Nevermelting shards of doom I say!

Just a short post as an intermezzo about an interesting trinket mentioned at MMO-Champion: Nevermelting Ice Crystals. The reason for this is because of the current wording on the tooltip.

“Equip: Increases spell power by 111.
Use: Increases your critical strike rating by 920 for 20 sec. Every time one of your non-periodic spells deals a critical strike, the bonus is reduced by 184 critical strike rating. (3 Min Cooldown)”

What this would suggest, if you take the wording literally, is that this ability gives you 920 critical strike rating (about 30%) for 20 seconds, reducing it by 184 but not for our VT, SW:P and DP tick crits. There were more abilities that are worded this way, such as the Mage’s Combustion ability.

Why is this important?

Say that you macro this trinket in with your  Devouring Plague and that by doing so you get a 50% crit (a little low but it is to illustrate a point). The result will be the following:

Cast VE while tank gets aggro and you run into position
Vampiric TouchMind Blast
Mind Flay (To get 5 stacks of Shadow weaving)
Shadow Word: Pain
Devouring Plague (Trinket activates)

What happens now is that the trinket activates, and for the next 20 seconds you get that lovely 30% crit bonus on VT, SW:P and DP. Since in that time you will cast maybe 2 MB, 4 MF and a SW:D (more with haste, of course) you will see your crit go down, but the largest part of that crit bonus keeps applying to your DoTs for most of the time.

This is what we call a double-edged sword: Either the trinket will allow us to roll a massive string of crits (expending itself in the process) or we will crit not or only a little, during which time the crit bonus will continue to apply to our DoTs. And no matter what, our DoTs critting will not impact the trinket’s bonus. Win-win!

Conclusion

Seriously though, that will require a lot of theorycrafting. But with a 3-minute cooldown, tying it into your Devouring Plague will keep it up as much as possible. Don’t tie it to (for instance) SW:P, because the longer you keep it rolling, the less chance the trinket will be activated again, which means you are being penalized for being a good player.

I will have to see exactly how much use it is, and how the theorycrafting works, but I think I may finally have found a replacement for the Sundial of the Exiled, since the Illustration of the Dragon Soul never drops for me. With a base 34% crit chance today, I would get 64%+ crit when this trinket whirrs up. Let alone…after raid buffs!

Pssst. Mister Arcane Mage, need a target for your Focus Magic? [links trinket]

P.S. You may wonder why I would go through an entire start-up line of spells before activating the trinket with a DP at the end (traditional lineups would also put up the DP sooner). First off, you need 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving to make SW:P do its work properly, and Mind Flay, Mind Blast and a Shadow:Word Death are quick ways of doing it. However, if the trinket is active before then, this is likely to eat up a large portion of the crit bonus, which I want to save for the DoTs.

Also, you will pull aggro this way if you pop it so early in the pull. Your tanks will have your hides.

P.P.S How long do you want to wager we can use it before it will be nerfed? If it even comes off the PTR this way?

DPS Q&A – Bring the pain

In line with the Q&A answered at Hots&Dots and Death Goddess, it’s time to put pen to paper and fill in one of them “Kyu-ennd-ays” for some insight in how I like my DPS. While I have a mage, druid, warlock and in the process of leveling a warrior, my Shadowpriest is closest to my heart and my main drive in the game – let’s face it, I blog about it, I raid as Shadowpriest, PvP as Shadowpriest and refuse to spec holy or discipline for utility.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary dps?

Natarumah, priest, Shadow

What is your primary dpsing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

25man raids, including hard modes, with the raiding community Unity

10mans with my guild, Saga

What is your favorite dps spell/ability for your class and why?

Shadowform.

It is the one true defining ability that sets up apart from the Discipline priest that has some Shadow talents. It hides our fugly outfits we would wear with shame by draping them in darkness. It reduces the damage we take, and the damage we deal. It makes crit a useful stat for our dots, and will make haste useful soon too.

Once improved, our Fade spell turns from an Aggro-surviving tool into a snare-release, saving our asses on nasty Faction Champions fights. And it prevents us from losing casting time because of random raid damage, where others would lower their DPS due to casting pushback.

