RSS feed2008-08-10 02:12:16
Yes, a pretty silly topic I agree, but here's the thing....
Theorycrafting DPS (with some in game testing) doesn't require a degree in rocket science or super secret inside information. We've got a pretty clear idea now about what sort of DPS boost we can expect to be seeing and basically it's pretty much in line with every other DPS class which leaves our relative DPS pretty much untouched.
But hey, our position as the lowest DPS class in a raid was justified in that we brought the most to the raid via utility yes?
With our Misery, Shadowweaving, Vampiric Embrace and the power that was Vampiric Touch we apparently brought so much to the raid in terms of utility that it was balanced for us to be doing hundreds of DPS less than the next lowest DPS class (either Balance Druids or Retribution Paladins) and doing half the DPS of a Hunter or Rogue.
I mean our Vampiric Touch was so sought after that guilds brought up to 3 Shadow Priests to a raid.
And I agree by the way, that this was too many and the ideal number should have been 1.
But what's changed?
First up, Shadowweaving:
This debuff only benefits 2 classes. Shadowpriests and Warlocks. And sure, at the start of TBC almost all raiding Warlocks were either Affliction spec, Demo spec or Shadowbolt-Destro spec. In all cases Shadowbolt was a staple of their casting rotation or they had other Shadow spells they cast. And thus, this debuff saw some action. Although true it only gave a 10% buff after it's nerf in 2.1 and again it only affects Warlocks and Shadowpriests. (Scorch on the other hand gives 15% and affects all the Fire Mages and any Firelocks).
What's changed with Shadowweaving? Well, in end game TBC raids, Fire is the better Warlock DPS spec and this is even *more* so in WotLK given that they've buffed Fire talents but not really buffed Shadow talents for Warlocks.
The amount of Raid DPS increase our Shadowweaving now brings to the table is far less. Scorch, by contrast, now brings far more. It's not pretty much only buffing ourselves (and remember the target in WotLK seems to be 1 Shadow Priest) and maybe that one Warlock assigned to spec Affliction in a WotLK raid.
The one positive change? Mind Sear stacks Shadowweaving fast so a Warlocks Seed of Corruption spam will be boosted compared to where it currently is.
Result: Shadowweaving is far less relevant in WotLK and gives lower returns.
Second: Misery.
This is a nice little 5% DPS boost to casters when they do DPS to the same target that a Shadowpriest has a SW:P, VT or Mind Flay up on. Which basically means at most 2 mobs at once.
What's changed? An Elemental Shaman's Totem of Wrath gives a 6% caster DPS boost to every caster in the raid on *every* target (and that's ignoring the 3% crit bonus it gives).
So this one totem brings more raid utility than Misery.
Ignoring that totem there's still Wrath of Air which gives a 5% haste boost, which (apart from some classes i.e. Shadow Priests) gives pretty much a 5% DPS boost (albeit with less mana efficiency). Or Flametongue if the Shaman isn't Elemental for a +dmg boost.
Or a Frost Mage's Winter's Chill which gives a +crit% boost to all Fire, Arcane and Frost spells. Or Curse of Elements from a Warlock. Or a Moonkin's +crit% aura. Or their Improved Aura which gives a Haste boost...or....etc....etc..
Basically, Misery is no more than any other hybrid has, and is in fact less useful than a lot of them.
Third, Vampirc Touch:
The big reason for bringing more than 1 Shadow Priest to a raid in TBC. The reason why our DPS is kept so much lower than everyone else.... 5% of our damage done is returned as mana to our group.
At the ultra high end of TBC raiding assuming *perfect* VT uptime this gives around 450mp5 to each caster in the group.
But what's changed? First up it's been nerfed to 2% down from 5%.
So that "perfect" TBC return of 450mp5 is now 175mp5 and it only affects up to 5 people (not counting warlock pets).
Anything else changed? Yes.
Frost Mages received a buff to their Water Elemental. Ignoring Cold Snap and assuming 3 points in the talent they can keep up their Water Elemental 1/3rd of the time. While it's up it restores 3% of the total mana of every caster in the raid every 5 seconds.
So averaged out that means 1% of each casters max mana every 5 seconds for 1 global cooldown every 3 minutes.
In endgame TBC raids, a good average max mana pool might be 11000 buffed up. So that's worth 110mp5 to every caster in the raid for the cost of 1 GCD every minutes. By comparison VT needs to be recast every 15 seconds and it needs use to actually be doing DPS to see returns.
If raids are bringing 3 Shadow Priests in TBC surely that means there's at least 15 casters in the raid. So whereas one Shadow Priest might be giving 875mp5 (5*175) that Water Elemental is giving 1650mp5. Which is almost double.
