Even though my 2-year WoW anniversary will be next week (*tear*), I must admit that my understanding of shadow priests has always been pretty weak... that is until I respecced my 50 holy priest on a whim, fell head over heels, and left my two shiny melee 70s to gather dust on my login screen.
My priest has been 70 for a little under a month, and while I'm absolutely loving the PvE side of things (/manabatterysalute), my blueberry of melty death is not quite the PvP force that I remember them being in the days of yore (read: Pre-TBC).
I've done my research and I know that spriests are totally hurting in PvP now (though not as much as the O-boards would lead me to believe). I've also had the pleasure of experiencing this fact first hand :/
My question is this:
What exactly has changed since the old days? What did the devs do to us? I honestly have no clue.
All I remember about spriests pre-TBC is that they were the bane of my rogue's existence, whereas now it seems to be the opposite.
Thanks in advance for humoring my curiosity!
edited for typos... as usual
Edited, Mar 11th 2008 5:35pm by twitters
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Please enlighten me, oh mighty old school spriests!Follow
Yeah, rogues had some nice changes with the expansion. Cloak of shadows being a key factor against us. Now with ignore armor coming in on pvp gear its going to get worse. There are some threads about this on the o-boards. At the end of the day, the shadow tree has been somewhat ignored as a pvp tree by the developers. It doesn't help that they nerfed the shadow priest damage early into the burning crusade, without realising that at later levels it would impact our scaling quite badly. We also don't get the same physical damage reduction from inner fire which we used to pre-tbc either. The spell was scaled back for some reason. There are other things which are causing us problems, resilience affecting dots certainly didn't help matters either. At the end of the day they're either going to fix it or just say we should respec disc. Not a lot that can be done about it tbh
mothra wrote:
It doesn't help that they nerfed the shadow priest damage early into the burning crusade, without realising that at later levels it would impact our scaling quite badly
Way new to the priest world myself, so I was wondering if you could be a bit more specific. What did they change that hit spriest dps so much?
Sucks to be pigeon-holed into one spec for pvp--believe me, as a mage, I can empathize--but that just seems to be the way of things since TBC and especially since PvP gear became very...well, just very.
edit: i r spek engish
Edited, Mar 12th 2008 2:16pm by AynLoD
AynLoD wrote:
mothra wrote:
It doesn't help that they nerfed the shadow priest damage early into the burning crusade, without realising that at later levels it would impact our scaling quite badly
Way new to the priest world myself, so I was wondering if you could be a bit more specific. What did they change that hit spriest dps so much?
Edited, Mar 12th 2008 2:16pm by AynLoD
Between 60 and 70, the amount of spell damage people had DRASTICALLY increased.
Mind Flay was hardcoded to receive 59% of spell damage, a very low number for a 3-second spell. That means with 1000 +spell damage, your Mindflay damage is increased only 190 per tick of the spell.
Compare this to a Mage's fireball, also a class's staple spell. Fireball is a 3.5 second spell, which receives a full 100% coefficient (3.5/3.5 x 100), then gets lowered to 3 seconds with talents, and the coefficient gets raised to 115% with talents. Mindflay would have had a coefficient of 85.7% if it were not hardcoded. (3/3.5 x 100)
So, look at the damage difference after scaling. Let's say that people had... 200 spell damage about at level 60. That's around where a mage's tier 2 was.
A fireball that normally did 650 would get an increase of 100% (this was before both the damage tax and the Empowered Fireball talent) of spell damage, so it now did 850 damage.
Compare this to a shadow priest with 200 spell damage from greens at level 60. At this time, Mind Flay still had 85.7% coefficient, so they got their 450-damage Mind Flay upgraded to about 621 damage. The difference between the increase for Mind Flay and the increase for Fireball was not that much.
Now at 70, a fireball that hits normally for 900, with 115% of 1000 spell damage, will hit for 2050 damage. A Mind Flay that does 550 total damage, with 59% of 1000 spell damage, will hit for 1140 total damage.
Shadow Priests' gearing is messed up because their main nuke does not scale well with more damage, while other casters do. Other casters enjoy the benefits of spell crit much more than Shadow Priests.
