Saturday, May 22, 2010

Quasi Guest Post / Interview: How 2 Shadow Priest

I wanted to jump in on the whole Professor Beej GS hatetrain this week, and thought I had a Golden Ticket: Nyix, a Shadow Priest from my guild on Pro'gall Bro'gall Cho'gall. Nyix (while Shadow, and not stuck healing as Hloly), is basically still rocking Illustration of the Dragon Soul and Eye of the Brood Mother for two reasons:

1) Those trinkets aren't bad
2) Nyix is good

I seem to remember a while back in vent that he mentioned how woefully low his gearscore was as a result of making intelligent decisions on gear rather than just picking the higher GS item, but I apparently have ADD or something because now that I've called him on it, he's at about 5600 or so. That makes for an anti-climactic "LOL GS SUX" article to have him above 5500 at the end of the article, so I've turned this instead into a "How 2 Shadow Priest" instead. The fact remains that he still wears gear that does more than just inflates his GS, but my crowning final line (AND HIS GS IS ONLY 37 LOL NOOBS) will need to be preemptively retracted.

/sigh

Anyway, let's do this:

Ixo (via ingame lolmail): So I heard your gear is teh sucks, but you still blow up charts in ICC etc. What's the deal with that? I wanna interview you for my blog, hit me up etc etc. OMG these stupid little WoWmails are so lame, hit me back on gmail, I think i'm running out of roo

Nyix: I missed you when I got on earlier but I don't mind at all having a Q and A with you. So I logged out wearing my shadow gear in my most used shadow spec. All the logs are from when I had 251 Shadow tier 10.0. I got the upgrade I'm wearing right now after I stopped raiding. Also note that I am not hit capped because I switched my Ashen Verdict ring out for the healing one. I took a screenshot of my stats in my shadow gear attached to this file.

The screen shot shows my GS and everything (click to enlarge) but the breakdown is:

5654GS Right now 5617 As the World of Logs Stats represent.

3095 SP
972 or 30.52% Crit
803 or 24.49% Haste
Hit capped if I use the proper Ashen Verdict Ring.
247mp5 out
138 mp5 in

I use a Nightmare Tear because that piece is used in my holy set as well and is used to get the meta bonus for both my holy and shadow sets.

On shadow gear:
Priority
#1- Hit cap -Don't be a retard 290/11% and stop. More is a waste. (even if the GS is higher)
#2- Spell power
#3- Haste over crit.
#4- Crit
#5- Crit is not a junk stat. It is only mildly below Haste 1.23:1.13
#6- Be mindful of GS. Sometimes the older things are better.
#274550001 - GS(//_-)

MH/OH or Staves?
MH/OH with best in slots. In reality, you are like me using the shriveled heart because you rolled a 3 on Shadow Silk Spindle and that clearly wasn't enough for a win. Staves are solid and just as viable if not more because you don't have to fight 500 other people for 2 weapons; just 500 for 1. Stats are close. Dps difference between best in slots for 2h and mh/oh is under 150.

Keeping an eye on spirit and mana pool is pretty low on priority. Most of the end game gear has more than enough to keep you in the fight. As a shadow priest you should not run out of mana on a single target fight. Using shadowfiend and dispersion/clipped dispersion while moving should keep you right up there. I found with high amounts of haste you have to be more weary of how and when you use things or you may find yourself oom.

Gemming/enchanting
1 - SP gems
2 - Sp/haste gems
3 - SP/spirit only to get your meta bonus. And please put it in a blue socket to get the socket bonus. Don't be a retard
Enchant for SP

Consumables
If you don't do this already then start. 1-2 seconds before entering combat pop a potion of speed to get your opening out blazingly fast instead of potions of wild magic because you are wasting a lot of your pot time casting your initial rotation. If you aren't in combat when you pop it you will only have to wait 60 seconds to use a second pot instead of waiting until the next fight. During bloodlust you should be using potions of wild magic. The amount of lag in combination with gcds and depending on how bad your computer is means popping haste pots will cause a clusterfuck and you will not optimize dps.

Cycle
The most important, integral drill into your brain key to maximizing dps is timing. You are not a ret paladin. You are not an arcane mage. You don't sit there and press buttons when you feel like it. You watch your dots. You watch your mind blast. You watch your mind flay ticks. And sometimes most importantly, watch the screen *cough*tunnel vision*cough*.

