Shadow Guard Vs. Devouring PlagueFollow

Hey guys!

I've read the posts you've sent so far, and I think that most people seems to forget the most important factor when they compare these 2 spells: Coefficients!

So lets take a closer look at the 2 spells at maximum rank:

Devouring Plague

"1145 Mana
3mins Cooldown
Instant Cast

Afflicts the target with a disease that causes 152 Shadow damage over 24 seconds. Damage caused by the Devouring Plague heals the caster."

So this is a dot which will tick 8 times, and the spell benefits 80% of your shadow bonus damage over the duration (without talents). This means that each tick of the spell gets 10% of your shadow bonus damage (which is really-really bad compared to other dots where the base coeff per tick is higher than 20%).

Some says that the spell is kinda useless due to its very high mana cost, but this can be compensated if you use Inner Focus (both spells have 3 mins CD). To calculate the damage of each tick for the Devouring Plague (assuming your opponent has no damage reduction) we can use this formula:

Damage = ( 152 + 0.1 * X ) * 1.15 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 222.08 + 0.146 * X // if you already have 5 stacks of shadow weaving on your opponent

Where X is your bonus shadow damage. Now lets take some examples at certain bonus damage values:

Shadow Bonus Damage / Damage per tick
500 / 295
750 / 331
1000 / 368

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Shadowguard

"270 Mana
Instant Cast

The caster is surrounded by shadows. When a spell, melee or ranged attack hits the caster, the attacker will be struck for 130 Shadow damage. Attackers can only be damaged once every few seconds. This damage causes no threat. 3 charges. Lasts 10min."

People like to say that this spell is basically a Lightning Shield for Troll Priests, in some ways they are right, but actually there are 2 big differences:
-The amount of talents affecting the spell
-The Coefficient of Shadowguard

For shaman, there's a talent called Improved Lightning Shield in the enhancement talent tree which increases the damage by 5% for each talent point, up to a maximum of 15%. But thats all! For Priests, especially Shadow Priests, there are ways more talents which interacts with Shadowguard:

Shadow Tree:
-Darkness (+10% damage)
-Shadow Weaving (+10% damage at 5 stacks, and each proc of Shadowguard applies a stack of Shadow weaving)
-Misery (+5% damage)
-Shadowform (+15% damage)
-Vampiric Embrace (gain 25% of damage done as Health, kinda like a mini Earth Shield)
-Blackout (10% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds when Shadowguard procs)

Discipline Tree:
-Mental Agility (-10% Mana Cost)
-Force of Will (+5% damage)
-Silent Resolve (20% chance your Shadowguard wont be dispelled)

The good thing about Shadowguard is that it will proc against anyone who deals damage to you, regardless it's spell, ranged or melee attack. When Shadowguard procs, there's a ~3 sec cooldown before it can trigger again. If there is someone who's dealing damage to you constantly, then this means that your Shadowguard is basically a dot which will deal damage to your opponent every 3 seconds while proccing all the good shadow talents you have. Another interesting fact about this "dot" is that the damage itself is counted as Direct damage, which means that the damage reduction from resilience WILL NOT affect your overall damage (which is not the case for Devouring Plague), but on the other hand, Shadowguard is uncapable of landing a critical strike (just like Devouring Plague)

So this is how the formula looks like for Shadowguard (the coefficient for each tick is 39.2%, which means 117.6% for the spell overall)

Damage = ( 130 + 0.392 * X ) * 1.15 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 189.94 + 0.573 * X // if you already have 5 stacks of shadow weaving on your opponent

Where X is your bonus shadow damage. Now lets take some examples at certain bonus damage values:

Shadow Bonus Damage / Damage per tick
500 / 476
750 / 619
1000 / 762

If you compare the damage per tick of Devouring Plague and Shadowguard, then you can see that Shadowguard is better than Devo plague, and as your gear gets better, the difference will be even bigger. Other pros for Shadowguard:

-as it is a buff, you can cast it before combat, so you can save time during fighting, but I highly recommend to always keep an eye on your remaining charges of your shadowguard to make sure its always active.

-No cooldown

-Much more mana efficient, and rank 1 Shadowguard has the same coefficient as maximum rank, so you can deal a LOT of damage just for 50 mana!

-Much easier and faster to get 5 stacks of shadow Weaving on target (saving you extra mana)

-Not affected by the damage reduction of Resilience

-You dont get screwed if your opponent dispels your shadowguard, while its DEVASTATING if your opponent cleanse a Devouring Plague

-The ability to stun your opponent while you are stunned (Troll Shadow Priest can be a nightmare for any rogue player ^^)

-Shadowguard makes your character look unique while its active! Whirling shadow orb things looks cool trust me :D

Pros for Devouring Plague:

-Arguably more useful for PVE environment (but then I would recommend Starshards)

-With Vampiric Embrace active, Devo plague heals you for 125% of Damage done, but due to the fact that it deals much less damage per tick compared to Shadowguard, the heal difference is not that big.


Overall I think that Shadowguard is WAYS WAYS better than Devouring Plague, and the more realistic question is to compare Troll Priest and Undead Priest in both PVP and PVE side, but this comment is too long already, so I will write a "short" comparison next time :D Anyways, if you ask me, even with both racials and priest racials, Troll Priest (esp. Shadow Priest) is better in PVP, while Undead is a bit stronger in PVE.


Edited, Apr 11th 2016 12:12pm by ArcaneHymn