There are more reasons why Shadow Priests are no longer demigods of PvP. Just covering some of the DPS story.
Thanks, Raglu, makes sense.
That is indeed one harsh coefficient.
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Mind Flay was hardcoded to receive 59% of spell damage
That is indeed one harsh coefficient.
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That is indeed one harsh coefficient.
It is indeed, especially seeing as how we no longer have any anti spell pushback talents. I believe there was one there pre tbc but I can't be sure.
Hopefully Blizzard can whip up something with the Inscription profession coming up and give us SPriests an epic comeback at the bottom of the 9th.
Scholar
45 posts
This is off the top of my head. I'm sure if you dig around the o boards you can find a bigger list of nerfs/gripes.
1. shadow weaving talent was reduced from 15% to 10% after max stacks
2. improved vampiric embrace was knocked down from 35% to 20%
3. darkness was reduced from 15% to 10% percent max
4. resilience didn't have dot reduction when it was first introduced.
5. inner fire, power word shield, and shadow form didn't scale up nearly
as much as the average dps of level 60 plus outlands geared folks.
1. shadow weaving talent was reduced from 15% to 10% after max stacks
2. improved vampiric embrace was knocked down from 35% to 20%
3. darkness was reduced from 15% to 10% percent max
4. resilience didn't have dot reduction when it was first introduced.
5. inner fire, power word shield, and shadow form didn't scale up nearly
as much as the average dps of level 60 plus outlands geared folks.
Jooj and everyone else for that matter are exactly right... I have semi retired my Shadow Priest because of it. In pre BC I was the champ in world PvE and up there for BG's as well. Then Outlands came out and we were put into the Outhouse.
In all truthfulness, as stated very effectively, they did not deem to scale us appropriately for PvP compared to other classes. I found I was still able to take on multiple mobs and elites that were several levels higher than me often times, but when it came to PvP I felt like a retarded Noob, and I mean that in all seriousness.
Lots of other classes gained abilities that could effectively continue to nullify our spells and dots with the new talents that were introduced. Specifically rogues... how I use to laugh at them when I saw them or they hit me with a cheap shot. I waited with glee for those 4 - 5 seconds to go away before they got demolished. SW:P, VE, VT, MB... scream and flay to death. Simplest kill of all... now they just cloak and poke. The only class that ever gave any difficulty in pre BC was a very good Warlock, Druids, and the occasional MS Warrior as our nukes did not do enough damage to get them down quickly enough.
WoW has always been good at leveling the playing field, but this time they have sort of missed the boat. However, like everything in life, it is cyclical so we should see a comeback at some point.
**Side Note - I really do hate the mechanics of Resillence and how it effects so much in the game, plus making it easier with the new honor system to get tons of it along with Stamina. That one change in my opinion was the worse thing Blizzard did as it changed the game so much. Now ordinary or below average players can still gear out their toons rather easily and ruined some of the fun for myself. This of course comes from playing on PvP realms only though too, so partially my fault as well.**
In all truthfulness, as stated very effectively, they did not deem to scale us appropriately for PvP compared to other classes. I found I was still able to take on multiple mobs and elites that were several levels higher than me often times, but when it came to PvP I felt like a retarded Noob, and I mean that in all seriousness.
Lots of other classes gained abilities that could effectively continue to nullify our spells and dots with the new talents that were introduced. Specifically rogues... how I use to laugh at them when I saw them or they hit me with a cheap shot. I waited with glee for those 4 - 5 seconds to go away before they got demolished. SW:P, VE, VT, MB... scream and flay to death. Simplest kill of all... now they just cloak and poke. The only class that ever gave any difficulty in pre BC was a very good Warlock, Druids, and the occasional MS Warrior as our nukes did not do enough damage to get them down quickly enough.
WoW has always been good at leveling the playing field, but this time they have sort of missed the boat. However, like everything in life, it is cyclical so we should see a comeback at some point.
**Side Note - I really do hate the mechanics of Resillence and how it effects so much in the game, plus making it easier with the new honor system to get tons of it along with Stamina. That one change in my opinion was the worse thing Blizzard did as it changed the game so much. Now ordinary or below average players can still gear out their toons rather easily and ruined some of the fun for myself. This of course comes from playing on PvP realms only though too, so partially my fault as well.**
Quote:
Between 60 and 70, the amount of spell damage people had DRASTICALLY increased.