So Frost Mages have *MORE* mana regen utility than Shadow Priests in WotLK. And yes, both scale. Shadow Priest's mana regen scales with DPS done. Frost Mage's with +int. Of which there is PLENTY in WotLK.
Hunters and Paladins also have received ways to give mana to the raid. Possibly Death Knights too (I'm not sure on this one).
Paladins of course have always had Blessing of Wisdom and Judgement of Wisdom.
Even just counting the new rank of Blessing of Wisdom (which is around 91mp5) and you see that this gives more mana than the Shadow Priest does and requires no GCDs at all (as it can be done before the raid). Their JoW on the other hand now scales and also gives large mana returns.
So okay, you don't want Shadow Priests to be the only choice when it comes to mana regen. Just like we're not the only choice for providing any other buff.
Which leaves Vampiric Embrace:
Okay, this is still a situationally useful spell that can help out the healing on fights with AoE damage. Of course the actual healing specs are all getting boosts to their AoE healing abilities (even Paladins) and from the sounds of it, don't don't Deathknights have something vaguely similar too? Paladins do with Judgement of Light for melee.
So okay, I *do* understand the direction you're going in with WotLK. You really want to change things so that no one spec of any class is wanted to be stacked in the raid for the purposes of raid utility. The "ideal" amount of each spec for each class is 1. With maybe 2 as desired. But as of course there are 30 main "specs" and 25 slots, on any given raid, 5 specs will miss out (obviously the desire is that it's not the same 5 specs for every guild each raid).
But the thing is, if you're going to even out the amount of raid utility every spec brings then you really should be evening out the amount of DPS every spec brings otherwise you will run into the situation where it's simply not worth bringing say a Shadow Priest to the raid because the Raid DPS/HPS/whatever suffers for it.
And yes, you've still said that your Balancing Pass hasn't happened yet. But you're also adamant that you don't want Shadow Priests to scale. This is a given because you don't want us to be able to see non-trivial returns from crit or even haste and we have poor coefficients from +dmg.
How can I justify that previous statement?
+dmg:
In TBC, between 25% and 30% of our total damage comes from Mind Flay which still scales worse than every other main nuke, yes, even with all our scaling buffs from talent points.
We still only get between 0.5 and 0.6 DPS per point of +dmg across all of our spells compared to other DPS classes which get between 0.7 and 0.9 DPS per point of +dmg.
Sure, this is boosted a bit in WotLK. We've gained 5% DPS from Twin Disciplines. We're gaining a spirit->dmg talent (Warlocks mind you have this as part of their undispellable armour that requires no talents at all) and as we'll be gaining +spirit from gear this boost our DPS a little. Though as it's only 30% and as +dmg is cheaper than +spirit the difference this makes isn't that huge.
It's true that our VT receives it's "correct" base scaling given it's duration.
Mind Blast and SW:D receive their "correct" base scaling given their cast times (though they ignore their cooldowns....How exactly from a results point of view is an instant cast spell with a 12 second cooldown different from a DoT with a 12 second duration? Why does one get 42.9% scaling and the other 80%?)
Shadow Word: Pain *was* receiving it's "correct" base scaling but it got nerfed back in 2.1.
+haste:
Between 30% and 50% of our total damage in a raid comes from DoTs. Mostly Shadow Word: Pain, but VT is still there.
The effect that +haste has on DoTs is extremely low given that (whomever that Blue poster was not-withstanding you do not spam DoTs.....sheesh).
How much of a DPS boost in single target DPS is 50% haste (the cap) on a 15 second duration DoT with a 1.5 second cast time? Well it lets you have another 0.5 seconds of non-DoT casting. So instead of losing 1.5 out of every 15 seconds you lose 1 out of every 15 seconds.
That's like a 3.7% DPS boost. From +50% haste. Which when we're talking about direct damage nukes would give a 50% DPS boost. Conclusion: Haste doesn't help DoTs.
What about Mind Blast and SW:D? The same thing applies to them as applies to DoTs because they both have cooldowns (though as the cooldowns are lower it applies a little less). But again, Haste gives little return to our 2 "big" nukes.
What about our new AoE spell, Mind Sear? Nope. Haste has *zero* effect on Mind Sear. Mind Sear is hardcoded to 1 second ticks, and as we're channeling it it's not like the lowered global cooldown helps either like it does with DoTs.
Mind Flay is our only spell that sees proper returns from Spell Haste.
Want to know what's funny though? Despite the poor returns from Spell Haste we get, haste rating is still in TBC, as good as +dmg (at raid level gear) because we scale so poorly with +dmg.
