SW:P and haste in 3.3

#0 - Nov. 10, 2009, 3:57 a.m.

With the upcoming changes allowing shadow priests DOTs to scale with haste, haste has become an extremely attractive stat for shadow priests. This is not taking onto the account that when shadow word pain is refreshed by pain and suffering, spell power is re-calculated while haste is not. This means that during heroism/bloodlust, black magic proc ( a haste proc in the upcoming patch), a haste potion, and even the troll racial: beserking (but i will get to this later) a priest may re-apply SW:P which will continue to benefit from suprfluous amounts of haste for the rest of the fight in many cases.

(Is that really that substantial of a dps increse? perhaps not, and i will not pretend to knnow exactly how much it is.)

What i propose is for SW:P to re-calculate haste, crit chance, % damage modifiers (ie. shadow weaving) and other similar things.

The reason behind this change is mainy for convenience, no waiting for shadow weaving stacks, no re-applying SW:P , and no switching from a high-haste weapon to a different weapon after casting SW:P (honestly i dont think this is an issue, let alone a dps increse but i will include it regardless)

Is a quality of life change worth a slight nerf? perhaps not. however, shadow has received a lot of buffs in the upcoming patch, which in the simulatorss have shown that if those changed go live shadow could be above almost all pures. I personally don't have a problem with that considering how bad we have been in the past, what i don't want is for the changes to go live only to see Shadow priests nerfed.

Will this change bring shadow priests in line? perhaps not, but it is a change i would like to see.

on a side note, i will most likely race-change from NE to troll, 20% haste on SW:P for the whole fight is ridiculous, unless of course this change happens, which isnt likely

disclaimer: i could be wrong
Edit: wrong toon

Ghostcrawler

#209 - Nov. 15, 2009, 1:04 a.m.

We removed Shadow Word: Pain from scaling with haste because we thought Shadow dps was too high with all 3 dots hasted.

There is a bug where you can get big SW:P dots and then keep them rolling at that magnitude forever since the spell gets constantly refreshed. It's a nasty bug to fix. However, that isn't why we removed SW:P from Shadowform.

It's important for classes to want the stats that appear on their gear, but it's not a goal that everyone requires all stats in the same 1:1 ratio. It's a bit unfortunate in the best-in-slot-or-nothing mindset of some of our players that the second and third best stats sometimes get labeled as junk even if they still boost dps beyond a non-trivial degree.

Our stance on simulations remains that they can be good tools when used correctly. We will continue to not pay a lot of attention to posts that simply say "Sims say our dps is too low. Please buff." You can't just accept a simulation's estimate of your dps as what you'll actually see on an encounter. Sim output is fundamentally not empirical data -- it is a model; an attempt to imitate what will really happen. Simulations can be really useful for predicting say an optimal talent or gear configuration for your character. Players have learned a lot of things about class mechanics from the better sims out there. "True dps" is not one of them.