Shadow Priest Best Stats?Follow

The Shadow Priest guide is a little outdated. What stats should I look for as a Shadow Priest?

Spellpower > Hit > Intelect > Crit

Is that the proper order? Maybe I'm wrong.

Thanks a lot.

That's an understatement =P I was going to think about it really well and come up with my view on the matter only to realize that I really don't have a clue as to what's better in the end for a DPS priest.

I am not sure what are the best stats but any that give you a faster hit or more damage must be good and i have just started using an addon called "ratingbuster" for selecting better gear and i find it very useful as it seems it takes into account your spec and compares the stats on your weapons and armour when you mouse over an alternative piece.

I wonder if others have any thoughts on using 'ratingbuster" as it seems great to me and takes out a lot of the guesswork in trying to pick a new piece of armour as not every higher level piece of armour or weapon with seemingly good stats is any better than you already have .

Actually, that doesn't suggest anything about stats. It's a caveat in Recounts DPS tracking.

Recount doesn't start tracking DPS until you physically participate in a fight. In other words the fight could have begun, if you cast a spell with a 3 second cast time, or a channeled spell or dot that doesn't hit the mob until 2 seconds into the fight, your DPS won't start recording until that spell hits the mob.

As an example of a recount reading.

Class - overall damage(dps)

Hunter - 12,000(1,950)
Warlock - 11,000(1,980)
Rogue - 10,500(2,200)

In this example, the hunter had the highest overall damage done, but the lowest DPS. He was able to attack from the very start of the fight, in fact he had a hit in before the tank(misdirect). The warlock started the fight off with a shadowbolt, which didn't land until 2 second after the hunter had already started the fight. The rogue started, quite a few second after them, because he was stealthed he had to slowly head to where the mob was being tanked.

When you are first to engage a mob in a fight, given a short enough fight, you could be lowest on DPS and still top the overall damage meter, and/or because you are in the fight the longest your DPS is more likely to plateau out, and be less subject to a lucky string of crits that could inflate your DPS, basically, the longer you are in a fight, the more true your recorded dps will be.

The exact opposite could be true when you are the last to engage a mob. Given a short enough fight, you are more likely to be the lowest in overall damage and could still be the highest DPS. Also you are more subject to inflated dps because of the shorter sample size.

My example shows, that assuming their dps isn't inflated by a lucky string of crits, given a long enough fight the rogue would eventually have caught and surpassed both the warlock and the hunter on overall DPS, but because the fight was so short, the delay in actually engaging the mob cost you some overall damage.

Basically, you want to go with what gives you the best DPS, and not worry so much about overall damage, because given a long enough fight(like a 6 minute raid boss), the person with the highest dps will surpass those lower. The increase in DPS is there to make up for the lost time from not technically engaging the mob due to class mechanics such as having to stealth to a mob or wait for a DoT to tick.

Whether crit or haste is a better increase in DPS is another matter, I just wanted to clear up on misinterpreting recount Overall Damage/DPS readings.

1) Get hit capped. Assuming Misery, you need 289.
2) SP > Crit = Haste > Spirit = Int
3) Stack Crit and Haste equally as they help you equally. Stop stacking haste once you can get 2 MF in between a MB... around 325 haste depending on lag.

This all assumes you are raiding. If you are looking at heroics, the hit can be 79 but the rest stays the same.

This is just wrong.

Hit to the cap (1.12) > SP (1) > Crit (.62) = Haste (.62) > Int (.22) = Spirit (.2). Numbers are realative weights.

Now this may change a bit in 3.1 it won't change all that much as best I can tell so far. Crit just feels sexy at lower gear levels but in truth the above stats are what you use to min max.