What dps spell do you use least for your class and why?

Like Cassandri, I have to vote for Mind Soothe. I never used it when I was the appropriate level, but not even in BRD. It just doesn’t make sense, is hardly useful, and can bug out nastily at times or get resisted. It’s garbage.

That said, I would like to cast the spotlight on a little-used utility spell I have always loved: Mind Vision.

From the proper location, Mind Vision can be used in Dalaran to scry any of the locations where one of the Studies of Magic books are found. I have used it in Karazhan many times to see where lost guildies are and guide them to the raid over Vent. On Quel’Danas I spied ahead of the party to see what companions Priestess Delrissa has, before deciding to reset the heroic. I use it today on Faction Champions, to spot what that one mob at the back really is.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your dps class and why?

Survivability, no doubt about it. With 15% damage reduction from Shadow Form, self-healing through VE, Dispersion when focus fired and Improved Shadowform’s ability to get out of snares using Fade, Shadowpriests are almost as survivable as warlocks (used to be) are. If we had a pet or Drain Life we’d be monsters.

Many times if we wipe, I am one of the last five remaining. Low aggro footprint means I am selected later than most, even when continuing DPS (faint hopes of the glory of downing a boss while being the last one alive) and it often takes 2 hits for a boss to kill me (not on hard modes).

We don’t do good DPS because our DPS is good. We do good DPS when other DPS die and we don’t.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your dps class and why?

Our class is seen as a spec. Whereas an Enhancement Shaman or Boomkin is considered a full DPS, Shadowpriests are just a spec, not a class, and should shut up.

Countless times I have been told that I should heal, or that if my DPS is low I should just reroll. I refuse. I love the mechanics of the Shadowpriest, and refuse to give up. But when people hardly recognize your hard work, when you have to bust your ass to end up very low on the DPS meters, it can be damn tough.

Yes, priests have 2 healing priests. We are the awesome mind-tearing, hope-stomping and teeth-grinding children of darkness who make up for having two sissies as companion talent trees.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best dps assignment for you?

Multi-dotting as always, single-target our DPS is just plain awful. Mind Sear is the best thing since sliced bread for trash mobs. On Faction Champions I usually toss a few dots while dispelling the main kill target and blanking the area with Mass Dispels. On most fights you can assume my debuffs are all over the adds (when not CC’d) like a bad case of acne.

When something has a raid symbol that indicates it should die, it must.

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with most and why?

Shadowpriest. Don’t mind you that I have done Feral Kitty DPS, or have a warlock (Affliction/Demonology dual spec), a Frost Mage, and am trying to figure out how warriors do their thing. From the first day I rolled my Shadowpriest I was hooked, and everything else is just alts. My Shadowpriest is my account, basically.

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with least and why?

I have to say, at this point, that I find the least enjoyment in Destruction Warlock DPS. It could be because I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, but I always feel like I am running behind on the facts a bit. Like it’s learning to play a Shadowpriest, but without the benefit of experience.

Frostbolt-spamming is also one of those things I don’t really like, but when I was raiding on my Frost mage at 70 in Karazhan, I loved the numbers popping up from doing so. In those days, my Frost Mage had comparable DPS to my Shadowpriest. Sigh.

What is your worst habit as a dps?

Kill order. We have a kill order measured in raid symbols, and I just can’t get the hang of it. It’s something like: “Star, Circle, Diamond….ah whatever, I forgot what’s next,  let’s target the Retri Pally and see what he’s killing”.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while dpsing?

Negativity, stomping on the DPS.

Let’s face it, it may not be as exciting as healing or tanking, but it is a job in the raid. Just because I could be replaced by any other DPS doesn’t mean I am less worth. When I enter a raid, I enter with the thought that we will focus, pwn stuff and win. To do so, I have to set aside any negativity, open myself to the raid leader’s tactics and the strengths/weaknesses of my raid members, and focus hard to get the job done.

That is why I don’t get cleaved or pull aggro. That is why I don’t stand in the fire. That is why my DPS is not 2K. That is why I feel I am allowed to come along. (Let’s face it, if I routinely did any of the above bad things, I would have forced myself to leave my raiding group).