Opening
Vamp touch. Mind blast. Mind flay 3ticks. Devouring Plague. THEN shadow word pain.

Why Vamp first and not mind blast? Because when you finally get to SWP. Your vamp touch has 1-2 seconds left and you have to re apply it. And then you get to mind blast as it comes up. Why all of this? You need to get 5 stacks of shadow weaving before you hit swp or you will have to recast swp when you get 5. Also. after 30 seconds or so I like to put a new swp just in case something went wrong. Because you are only human and may have clipped your mind flay.

Using trinkets to roll SWP with high crit or haste rates is stupid. I've run the tests so you don't have to. SWP IS NOT high enough dps to waste a trinket slot to give it a 60% crit chance. Don't bother arguing. Go look at my dps output on world of logs and see how low swp is on the list.

As far as the actual rotation goes. You just have to get into a rhythm. Clip mind flay. Not Dots. Wait until vamp touch is at 2 seconds to re apply if it is going to fall off by itself. If that and Dev plague are falling off at the same time you can adjust that time to 3-4 seconds before vamp is up to re apply both. Mind blast on cd after dots are up and if it happens to be mid cast of a mind flay; 2 ticks and clip. During movement it is a good idea to use shadow word death and Dev Plague for the instant damage (or dispersion/clipped dispersion if you need mana because thats is still kind of important)

Bloodlust!
If your group is going to lust at 30% try to have shadowfiend up for it. Because I am at the "just burn him quickly" point of raiding we blow it at the start just for the sake of speeding up our raid. This leaves your use open to whenever you feel like it. 80 and 30% are good times if you are going to use it more than once. Again. Use potions of wild magic during bloodlust for sexellent dps optimization. If you are a troll like me. Use berserking right after lust to continue the fun and not add to the chaos.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So, yeah...

Sadly, I can't end this post on the note I intended to, but I can say that throwing away perfectly good items just because some other one jacks your GS up by 13 points is retarded. Keep a set of spellpower gear on your rogue to wow the noobs at the mailbox, but when it comes time to shine, go with what you know, and get crackin'.

And PuG raiders (and raid leaders with ML), remember: MS > OS > GS

<3

7 comments:

Jan said...

Yeah, I'm really out of touch with the game when I have no idea what a good GearScore is, much less what GearScore is at all. :3

Anonymous said...

Let's talk Gear score. Trinkets at lvl 213/219 give heroic icc trinkets a run for their money. Illustration is 200sp. ALL THE TIME! Not every 2 minutes. Not wasting GCDS Not having to time out blocks of dps. Priceless. The fact of the matter is that SP is your most valued stat as a caster and Illustration just has more sp than the other trinkets out there. Eye of the broodmother is the same deal. Plus a nice little crit bonus.

Take the player not the GS.

Silkworm said...

L2Play is the name of the game.

I spent most of my time healing for the past 5 years. I'm pretty sure if I spent the same time as dps(and loot whoring ofc) I would still be a decent dps. Now I look at our raiders and a shadow overcomes me. Even with %15 buff in ICC, pure dps classes mages/locks/huntards suck big time. Some of them can't even pull a steady 7k 8k on basic combats like Lady. Where they just have to sit and dps.

This is what it comes down to in 25 man and Bliz is again downgrading the raids to 10 man. 10 man content will be harder and with exactly the same loot as 25 man. (Here is another one for you Ixo to write about 40>25>10 mans)Its much much easier to gather 10 very good players than gathering 25 very good players.

Seriously when someone new wants a a spot in raid, and when they can not even pull 6k,7k WITH the buff, I despair. 10 man has less room for error and needs exceptional players. Going down to 10 mans will leave those "casual millions" in Pugs forever like the Pug BG's which I started doing recently.

Sometimes you are lucky and you get pugged with 4-5 people from a PvP guild or at least an arena team and they pull the game away. Sometimes its just endless minutes of rape by the horde.

Anonymous said...

I had a fight with another rogue in an ICC-25 I ran the other day. Apparently, he wanted to upgrade his boots from decent ones for mutilate with haste and hit on them to horrible boots for his spec with armorpen on them. But wait, his gearscore did raise by about 50, though his DPS went down by twice that. Losing rolls to noobs is pretty frustrating. :(

By the way, Nyix is bad. :)

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