The Shadow Priest concept remains strong and sound. But we still need attention.

I started writing a very long comment in reply to Natarumah’s very interesting analysis on the Priest Class Q&A and Expectations for Shadowpriest design in 5.0.

My point of view is a little different. I agree that a lot of creative thought at Blizzard seems to be placed on the healing aspect of Priest-ing. And there are many wasted opportunities for Shadow Priest game play improvement and design. As I spend most of my time soloing content and doing dailies, with the occasional 10 man raid thrown in – I do, occasionally, get to participate in my guild’s “alt” runs – I see our spell and talent abilities differently than players who only raid or PVP with their Shadow Priests.

Natarumah makes many excellent points about the current problems a Shadow Priest is likely to experience while raiding. And he has many creative ideas on how the class could be re-imagined and further developed. Please do read his well rounded post. And then come back and try and understand my impressions and haphazard observations.

First and foremost I do think that a big reason that developers don’t try and “fix” Shadow Priest game play is simple numbers. People still play Shadow Priests. Many players choose to play Priests. DPS Priests and Warriors never seem to fall out of favour with the player base. Numbers indicate that there is no problem with Shadow Priest-ing. So why change it?

If it ain’t broke…

Every single 10 man raid that I’ve done this expansion (and I think, at most, that’s about 10 or 15 raids) I’ve been one of several Priests. And often not the only Shadow Priest. Priests, in general, seem to be abundant.

I do believe that a lot of design focus is driven by numbers right now. Blizzard are likely worried about getting a certain percentage of players into the normal modes of their next raid zone. They’re worried about getting a percentage of players through the hard mode of their next raid zone. They’re worried about losing subscribers. They’re trying to meet KPIs.

When almost all the Rogues in Azeroth put down their swords (or daggers if you like) and choose to play as a different damage dealing class the developers notice. I still remember the scarcity of Rogues at the start of Wrath of the Lich King and Blizzard responded by revamping the Subtlety talent tree and put the OP feeling back into Rogue game play. (Sure, it was nerfed with the next major content patch but for weeks you’d run into Rogues boasting about their Honor Among Thieves combo points or crits or whatnot). Even though they didn’t receive a straight up boost to their damage output, they received some talent revisions that made players feel powerful once again.

Shadow Priests and DPS Warriors usually see a different scenario: a patch is released, a spell is fine tuned or new content is available, and suddenly one of our abilities becomes noticeably glitched. And if it glitches in a way that we can exploit, or results in us topping the damage charts, heads and shoulders above Mages (or Rogues), we’re quickly brought back into line.

But I wouldn’t still be playing my Shadow Priest if they didn’t still work. I’m not talking about damage output numbers. Something about the spells, the abilities, the utility buffs we provide, something… still feels very, very right. The Shadow Priest isn’t showy. But many of the Shadow Priests that I’ve played with – often players who have only recently picked up the class/spec – very nearly slip into role playing without much prompting from me. Pretty uncommon to find on a PVP server.

I’m convinced that Shadow Priests really inhabit their avatars. They are their character. Manipulators of the mind. The ones who rejected the healing side of our nature. The black sheep.

Or perhaps only a Hunter would recognise another Hunter as deeply immersed in the class as they themselves are. Who knows?

Mind Spike

The one place where I have to disagree with Natarumah is on the topic of Mind Spike.

I adore Mind Spike. I rarely use it during raiding, sure, but it’s my go to spell for dailies and solo content. I don’t think that I used Mind Spike very much during leveling but now that I have gotten used to it… it’s perfect for taking down a level 85 mob. The Mind Spike x 3 + Mind Blast + SW:D combination will take down 9 out of 10 mobs. Most will go down before reaching for SW:D if you get a critical strike. It’s fast, and you take little damage simply because you can bring down your foe often before they even reach you.

I really like it. Even though I picked up Cataclysm to see my Priest sprout wings and to save the day with Leap of Faith… I am more impressed with Mind Spike than either of those other new-with-Cataclysm abilities.

Juggling DoTs… and Buffs

Unfortunately I’m not particularly impressed with the implementation of Evangelism and Empowering Shadows. I don’t think Evangelism (eventually consumed by Archangel) is particularly intuitive to understand. I don’t understand it. Frankly I think I need to consult some external game resources to understand how to use Evangelism and Archangel to best effect. Playing the game itself doesn’t really teach me enough.

I should feel powerful when I cast Archangel, but I don’t. I actually feel that it throws all my carefully juggled buffs out of whack. And I spend the duration of Archangel trying to get all my buffs back up and running instead of simply kicking ass.

Frankly I think I spend way too much time watching my stacks of Empowering Shadows and Shadow Orbs when I’m in combat. I can’t imagine playing with the default UI and staring at the rows of buff icons.

Managing your Shadow Orbs is too random and uncontrolled. I have come close on many occasions to announcing out loud on vent “Can we pull in the next 5 seconds? I’ve got an Orb right now! I can’t afford to waste it!” and I’ve also come close to complaining verbally at the – far too frequent – occurances of terrible bad luck when the constant tick of a single Shadow Word: Pain and the constant casting of Mind Flay doesn’t produce one single Shadow Orb for the entire 15 second duration of Empowered Shadows.

I may have held my tongue so far but I can promise you that my internal monologue goes something like this “okay… just a few more seconds before Empowering Shadows drops off… been a long time since I cast Mind Blast… how is it I still don’t have an Orb? I need an Orb! What another Mind Flay that generated no Orbs?! I need an Orb! What? Is that the 5th or 6th Mind Flay that didn’t generate…” while I watch Empowered Shadows drop off. Terrible RNG happens much more than it should in regards to Shadow Orbs.

The slow build up of our damage dealing is worse in Cataclysm than ever before. I thought the intention with Cataclysm was to reduce the Shadow Priest damage ramp up time by removing Shadow Weaving. But I’d take Shadow Weaving back over what we have now. Shadow Weaving stacks could be built up immediately and with predictability as you launched into a fight. And unless there was an extremely lengthy phase change with no combat you could easily build up Shadow Weaving and then mostly forget about it.

And just focus on DoT uptime instead.

Class balance

I’m not sure what to make of the plans for 5.0. I still think we have some awesome things going for us as a damage dealers especially compared to our cloth-wearing cousins: Mages and Warlocks.

Our DPS seems to be on par. That is no small thing and not to be dismissed.

Mind Sear is freaking awesome in my opinion. I adore that we can now cast off a tank or friendly target. In fact I wish more of our abilities could be thrown on a friendly target. I’d love to have Psychic Scream fear 3-5 mobs in a 8 yard radius around a tank, or a healer.

Our crowd control isn’t good enough for a damage dealer and I still feel that I drag down a 5 man group in that regard. We can reduce damage (Scream) and occasionally interrupt one mob (Horror) but we can’t tie up a mob indefinitely unless we resort to Mind Control which is clunky and disorienting and is usually a DPS loss. It also makes your own avatar very vulnerable and no matter how well you plan your MC there’s going to be a chance that another enemy mob will charge your avatar, launch an AoE attack in the general vicinity of your avatar or otherwise lay a fire at your feet that will put you in a difficult decision: break MC and potentially unleash that mob on your healer or yourself, or wait and see if your avatar can survive the “bad” that you’re unable to move away from.

Mind Control is going to need some serious improvements to turn it into a workable method of CC. And even then I can’t imagine it being anything other than slightly awkward.

I do feel that in raids I am more resilient (so to speak) than Warlocks and Mages. The immunity to damage granted by Dispersion means that you can live through almost anything other than a boss beating on you without cease. Vampiric Embrace seems to keep my health bar somewhat stable. Levitate shouldn’t be forgotten either.

Leap of Faith and Missed Opportunities

I do feel that Evangelism + Archangel were designed for healing Priests and – in its dark from – is mostly confusing as a Shadow Priest. It’s an opportunity to feel powerful and it totally misses the mark. It could be an on demand (ok, there is some prep work required) I Win/Burn Phase button.

Leap of Faith removes Shadowform and I can’t agree more with Natarumah on this one: it’s a lost opportunity to approach this as a healing utility spell that only a healing Priest would/should use. Why can’t a damage dealer be raid aware enough to pull a friend out of danger? I think Leap of Faith could save a life if Shadow Priests weren’t actively discouraged against using it in the same way we are discouraged to drop Shadowform and heal.

“Leap of Faith will continue to have a facing requirement because healers should not just be staring at health bars but should also be paying attention to the raid environment.”

I’m not sure if Blizzard are stereotyping Shadow Priests and damage dealers as being selfish, damage meter hogging whores or if Blizzard are slighting healers for not being more aware of their surroundings. I think all Priests might have been insulted with that reply in the Q&A.

***

What do you think?

Do you feel the same way about your Shadow Priest? That, deep-down, we just work as a concept and a spec? Do you feel we have been largely forgotten while the focus has stayed on Discipline and Holy Priest-ing?

3 DoTs. Couldn't be easier, right?

Dusknoir, who has been playing his Shadow Priest to level 85, has given me lots of food for thought in his latest post. Frankly, since the game was patched with our Cataclysm talent trees and mastery I’ve been trying to play my Shadow Priest at level 80 the way that I’ve played her during Wrath of the Lich King.

Well it’s time to come to grips with the Cataclysm Shadow Priest play style. And we have nearly all the tools and time at our disposal to perfect our spell casting while we level up.

In Part 2 I’m going to help you (and me) come to grips with our Mastery: Shadow Orbs and Mind Blast. In this post I’m going to try and break you of six years of conditioning and teach you to recast your damage over time spells early.

If, like me, you’re a NW (Non Warlock) I strongly suggest that you head over to Cynwise’s blog and read his post about Warlock DoTs in Cataclysm. There are lots of diagrams, I promise. I’m going to just look at how the new Damage over Time approach applies to our Shadow Priest spells: Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague.

I’m going to try and give you diagrams too.

Breaking the Habit

Prior to the release of Cataclysm Shadow Priests strived for 100% DoT uptime. That hasn’t changed. We want our DoTs to be up on the target all the time, reapplying our DoT the moment it runs out.

Old model: Reapply too early and you will overwrite and “clip” your previous application of the DoT, wasting a damage tick and wasting your casting time (when you could have been casting something else) and wasting your mana. Inevitably there would be tiny gaps of time in between applications. Frankly, I was usually pretty happy to get to about a 95% DoT uptime.

New model: Blizzard have been kind to DoT casters and Shadow Priests. Now, in the same manner that you can queue up your next spell while still casting your current spell, you can queue up your next application of a DoT.