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other dps?

When Ghost Crawler made some vague statements regarding “Given equal skill and gear” I knew we were in trouble. Shadowpriests have to do a lot of work to be comparable to DPS who have considerably easier rotations and more room for error.

Don’t get me wrong, the base of our class is working properly. It’s just that we’ve been nerfed quite a lot, lost a lot of our identity when Wrath hit, and get buffs measured very, very carefully measured on vague analyses.

Like I said before, the only thing that helps us is that we stay alive longer. Better to do 4K-5K dps and survive the fight than do 12K DPS and die in a fire after a minute or two.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a dps’er?

Basic tools are a damage meter (Skada in my case) which measures my DPS and damage done. I often don’t do too well on DPS (low burst) but my damage done can be quite nice overall. I check the total of a fight, as well as during an entire raid, and try to see if I had great variations, and why.

Unity uses World of Logs to create and parse combat logs, which I analyze to see if I could get my DoTs refreshed tighter, could get better DoT uptimes, or wheter I failed a lot of encounter-based things (like fires).

Finally I trust my gut instinct. “Did the raid feel right”, “Was I getting frustrated?”, “Did I feel like I did a good job?”.

The answer you give yourself could be more valuable and accurate than any damage meter.

What DPS class do you feel you understand least?

Death Knights. I leveled a few past the starting areas, but I just couldn’t get into it. Must be their “faceroller” stigma, but I thought it wasn’t fun or very structured. I wonder how much that would change at 80, but I don’t have the patience to level one all that way. Which is strange, considering I leveled 5 characters to over level 60 now, which you basically get for free on a DK.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in dps?

I use … (Ellipsis) as a DoTtimer and cooldown timer, and Vudoh as raid frames (it is a grid replacement with lots of nice options, easily dispelling and debuff tracking).  Skada is my damage meter by choice.

As for macros, I have one macro that tries to sequentially target raid-critical targets (Bomb bots, Infernal Volcanoes, etc.) and casts Shadow Word: Death on them. This allows me to quickly switch to critical targets in hectic fights. Thanks for this one goes to Shylocke who brought it to my attention.

I also have the typical Shackling macro from Wowwiki, which sets my target to Focus, shackles it, and re-shackles my focus by clicking the button. In other words, a macro that is a leftover of my days in Karazhan, when that was my duty at Moroes. I replaced Shackle with Mind Control for hardmode Thorim fights, and Dispel Magic for Steelbreaker.

I tried using mouse-over macros, but decided it is just not working quite as I wanted to. Not to mention that mouse-overing a mob in a fight is a tough, tough thing to do. I should check them out in a future post, perhaps…

What stat to stack, and why?

Spellpower. Nothing scales for us like Spellpower, and Spellpower is even used as the base for stat comparisons (like: 0.7 Crit = 1 SPP). Hence the adage of “if the socket bonus sucks, stack Runed”.

 

Tier 10 – for real this time

So, now that the stats for Priest Tier 10 have been released, time to show off what we will be seeing coming patch 3.3; I personally will mourn losing 2pT8 (the additional damage on DP was very welcome) but since that will be added to the Improved Devouring Plague talent effectively, we should see no difference there. Tier 9 was pretty much a joke, leaving us swamped in +Hit unless you happened to sport a set of Heroic ToC25 version.

So what’s in the goody bag?

This is the quick link to the set on the database of MMO-Champion: http://db.mmo-champion.com/is/886/

For easy comparison, I am going to compare T8-T10 on the normal 25man level. But first, the set bonuses we have all come to love and adore:

(2): The critical strike chance of Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague is increased by 5%.

(4):Reduces the channel duration of Mind Flay by 0.5 seconds, and the time between ticks by 0.17 seconds.

Tier comparison by slot

Below are some comparisons I made – you can click on them to see them fully sized.

As you can see, we will lose almost 225 Spirit if we upgrade from T9, over 60 Hit and 74 Haste. This however, is made up for by adding over 150 Crit, and 138 Spellpower across the set. That is some very sweet Crit indeed, and allows us to give more priority to Haste in our other pieces. Rings and trinkets are generally more flexible to swicth and mix-and-match with, once you have some collected.

