Needs Moar ShadowFollow

We've had very little talk of the Shadow tree recently, and with 4.0 right around the corner, we need to hop to it!

Damn healers taking up all the limelight...

I'm not bitter at all. Nope. Anywho.

I just discovered something very alarming the other day when browsing Shadowpriest.com.

One of the theorycrafters over there did some number crunching, and discovered a disturbing little fact: Shadow's Mastery is currently completely useless, and the shadow priests that know what they're doing will be avoiding this stat like the plague.

I'll spare you the numbers, but it works like this: Mind Blast just isn't cast enough that having a random proc to boost its damage is worth it as a mastery. When compared to haste, and even crit, it falls behind. In fact, compared to crit, mastery is only half as useful to a raiding shadow priest.

But then why doesn't Blizzard squiddle with the numbers and, say, increase the damage boost on the orbs? You know, if the Mind Blast can't hit more often, just make it hit for harder. Simple.

Well, they can't do that because of PvP reasons. Mind Blast is already hitting for fairly hard on Beta with 3 orbs and Evangelism up. Increasing the orbs damage will only make them hit much, much harder. So while Shadow will go form underwhelming to competitive in PvE, it'll go to completely overpowered in PvP. Something that Blizzard, obviously, doesn't want to do.

"But wait!" you say. "Mastery isn't supposed to even be on PvP gear!" This is true, but there's nothing stopping players from reforging or enchanting the stat onto the gear. And I don't even know about trinkets, consumables, etc.

The players have come up with a few solutions themselves to suggest, among them being a reduced cooldown on Mind Blast with mastery, making the target take x% more damage after a Mind Blast, or even just a flat DoT damage increase. These each have their problems, though. Some would be overpowered, some would run into the same PvP issue, and that last one would just be blurring the already barely-visible line between Affliction Warlocks and Shadow Priests.

Ghostcrawler hasn't been silent on the issue. But not much better. The only response I've seen of his went like so:



...Which brings us right back to the PvP problem.

But that's what they did. As of build 13033, each point of Mastery increases MB damage by 4.3%, which is an improvement.

And that should bring things back into line, right? Wrong.

There's a program out there called SimulationCraft. It's an excellent tool, and it's the program to use for theorycrafters to calculate what stats to go for and why. Here's the results it spit out (higher number = worth more):



Aw crap. Mastery is still almost three times as bad as Crit. And on top of that, they can't boost Mind Blast any further, as it's already hitting in the range of ~25k. Not good.

Hopefully Blizzard can think of something, and us Shadow priests don't have to pull another ICC. For those of you who didn't pay much attention, Shadow Priests were generally subpar up until 3.3 (when ICC came out), when Shadowform let our DoTs scale with Haste. And all was well.

Having to wait through 3 tiers of content just to be competitive? Ugh, please no.

So... opinions? Discussion? Staring at me like I'm a loon because everybody here heals (weirdos)?

Edited, Oct 4th 2010 8:28pm by IDrownFish

First off and most importantly, apart from mastery, I think we're in good shape going into 4.0/Cataclysm. While it's highly entertaining to read the-sky-is-falling posts, it looks as if just about every class except perhaps mages is indulging in it.

I don't think there's a whole lot to say right now about the SP mastery except that it's mathematically broken and really hard to see how they'll fix it unless they make it work one way in PVE and another in PVP. I don't even know if Blizz has the tech to do that.

People are proposing all sorts of ideas to fix it. I'm more than a little doubtful that they're going to completely change SP mastery at this late date.

As I've written over there, I'm really more interested in what the devs were thinking about when they designed it because clearly, once you run the numbers, it's anything but attractive. I think it's pretty hard to imagine this is what they wanted the end result to be. I'm not at all clear about what it was supposed to be conceptually.

The optimal Mastery percentage for SPriests is zero? For now, Yeah. Reforge all of your mastery stats into something else or as much as you can realistically.

So it's a wait-and-see and try to be hopeful situation. I'll let others do the game designing.

I'm still getting used to the idea of SW:Death in my normal rotation. And I might actually skip a bit of damage to get some extra CC. It's no end of amusement to get targets to drop their weapons with Psychic Horror and the Glyph of Psychic Scream (AOE freeze for mobs) is pretty hot. Mind Control is much improved as well.

Maybe after I'm done leveling I'll get serious. Maybe. Rambling again I am.

Edited, Oct 4th 2010 10:17pm by Moanique

Edited, Oct 4th 2010 10:18pm by Moanique

Blah blah shadow blah mastery blah whatever. Enough of this on-topic stuff. You should be working on your NaNo plot.

Okay but really, I'm sorry I don't have a lot to contribute to shadow threads, but I do agree there aren't enough of them. It's not like the healers are hogging all the cookies, shadow peeps. We will share if you post moar.

I've always enjoyed my forays into the dark side and I find the discussion interesting even if I don't know squat.

Wow, they have two posters now. I'm impressed.

Not really. I'm the second one; and I mostly just troll, spout nonsense, and chase people away.

Dark purple shadowy cookies...mmmmmm

I believe it. Sometimes we have a our bear druid DPS in tank spec and gear and he did amazing DPS.

I just have NO idea what your supposed to do to manage it.

I haven't kept up with shadow changes much, been focusing more on my mage, but last nite one of my guildies mentioned something about shadow mastery being improved by like 700%. I can't find anything about it anywhere with a random googling, but maybe someone who's watching EJ will know what I'm talking about. The people who were talking about were saying that's how bad it really was. 700%? Anyone seen this anywhere?

The base damage of shadowy apparition (not shadow mastery) was increased by 700%, which is less impressive when you realize its base damage was quite low. Its scaling from spellpower is unchanged.

Just to fill in the specific numbers: base damage from Shadowy Apparition went from 62.5 to 500 (+700%).

Build 13131.

So basically from nothing at all to something.


Edited, Oct 5th 2010 10:04pm by Moanique

If you never had the experience in endgame vanilla of being one of the most feared opponents due to your facemelting powers, you should definitely try out some shadowpriest this weekend. Hasted, critting DoTs are just devestating.

I suspect it’s the removal of armor penetration that’s made such a huge difference. AP favored plate over cloth heavily; now that it’s gone, the balance between casters and melee is shifted heavily. And priests usually have the edge in a caster fight.

By the way, resilience no longer affects Mana Burn. Another good reason to stack haste instead of crit.