Shadow Priests in MoPFollow

I raid Shadow. My guild is #7 on the server, 2905 world, and have down 7/16 heroic. I'm no bodhi, but I think I can answer any questions you have.

Taking a quick glance at your gear, I see some gemming issues. You're using Energized greens to fill your blue slots (Haste/Spirit). I'd recommend switching those out for Purified purples (Int/Spirit). Switch out the Quick yellows (Pure haste) for Reckless oranges (Int/Haste). For red and prismatic slots, Brillaint reds (Pure Int). Intellect is super good, and you need to have it everywhere. It is better than even Haste by far. Basically, your gemming should be thus: If red slot, use Brilliant. If yellow slot, use Reckless. If blue slot, use Purified. All have Int and a useful stat.

Mastery is sh*t, it seems like you realize that.

As far as talents/glyphs go, It's hard to go wrong now. Divine Star/Halo/Cascade is really fight specific. If you're constantly close to the boss, get Divine Star. If you're far away and there's a lot of spread out adds (like Elegon and Will), get Cascade. Otherwise, get Halo. Cast Halo and Cascade from max range if possible (the addon HaloPro on Curse does a great job for helping with this). Keep all three on cooldown, period.

I prefer Glyph of Vampiric Embrace, as it increases the power of VE (you heal more overall, even with the reduced duration). Gives you a mini tranq almost for a raid cooldown, though it's far from necessary. Fade can be useful, but I find the damage reduction kind of underwhelming. Still, every little bit helps the healers.

Other choices are Glyph of Mind Spike and Glyph of Mind Flay. Again, this is pretty much preference, so you're fine to even go with what you've got (though I would still recommend VE).

Switch out Mindbender for From Darkness, Comes Light if you're dealing with a fight where you are multidotting. It scales VERY well with multidotting. So does Divine Insight, but if you are multidotting, then adds are likely dying, at which point ToF is better. I can't really think of a fight in which you want to take Divine Insight that's not a single-target fight.

Seriously, Twist of Fate is overpowered, abuse it like a red headed stepchild whenever and wherever possible. Make sure to refresh your DoTs just before it expires for maximum benefit.

Even though Haste is very good and Mastery is very not, I would still recommend swaping the enchant on your boots out for Pandaren's Step. The movespeed is absolutely essential for raiding. It seems terrible on paper, but in practice it is great. The entire raid should be using a movespeed enchant on the boots.

I'd swap out the spellthread on your pants for the Sanctified one (Int/Spirit instead of Int/Crit). This frees up some reforging on your gear that you can instead use for Haste. Namely, the helm (Mastery -> Haste instead of Mastery -> Spirit)

Edited, Jan 16th 2013 5:39pm by IDrownFish

Thanks a lot! Yeah just looked up stat weighting and realized that 1 Int > 2 Haste. Somehow I had it in the back of my head that Haste is worth something like 0,6 Int. Maybe I misremembered or maybe stat weighting changed since my last visit to How2Priest. The former is absolutely possible.

The next few days I will be away but after I'm back I will change my gemming accordingly. The Spellthread advice is really helpful. In essence I'm giving up some Crit for Haste which is always good. My biggest problem at this moment is that I am still under the recommended value for Haste. 8085 me thinks. And after I re-gemmed I will be even further away. That's not to say I disagree! I completely agree with you. But I thought with my iLevel 8085 Haste should be easily achievable.

I mainly choose Mindbender 1) to have more Mana returned to me and 2) because it makes our rotation a bit easier to predict and especially in progression fight I can really use that.

I hope they change Hymn of Hope so it won't kick us out of Shadowform. The time spend channeling costs us much DPS already but the wasted GCD at the end to switch back to Shadowform is just unnecessary.

The Shadowy Apparitions need to move faster and their AI needs some overhaul. In the more dynamic fights with much boss movement there are always some of them stupid apparitions hovering hopelessly around and never reaching their destination. Another unnecessary DPS loss.

How to play shadow and feel good about yourself:

1) Spec shadow.
2) Get PvP gear and play PvP.
3) ???
4) 2800 rating, Gladiator.

Edit: no seriously, shadow is ridiculously OP until 5.2.

Edited, Jan 17th 2013 1:57pm by Theophany

PvP Power won't increase healing as well as damage for shadow. Right now (AFAIK), it does both. So they can be gods of damage and healing by stacking PvP Power.

Well okay then. I'm glad the relentless application of pressure during your formative years had some effect, at least.

I don't know if I could stand it, even for amusement purposes. If I stay in my Holy spec while questing it takes me half an hour to kill a bunny, even in Chastise. (Oh, it's just a harmless little bunny, isn't it?)