If, for example, your Devouring Plague spell has just 1 more tick of damage to dole out before expiring, a new application of Devouring Plague will allow the first application and its last tick to play through before starting in on the new duration. It won’t clip your last tick.

Recasting a little bit early will give you 100% DoT Uptime

Theoretically this allows for 100% DoT uptime. And, as aspiring master Shadow Priests, we should work very, very hard to play just that precisely.

Aim: Cast after the 2nd last tick but before the last tick and before your DoT expires.

Recast too early – before the 2nd last tick – and you will clip off the end of your first DoT application. Recast too late – after the last tick – and you will delay the first tick of your second application and lose DPS.

So the next question you should probably ask is, if the last tick occurs right as my DoT expires with 0 seconds remaining, when does my 2nd last tick occur? How do I know when I have entered the ideal recast window of opportunity?

Ticks, Haste and the Countdown

If you love ForteXorcist as much as I do, you can easily configure your Spell Timer to display the tick intervals on your DoTs. In fact, the diagram above was retooled from a screen capture taken with ForteXorcist monitoring my Devouring Plague applications.

At level 85 Haste will not effect the duration of our DoT spells. They will remain constant regardless of the amount of Haste Rating you equip on your gear. Instead Haste Rating will increase the number of times damage is dealt during your DoT, and, in the case of Vampiric Touch, Haste Rating should decrease the time it takes to cast the spell.

Devouring Plague ticks at different Haste amounts

If we take the example above, let’s look at it again with 5% Haste (any high level Shadow Priest in Shadowform would benefit from their own Mind Quickening buff), and with a significant amount of Haste Rating from gear (in my Tier 10 gear set).

You can see that with more Haste the recast window of time shrinks as damage is inflicted more frequently in the same period (24 seconds for Devouring Plague). This is the challenge of the well geared Shadow Priest: adapting and becoming more precise.

Devouring Plague

In the example above Devouring Plague deals damage 9 times over the course of 24 seconds. There is a 3 second gap between each tick (8 intervals between 9 ticks). In the Hasted example above Devouring Plague deals damage 12 times over the course of 24 seconds. There is a 2.18 second gap between each tick (11 intervals between 12 ticks).

When to recast Devouring Plague

I use ForteXorcist’s countdown timer on my Spell Timer bars. This means that I can see the time (in seconds and tenths of a second) still remaining on my Devouring Plague. So the number to keep in my mind when wearing my current gear is 2.1 seconds. If I see my Devouring Plague with less than 2 seconds remaining I should recast Devouring Plague on that target.

What makes Devouring Plague unusual is the restriction that dictates only one target can be afflicted by your Devouring Plague disease at a time.

If you cast Devouring Plague on one target, and then only a few seconds later cast Devouring Plague on a second target the first DoT immediately drops off. That said, I think it wise to only recast Devouring Plague early (just before that last tick) if you intend to remain on the same target. If you wish to dot up a different target with Devouring Plague I think it best to let your current Devouring Plague run its full duration and expire entirely before you recast.

Shadow Word: Pain

Shadow Word: Pain lasts 18 seconds. With no additional Haste from gear it deals damage 6 times over the course of 18 seconds. There is a 3.6 second gap between each tick (5 intervals between 6 ticks). With 39% Haste Shadow Word: Pain deals damage 9 times over the course of 18 seconds. There is a 2.25 second gap between each tick (8 intervals between 9 ticks).

Unlike Devouring Plague we don’t (or shouldn’t) need to recast Shadow Word: Pain to keep it active on our target. Instead we cast Mind Flay on our Shadow Word: Pain afflicted enemies to reset Shadow Word: Pain.

Talented we have only a 60% chance to refresh Shadow Word: Pain with 1 Mind Flay. If you’re DPSing on just one target this is fine: you’ll Mind Flay your target many, many times within 18 seconds. If you’re focusing on another target and only swapping back to a mob in order to refresh SW:P that 60% chance makes things much harder to predict. I know that in the last few weeks I’ve had many a SW:P DoT expire because Pain and Suffering hasn’t worked.

I think a more sensible approach would be to anticipate that you will need to cast two Mind Flays in succession to guarantee (or near abouts) a refresh of Shadow Word: Pain.

When to refresh Shadow Word: Pain with Mind Flay

Theoretically it is possible to start up two Mind Flays inside that optimum window before the second last tick. Honestly, I don’t think this is going to work well in the actual game – especially once you take lag into consideration! Clipping a tick or two of Shadow Word: Pain isn’t a huge DPS loss or waste of resources: after all, casting Mind Flay is a nice chunk of our damage on its own.

I think I will be target switching back to my Shadow Word: Pain targets once SW:P has about 4 seconds remaining and lining up two Mind Flays in quick succession. Only once I’m sure that Shadow Word: Pain has been refreshed will I switch back off.

Vampiric Touch

Vampiric Touch is our only DoT that has a cast time to reapply. We need to take that into consideration and start casting just that bit earlier again. Naked with 5% Haste, Vampiric Touch deals damage 5 times over the course of 15 seconds. There is a 3.75 second gap between each tick (4 intervals between 5 ticks). In the 39% Haste example above VT deals damage 7 times over the course of 15 seconds. There is a 2.5 second gap between each tick (6 intervals between 7 ticks).

When to recast Vampiric Touch

If we factor in the time it takes to cast Vampiric Touch (1.39 seconds at 5% Haste, 1.04 seconds at 39% Haste) the point at which we can recast Vampiric Touch is actually quite early. With 3.5 seconds still remaining on my first Vampiric Touch in my current gear I can start casting the second one safely.

A Discovery: The start of your DoT is padded

ForteXorcist tends to morph the positioning of ticks on its Spell Timer bar in the second or two after you apply a DoT. I assume that it calculates the positioning of each tick given your current amount of Haste immediately after you cast.

This led me to question how accurate the display was. I assumed that a DoT would tick immediately on application and then always tick as it expires. With this assumption my Spell Timer bar mislead me and I often counted 1 additional tick that, according to Recount, didn’t exist.

I went back to basics. I applied one DoT, just one spell, and actually counted the number of times WoW popped up a damage number. I soon realised that most DoTs, in fact, do not tick immediately after application. But they do always tick just as they expire. I believe this is the new way that Blizzard have approached their Haste calculations.

For example, at 5% Haste you get 5 ticks out of Vampiric Touch. Now imagine that at 6% Haste you tip over into the next bracket in which you get 1 more tick in the same duration.

Being just under a Haste tipping point (eg 5%) sucks

In the first example there’s a good second or two of wasted time before your spell even starts to do damage.

This leads me to believe that however Blizzard have spaced out ticks across the static time duration of a DoT, they’re doing some rounding to keep the intervals to say, half second possibilities instead of tenths or hundredths of a second. Perhaps it’s possible to have DoTs tick at:

5 seconds, 5.5 seconds, 6 seconds, 6.5 seconds = interval of half a second

but not possible to have them tick at:

5 seconds, 5.95 seconds, 6.9 seconds, 7.85 seconds = interval of .95 seconds

The Haste Sweet Spots

In this article I’ve compared Haste at 5% vs Haste at 39%. Is it likely that Shadow Priests will be raiding with a 39% Haste at level 85? Eventually, yes, I think so. I haven’t done any investigating of gear for max level Cataclysm Shadow Priests just yet but with each new maximum level cap the amount of Haste Rating needed to provide 1% of Haste increases quite a bit. This means that once I reach level 85 I might need double the Haste Rating that I have now to get even close to 39% Haste.

It looks like early calculations are saying that 128 Haste Rating at level 85 is an increase of 1% of Haste.

Extra Haste Rating might not result in a steady, gradual improvement to your DPS. If you knew that equipping just 1 more point of Haste Rating would give your DoTs and additional tick (instead of a bunch of padding/wasted time) – you would do it whatever it took to get that 1 point. Reforge, re-gem, whatever!

However I think it’s safe to say that each of our three DoTs (Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague) are likely to gain extra ticks at different Haste points. After all, each has a different duration.

Amounts of Haste that will give you an extra tick of damage

This means that even if one of your DoTs isn’t quite getting that extra free tick at your current Haste Rating, perhaps one of your other DoTs is. And the steps between Haste “sweet spots” probably isn’t as big as you’d expect.

The three DoTs gain additional ticks as you increase Haste

And if you’d still like to know precisely when Haste will give you an extra DoT tick here are the tables from Nysem posted on Elitist Jerks:

TLDR?

Worry about Haste, but don’t worry too much about it! Every point is likely to help one of your three DoTs… and if nothing else, your Mind Flays will be faster.

Vampiric Embrace might not be visible to you, but it's as defining as Shadowform to us

I often feel that of all our Shadow Priest spells, Vampiric Embrace is the spell that is really only understood by those who have played a Shadow Priest.

Most people know that a Shadow Priest gets back a bit of passive healing while they deal damage. But Vampiric Embrace hasn’t been a hot topic during Wrath of the Lich King. We’ve talked about Dispersion and Mind Sear a lot. And so we should: they were new and interesting.

We’ve always taken Vampiric Embrace for granted. It’s one of our defining abilities, as important as Shadowform to my way of thinking.

The last time I remember really thinking about Vampiric Embrace was right before Wrath of the Lich King was released back at the end of the Burning Crusade. Up until then I think (from memory) Vampiric Embrace was a spell that we would cast on our target, it cost mana, only lasted for about a minute and any damage that we did to that target would heal back both the Shadow Priest and their four party members for 10% of the damage dealt. You could spend talents and I think you could boost that amount to almost 20%. So much has changed.

Mostly Vampiric Embrace was a bit of an annoyance. One that lazy Shadow Priests forgot about and one that smart Shadow Priests could use with a bit of planning to benefit their party and help keep themselves healthy during raid encounters.

And boy did we need it. Back then Shadow Word: Death, our instant spell with a very nasty 100% backlash, was part of our regular casting rotation.

In fact when I was first learning how to Shadow Priest I was given the advice to try and follow up a Shadow Word: Death cast with a Mind Blast. This way we would drop to a third health (from SW:D) and then prop ourselves back up to say half health with the Vampiric Embrace heal (from Mind Blast damage).

Still a distracted Shadow Priest could easily kill themselves by following their “rotation” and not paying attention to incoming environmental damage. And on a fight were the raid’s DPS was artificially boosted? We would often slip up and kill ourselves.

