geared, averaging 3300 dps in a sub-optimal spec. I frequently outdamage mages (mages!) and never pull aggro, a common experience in BC. I can still restore your mana, and pew pew while doing it.
We've come a long, long, way baby.
Hi
Hi, and welcome to the inaugeral post of A Shadow Priest. This is my first attempt at blogging since I had a Livejournal back in high school, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's a little touch-and-go for a while. Mainly this will be a World of Warcraft blog about my favorite class (Priests) and my primary spec (Shadow), but there will be a fair amount of other random assorted crap thrown in. At the moment I don't really have a more specific focus, so I suppose I'll just see how it goes.
If you are easily offended by profanity or dirty jokes you probably shouldn't read any of this blog. Fair warning.
If you are easily offended by profanity or dirty jokes you probably shouldn't read any of this blog. Fair warning.
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