Mind Flay was hardcoded to receive 59% of spell damage, a very low number for a 3-second spell. That means with 1000 +spell damage, your Mindflay damage is increased only 190 per tick of the spell.
Compare this to a Mage's fireball, also a class's staple spell. Fireball is a 3.5 second spell, which receives a full 100% coefficient (3.5/3.5 x 100), then gets lowered to 3 seconds with talents, and the coefficient gets raised to 115% with talents. Mindflay would have had a coefficient of 85.7% if it were not hardcoded. (3/3.5 x 100)
Mind Flay was hardcoded to receive 59% of spell damage, a very low number for a 3-second spell. That means with 1000 +spell damage, your Mindflay damage is increased only 190 per tick of the spell.
Compare this to a Mage's fireball, also a class's staple spell. Fireball is a 3.5 second spell, which receives a full 100% coefficient (3.5/3.5 x 100), then gets lowered to 3 seconds with talents, and the coefficient gets raised to 115% with talents. Mindflay would have had a coefficient of 85.7% if it were not hardcoded. (3/3.5 x 100)
a little niave, u think? keep in mind mages dont have 2 dots and heals comin in when they are casting said fireballs. also, mindflay is channeled so dmg ticks off instantly...fireball is casted which can be interrupted before any dmg is done. mage was not a good example to compare with SP pvp.
SP are weak due to lack of dmg-on-the-fly, not because coefficients etc. this is similar to holy vs disc or pally vs druids...on the fly.
42 posts
I have to say shadow priests may be weak DPS but I really notice the difference when we don't have one in a raid. It's almost like having a whole group that I don't have to heal. Ok the DPS is down, but with VE and Improved VE they have off set the amount of healing needed on their group. Now a nice boost for raids would be to enable VE healing to work accross the raid.
I would say VE healing across the raid would make for a quick death for one unlucky shadowpriest...
Tokijinn wrote:
I would say VE healing across the raid would make for a quick death for one unlucky shadowpriest...
unless they changed it so that VE didn't generate threat!
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I would say VE healing across the raid would make for a quick death for one unlucky [shadow priest].
That's not true. I use VE all the time, with no complaints.
I did Karazhan for the first time on my priest recently. During the fight with Morose, I was always one of the very last people to die, and our group's healer (Holy priest) was being attacked more. I kept repeatedly shackling, and if that broke, he would go straight for the healer or someone else.
The problem with that, is possibly because the rest of the group is not keep threat off us, or some priests dont use Fade at the appropriate time. I would fade after a Mind Blast or critical, or if I had to start healing, so pulling would not happen. And, that worked.
Edited, Mar 31st 2008 5:21pm by sederix
tommyguns wrote:
a little niave, u think? keep in mind mages dont have 2 dots and heals comin in when they are casting said fireballs. also, mindflay is channeled so dmg ticks off instantly...fireball is casted which can be interrupted before any dmg is done. mage was not a good example to compare with SP pvp.
SP are weak due to lack of dmg-on-the-fly, not because coefficients etc. this is similar to holy vs disc or pally vs druids...on the fly.
SP are weak due to lack of dmg-on-the-fly, not because coefficients etc. this is similar to holy vs disc or pally vs druids...on the fly.
Whaddya talking about, Willis? I'm talking about the nerf (lack of scaling buff) of Shadow Priest damage, nothing else.
I don't understand what you mean by 'damage on the fly'.
Yes, Mindflay can do a spot of damage before being interrupted while Fireball can be entirely interrupted with no damage coming out.
A single Fireball does loads more damage than a single Mindflay when it goes off, though.
And instead of DoTs, the mage is casting the instant Fire Blast.