But I’m getting off track. Someone changed the numbers in the lead up to Wrath and for a very short time the amount that Vampiric Embrace healed was boosted to 25% of damage to the target… baseline. I think they may have increased it to a raid wide effect too briefly. Remember this was in the days when they were trying to simplify raid composition and buffs.

The TLDR version is that for about a week or two during the lead up to Wrath even Shadow Priests would admit “Vampiric Embrace is OP”. The nerfs were fast and furious. Shadow Priest DPS was increasing and nobody wanted to make healers obsolete.

Numbers were changed. But the most important change to the spell split the healing returns: the Shadow Priest would receive a much bigger heal from Vampiric Embrace, and the rest of their party would get a little bit. Vampiric Embrace existed to help keep Shadow Priests alive all on our own. It helped keep us independent.

I loved this change. I wanted to feel the effect of my own Vampiric Embrace spell, and I wanted some control over my own health bar. Just as Warlocks have both Life Tap and Drain Life, I wanted to know that I could choose to hurt myself with Shadow Word: Death, but that I could also heal myself in part with Vampiric Embrace – and, as the encounter demanded drop one or both from my spell casting altogether.

I loved all the changes made to Vampiric Embrace to make it more useful – to more than just long boss encounters that is – during Wrath of the Lich King. First Blizzard dropped the mana cost and then extended its duration to 5 minutes. Then it became the self buff, an aura, that we have now. No longer did we have to focus fire one target to receive the benefits. It became great for instances and 3-4 mob pulls.

Most of these changes made Vampiric Embrace an easier spell to use, and like Shadowform and Inner Fire it became a pre-fight buff rather than a decision you would make mid-combat.

See a Shadow Priest? Well assume they have Vampiric Embrace active. You won’t get one without the other.

But while Vampiric Embrace was going through a series of minor usability improvements it didn’t get much press. When, during Wrath of the Lich King, did you read a raid strategy guide that even mentioned the words “Vampiric Embrace”. I can think of only one fight in which Vampiric Embrace was noticeably useful to the raid’s success: Heroic Anub’arak in Trial of the Crusader.

As a member of a moderately successful guild I can tell you that we spent about 4-6 weeks working on that encounter and it was a doozy. Heroic Anub’arak, Heroic Lich King and Heroic Halion are the only encounters that I haven’t completed this expansion and I can tell you that I’d much prefer to be wiping on Heroic LK or Halion instead of Anub’arak.

Need to keep a party at near death indefinitely with a tiny trickle of heals keeping them alive? Vampiric Embrace to the rescue!

Meanwhile Blizzard have struggled to move Shadow Word: Death into its “rightful” place as an execute: a spell with no place in our rotation until our target is under 25% health. Unfortunately they haven’t been very successful. We dropped Shadow Word: Death out of our rotation back when we lost our Tier 7 four piece set bonus and we haven’t been harming ourselves with it until very, very recently.

It’s no wonder that over the space of two years Shadow Priests have been some of the most reliable, resilient (no, not the PVP kind!) clothies standing at your back.

We don’t die. We haven’t been killing ourselves with the backlash from Shadow Word: Death since we dropped it  and we’ve been keeping ourselves alive with hymns, Dispersion and Vampiric Embrace.

Obviously we’re doing too good a job.

It surprised me when I read Natarumah’s Survivability and DPS at stake post in which he outlines the direction that Blizzard are taking with Shadow Priests, Mastery and Vampiric Embrace in Cataclysm.

Vampiric Embrace is taking a pretty significant numbers hit. In Cataclysm we can expect to receive only 6% of our damage done to return back to us as a heal. And only 3% to go to our party members. Even if you assume our damage output will increase, that’s a significant reduction.

Natarumah points out that this puts Vampiric Embrace in a very weak position when you compare our self heal to those given to other classes like Warlocks.

I was a bit put out when I first saw Ret Paladins get their passive self heal with Wrath of the Lich King. I was a bit put out when I discovered that Death Knights were prone to self heal through damage. And I’m certainly not welcoming the news that our once unique utility ability is now the weakest self heal of the lot.

I understood what the Shadow Priest was in Wrath of the Lich King. We were the steady, dependable and slightly evil caster at the back that never did the most damage, but somehow steps out of the shadows as the last one standing. We had close ties to our Holy and Discipline brothers and sisters and often recited our Hymns when they couldn’t.

I was less comfortable with the power of our new and somewhat awkward AoE, Mind Sear, and never really liked the idea of being the one everyone looked to during AoE phases. I’m not sad to see Mind Sear nerfed in the lead up to Cataclysm.

We weren’t bursty. Never have been. As Shadow Priests we planned out in advance, independently. Like any serious DoT class we’d spread our damage around, prepping for a target switch long before our raid leader called it.

Natarumah is worried about our DPS nerfs, and to a certain extent I share that concern. But I’m more disturbed by weakening of Vampiric Embrace.

What will this mean for leveling?

If our self healing becomes both totally passive and of no real significance (read: it won’t save our life) and we lose our Hymns (our ties to our better selves) I’m not sure if Cassandri will even feel like a Shadow Priest anymore.

I know she’ll look like one, but will she still feel that way?

I can’t help but ask myself: what are we without Vampiric Embrace?

This story takes place inside Hellfire Citadel...

Tam prompted me to relate a little story, a small moment of glory (oh the glory!) when he blogged “this is probably quite obvious to anyone with a serious alt habit but it’s interesting to see the way transferable knowledge operates in WoW.”

I had a revelation. Yes, a revelation. In Shattered Halls.
I’ve been loving playing my Mage. I didn’t much in the beginning. In fact, I was well and truly bored until around level 60 when all the good stuff starting coming my way: my water elemental – my partner in crime! and I think he deserves a proper name – and a whole bunch of free procs: free Fireball! free Ice Lance damage! free stun!

Actually playing the Mage had really cemented one truth in place: I love casters. I just love them. That’s why I can’t pursue my baby Paladin, or Death Knight for that matter, with any real effort. I know that even if I dabble with all three specs I won’t play a level 80/85 melee (Ret or Prot) or a healer (Holy) with any real dedication. And that’s why I rolled a Warlock on Argent Dawn instead.

Before I tell you about this revelation I had playing while playing the Mage I want to tell you how I go about wrapping my brain around new class abilities as I learn them.

I started playing a Rogue. And like all newbies, I played with the Blizzard default UI. I leveled as Assassination, and switched to Combat at level 70. Basically my keys were set up something like this (to this day they haven’t much changed)

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	0	-	=
	Instant strike	Finisher	Stun				Drop threat		Oh shit!	Oh shit!	Oh shit!

I don’t think you can get match abilities when you go from a Rogue to a Shadow Priest, but I tried. As I learned each new Priest ability I tried to match it to a similar Rogue move and bind it to the same key.

In the heat of battle, I often reach for the same keys to do the same kind of job – drop threat, hide, cast an instant spell, absorb damage – regardless of what character I’m playing.

My key binds for Cassandri have changed over the years but some of the “matches” have been around for years. For example, my Priest’s Fade (even when it was crappy in BC) took my #8 key in the same place I keep my Rogue’s Feint. Both are threat reducers. And Every Man for Himself (or Escape Artist on my Gnome) goes straight on the Equal keybind whenever I start up a new character.

If I don’t follow through and put, say, an instant attack where I have a utility spell … then you can end up doing something like pulling Faction Champions with Shadow Word: Death instead of buffing. Which is something that I actually did, because on my Discipline UI, I had moved SW:D onto a key that was perfectly harmless while playing Shadow spec. That was one of the most embarrassing moments in my virtual life.

Of course, classes are different enough that you can’t always do a direct translation. But nevertheless here’s my keybinds character to character:

Key binds across DPS classes

And the common theme for each:

1. An occasional, but important attack/spell. Part of the rotation.
2. Almost always an instant. My opener.
3. And occasional, but important attack/spell. A nuke. Or cool down spell.
4. Stun/Slow
5. AoE
6. AoE
7. Utility spell
8. Drop Threat!
9. Pet/Utility spell
10. An occasional, but important attack/spell. Part of the rotation.
11. Oh shit!
12. Oh shit!

During combat I reach for 1, 2, 3, 4 and 0. That’s where you’ll find my cast rotation spells.

I almost always open up with #2. And it’s almost always an instant spell, or a DoT. Shadow Word: Pain, Corruption and Flame Shock are all on #2. Blizzard automatically placed Corruption elsewhere and gave me Immolate on #2 instead. However, in my mind Immolate is more comparable to Vampiric Touch (both with a cast time, both DoTs).

I’ll confess I bought into the “Mages are easy” mentality that gets thrown around. And you can kind of understand why: I usually start hitting 1, 2, 3, 4 and 0 the moment I enter combat on my Mage after playing another character of mine. When in fact I should be just hitting 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 etc.

Unfortunately I was slightly worried about the mental lull induced by Mage-ing. Anyone can hit their Frostbolt button over and over again. How is this teaching me to be an excellent Mage? As I approached level 80 I was starting to get pretty damned worried that I might need to head into a battleground to really master the Mage.

I don’t worry so much about that now.

It had been almost two years since I’d been to Shattered Halls. Caesandra (my Mage) and Pixii (Lathere’s Warlock) had been sent there by the dungeon finder. I had forgotten a lot about the dungeon in that time. Lath and I argued about what could open the door to the first boss (she had never gone by way of the sewers – to which I pointed out that I had always been around to unpick the lock). I did remember that ranged had to kill the first boss when he started whirlwinding… because he wasn’t going to stop. I couldn’t remember how threat worked for the ogre boss, and ran around like a crazy gnome trying to stay both in range of our tank’s taunt, and out of range of the angry ogre/s.

After eating dust on that boss I didn’t really have any expectations, or high opinions, of my own performance.

As a group we took a few steps into the final corridor to approach the last boss.

And I heard our tank get sapped.

I was already running away as I hit Frost Nova, exposing the enemy assassin from stealth, and freezing him in place far enough away from everyone else in the rest of the group that he couldn’t do anyone any damage. The sap wore off and the tank picked up the mob.

Not only did I identify the sound of the sap, I pulled out the reason for it from my memories of Shattered Halls: remembered that there are stealthed mobs in the lead up to the last boss, and that they always incapacitate the tank (or whoever they spy leading the way) and then proceed to stun and slaughter the very next member of your party.

And, if all that wasn’t enough, I automatically reached for the very best spell on hand – on my alt Mage – to deal with it. I could have blinked away and saved myself, I could have Arcane Explosion-ed or AoEed to expose the Rogue and bring him out of stealth. I probably could have even used Cone of Cold + Polymorph to expose and render him harmless.