(continued...)
Theorycrafting DPS (with some in game testing) doesn't require a degree in rocket science or super secret inside information. We've got a pretty clear idea now about what sort of DPS boost we can expect to be seeing and basically it's pretty much in line with every other DPS class which leaves our relative DPS pretty much untouched.
But hey, our position as the lowest DPS class in a raid was justified in that we brought the most to the raid via utility yes?
With our Misery, Shadowweaving, Vampiric Embrace and the power that was Vampiric Touch we apparently brought so much to the raid in terms of utility that it was balanced for us to be doing hundreds of DPS less than the next lowest DPS class (either Balance Druids or Retribution Paladins) and doing half the DPS of a Hunter or Rogue.
I mean our Vampiric Touch was so sought after that guilds brought up to 3 Shadow Priests to a raid.
And I agree by the way, that this was too many and the ideal number should have been 1.
But what's changed?
First up, Shadowweaving:
This debuff only benefits 2 classes. Shadowpriests and Warlocks. And sure, at the start of TBC almost all raiding Warlocks were either Affliction spec, Demo spec or Shadowbolt-Destro spec. In all cases Shadowbolt was a staple of their casting rotation or they had other Shadow spells they cast. And thus, this debuff saw some action. Although true it only gave a 10% buff after it's nerf in 2.1 and again it only affects Warlocks and Shadowpriests. (Scorch on the other hand gives 15% and affects all the Fire Mages and any Firelocks).
What's changed with Shadowweaving? Well, in end game TBC raids, Fire is the better Warlock DPS spec and this is even *more* so in WotLK given that they've buffed Fire talents but not really buffed Shadow talents for Warlocks.
The amount of Raid DPS increase our Shadowweaving now brings to the table is far less. Scorch, by contrast, now brings far more. It's not pretty much only buffing ourselves (and remember the target in WotLK seems to be 1 Shadow Priest) and maybe that one Warlock assigned to spec Affliction in a WotLK raid.
The one positive change? Mind Sear stacks Shadowweaving fast so a Warlocks Seed of Corruption spam will be boosted compared to where it currently is.
Result: Shadowweaving is far less relevant in WotLK and gives lower returns.
Second: Misery.
This is a nice little 5% DPS boost to casters when they do DPS to the same target that a Shadowpriest has a SW:P, VT or Mind Flay up on. Which basically means at most 2 mobs at once.
What's changed? An Elemental Shaman's Totem of Wrath gives a 6% caster DPS boost to every caster in the raid on *every* target (and that's ignoring the 3% crit bonus it gives).
So this one totem brings more raid utility than Misery.
Ignoring that totem there's still Wrath of Air which gives a 5% haste boost, which (apart from some classes i.e. Shadow Priests) gives pretty much a 5% DPS boost (albeit with less mana efficiency). Or Flametongue if the Shaman isn't Elemental for a +dmg boost.
Or a Frost Mage's Winter's Chill which gives a +crit% boost to all Fire, Arcane and Frost spells. Or Curse of Elements from a Warlock. Or a Moonkin's +crit% aura. Or their Improved Aura which gives a Haste boost...or....etc....etc..
Basically, Misery is no more than any other hybrid has, and is in fact less useful than a lot of them.
Third, Vampirc Touch:
The big reason for bringing more than 1 Shadow Priest to a raid in TBC. The reason why our DPS is kept so much lower than everyone else.... 5% of our damage done is returned as mana to our group.
At the ultra high end of TBC raiding assuming *perfect* VT uptime this gives around 450mp5 to each caster in the group.
But what's changed? First up it's been nerfed to 2% down from 5%.
So that "perfect" TBC return of 450mp5 is now 175mp5 and it only affects up to 5 people (not counting warlock pets).
Anything else changed? Yes.
Frost Mages received a buff to their Water Elemental. Ignoring Cold Snap and assuming 3 points in the talent they can keep up their Water Elemental 1/3rd of the time. While it's up it restores 3% of the total mana of every caster in the raid every 5 seconds.
So averaged out that means 1% of each casters max mana every 5 seconds for 1 global cooldown every 3 minutes.
In endgame TBC raids, a good average max mana pool might be 11000 buffed up. So that's worth 110mp5 to every caster in the raid for the cost of 1 GCD every minutes. By comparison VT needs to be recast every 15 seconds and it needs use to actually be doing DPS to see returns.
If raids are bringing 3 Shadow Priests in TBC surely that means there's at least 15 casters in the raid. So whereas one Shadow Priest might be giving 875mp5 (5*175) that Water Elemental is giving 1650mp5. Which is almost double.