Stat-wise, I am very impressed by this new set – it seems to remove the flaws of the T9 and still keep its strengths. When upgrading from T8 you will see a greater loss in Spirit (and thus a little spellpower and mana regen) but the other stats are too awesome to be believed.

Upgrade now! Offers while they last!

The looks

Well, I don’t think the set is half-bad. While we don’t look as awesome as Gnomish Warlocks, who get to look like evil reanimated ragdolls, at least we’re not Rogues (sorry guys, you got shafted).

All I can say is: Elvis is in the house! And she’s evil.

Final answer to Pain and Haste?

This is the latest stance Blizzard is taking on the issue of not getting Haste applied to Shadow Word:Pain. According to Blizzard, our DPS would be too high with all 3 dots hasted – mentioned in the same line with simulations not being accurate enough.

“Shadow Word: Pain and Haste in Patch 3.3
We removed Shadow Word: Pain from scaling with haste because we thought Shadow dps was too high with all 3 dots hasted.

There is a bug where you can get big SW:P dots and then keep them rolling at that magnitude forever since the spell gets constantly refreshed. It’s a nasty bug to fix. However, that isn’t why we removed SW:P from Shadowform.

It’s important for classes to want the stats that appear on their gear, but it’s not a goal that everyone requires all stats in the same 1:1 ratio. It’s a bit unfortunate in the best-in-slot-or-nothing mindset of some of our players that the second and third best stats sometimes get labeled as junk even if they still boost dps beyond a non-trivial degree.

Our stance on simulations remains that they can be good tools when used correctly. We will continue to not pay a lot of attention to posts that simply say “Sims say our dps is too low. Please buff.” You can’t just accept a simulation’s estimate of your dps as what you’ll actually see on an encounter. Sim output is fundamentally not empirical data — it is a model; an attempt to imitate what will really happen. Simulations can be really useful for predicting say an optimal talent or gear configuration for your character. Players have learned a lot of things about class mechanics from the better sims out there. “True dps” is not one of them.”

While they have a point here, I don’t hear a resounding cheer across the forums and PTR forums regarding us being overpowered – most reports say that we are doing more DPS, but not magnificently so. Numbers mentioned vary between 300 and 500 DPS, depending on how much that particular Shadowpriest favored Haste before patch 3.3.

Fact is, that if we wanted to meet Druids and Death Knights in DPS (who are pretty high in numbers generally), even 1000 DPS would be a fair gain until we catch up. Even then we will not be anywhere near Warlocks, Mages and Rogues (who routinely make 6K-8K DPS on their own).

The problem with the accuracy of these numbers is that they are situational; there is virtually no change in DPS where we need AoE (Mind Sear) because there our Haste was already factored in. My DPS in such fights (Onyxia whelps) is 5-6K in 10mans, and runs up to 8-9K in 25mans.

In multi-dotting situations (which means a few adds to a boss, such as Gormok or Anub’arak) our DPS increases slightly. VT will benefit from Haste, SW:P does not, so our DPS on adds will be a little bit buffed. DP is buffed, so our DPS on the boss increases a bit as well.

On single targets (where we are worst at DPS) both VT and DP are improved, so our boss DPS goes up. But without adds or multi-dotting, we will still not generate the single-target DPS that a Druid or Death Knight could generate.

In PvP, however, things change. Haste on all 3 dots means that they will quickly destroy anyone you cast them on – even dispelling them quickly will not prevent a lot of damage going through. We’d be multi-dotting enemies and watching them burn while the healers on the other side try and struggle to get them off. This in my opinion is the main increase in DPS – and the reason we can’t get SW:P affected by Haste as well.

Conclusion

So this leaves me to wonder – when would Haste on 3 dots be too powerful? Clearly only in multi-dotting situations. Now either Icecrown will feature a lot of fights being 1 boss + a few adds, or all their data is based on ToC and Ulduar, where this happens regularly. This means that we will either see our DPS go way up (yay for adds) or we will still lose ground (single-target bosses).

Time will tell, but something tells me that patch 3.3 will be a bit more disappointing than I first hoped for.