One spell. At the exact right time. Used when my party members weren’t in harm’s way (if a Mage Frost Nova’s something right next to you they enemy will just hit whatever it can reach… usually an unsuspecting healer).

The human mind is an amazing thing.

I never really ran Shattered Halls back in the day with a Mage beside me either. I don’t think I’d ever seen a Mage deal with that exact situation in SH using Frost Nova. And certainly I don’t think any other class that I play has an ability similar to Frost Nova.

Yet I still knew to reach for that key, that ability. Oh it was glorious. I think I almost fell off my chair as I started to think about what I’d done.

(Lathere didn’t seem to appreciate my genius).

See those skeletons all over the ground? Yeah.

I just finished watching the latest episode of Big Crits. They’re so happy that they’re now 8/12 Heroic ICC.

Ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Well the first eight or nine Heroic modes in (25 man) Icecrown Citadel go down pretty easy. I’m sure the Big Crits guild will get Lady Deathwhisper next without too much trouble. But then they’re probably going to hit their heads against the wall also known as: Heroic Professor Putricide.

Having suffered about 2-3 months of wiping on Heroic Putricide we earned our first Heroic kill just this week. Compare that to the time it took us to get the nine heroic modes before that: less than 1 month. The ICC buff was at 15% when we killed Lady Deathwhisper and it was 25% on our first Heroic Professor Putricide kill.

I’m not sure that I’m qualified to offer tips and tricks for other Shadow Priests out there attempting this fight. But surely I’ve devoted such a large amount of game time to dying on this fight and I can share some hard-earned wisdom. 

Stuff for Shadow Priests

Dispersion and Unbound Plague

Unlike the regular version of the Professor Putricide encounter, in which you should use the Tear Gas mass stun as a chance to Disperse and regain your mana during the phase transition, in Heroic mode you should save Dispersion for:

(a) an opportunity when you can’t really DPS anyway but need mana. This includes when you are the target of the red Gas Cloud (when you are the target of Gaseous Bloat) and will be running/kiting the cloud around the room, or, if you get hit and smacked with the Malleable Goo debuff.

But ideally you should use Dispersion for:

(b) extending the time you can hold Unbound Plague. Everyone in your raid should download and run the mod called Plagued. It does a simple little announce countdown that helps you monitor when the ticks of Unbound Plague are going to get too painful and you need to pass it off. Most guides/guilds recommend that you hold it for 10 seconds, 10 ticks. The Plagued mod counts down from 10 to 1 to notify the players around you. When the timer reaches 2 or 1 seconds to go, use Dispersion. Dispersion will numb the pain for the next 6 seconds. Just make sure you pass it off to someone else before Dispersion wears off because that 16th tick really, really hurts.

Your Shadowfiend and the Green Ooze

Talented, your Shadowfiend will be down on a 3 minute cooldown. And you should summon him twice – during the Phase 1->2 transition and the Phase 2->3 transition. Get him to attack the Green Ooze and he will help absorb the knockback damage. I like to wait until the first knockback before summoning my fiend, it’s usually players running to the second or third knockback point that having an extra friendly around to spread the damage really makes a difference.

Just be careful of this one little thing: if you’re currently using a macro (it’s often tied to Mind Flay) to get your fiend to use its Shadowcrawl ability, and you have the Gas Variable (thus, are attacking the Gas Cloud and not the Green Ooze) you need to make sure you don’t accidentally command your fiend to switch and appear right on the Gas Variable. Might be worth ditching the macro for this fight – after all, it’s not so much about the damage your pet deals, it’s about the damage it can absorb.

Professor Putricide: he’s right behind you!

Just because there’s a Gas Cloud or Green Ooze hanging around it doesn’t mean that you should let Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain drop off Professor Putricide. On a good attempt I can keep my DoT uptime fairly high, but on an unlucky attempt Professor Putricide will often be out of my range, or my Variable target will need all the DPS we can get (when you have a bunch of healers and tanks all with the Gas Variable you’re going to really need to focus fire if you’re one of the few DPS with the Gas Variable).

In Heroic mode Professor Putricide tends to spend a lot of his time hanging around his table – and he always heads there while you’re busy with the transition phases. Now, it could be different depending on what positioning strategy you’re using, but for me Professor Putricide was inevitably behind me when it was time to refresh my DoTs. This is quite annoying because I tend to rely on enemy nameplates to keep my targets in view/range and tab targetting to select them. And there are many occasions during the fight in which I can’t see the Professor’s nameplate.

Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague can all be cast with your back to Professor Putricide. Rely on a Focus frame or your DoT monitoring addon of choice instead of nameplates. And you can go a step further and create a macro for targetting Professor Putricide when he’s behind you:

/tar Professor Putricide

Simple! Actually because I’m so hesitant to spin my view around between my Variable target and the Professor I tend to let Shadow Word: Pain expire and just reapply it when it suits me (usually when I’m flying through the air from a knockback!) instead of trying to face the Professor to refresh SW:P with Mind Flay. This isn’t great for mana conservation, or for extending a boosted Shadow Word: Pain indefinitely, but it’s better than nothing.

2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace and Divine Hymn

I love Vampiric Embrace so I always talent into 2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace. The first time we got the Professor into the final phase I was the last to die – a steady stream of damage will keep you alive long after the damage aura has killed your teammates.

As we started refining our Phase 3 approach I got put on a Divine Hymn rotation (the other Shadow Priest in the guild would chant her hymn around the 12-15% mark and then I would follow her, and then our healing Priests would follow me). I really disliked this approach – reciting my Divine Hymn was usually the closest I came to death. In our kill neither of us Shadow Priests used Divine Hymn, although I think maybe one of our Holy Priests may have used hers.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be the last DPS standing, too!

Improving your DPS

Absolutely the most effective way I was able to improve my DPS during this encounter was to keep all my DoTs running on both the Professor and whatever Gas Cloud/Green Ooze was up (or my Variable target during transition).

From there it’s a case of minimizing your movement. You need to be very careful not to get caught out by Malleable Goo and I would recommend being overly cautious while you’re wiping/practicing – move even when you’re fairly sure that you’re in the clear. You cannot afford to be hit. However, once you’re fairly confident that you aren’t being hit, try not to move unless you actually need to.

Unfortunately the stuff that will mess up your damage are all pretty important:

• being a good, thoughtful, Unbound Plague carrier
• intentionally stacking to absorb Green Ooze damage
• kiting the Gas Cloud if you are targetted
• moving away from the Gas Cloud before it retargets
• moving away from path of Malleable Goo

I would also argue that, as ranged DPS, getting the Gas Cloud variable is a pretty big DPS loss. In our strategy we had our ranged DPS continue to stack and absorb the Green Ooze damage even when they couldn’t DPS the Green Ooze themselves because they were debuffed with the Gas Variable. This mean that, if the Gas Cloud was kited out of our range, we couldn’t really DPS the Gas Cloud. As a Shadow Priest, you can still contribute by keeping your DoTs on the Professor.

By the way, a more experienced player told me that you should be aiming for 9k DPS from each of your raiders. On a lucky attempt (Green Ooze Variable, not targetted personally by the Gas Cloud, only carried the Plague once or twice) I could reach over 10k DPS. I saw a bit of a DPS drop once we hit Phase 3. On your average attempt I was still hovering around 9k DPS. If I got hit by Malleable Goo? 8k.

And every single attempt I had my ass kicked by our Hunters.

General Stuff for Ranged DPS and Healers

Zoom In

I think a lot of players, especially us ranged DPS, like to zoom their camera out to maximum distance so that we can see everything. In Professor Putricide having your camera a maximum distance can make it harder, not easier.

Ideally, you want your camera zoomed in close enough so that you can read the character names of the players standing nearby, but far enough away that you can judge which three directions Professor Putricide has thrown his three Malleable Goo.

I can’t stress how important it is to be able to see who’s standing nearby. We have 3 – yes, three! – Moonkin in our raids at the moment and 2 Hunters with that trinket that turns them into an ugly looking Gnoll. Our 2 Mages are fairly easy to identify because one is a Human and one is a Gnome. I’m also not the only Shadow Priest in the group.

We used vent to coordinate the spread of Unbound Plague. And the responsibility lay with the person currently handing Plague: when they were ready, they would run to pass it to the next carrier. But within the first few seconds of catching the Plague they had to call out on Vent who they intended to pass it to. And if your name was called, you would do your best to make catching the Plague safe – moving away from the rest of the raid (if you were a bit close to others) and then staying completely still while you identified who was trying to pass it to you.

Communication: Be Clear

When I would hear:”I’m passing the Plague to Cass”, my thought process immediately switched from juggling cast bars, DoTs and targets to:

Who said that? then Where are they standing?

Where am I standing? Do I still have an infected debuff from the last time I took the Plague? If so, can I afford to take it again? Are there people standing too close to me? Am I in the green ooze knockback area? Am I close to the Gas Cloud spawn point?

Professor Putricide casts Malleable Goo!

Oh crap. Is there a goo coming towards me? Of course there is. How can I avoid it and still be close to the plague carrier? Should I take the plague early?

It’s pretty easy to see how dealing with the Plague can take your mind off dealing damage. Now imagine that the person called out “I’m passing the plague to Cass” and I get half way through that distracting thought process only to realise that they’re actually standing 20 yards away and the other Shadow Priest in the guild is right next to them… they just got the name/person wrong.

Or, when you get the Plague and are unable to easily see if the Moonkin standing next to you is actually Player A, B or C. If you call out “I’m passing the Plague to… er that Moonkin nearby… wait! don’t move away” you distract three of your damage dealers all at the same time.

Pivoting for Malleable Goo

One of our newer healers was really struggling to avoid Malleable Goo and he was very upfront about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the timers or wasn’t trying to look and move out of the direction of the goo. He was. He was just having problems accurately determining the path of the goo flying through the air.

After a couple hours he pinpointed the problem: his camera was zoomed out so far that the ceilings and walls of the laboratory kept interfering, forcing him to pivot his camera view (when Malleable Goo was cast) to strange angles to see the room.

Try it – zoom in for Professor Putricide!

What's the opposite of being in the right time at the right place? This.

There’s a chance, a small chance, that I might be able to sneak my way into a 10 man Ulduar group bent on earning both their Rusted Protodrakes and the title, Herald of the Titans. I’m so excited!