So Frost Mages have *MORE* mana regen utility than Shadow Priests in WotLK. And yes, both scale. Shadow Priest's mana regen scales with DPS done. Frost Mage's with +int. Of which there is PLENTY in WotLK.
Hunters and Paladins also have received ways to give mana to the raid. Possibly Death Knights too (I'm not sure on this one).
Paladins of course have always had Blessing of Wisdom and Judgement of Wisdom.
Even just counting the new rank of Blessing of Wisdom (which is around 91mp5) and you see that this gives more mana than the Shadow Priest does and requires no GCDs at all (as it can be done before the raid). Their JoW on the other hand now scales and also gives large mana returns.
So okay, you don't want Shadow Priests to be the only choice when it comes to mana regen. Just like we're not the only choice for providing any other buff.
Which leaves Vampiric Embrace:
Okay, this is still a situationally useful spell that can help out the healing on fights with AoE damage. Of course the actual healing specs are all getting boosts to their AoE healing abilities (even Paladins) and from the sounds of it, don't don't Deathknights have something vaguely similar too? Paladins do with Judgement of Light for melee.
So okay, I *do* understand the direction you're going in with WotLK. You really want to change things so that no one spec of any class is wanted to be stacked in the raid for the purposes of raid utility. The "ideal" amount of each spec for each class is 1. With maybe 2 as desired. But as of course there are 30 main "specs" and 25 slots, on any given raid, 5 specs will miss out (obviously the desire is that it's not the same 5 specs for every guild each raid).
But the thing is, if you're going to even out the amount of raid utility every spec brings then you really should be evening out the amount of DPS every spec brings otherwise you will run into the situation where it's simply not worth bringing say a Shadow Priest to the raid because the Raid DPS/HPS/whatever suffers for it.
And yes, you've still said that your Balancing Pass hasn't happened yet. But you're also adamant that you don't want Shadow Priests to scale. This is a given because you don't want us to be able to see non-trivial returns from crit or even haste and we have poor coefficients from +dmg.
How can I justify that previous statement?
+dmg:
In TBC, between 25% and 30% of our total damage comes from Mind Flay which still scales worse than every other main nuke, yes, even with all our scaling buffs from talent points.
We still only get between 0.5 and 0.6 DPS per point of +dmg across all of our spells compared to other DPS classes which get between 0.7 and 0.9 DPS per point of +dmg.
Sure, this is boosted a bit in WotLK. We've gained 5% DPS from Twin Disciplines. We're gaining a spirit->dmg talent (Warlocks mind you have this as part of their undispellable armour that requires no talents at all) and as we'll be gaining +spirit from gear this boost our DPS a little. Though as it's only 30% and as +dmg is cheaper than +spirit the difference this makes isn't that huge.
It's true that our VT receives it's "correct" base scaling given it's duration.
Mind Blast and SW:D receive their "correct" base scaling given their cast times (though they ignore their cooldowns....How exactly from a results point of view is an instant cast spell with a 12 second cooldown different from a DoT with a 12 second duration? Why does one get 42.9% scaling and the other 80%?)
Shadow Word: Pain *was* receiving it's "correct" base scaling but it got nerfed back in 2.1.
+haste:
Between 30% and 50% of our total damage in a raid comes from DoTs. Mostly Shadow Word: Pain, but VT is still there.
The effect that +haste has on DoTs is extremely low given that (whomever that Blue poster was not-withstanding you do not spam DoTs.....sheesh).
How much of a DPS boost in single target DPS is 50% haste (the cap) on a 15 second duration DoT with a 1.5 second cast time? Well it lets you have another 0.5 seconds of non-DoT casting. So instead of losing 1.5 out of every 15 seconds you lose 1 out of every 15 seconds.
That's like a 3.7% DPS boost. From +50% haste. Which when we're talking about direct damage nukes would give a 50% DPS boost. Conclusion: Haste doesn't help DoTs.
What about Mind Blast and SW:D? The same thing applies to them as applies to DoTs because they both have cooldowns (though as the cooldowns are lower it applies a little less). But again, Haste gives little return to our 2 "big" nukes.
What about our new AoE spell, Mind Sear? Nope. Haste has *zero* effect on Mind Sear. Mind Sear is hardcoded to 1 second ticks, and as we're channeling it it's not like the lowered global cooldown helps either like it does with DoTs.
Mind Flay is our only spell that sees proper returns from Spell Haste.
Want to know what's funny though? Despite the poor returns from Spell Haste we get, haste rating is still in TBC, as good as +dmg (at raid level gear) because we scale so poorly with +dmg.
(continued...)
[ Post edited by Belo ]
Belo
