Explanations, and a New Main

I've been absent from Shadow Priest blogging for a while not because I got bored, or quit WoW (although I've come close a few times, I think). I just switched my main to my mage, located back on Zul'jin where my wife and I were playing last year before transferring to KT in the final months of BC.

Posting about mage theorycrafting doesn't seem to fit in a blog titled "A Shadow Priest," hence the lack of activity. I appreciate that some of my older posts are still getting comments -- I like seeing that I wasn't just talking to thin air (but I wouldn't necessarily care if that was the case, either!).

In the past couple months, I've been dedicated to my mage and finally got back into 25-mans about mid-August. He's about as geared out as one can get without dipping into Heroic 25-mans, pretty much. I also transferred my priest back to ZJ as well. I suppose I should update my bio on the right sometime.

I'm starting to get bored as getting gear is way too easy when you clear 10 and 25 man ToC and 10 and 25 Onyxia every week. Hell, it was easy before I was doing that. After a couple weeks I finally got enough people to get interested in going back to Ulduar, and finally saw Thorim, Vezax, and Yogg for the first time -- sadly enough. We're wiping on Yogg's second phase, but that encounter is everything I was hoping it would be. It beats ToC hands down.

I especially like and enjoy encounters designed not to be brute-forced through gear. They show thought and effort on the part of the design team, and other than Ulduar, that sort of effort isn't really apparent in the raids so far implemented in this expansion. 80s are perfectly capable of wiping even in BWL these days. I've been in quite a few pugs myself who didn't bother listening to warning to avoid standing in front of Ebonroc, for instance, or to avoid Nef's shadowflame.

We're not likely to ever do much in H-ToC25, due to too much dead weight on the roster, but H-ToC10 is still a possibility. This is an unfortunate truth, but given the direction raiding has been going since WoTLK launched, and Blizzard's stance towards universal content delivery, it's kind of to be expected, although I'm not a fan of it. Lackluster performance and minimal drive to succeed are simply a natural consequence of the level of (gear) quality being so high these days, compared to what's actually required for the current content. Improving skills and performance in order to push progression content is simply not necessary when your gear is already compensating for so much in the regular runs, but not enough to bridge the gap to the hardmodes/Heroic modes. Many people in the guild who might be interested in Heroic modes for the rewards in doing so aren't interested in putting up with the weaker links that we would have to bring in in order to make those attempts.

Blizzard really, really fucked up with ToC, in so many ways. It's a mistake in every way.

This is turning into a much larger post, so I'll cut it here. Hope to write more in the future. May be mage-related more than priest-related, so fair warning.

Jumping on the bandwagon

All right, I'll say it: Shadow Priests are being ignored. Ghostcrawler knows it, Shadow Priests know it, everyone knows it.

I don't think that we're competitive dps, either. I wish I had a recent WWS parse to prove it, but I don't. Either you take it on my say-so, or you call me a liar--I'm okay with either of those options. However, the top DPS slots in our 10-mans (which weren't even great for me in the first place), I'm lucky to place top 4 in a non-aoe situation, or above any similarly-geared melee class. Although I'm not the best-geared priest, my rotation is solid and doesn't vary much, and the fights I am thinking of as examples don't require me to move a whole lot (Razorscale, minus aoe-ing the adds; XT when I don't have the aoe slot; Kologarn; Ignis etc.).

So what, then, is the problem? A lot of people would say scaling is a huge issue--Shadow Priests are one of the worst scaling classes/specs in the game right now, second only perhaps to ... actually, I can't think of any. I'm going to go ahead and say we're the worst off in terms of scaling. Our gear gap is growing, and it's not getting any better.

I have heard all sorts of reasons for this gap:

1. Needing to use Glyph of Mind Flay to even get close to the range of other caster dps classes. Range issues in general.
2. Mind Flay sucks. A crappy spell damage coefficient due to snare component + glyph (effectively) removing snare component = bad spell.
   
3. Haste simply sucks. It doesn't scale, it's too dependent on latency, and its usefulness as a stat hasn't kept pace with the buffs to other mechanics that tremendously increase the usefulness of crit rating.
4. No "big nuke" on a cooldown for burn phases. Inner Focus does not a dps cooldown make. Some Shadow Priests I know don't even take that talent, for so long considered mandatory, with no appreciable impact on their capabilities.
   
5. Various bugs the community has been aware of for ages that haven't gotten fixed; i.e. Shadow Weaving stacking (if anything nerfed, due to the "fixing" of the bug with Mind Flay that made it easy to build stacks), goofy mechanics with Shadow Word: Pain, etc.
6. A long "ramp-up" time that prevents us from front-loading damage in any way, shape, or form. Ten seconds after mages are happily throwing Frostfire Bolts, we're still applying dots and haven't started the meat of our rotation.
7. Sort of related: no spammable nuke.
8. Cooldown on Devouring Plague (though to be fair, this is being fixed). As it stands, if we don't want to burn the cooldown, for example, on trash--it's 20% dps gone off the top.
9. Dispersion has almost no PVE utility at all.
   