Herald of the Titans is awarded when a group successfully kills Algalon, but only if they’re wearing 10 man gear. Fortunately Blizzard isn’t too picky about what constitutes 10 man gear and just put a restriction on the item level. Getting to Algalon in the first place requires you to complete all the hard modes: Flame Leviathan+4, Heartbreaker, Steelbreaker, Thorim+Sif, Hodir speed kill, Firefighter, Freya+3, General V without vapor and Yogg-1. All those 10 man hard modes award item level 226 gear. The same item level on normal mode 25 man Tier 8 gear.

I was asked: “What Ulduar gear do you still have?”

Perhaps they just want me for my Dispersion. Who knows and who cares, right? There’s a title at stake!

I knew that I still had my Tier 8 set in the bank. I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to armor. But I wasn’t sure what I had kept.

Unfortunately about a month or two ago I went through a mad Disenchanting spree in an attempt to clear out my full bank bags. Any item that I had no sentimental attachment to was turned into an Abyss Crystal. Fortunately I still had my weapon to go with my Tier set. But not much else. My belt from Ulduar still exists, although I put that down to pure luck.

I’m not sure exactly who is in this 10 man group. But I know that my friend in the group has killed Algalon on another character.  I’m sure that’s likely the case with some of the others in the group. I just know we’re up to the challenge, regardless of our gear.

My Herald of the Titans Set So Far

10 items. That still leaves a lot of slots empty including: Offhand, Wand, Neck, Back, Wrists, Feet, Ring.

A Patch 3.3 Shadow Priest in Ulduar

The interesting thing is that I’m not really trying to resurrect my old gear set. I’m not a Patch 3.1 Shadow Priest anymore. Things have changed, Shadow Priests have changed, and itemisation for Shadow Priest gear has certainly changed since then.

In Ulduar, in Patch 3.1, Shadow Priests geared for Spell Power alone. And when we couldn’t get that, we took Critical Strike Rating. Haste had next to no value to us – once we reached about 10% or 11% Haste it was enough to smooth out the hiccups in our rotation. In August of last year I posted:

The gear goals are:

• About 11% haste
• 263 hit rating (Heroic Presence) or 289 hit rating (No Heroic Presence)
• Heaps of Spellpower and Critical Strike

These days it’s all about Haste. We now have modified talents that allow two of our most powerful DoTs to tick more quickly based on our Haste Rating. In my Icecrown Citadel gear I’m sitting at around 1000 Haste Rating.

But I look at the remnants of my Tier 8 gear and my decisions back then are starting to haunt me. First and foremost, why didn’t I at least buy the Shadow Tier 8 legs for my glory box? At the time choosing the healing legs instead of the Shadow legs seemed like such a sensible decision. I did have a 4 piece set (Helm, Shoulders, Gloves and Robe) but was quite happy to scale back to my 2 piece bonus (Helm, Gloves, Robe) when I upgraded to Amice of Inconceivable Horror.

I much prefer Amice of Inconceivable Horror now and then, but I can’t quite decide if my 4 piece bonus (a temporary Haste boost) might be really worthwhile now even if it wasn’t back then. I think it just might. Especially since Algalon is a single target fight where I should be able to sink into a straightforward rotation with lots of time to Mind Blast > Mind Flay > Mind Flay.

I’ll probably regem for Haste instead of Spell Power too. At least that’s easily fixed.

Depending on how my set turns out I know that I can boost Hit or Haste will my buff food on the day.

Lets Go Shopping

So if I assume that I just might get an invitation to this group, I’d like to be prepared. Perhaps having my gear set all ready to go will be the reason that I get an invite.

I have 7 item slots to fill. I’d like to get some Haste gear. I’d like to get another 150 Hit Rating. But if I can’t do that, then I can work towards an extra 110 Hit Rating and bring myself up to Hit Cap with buff food.

The first thing that I did when I figured out what was missing was open up my Tailoring panel. What ilvl 226 BoE items can be sewn? Boots and belts. That might be the way to go to get some appropriate shoes. I could consider replacing my existing belt with Sash of Ancient Power. (I find this dilemma amusing because I had the same dilemma about this time last year. Never did decide if it was worth the gold.)

The next place I can go shopping for level appropriate items is the Emblem Vendors. They offered me these:

1. Evoker’s Charm (19 Emblems of Conquest, ilvl 226)
2. Disguise of the Kumiho (25 Emblems of Valor, ilvl 213)
3. Wraps of the Astral Traveler (60 Emblems of Valor, ilvl 213)

There’s also a belt available through Emblems but I think the crafted options are much better.

I’ll check out the Auction House for BoE items which drop in Ulduar but I don’t expect many to be available since nobody really runs Ulduar anymore. I think when I was running Ulduar I wore Asimov’s Drape which is BoE. But I’m not sure I’d choose to wear a Spirit/Crit cloak now even if I could get my hand on it again.

For my second, and only missing, ring slot I think I might purchase Band of Channeled Magic or more likely I’ll work up to buying Etched Signet of the Kirin Tor. The gold cost of the ring doesn’t concern me too much because I almost bought this ring when I started the grind for The Insane title just to get the free trip to Dalaran every 30 minutes (I haven’t had my hearthstone set to anywhere Northrend for almost a month now).

Still Missing

The tricky slots to fill, I think, will be my Wand and Offhand. Perhaps the new Icecrown Citadel dungeons can offer me something for these.

Here are all the potential Off Hand items from Wowhead. Oh why did I disenchant my Ironmender? Will I be back to buying (again, for the second time) and using Ward of the Violet Citadel? Perhaps I should keep my eye out for the raid weekly and, if I’m really lucky, I might score Ignis’s 10 man Igniter Rod.

Here’s a question. Do offhand items count as “weapons” or “armor”. I think I was told that you could use ilvl 232 weapons for Herald of the Titans – I presume that one of the hard modes dishes out ilvl 232 weapons as a reward – so perhaps I can use a ilvl 232 two handed weapon or a ilvl 232 offhand?

From Wowhead comments (if you trust such a thing):

This achievement is very poorly worded. I got this achievement tonight, using an ilvl 232 weapon and wand. Due to the way 10man hardmode loot works, you can still get this achievement using ilvl 232 weapons, offhands, wands, ranged weapons, sigils, idols, etc etc. You cannot be wearing any armor, or using any trinkets higher than 226.
– Hina9888

Armour (all armor, rings, trinkets, necklaces, cloaks) must not be higher than ilevel 226. It does not matter where you got it from.
Weapons (main hand, off hand and ranged) must not be higher than ilevel 232. It does not matter where you got it from.
– Shadowtion

Here are the ilvl 232 off hands. Now the beautiful Shriveled Heart, from Halls of Reflection, is available. Or I could go for a 232 staff. Like Pit of Saron’s Engraved Gargoyle Femur. That’s one way to solve my concerns about Hit rating.

Here are the ilvl 200-232 wands. Falric in Halls of Reflection drops a 232 wand, Soulsplinter, if I want to play it risky. I think my best bet might be to grab Rod of the Fallen Monarch from Anub’arak in Azjol-Nerub during a daily Heroic.

To 4 piece or not to 4 piece… and to take a risk or play it safe

So I’m left with a few decisions to mull over. I could try and get my hands on a Tier Token and pick up my Shadow set legs. But if I can’t get that, do you think I should try and hold onto my 4 piece set bonus even if it means losing Amice of Inconceivable Horror?

And finally, I should I play it safe and stick to ilvl226 weapons, offhands and a wand? Or should I try and win the ilvl232 staff and wand available from the Icecrown Citadel 5 man heroics? Can I use my very pretty Frostsycthe of Lord Ahune?

Either way, I’ve got a lot of Emblems to grind.

Welcome to the future!

I read the Priest Class Changes for Cataclysm (MMO Champion link for when the Blizzard one breaks) right after they were released. I was standing at a target dummy in Stormwind messing with my UI and it was a quiet afternoon when a guildie asked me if I had read the post. I read it. I thought: oh well that’s not great, not too bad either. And went back to making my ForteXorcist Spell Timer match the exact width of Quartz.

I counted myself lucky when, a day later, Lathere totally freaked out that Tree form might be taken away from her. At least they weren’t removing Shadowform or something!

During last night’s server maintenance I started reading what all the blogging Priests, mostly healers, thought of our class changes. I never intended to post on the two or three Shadow Priest changes mentioned. I hate doing news pieces for the blog – I always feel like I’m under some tight deadline to get things out while its is still relevant. But after I left my 2nd lengthy comment I discovered that I actually had quite a lot to say.

And I felt that someone ought to comment on the Shadow Priest changes. And since there are only a couple of Shadow Priest blogs out there… here goes.

I know, not actually a Shadow Priest change. But I’m actually really happy to hear about this change.

I tend to bring abilities out onto my toolbar the moment I learn them, convinced, that at some point, in some situation that spell will the right one to use. The very first time I healed (well successfully) was when I reached level 40 something and healed an entire Zul’Farruk run using Lesser Heal and Renew.

I don’t understand the logic in teaching new players one spell only to introduce them to something else later under a completely different name. Sure you want your heals to become more powerful as you rack up the levels. Isn’t that what Spell Ranks are for?

The first Shadow Priest change announced. I know that a lot will change between now and the release of Cataclysm and I really truly hope that it’s the name of this spell. I am willing to pay. Otherwise I’m forever going to be hearing Lord Marrogar saying “stick around!” like some kind of catchy horrifying remix by Mr Voletron.

Also, I don’t think Blizzard took into account that the Shadow Priest abbreviation for Mind Spike “MS” is already taken. Have you ever tried to read an Arcane Mage theory crafting article when 70% of the Arcane spells all abbreviate to “AB”?!

I’m glad that the developers have correctly identified that Shadow Priesting is pretty miserable in instances. Especially when your party brings a truckload of DPS in the form of a Mage or Hunter or Shaman or Paladin or… well you get the picture.

A year ago I would have said “who cares” and that feeling weak in one situation – a dungeon/raid trash – is a fair sacrifice for being so fun to play in other parts of the game. However, if Cataclysm follows the trend set in Wrath of the Lich King we’ll be running the Cataclysm heroics for the entire expansion. And for many players who don’t want to raid, they’ll be spending all their play time in dungeons wondering why their alt Mage still wearing level 80 gear can out-DPS their Shadow Priest.

I don’t really like Blizzard’s solution to the problem here. Partly that’s because Shadow Priests have been promised a new, no cooldown, nuke for Cataclysm. Something that will replace our channeled Mind Flay (with its snare utility) as our go-to spell in Cataclysm. I was really, really, looking forward to replacing the channeled part of our rotation with a direct damage spell that’s not so fussy. No more worry about clipping the spell too soon or being hampered by unpredictable latency. I’m worried that Mind Spike will be this new spell. And that we’ll still be Mind Flaying during boss encounters.