Haste, dots and mana return

Time for a little bit of napkin theorycrafting regarding the changes on the PTR for us Shadowpriests with regards to Haste. This can be a bit fuzzy, and the benefits and drawbacks of Haste need to be kept into account, maybe changing what people call the “sweet spots”.

This article is written under a few assumptions:

• Everyone understands that Haste speeds up casting, not reducing cast time (so at 100% haste your casting time is halved, not negated). With DoTs, this means that at 100% haste a 12-second DoT will run fully in 6 seconds.
• Shadowform will give the benefits of Haste on Shadow Word:Pain, Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch (current PTR may have removed SW:P from this list, but no idea if this is intentional or an oversight).

To start with, let’s take a look at the durations with Haste taken into account:

Nothing special so far, as Haste increases now our DoT durations will shorten. Because the damage done remains the same, our DPS contribution from these DoTs will be increased linearly with our Haste.

To see what this means for your damage, simply check what percentage of your total DPS/Damage is done by each DoT, and then multiply this with 1.X, where X is your haste%.

Example: You have 10% Haste, your DPS by SW:P is 1000, VT is 2000 and DP is 1500. Your new DPS totals for each (after adding Haste) will be 1100, 2200 and 1650. Your new total DPS goes from 4500 to 4950, meaning an upgrade of 450 DPS (or 10% increase). This is easy napkin math, trinket procs and Bloodlust are just one of many things that can screw over this example, but it gives an indication of what to expect.

Now, let’s take a look at the mana costs:

With the changes in Haste, DPM (Damage per Mana) will not change, as the increase in cost is buffered by the increase in damage done per second. However, because the mana spent over a particular time period increases, our mana pools will drain dry quicker than before. You will not notice this over short fights (where normally you’d have half a mana bar left) but during long fights (say, Faction Champions) you will get mana starved and need to use Dispersion and Shadowfiend more often.

To combat this occurence, Blizzard has proposed a change to our Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain; with the glyph, our Shadow Word:Pain will give us 1% of our base mana per tick of the spell, yielding the following results:

 This means that as Haste increases, we will regain more mana per second from the glyph – which is logical. Haste will also increase the mana cost for our spells, which means we can also make a table with the Mana spent per second assuming our DoTs are continually ticking:

If we take an average of about 25% Haste, we can expect to see an increase in our mana usage of 25% as well – going from 128 MpS to 151 MpS. With the gylph we will regain 15 MpS from our SW:P ticks at 25% Haste.

If we put these to values against each other, we see that we will spend 8 Mana per second more (151-128-15) after patch 3.3 than we do currently. At the extreme of 100% Haste we spend 256 MpS and regain 26 MpS, meaning we spend 132 Mana per second (256-128-26) more.

Conclusion

This is all napkin math, and I think the Live patch 3.3 will not include SW:P as one of our Hasted spells; I think Blizzard wants to have us feel our increased DPS in our Mana Pools.

The DPS increase from Haste will be linear, but as the amount of mana we spend on the spells increases exponentially with Haste, I can expect math buffs at Elitist Jerks or Shadowpriest.com to come up with some interesting models determining at which amount of Haste we get the best DoT bang for the MpS buck.

As always, if you see an error, have an addition or a unique insight let me know, and I will edit my post to reflect this.

Edit: Currently, Shadow Word:Pain has been removed from the wording of Shadowform, meaning it no longer benefits from Haste, only Crit. This means that the mana returns from Shadow Word: Pain are a fixed 1% of base mana per 3 seconds, or 13 Mana per second. This also means our DPS will not go up quite as much as on previous versions of the PTR.

For me personally, this means that with my DoT use (16,7% DP, 16,1% SW:P and 22,4% VT) I will gain about 200 DPS (11% Haste increase over 39,1% of my DPS roughly) instead of about 300 DPS (11% Haste increase over 59,2% of my DPS).

I am not sure why this change was made, most likely the weird mechanics of Crit and Haste procs on SW:P which are then refreshed by Mind Flay, allowing you to pop a destruction potion and a Haste trinket and then roll a High-Crit, High-Haste SW:P throughout the fight…