But I'm only using the mage example about damage.
sry, it seems we went from SP in pvp to SP in pve back to SP in pvp.
pve-wise, remember that SP are focusing more on just +shadow than any other stat. different from mages where +spell hit and +spell crit are just as crucial as +fire/frost. this gives the SP more room to load up. not to mention the raid-wide utility we give.
pvp-wise, SP suck because they cant hit 'on the fly', while moving, while attacking, while being attacked. warriors, druids, locks, and hunters(to a lesser degree) are the king of arena because they can do their jobs in any situation. SPs lay a weak dot and then get pummelled by the resident MS warrior in zerker. then there is the curse of the cooldowns FTL.
pve-wise, remember that SP are focusing more on just +shadow than any other stat. different from mages where +spell hit and +spell crit are just as crucial as +fire/frost. this gives the SP more room to load up. not to mention the raid-wide utility we give.
pvp-wise, SP suck because they cant hit 'on the fly', while moving, while attacking, while being attacked. warriors, druids, locks, and hunters(to a lesser degree) are the king of arena because they can do their jobs in any situation. SPs lay a weak dot and then get pummelled by the resident MS warrior in zerker. then there is the curse of the cooldowns FTL.
WOW there's a lot of misinformation in this thread.
Mind Flay has ALWAYS been a 57% coefficient (not 59%). It was that way pre-BC, it was that way at 1.0, it's that way now. The only change was one BC beta patch where it was, iirc, mid-70%'s, and was immediately nerfed back to it's current form.
Darkness didn't change, but VE went from 25% base/35% talented to 15% base/25% talented, and can no longer crit. Fairly large PvP nerf, I remember back when I could crit VE for over 1000. Fun times.
As for the relative change from Flay versus Fireball then and now:
In +200dmg gear, Flay used to hit for around 260dmg/sec. Fireball would have hit for around 270dmg/sec. Simply put, spriests were overpowered at 60, we could beat classes that greatly outgeared us due to the insane multipliers spriests got.
Fast forward 2 years to today. A shadow priest running +1200dmg and a mage running +1000dmg and 30% crit. The spriest average 590dmg/sec from just Flay, and the mage is running around with more around 940dmg/sec if you include crits. Spriests don't scale nearly as well as other casters, AND they got less damage-boosting stats with BC than other classes. Take two fresh 70's and the spriest will still probably be pretty damn good, but get them in decent gear and the spriest just doesn't scale as well.
There's also the fact that people have gotten smarter about dispelling, and spriests no longer have the "run if you want to live" mentality associated with them. In short, that means you're stunlocked or gangbanged 95% of the time, meaning what few DoT's you can get off can and will be quickly dispelled.
In AV, I usually run around as shadow, fearbombing and getting killed quickly. It rather sucks. In other BG's, I usually switch out to heal flagrunners because a healing priest - even as shadow, in shadow PvP gear - can easily turn the tide of a close fight. In arena, I'm the distraction, dispeller, and mana burner, and I pray my rogue partner can get someone down before I go. Spriest PvP all around sucks right now, when I want to PvP I get on my shammy and throw lightning bolts or get on my hunter and shoot people from behind trees.
Sederix, on VE: More than likely you're either running with a tank that vastly outgears you, or you're not wearing FSW, or you're not using Blast/Death. Back when I was running with about +900dmg unbuffed I was already threat capped beyond Curator if I used VE. Now that tanks are finally catching up with the awesomeness that is FSW, my fully-buffed +1525dmg combined with non-improved VE isn't a problem except on certain fights (if I ever touch it on Reaver, I die). I have to hold back on Bear in ZA, as well as any boss with adds (Tidewalker, Dragonhawk), and on our first night in Hyjal Omen was being screwy but I still regularly got the "You have passed 90% of XXX's threat!" warning on Rage and Aneth.
Also, Fade is pretty much worthless. If you pulled aggro off a main target, it just means you wasted a little more mana before you died. Fade is ONLY for phase transitions or adds, in order to dump a few seconds worth of DoT or VT aggro. In any other case, you'd be better off just standing still for that 1.5sec and saving yourself some mana.
Mind Flay has ALWAYS been a 57% coefficient (not 59%). It was that way pre-BC, it was that way at 1.0, it's that way now. The only change was one BC beta patch where it was, iirc, mid-70%'s, and was immediately nerfed back to it's current form.
Darkness didn't change, but VE went from 25% base/35% talented to 15% base/25% talented, and can no longer crit. Fairly large PvP nerf, I remember back when I could crit VE for over 1000. Fun times.