I don’t want Shadow Priests, even with our annoyingly long ramp up time, to change into something we’re not: bursty, with front loaded damage and spammy, benefiting from casting one spell over and over again. I feel that Mind Spike will make it easier to play a Shadow Priest without thinking in a dungeon setting. But I don’t think anybody who chooses to play a Shadow Priest should be happy about that.

Perhaps this spell will be the one that makes all the Discipline and Holy Priests out there no longer hate Shadow spec for solo play? If so, they should have called it Mind Smite.

I just read this as a PVP version of Inner Fire.

Other bloggers are reading all kinds of amazing things into this spell but I think it’s more likely that raiding Shadow Priests will be totally unwilling to loose the spellpower boost even temporarily mid fight – or whatever Inner Fire will give if spellpower is gone – unless they’re in a phase when they cannot cast at all.

Be handy for something like swimming to the orbs in Dreamwalker. But that’s a healer senario.

Wait. I know exactly what I’ll be using this for. To pop while clearing trash. Yep, I’ll just pop Dispersion at the same time and laugh at the Hunters and Mages as I fly past. Now I’m excited.

A lot as been said about this spell already. My initial reaction to this was simple: it’ll never make it to live servers. At the moment it has a 45 second cooldown. I also expect that it will have a nasty mana cost or high threat component but make no mistake: it will come with a high cost so that you, as a Priest, are hesitant to cast it.

Alternatively, I believe it may become in PVE what a Death Knight’s Death Grip has become. Something that the Death Knight uses to help the raid, that everybody fervently wishes they just wouldn’t use it at all. Eventually the Raid Leader snaps and declares that nothing is to be Death Grip-ped in raid. The ability that, if you use it under your own initiative as a Raider Trial, will soon get you gkicked.

On a more serious note, I dislike the notion that a Priest should be that responsible for their raid members. Priests are not baby sitters and even if your raid members don’t expect you to become one, I feel that having an ability like this will slowly change our own thinking about ourselves and our raid. For example, having Hymn of Hope forced me to be aware of other players’ mana. Even once they take that spell away, I’m sure parts of my brain will still be sparking unnecessarily when I see our Holy Paladin get brezzed.

If it does come in I’m going to follow Amber’s advice on how to use Leap of Faith:

Yank some easily movement impaired class to you for no reason other than to fuck up their DPS.

Yank the melee to you after they blow their cooldowns.

This is actually my favourite change announced. I’d love to return to a time when Vampiric Touch was 15 seconds, Shadow Word: Pain was 18 seconds and Devouring Plague was 24 seconds. At the moment Haste is shortening those durations and this can throw off your rhythm a little bit.

Anything that gives us a smoother rotation and higher DoT uptime is something I really favor.

I’d be really curious to see how they manage to pull this off. For as long as I’ve been playing the Shadow Priest Shadow Word: Death has either been a steady part of the rotation (the Burning Crusade) or absolutely not a part of the rotation (Wrath of the Lich King). At no point as the decision to use Shadow Word: Death been affected by the health of the boss.

Quite amusing when you think about it actually.

I’m quite a fan of Shadow Word: Death as it stands right now. It’s an excellent spell to cast when you’re on the move. It has a small penalty so you do need to use a part of your brain before using it (killing yourself is as embarrassing now as it was years ago). It’s an excellent spell to strike down mobs in heroics. If it crits it can feel godlike. PVP-ers still claim that you can use the backlash to break out of CC but this obviously requires a hell of a lot more skill and timing than I can manage.

Perhaps they could do something like make the damage dealt by Shadow Word: Death inversely scaled to the health of the target – like if you cast it when the boss is at 90% it does 10th of its potential damage. Cast it at 20% and it does 80% of it’s potential damage. And I don’t think Shadow Word: Death should ever kill you, it should be capped to bring you down to like 10% or something, but never outright kill you. Getting to 10% health is pretty dangerous all on its own.

Oh yeah. And if you want us to use it, make sure it hits harder than Mind Flay.

Awesome! So far we’re down to 4 buffs instead of 5 (6 if you count Shadowform) on the pre-pull buff checklist. Can you make Vampiric Embrace, Shadowform and Inner Fire/Will persist through death?

Oh my. Do I even want to get started? Replenishment is offered by four classes. Nearly half the classes available in the game. I want to see these raids that don’t have Replenishment. And don’t tell me that your Hunter/Mage chooses not to spec into it, because that’s not our problem. That’s your Hunter/Mage being inflexible. And who doesn’t have a Retribution Paladin hanging around? They’re everywhere.

I’ll bet you’re thinking “of course Cassandri takes Replenishment for granted – she’s a Shadow Priest!”. Well you’re wrong. I don’t take Replenishment for granted. I’m not a healer but I need it all the same. My spell costs and abilities are all factored around the understanding that I’ll be getting mana back from Replenishment. When they nerfed Replenishment you can bet I noticed it.

I love that Replenishment is a buff provided by DPS classes – something that we can give back to our healers. Frankly if they’re going to nerf Replenishment further I wish they’d just remove it from the game. Why bother? I’d like something amazing for my effort, instead of something that forces me to cast Mind Blast on a Vampiric Touch-ed target to keep it up.

That’s what I figured the Mind Spike spell was all about – short fights. I hadn’t really noticed the problem with being locked out of Shadow spells. Must be a PVP thing because any PVE Shadow lock out that I can think of – Lord Jaraxxus and his mistresses? – is preventable.

I don’t really understand the Mastery thing and I’m quite happy to figure that out once I’m hitting level 81. It’s true – our Shadow talents are mostly boosts to our damage under certain conditions: when such and such spell is up, when you’re in Shadowform etc. I’d be really excited to see what else they have in mind.

I’m ambivalent about the Shadow Orbs mechanic that they’ve brought up here. I think of Earth, Water and Lighning Shields as very unique Shaman abilties. Very visual Shaman abilities. They are also really annoying when they lose charges and drop off while you’re busy doing something else.

I don’t mind the idea of having some spare charges lying around, but my primary concern/question is “what is this going look/animate like?”. I don’t want to see a Shadowpriest hovering in the back of the room with 3 black balls spinning around their body. Give us something that complements Shadowform and doesn’t look anything like a Shaman’s shield and I’ll be happy. Ideally they won’t be visual at all and might just be a resource system like a Death Knight’s rune system – something only the Death Knight user can really see and monitor.

I remember when Misery was a debuff that meant the target was susceptible to Shadow Damage from the party/raid. But I can’t find anything to back that up.

Nobody enjoys spending talents to buff +hit anyway. No problem, get rid of it. Now what are you going to give us that is awesome?

Further Reading

• Amber at I Like Bubbles has an absolutely excellent overview/response to the changes. And she doesn’t snub Shadow Spec either.
• Natarumah at Twisted Faith shares his thoughts on the Shadow Priests changes
• DuskNoir comments on the Priest changes announced from a Shadow Priest point of view. He also has a bit to say about the Dispel changes.

Enjoying the mana returns from 3/3 Meditation (inside a Sindragosa Frost Tomb)

Natarumah at Twisted Faith recently theorised that there might be a point at which a heavily hasted Shadow Priest would “gain” more mana during combat by talenting into Focused Mind instead of Meditation. He’s absolutely right to ask the question.

Meditation works off our least favourite DPS boosting stat: Spirit. Furthermore even at high Spirit amounts it returns mana in the form of mana per 5 seconds (Mp5) which returns a constant stream of mana back to us for the length of the fight regardless of how many spells we output in that space of time. As we cast more and more spells during a set period, for example a standard 5 minute boss encounter, Mp5 becomes less valuable and insufficient to replenish (for lack of a better word) our resources as we spend mana more quickly.

Focused Mind, on the other hand, is a straight up, spell for spell, discount.

The trouble is this: we’ve been led to believe that 3/3 Meditation is mandatory in any Priest’s raiding build. And that Focused Mind is unnecessary because we shouldn’t lack for mana as Shadow Priests. Is that really still the case? Which is better in Icecrown Citadel, in practice?

A Case Study – Me

At the start of Icecrown Citadel I was talented for 3/3 Mediation and 1/3 Focused Mind – freeing up 2 points for Improved Vampiric Embrace. Months later and my talent build hasn’t changed. I started ICC with about 750 Haste. I gemmed for it, chose lower ilvl trinkets for it.

Now I’m at 935 Haste. I don’t gem for it, I don’t actively seek out Haste items. Yet even I have noticed a change in how I approach and manage my mana bar between then and now. That is to say – I didn’t bother managing it at all at the start of ICC. Shadowfiend was a DPS boost on a 3 minute cooldown and Dispersion was my 90% immunity, get-out-of-jail-free card. Now I actively use Shadowfiend to refill my mana bar as early in the fight as I can and try and bring him out a second time before the fight ends. If there’s even a tiny five second window in which I need to run across the room, run out of fire or stop casting for some other reason I reach for Dispersion.

Maybe it’s time to change our thinking. Is Meditation really so great? In my mind there’s only one way to know for sure. In this post I’ve gone through my latest World of Logs parses and extracted data from three fights in which:

1. I’m pretty confident that I played it (cast x,y,z) the same way I have been for weeks
2. I didn’t die
3. We didn’t wipe and followed a pretty standard strategy/approach

The three fights I’ve chosen – Festergut, Professor Putricide and Sindragosa – have been selected to represent how a Shadow Priest might cast in three very different fights – Single Target, Multi Target and AoE – respectively. I’ve tried to liven things up by colour coding a lot of the spell specific stuff. Hopefully it will also make the tables easier to understand. I’ve also dragged out the methodology and assumptions and stuck them way at the bottom as totally optional reading.

The Three Encounters

Assumed that SW:P was cast twice: once with 5/5 Shadow Weaving and once with max debuffs from other players.

There is no easy way to see how many times SW:P was applied. So I went in and counted each one in World of Logs for the duration of the fight. Shadow Word: Pain was cast 7 times on Prof Putricide and 10 times on Gas Clouds and Volatile Oozes. Therefore Shadow Word: Pain was cast 17 times.

Counting the Shadow Word: Pain casts individually shows that I cast it 8 times on Sindragosa and 11 times on Ice/Frost Tombs. Therefore Shadow Word: Pain was cast 19 times. I should also point out that I didn’t cast any AoE during the first of the 3 air phases, presumably because I was in a Frost Tomb myself. I think that’s pretty normal, but if you get lucky and don’t get Frost Tombed during any of the air phases your Mind Sear count would be higher.