This is all just off the top of my head.

I have two major suggestions aimed at improving the scaling issues in particular. One, improve the spell damage coefficient on Mind Flay and drop the snare, or buff the range and drop the snare. Or (dare I say it) do both on the current glyph to simply make it into even more of a must-have PVE glyph, which is fine for me, and I think most Shadow Priests would also agree given the options available at the moment. The alternative is the make the baseline spell a no-snare, extended range, better spell damage coefficient version, and change the glyph so that it will return Mind Flay to the original version. Either way works for us.

And secondly, depending on which direction Blizzard wants to take design-wise for the class, either redesign our tree to not be so reliant on applying/maintaining our dots for optimal damage and give us a spammable nuke, or improve our dots to more directly scale with gear. Wowinsider floated the idea I've heard before of having haste give some kind of a benefit to our dots. As it stands, it does nothing for the dot component of our dps, and with us being so reliant on dots to do damage, effectively makes haste half as helpful as it should be.

I'd rather not sacrifice our reliance on dots--that'd effectively make Shadow Priests into a diet mage or warlock, an accusation levelled at us in the past.

But for the love of god, FIX MIND FLAY!

A note to puggers

I really dislike it when people specify "x DPS minimum for invite" or other related criteria. It is literally impossible to quantify expected DPS unless you are talking about one specific situation. For example, on a Heroic Target Dummy. And I do 4k+ dps in a well-constructed 25man raid but I'm not going to brag about my 2800 dps on a target dummy. The only other option is, like the theorycrafters at Elitist Jerks, to simply assume that the player in question has all available raid buffs period. This assumption makes sense when comparing top end capabilities of classes in progression guilds in progression content. However it makes little to no sense to compare these imaginary situations to reality when you're spamming for group members in Dalaran.

So, if you're one of those people that sits in Dalaran spamming Trade with something to the effect of "LF 1 DPS 10 man Ulduar 4k dps please" you're an idiot. You're not even going to guarantee you're going to get a decent dps'er either. Depending on your group makeup and buff synergy, in a ten-man raid my 4k+DPS in 25 man Naxx can turn into 3k or less. It's just how the game works. By the time you lower your "required DPS"to an accurate and representative level for the instance you're finding group members for, the less useful and discriminating your ad is going to be.

Therefore, please don't encourage meter padding and bads that raid with one eye fixed on Recount with those LFM ads.

What you want is a 2.8k dpser who will stay alive to the end of the fight, rather than a 3.8k dps'er who dies to a void zone ten seconds into the fight. You're not going to be able to find that kind of player much more easily than simply taking who you can find (in an appropriate level of gear) and giving the instance a go.

Coming up

Stuff I'd like to accomplish (WoW-related) in the next couple weeks:

• Finish levelling enchanting to at least 400
• Continue working on Netherdrake rep (I seriously want one for some reason. I think I have always been jealous of those people flying around on them in BC). Want to get exalted in two weeks with some lucky egg farming.
• Make a Wispcloak for my healing set.
• Enchant my healing set, including head and shoulders. Consider using Cowl of Vanity (gemmed and enchanted) for my healing helm instead of Cowl of Innocent Delight as I am now. Was going to save Vanity for a DPS helm once I got enough +hit to replace Faerlina's Madness but Ulduar is shifting priorities. I don't want to spend 250g doing that to only replace it in a week.
• If I swap helms, it seems likely I will have to switch in Legwraps of the Defeated Dragon (which is arguably only a marginal upgrade if at all) to replace Leggings of the Instructor, an awesome item even though they come from 10 man Naxx, just to make up that +hit. I was hoping to hold out for Kel'thuzad's leggings, but the likelihood of getting those if they drop is slim. However swapping out Leggings of the Instructor when in Shadow spec will make them into full-time healing legs, a role they excel at.
• Run 10 man naxx for some non-dps items to fill out my healing offset. Notably belt and neck. As a corollary, pick up whatever's available in 25 man Naxx. If we actually run it. Otherwise 25 man Naxx is getting pugged like whoa, bads and all.
• Work on fishing and cooking now that those balls-tastic quests to progress past 225 are gone. Considering letting Zerkker be my cook and fisherman, but it will be a while before I can cook useful food for my priest if I go that route.
• Somehow find the time to do enough dailies to fund all this AND pay for progression raids 3 nights a week.

This is all a tall order. The money issue is a big one, as the gear switching, if I go ahead with it, will gain me very little actual improvement in exchange for 500g all told (about 350g for the gems, 160g for the enchantments). Considering I hit 4000 dps fairly easily I don't think anything's particularly wrong with my gear setup that I would need to fix right now. I'm not going to be zerging 10 man Sarth+3 anytime soon, but that wasn't in the cards anyway.

And this is all assuming I have the time to accomplish any of this.

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.

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.

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.