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!

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.