Spell Costs (in Mana) with and without Focused Mind

Talenting into Focused Mind only reduces the cost of our “Mind” spells. It’s a direct discount on the cost to cast Mind Sear, Mind Blast and Mind Flay by up to 15%. No other spells are affected. Base mana of a level 80 Priest is 3863 mana. Final values are rounded up/down to closest whole number.

If you apply those costs to the number of each spell cast in the three fights (Festergut, Putricide and Sindragosa) you end up with these final mana costs:

• In Festergut talenting into Focused Mind would gain you 6536 mana
• In Professor Putricide talenting into Focused Mind would gain you 9336 mana
• In Sindragosa talenting into Focused Mind would gain you 10466 mana

Lets Consider Meditation

I have 238 Spirit. But just in case I’m not normal – which is quite possible – I’m going to calculate off the BiS (non heroic) 25 man gear set from Shadowpriest.com which ends up with 250 Spirit (base spirit + 70 from gear). When calculating Mediation I think it’s important to factor in the 80 Spirit we get by buffing ourselves with Prayer of Spirit. This boosts the BiS Shadow Priest gear set up to 330 Spirit; 210 mana per 5 seconds (mp5) while not casting.

Three points in Meditation that gives us half of our mana regeneration from Spirit out of combat (210 mp5) back to us during combat: 105 mp5. The amount of actual mana returned depends on the duration of the fight. In the three examples:

• In Festergut talenting into Mediation would gain you 5040 mana
• In Professor Putricide talenting into Mediation would gain you 10710 mana
• In Sindragosa talenting into Mediation would gain you 11760 mana

Mediation vs Focused Mind in Conclusion

Now we get to the most important bit – which talent actually returns the most mana fight for fight?

Focused Mind or Meditation return nearly identical results in practice at this level of gear: heavily hasted (thus casting more spells) with very little spirit items equipped. There’s simply not much difference between the performance of either talent.

Meditation seems to win out on longer fights, with or without Mind Sear.

Perhaps Meditation will always perform well even when we avoid equipping items with Spirit simply because Priests start out with a nice base amount of Spirit and we will always be able to boost that quite significantly by self buffing Prayer of Spirit.

Focused Mind only reduces the cost of our least expensive commonly used spells: Mind Flay and Mind Blast. Single target fights aren’t the fights that really drain our mana pool – saving mana here isn’t really a concern.

The fights that really drain our mana quickly are fights that give us multiple targets to DoT up. Our DoTs are our most expensive spells. If Focused Mind applied to our DoTs (Vampiric Touch, Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain) instead of our direct damage casts I would definitely recommend choosing Focused Mind over Meditation. It would make for a much more interesting talent choice too: something that you would really only benefit from in fights where you are running several DoTs over multiple targets. But that’s when Shadow Priests really need some mana returned back to us.

Focused Mind might have performed better in Festergut because, not only is it a short fight, there is very little downtime during Festergut and no phase changes like there is in Professor Putricide and Sindragosa. Phase change downtime is an ideal chance to reap the benefits of mana returned through Mp5. Remember, Focused Mind isn’t going to save you mana unless you’re casting one of those three “Mind” spells. It might be worth mentioning that about one tenth of the Festergut fight will see me under the effects of Heroism – during which I cast pretty much nothing but Mind Flay – a situation in which Focused Mind would really shine.

But I have 4 talent points?!

Considering how similar the actual returns from Focused Mind and Meditation are in the three fights that I’ve analysed I would normal advise Shadow Priests to choose whichever talent is less difficult to reach in the talent tiers, or whichever talent has less prerequisites. Fortunately neither Focused Mind or Meditation are really out of our way in the talent tiers and furthermore, most Shadow Priests have more than 3 talents hanging around that could be dropped into mana regenerating talents.

I really like Improved Vampiric Embrace. That leaves me with 1 point in Focused Mind and 3 points in Meditation. Have you also got 4 points spread amongst the two? Is 3/3 Mediation and 1/3 Focused Mind the best option? Or is there a significantly better combination?

• 3/3 Mediation = 105 Mp5
• 2/3 Mediation = 69 Mp5
• 1/3 Mediation = 36 Mp5

The winning combination for each fight is highlighted below:

Point for point the talents perform equally well. There is no clear winning combination.

Throw your final points into either talent and I doubt you’ll be able to tell the difference. I do think it’s fair to say that 3/3 Meditation is no longer mandatory. I wouldn’t refuse a Shadow Priest raiding applicant if they talented for 3/3 Focused Mind instead of 3/3 Meditation.

Notes

Some notes on how I got to the actual results are below. If you trust me – feel free to skip the small print!

How I Counted the Casts using World of Logs Data

Channeled Spells: Mind Flay and Mind Sear I assumed that each counted Mind Flay and Mind Sear (both channeled spells) hits and crits – displayed as Direct Damage in World of Logs – are actually recording 1 tick of the channeled spell.

Mind Flay ticks 3 times in 1 channeled cast. So in the Festergut table 122 hits with Mind Flay + 118 crits with Mind Flay = 240 ticks of Mind Flay. 240 divided by 3 is 80 so it is assumed that I cast the spell Mind Flay 80 times, not 240 times.

Mind Sear ticks 5 times – once per second – in one 5 second channeled cast. So in the Sindragosa table 56 hits with Mind Sear + 53 crits with Mind Sear = 109 ticks of Mind Sear. 109 divided by 5 is 21.8 so it is assumed that I cast the spell 22 times, not 109 times. I should also point out that I only cast Mind Sear during the second and third air phase and not at all during the first. I was one of the trapped players in the first air phase. If I had not been trapped I would have cast more than 40 Mind Sears during the fight which might have led to a different conclusion.

Devouring Plague and Improved Devouring Plague Improved Devouring Plague is an effect that occurs when Devouring Plague is cast and instantly deals some damage. It is a side effect of casting the spell Devouring Plague, not a spell you can cast with a mana cost associated. However, as this effect occurs just once at the start of each cast of Devouring Plague I used the Improved Devouring Plague count to count how many times Devouring Plague was cast.

Vampiric Touch Vampiric Touch is a damage over time spell. It deals damage every 3 seconds over 15 seconds per cast – 5 ticks for 1 cast. The number of hits and crits are added together and then divided by 5. Remainders are rounded up in case the spell has been reapplied too early or it did not tick out when combat ended.

Shadow Word: Pain In both the Festergut and Sindragosa examples Shadow Word: Pain was counted manually from the World of Logs timeline showing damage done by this spell. As Shadow Word: Pain can be refreshed indefinitely there is no clear cut method to calculate when it was cast based on the amount of times it ticked or dealt damage.

The Tedious Spells Cast x Spell Cost Calculations

This is the full table that I used to multiply all the spell costs by the number of times each spell was cast.

Unfortunately you can't just choose your gear based on looks alone

I think most players, certainly raiders, are used to evaluating gear attributes in terms of how they benefit their own character – their own class or even just what’s best for their own talent spec.

The advice I give to brand new Shadow Priests is very simple: Haste and Spell power are equally as good as each other and the value of Critical Strike Rating is about half that of Spell power or Haste, point for point. And if you’re not sure, choose the item with higher Spell power.

Then, if it’s a (formerly) Holy Priest asking, I tack on this final piece of advice: Never choose one item over an other because it has more Spirit.

Spirit

Just because Shadow Priests don’t value Spirit very highly it doesn’t mean that other cloth wearers, and Blizzard, feel the same way.

Let’s consider all the cloth wearing classes and raiding talent specs and compare what value 1 point of Spirit is worth compared to 1 point of Spell power:

Source: Wowhead’s Stat Weighting, when Spell power = 1.

Spirit was not mentioned/used to find Mage Fire or Frost gear, so I assume that it is irrelevant to these specs. Does anyone raid as Demonology these days?

I should also point out that Shadowpriest.com’s most recent testing for Tier 10 gear has valued Spirit more highly than it has in past Patches and I assume that the value on Wowhead of 0.21 (above) is from Patch 3.2. In Patch 3.3 Spirit has been valued at 0.59 compared to 1 point of Spell power. This is still less than the value of 1 point of Critical Strike Rating, which becomes important further on in the piece.

The Budget

The developers place a completely different value on Spirit – one that sits above class and talent mechanics. A single value that they use to create or budget gear.

What makes a 264 item different from a 251 item? More gear attributes. What makes one 264 item better than another 264 item? Personal preference. We might prefer one item over another item, both with the very same item level, but in Blizzard’s eyes they are equal.

Every single attribute – Stamina, Intellect etc, even empty sockets and magic resistances, is valued and the sum of these values adds up to give you an item of that item level. Compare these two similar items both item level 264:

Two offhands from Icecrown Citadel 25 man. Item level 264.

What value does Blizzard place on each attribute? What is the master value stat weighting list? I’m sure a more practised mathematician than I could figure it out. If x = stamina, y = intellect, z = spell power, a = spirit, b = haste, c = critical strike rating you might read the above items like:

Shadow Silk Spindle: 69x + 69y + 60c + 60b + 106z = ilvl264 offhand
Sundial of the Eternal Dusk: 69x + 69y + 60a + 60b + 106z = ilvl264 offhand

I might not be great at math, but I can see that Blizzard values 1 point of Spirit exactly the same as 1 point of Critical Strike Rating. Look again:

Offhand items, Item level 264, 60 Spirit = 60 Critical Strike Rating

The Sacrifice

Items that we prefer, the ones that become our best in slot, tend to have higher values of our strongest DPS producing attributes. That doesn’t mean we don’t need some of the other stuff to survive, or to have enough Mana to last.

I’m finding that this is most easily seen while I level up Caesandra, my baby Mage. The other night I passed on a belt that dropped in Blackrock Depths. At first glance it was a lovely combination of Stamina, Intellect, Spell power and Critical Strike Rating. But the belt that I’m wearing, and have been wearing for the last 15 levels or so, is still better for me. It has no Stamina, no Intellect. Just a bit or Armor and the rest of the budget spent on pure Spell power.

Technically the BRD belt was a better item overall, and it had a higher item level. If I was questing, I probably would have valued it differently. But I’m leveling inside the sheltered environment of PVE dungeons and I can easily sacrifice survivability stats – it’s up to the tank to take a beating, not me.