As for the relative change from Flay versus Fireball then and now:
In +200dmg gear, Flay used to hit for around 260dmg/sec. Fireball would have hit for around 270dmg/sec. Simply put, spriests were overpowered at 60, we could beat classes that greatly outgeared us due to the insane multipliers spriests got.
Fast forward 2 years to today. A shadow priest running +1200dmg and a mage running +1000dmg and 30% crit. The spriest average 590dmg/sec from just Flay, and the mage is running around with more around 940dmg/sec if you include crits. Spriests don't scale nearly as well as other casters, AND they got less damage-boosting stats with BC than other classes. Take two fresh 70's and the spriest will still probably be pretty damn good, but get them in decent gear and the spriest just doesn't scale as well.
There's also the fact that people have gotten smarter about dispelling, and spriests no longer have the "run if you want to live" mentality associated with them. In short, that means you're stunlocked or gangbanged 95% of the time, meaning what few DoT's you can get off can and will be quickly dispelled.
In AV, I usually run around as shadow, fearbombing and getting killed quickly. It rather sucks. In other BG's, I usually switch out to heal flagrunners because a healing priest - even as shadow, in shadow PvP gear - can easily turn the tide of a close fight. In arena, I'm the distraction, dispeller, and mana burner, and I pray my rogue partner can get someone down before I go. Spriest PvP all around sucks right now, when I want to PvP I get on my shammy and throw lightning bolts or get on my hunter and shoot people from behind trees.
Sederix, on VE: More than likely you're either running with a tank that vastly outgears you, or you're not wearing FSW, or you're not using Blast/Death. Back when I was running with about +900dmg unbuffed I was already threat capped beyond Curator if I used VE. Now that tanks are finally catching up with the awesomeness that is FSW, my fully-buffed +1525dmg combined with non-improved VE isn't a problem except on certain fights (if I ever touch it on Reaver, I die). I have to hold back on Bear in ZA, as well as any boss with adds (Tidewalker, Dragonhawk), and on our first night in Hyjal Omen was being screwy but I still regularly got the "You have passed 90% of XXX's threat!" warning on Rage and Aneth.
Also, Fade is pretty much worthless. If you pulled aggro off a main target, it just means you wasted a little more mana before you died. Fade is ONLY for phase transitions or adds, in order to dump a few seconds worth of DoT or VT aggro. In any other case, you'd be better off just standing still for that 1.5sec and saving yourself some mana.
>.< I even said 190 per tick at 1000 spell damage, being 19% times 3 = 57%. I phail.
As for the coefficient always being 57%, my bad then-- I've no experience with shadow priests pre-BC myself, I went off of what I heard in the past (when I read the O-Boards :O ).
As far as Shadow Priest & Fire Mage at 200 spell damage, I had to do that off of looking at values in my head and did not include talents that gave purely damage increases (like +10% fire damage or +5 spell damage), for the sake of giving a quick example of scaling. But yeah, your example shows even more the lack of disparity between their damage back then.
As for the coefficient always being 57%, my bad then-- I've no experience with shadow priests pre-BC myself, I went off of what I heard in the past (when I read the O-Boards :O ).
As far as Shadow Priest & Fire Mage at 200 spell damage, I had to do that off of looking at values in my head and did not include talents that gave purely damage increases (like +10% fire damage or +5 spell damage), for the sake of giving a quick example of scaling. But yeah, your example shows even more the lack of disparity between their damage back then.
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Sederix, on VE: More than likely you're either running with a tank that vastly outgears you, or you're not wearing FSW.
Not a tailor, so cant get that. And, the tank's gear is possible, but I would not say they were always better geared, because some of them had leveled with me. I usually group with mages and warlocks, which are the largest agro-magnets I have seen; and I can tell you I could nuke all day with them fighting with their insane DPS. Mind Blast is part of my regular rotation during boss fights, but not Death; and I use Fade after a MB or a burst-healing spell.
The only consistent time I pull agro is when I stop DPS and start actually doing healing spells when the main healer dies.
Like I said, VE has never been a problem so far, and no one has complained. It could become a problem when I get more spell damage and get into more intense raids, but from where I am, there does not seem to be any disadvantage.
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