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.

These days there is no cooldown (which is good, I know) but it can still only be applied to 1 target. Switch to a second target and you have no way of knowing when Devouring Plague needs to be reapplied.

ForteXorcist excels at tracking DoTs across multiple mobs regardless of your current target. So I decided to give it a go.

Introducing ForteXorcist

TMI: ForteXorcist straight "out of the box"

All I wanted to do was track Devouring Plague, right? ForteXorcist is a cooldown reminding, spell tracking, DoT timer beast.

The first thing I did after installation was head down to some Target Dummies in Stormwind and open up the Configuration. 5 minutes later I realised that if my brain was going to make sense of all this information, I needed to scale things right back.

I logged out and switched off all the class modules except the “Priest” class module which got rid of the Warlock purple boxes. I disabled the buff tracking section (all the blue bars: Inner Fire, Shadow Weaving, Illustration, NitT) because I have another Addon that tracks and displays that very neatly.

Then I got stuck into the Spell Timer configuration options.

Monitoring Devouring Plague, and just DP

I beat ForteXorcist into shape. I disabled all kinds of tracking and plugged “Devouring Plauge” into my Customise list and gave it a pink colour and told it to show up.

Placed to the right of Debuff Filter, and above my Quartz Cast Bar, it displays the progress of Devouring Plague regardless of my target. It can also show little markers on the progress bar to indicate the damage ticks, too, which I thought was neat.

ForteXorcist setup to display Devouring Plague only (right)

Ok, so that screencapture is a pretty bad example. The icon with the number 12 on it (on the left) is being displayed by Debuff Filter because my target has Devouring Plague applied to it.

The bar with 2 shiny white blips on the right is ForteXorcist. The big blip is the progress indication, the little blip is when the next damage tick occurs. If I had another target selected this bar would fade to 50% but still be visible but the left icon from Debuff Filter would just disappear.

More Spell Timers Please!

Before making up my mind about ForteXorcist I thought I’d better give it a go at doing all my DoT tracking. This is how I organised things to monitor DoTs on multi mobs. With this setup I could completely remove Debuff Filter and use ForteXorcist to tell me when I should refresh Shadow Word: Pain and when Vampiric Touch is about to expire.

This is how ForteXorcist is intended to be used.

Multi-dotting 2 targets with ForteXorcist

The 2 boxes on the left of my cast bar are ForteXorcist – each box representing 1 mob. I’ve coloured each of my spells separately (to match their icons: blue, yellow and purple) but I couldn’t remove the icons altogether or that incredibly annoying drop shadow border.

I also couldn’t figure out how to simplify the timers the way I could using Debuff Filter/OmniCC. With tenth-of-a-second countdowns I couldn’t help but feel rushed by ForteXorcist. Having 10.2 seconds left on Shadow Word: Pain is not something I need to know. 2 seconds left on Vampiric Touch? I’m interested.

The worst part of playing with ForteXorcist is that there is nothing to connect the actual target mob to its corresponding box of progress bars. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it would be better to play with the default combat-text, damage-done yellow numbers which appear over the mob’s head. If I’m in a room full of tentacles that I’ve dotted up it’s going to be very easy to lose track of exactly which Corrupter is about to lose Shadow Word: Pain – even though I’m watching it happen with ForteXorcist. Perhaps it’s time I turned off Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text.

ForteXorcist has the ability to display raid symbols (skull, cross etc) on your targets, too. I think this might help bridge the progress bar => mob disconnect.

Something else to note is that I have kept my ForteXorcist progress bars very narrow (about 120 wide, I think) but you can draw them out as wide as you like. I’ve seen many interfaces where Shadow Priests play with ForteXorcist extended to match the width of their Cast Bar. Personally I don’t like seeing 10 progress bars whizzing past so I’ve kept my bars short to reduce the amount of on-screen animation.

Monitoring Cooldowns

When I switched on and played with ForteXorcist’s Cooldown module I recognised it immediately from many different strategy videos I’ve watched over the last 6 months. I’ve seen it used by Hunters. I’ve seen it used by a holy Paladin. And I was impressed.

The only cooldown that I really like to be reminded of mid-combat is Mind Blast. I’m not fussed about Inner Focus (which I have macro’ed anyway) and I have plenty of time to consider using Shadowfiend or Dispersion, so I turned everything off and coloured it up pink to match the Mind Blast spell icon.

The Cooldown module setup to track Mind Blast

The great thing about ForteXorcist’s cooldown reminder is that when the spell comes up off cooldown and reaches the end of the progress bar it animates (enlarges and fades) that pops out visually to remind you it’s time to press that button!

The good/bad thing is that the progress bar isn’t evenly distributed over time. You can see in the screen capture above the progress markers in seconds. The bar spans 6 seconds (0 at the left end, 6 at the right) but the center point of the bar indicates the 1 second mark.

This means that the spell cooldown you’re tracking travels faster and faster down to 0. I found this actually made it more difficult to judge when to hit Mind Blast and found myself trying to anticipate the ForteXorcist cooldown bar and getting “spell not ready yet” complaints from Cassandri instead.

Final Result

I am undecided about ForteXorcist. It’s an incredibly powerful Addon that gives you a lot of control through customisation.

If I was a fan of progress bar DoT tracking I would love it. If I was new to Shadow Priesting (or any class that DoTs) I would love it.

I guess I’ve played for so long now keeping track mentally of what mob has what, and when it’s time to switch over and recast that I feel ForteXorcist makes me doubt my timing and watch the bars instead.

But overall I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by everything that’s being displayed all at once and, as I mentioned above, feeling more disconnected from the actual game play video streaming onto my monitor.

I’m looking forward to giving ForteXorcist a whirl in a raid with Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text turned off and we’ll see how I adjust.