In the Burning Crusade I wore incredibly fragile caster pieces – Spellstrike over Battlecast gear, the Frozen Shadoweave set: items that sacrificed Stamina (survivability) in order to load up on DPS stats that rivaled higher tier gear. In preparation for Black Temple, where it was recommended that all players have at least 9000 health in order to survive the first boss, I came up short.

Shadow Priests: But I only want Spell power! Haste!

In Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard have done away with items that are weak on survivability stats in order to hold more DPS stats. All the 213 cloth gear has about the same amount of Stamina and Intellect, all the 232 gear has a bit more, and so forth. You can pretty much ignore it entirely – it’s always there. We’re left to make upgrade decisions based on more interesting dilemmas – what has more power?

We know that Blizzard values 1 point of Spirit exactly the same as 1 point of Critical Strike Rating. Now factor in some Shadow Priest preferences:

• 1 point of Critical Strike is valued to be about 75% as good as 1 point of Spell power (100%) or Haste (100%)
• 1 point of Spirit is valued to be only about 50% as good as 1 point of Spell power (100%) or Haste (100%)

Blizzard values Critical Strike Rating and Spirit as equals, but if given the choice, us Shadow Priests would take Critical Strike Rating over Spirit any day.

Critical Strike Rating is our third priority attribute. Spell Power and Haste are more valuable so we tend to choose items with Haste over items with Critical Strike Rating. What worries me is that, in our quest for more and more Haste, I see many new Shadow Priests with lots of Haste/Spirit items. And seriously deficient in Critical Strike Rating.

Here’s the rub. Items that you have with Spirit on them, even though they might be loaded up on Haste, may be hurting your gear set and overall stats.

If you are wearing two rings:
1. Item level 251: Spellpower/Haste/Spirit
2. Item level 264: Spellpower/Haste

I would consider swapping out the 251 ring for a 264 Spellpower/Crit ring. The item might be considered lower on the Shadowpriest.com Best in Slot ranks (using the Haste>Critical Strike weightings) but it doesn’t mean it’s an inferior item. You can’t wear pure Haste items in every single one of your gear slots. Ok, you can, but the output would be worse than a balance Spellpower/Haste/Crit approach and you probably wouldn’t make the Hit cap. So don’t shy away from great items just because they have Critical Strike Rating on them and no Haste.

If you have 500 Spirit and 850 Critical Strike Rating, wouldn’t you prefer to have 400 Spirit and 950 Critical Strike Rating? You can do that using the same item level gear available to you – remember 1 point of Spirit is the same as 1 point of Critical Strike Rating according to Blizzard.

I know I’d much prefer the extra Critical Strike Rating.

The long and short of it

Every time you choose an item with Spirit, that item budget could have been spent on additional Critical Strike Rating, Haste or Hit. Keep an eye out for items that drop with zero Spirit, but with Hit or Critical Strike Rating. You still need Hit and some Critical Strike Rating in some of your gear slots so don’t discount these items just because they don’t have Haste.

Mistake #1: Using an AoE spell when there's only 1 or 2 mobs left to kill.

Lathere is a healer. I am a damage dealer. But we both have alts at level 80. And we’ve both tried to swap roles, with little success. And watching Lath fail in her new role… is actually pretty satisfying. That’s sisterly love for you.

I do a lot of 5 man healing as my Priest. I’m okay at it. Not great, but okay. I believe that’s because I spend so much time playing the Priest that I’m “comfortable”. I’m not a good healer. I don’t know exactly what the difference between me and a good healer is, other than years of experience, but I know whatever I’m doing wrong, I’m not a great healer.

In the last couple months I’ve also been healing as my newish Resto Shaman. I’m okay at it, just. The only thing I’m good at with the Shaman is totems because I know the dungeons pretty well.

On rare occasions I’ve been given the opportunity to play as Elemental as the Shaman. And not only is it pretty easy, I’ve impressed people with my DPS based on my gear. A friend of mine once advised me: the difference between mediocre and great Elemental Shaman is the ability to factor Chain Lightning (on a cooldown) into a single target fight.

Is that it?

Forgive me, I’m not being very kind to Elemental Shamans. Of course there is some further mastery involved. If I were taking it seriously I’d be looking into whether or not it’s preferable to reapply Flame Shock early so that it doesn’t cause Lava Burst to be on cooldown even 0.5 seconds longer than necessary. It would also be a good idea to find out whether it’s worth sacrificing Totem of Wrath to put down a Fire Elemental in a 5, 10 and 25 man raid setting.

Actually the most interesting part of Elemental DPS, in my opinion, is when you need to AoE. Most classes that I’ve played get incredibly boring when you AoE. But an Ele Shaman’s AoE is on cooldown. And it’s kind of fun to try and spread the DPS all around.

Sorry – how did I get so off topic?! Self evaluation so far:

Shadow Priest: Awesome!
Discipline Priest: Good
Resto Shaman: Crap
Elemental Shaman: Good

And now I’m playing a baby Mage (level 46 as I write this) and receiving quite a lot of compliments. I figure, for every compliment typed in party chat during a cross-server pug there are probably about 5 compliments that never actually “said”. Of course I have a heck of a lot to learn about the Mage and I’m really ignoring a lot of the Arcane and Fire damage spells in my spell book as I’m leveling as Frost. So let’s add:

Mage: Good

Meanwhile Lathere has been swiftly moving up the ranks on her level 80 alt, Alexria: a Discipline Priest. I’d say that my Resto Shaman and her Discipline Priest are pretty evenly geared. There’s one major difference: Lath is actually pretty damn good at the Disc Priest. And I’m still total crap at the Resto Shaman. She can hold her own in a ToC or ICC10… and I highly doubt I could do the same.

But the tables have turned!

Before Alexria was a Discipline Priest, she was a Shadow Priest. That was mid 2009. And she was awful.

Mistake Number 1: AoEing when there are only one or two targets.

I’m pretty confident that it holds true for all damage dealing specs across all classes. Except perhaps Ele Shamans when Chain Lightning hits the initial target so hard it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t hit much else.

Mind Searing 1 target when it only has 1 other target nearby actually taking damage from Mind Sear? Mistake!

Tip: If you play with enemy nameplates turned on (hit your “v” button when you’re in range to toggle them on) it’s very easy to see just how many mobs there are in a pull. You should mentally count the number in the pull as the tank is pulling them – every pull.

Mistake Number 2: Not knowing the kill order.

I think only a healer could ask repeatedly “so do we kill these adds or not?”. After a while I just got into the habit of actually explaining all fights and situations to Lath as if she was a new player and had never been to Obsidian Sanctum, Naxx or the Nexus before.

If you’re really not sure, watch the melee in the group. If they’re willing to move a few steps over and kill something, you probably should too. Or, if you count more than 3 debuffs applied to your target someone else is probably killing it already.

Tip: In instances either assist the tank (click on the tank and hit “f”) or kill anything with a mana bar first. Anything called a Disciple, Acolyte, Priest or anything that waves its hands around with a golden glow should be your first kill.

Back to the Story

I won’t even go into the other, specific, things Lath did wrong as a Shadow Priest. That would have come good (I hope) with a heck of a lot of practise.

Around the time she was giving up on Shadow damage dealing, she also had the opportunity to switch to Moonkin when we dropped to a 2 healer set up for ToGC Anubarak on 10 man. She’d had the opportunity to DPS a few times during Ulduar, but this 10 man fight was the time we really needed to see some numbers.

Lath had some Tier 9, 25 man, Moonkin gear and, factoring in some inexperience, you’d think she’d come in 500-1k DPS below the rest of us. Oh no. Lath was able to achieve a whopping 2.8k DPS. How is it possible that such a good healer could be so bad at DPSing?

Mistake Number 3: Pausing between casts

One of the things I’ve noticed while Lath and I have been playing DPS together is that she will wait until her cast is finished. Then start cast another one. I first noticed this during AoE packs because the cast/channel time of her AoE was so long, and I could see the 1.5 second gap between the animation ending and the next spell starting.

You need to queue up your next cast (click it) before the current one is finished. There should be no gaps.

Healers are encouraged to think carefully about what spell to cast and when to apply it. They are rewarded (extra mana regen) if they are conservative and take breaks when healing isn’t necessary. That’s not true of damage dealing. Cast all the time. Even if you’re not sure which spell is the right one to cast at any given moment, casting something is better than casting nothing.

Back to the Story

To be fair, I don’t know if chain casting was the missing element that caused Lath’s Moonkin debut to fall so flat. I doubt it was just that one thing. It also didn’t help that she wasn’t sure what targets to DPS when (I think I just told her to follow the Mind Flay beam when in doubt, so she wouldn’t have to fess up over Vent).

I think she was a bit flustered by Eclipses and frankly I know nothing about Moonkin damage dealing, so perhaps it’s a complicated topic. I do know that most main spec damage dealers use Addons to help them track the complicated parts of their rotation. Which leads me to:

Mistake Number 4: Using a healing or the default UI

How hard is it to heal using the default UI when you’ve been spoilt with healing addons like Grid or VuhDo or Healbot? Very hard.

The same holds true for DPS, too. DPS players use DPS addons. If you play a DoT heavy class like an Affliction Warlock or Shadow Priest use a DoT monitoring addon like ForteXorcist.

If you need to react differently when something procs and you gain a buff, (Fire Mages track Hot Streak, right?) consider using Power Auras or Elkano’s Buff Bars and great a custom visual effect, or at the very least, enlarge just that one buff so you’re not staring at a tiny icon in the corner of your screen that keeps moving around.

Back to the story

Now that Lath is quite successful as a Discipline Priest her dreams of pew pew-ing it up have been projected onto her level 80 Mage. According to Lath: “even a monkey could play Arcane” so either she’s finally come across the spec/class combination that she can excel at… or… she’s a monkey. I don’t know, but she’s doing quite well.

There’s just one final thing that she needs to master:

Mistake Number 5: Ignoring your Interupt key!

Spending most of my time on the Priest without an interupt to call my own has definitely made me appreciate having one as the Shaman and Mage.

When your tank pulls a pack of five and several seconds later there’s 1 who hasn’t moved towards the group and is merrily waving their shadowy/icy/firey hands in the air? Interupt the next cast.

Tanks can’t really tank stuff out of their melee range. And if they’re not tanking it, the healer is going to. So by interupting you force the enemy mob to stop casting and instead it will come and try to kill your tank from melee range using physical attacks. You then get one more mob to include in your AoE, so everyone wins.

And if a caster mob starts to cast anything with the word “heal” or “mend” in it? Interupt! Casting “Mind Control”? Interupt that too! Oh, and anything with the word “volley” in it should be interrupted.