#0 - July 24, 2010, 5:34 p.m.
Many will say that Mind Flay is the signature Shadow ability, and they're right. It's a fun spell and sets us apart from other DPS classes, but it does have it's drawbacks. The primary one is channeled spells' interaction with latency, and therefor latency's impact on DPS. Latency is a factor in all server / client games, but other classes have a workaround for it in the spell queue.
Moonkins (for instance) across the spectrum of latencies can achieve very similar numbers because they can repeatedly hit Wrath or Starfire while casting their current spell without any penalty. The next spell will begin casting immediately after the completion of current one. This means whether you have 20ms or 200ms you're still going to be very close to Moonkins of a similar gear and skill level.
Shadow Priests are not in the same boat. Every cast of Mind Flay comes with the risk of loosing the final tick of damage or delaying the next cast which means loosing significant cumulative DPS time. On live servers the problem is exasperated by incredibly fast Mind Flay cast times, but the problem still exists when the cast is three seconds long.
There are certain ways to 'work around' this issue in both [nochanneling] macros and in using Cast Bar addons with latency overlay. Both of these again cause problems. [no channeling] macros, while preventing the loss of the final damage tick, cause even more delay at the end of every cast. Ultimately unless you're in a very low latency environment they will cause more DPS loss than not using them. As far as latency overlay on cast bar mods: they suffer from temporal inaccuracies. That is they are calculated based on the latency at the start of the cast and are not updated during the cast. This means that any fluctuations in latency will cause it to be inaccurate and promote either a loss in damage by clipping the last tick or by increasing the delay after the cast.
Is it fair that Shadow Priests have to use a spell that is so vulnerable to unstable latency while other classes have casted spells? We want skill to be the largest factor in our DPS, not lag.
At the announcement of Cataclysm in 2009 there was mention made of a cast time nuke for Shadow. We understand that part of that plan was rolled in with the Frost spell to create Mind Spike (which in it's current design) that is decidedly not a proper spammable nuke. Both in it's high mana and threat it's set up to be a PvP and niche spell.
What Shadow Priests need is a solution to this: we need a proper spammable nuke. Having Mind Blast (and even Shadow Word: Death) in our rotation is great, but in between there we need something that will allow our DPS to be based more on our gear selection and skill than it is on how good our connection is. Whether this comes in the form of a mechanic change to allow channeled spells to be spammed without loosing damage ticks (essentially allowing them to use the spell queue), a Medium or Prime glyph to convert Mind Flay into a Cast time spell, adding a new spell, or changing one in existence to suit that need.
Another thought would be to have a choice, a casted nuke, equal in terms of mana consumption, dps output and utility to Mind Flay, that would provide an extra option, but not replacing it in every situation.
If you have great internet connection or want to enjoy "the melting feeling", use Mind Flay.
If you have fluctuating ping (who doesn't) or lag spikes, casted nuke will provide the stability in DPS output.
Mind Blast is also considered a strong Shadow ability, but at the end of Wrath we're seeing many Shadow Priests at the T10 level leave it out of their rotation. This is something that needs to be rectified in Cata. Mind Blast has a cooldown and we spend valuable points in Shadow to reduce that: we expect big things from it.
Cool Downs:
Shadow Orbs in it's current form is not an 'on demand' DPS cool down, but rather RNG burst. Throughout the game there have periods in encounters where high burst damage is required to progress through it. Shadow Priests aren't allowed to participate in those heightened times of DPS frenzy, and we feel rightly left out. If that aspect of encounter design continues into Cataclysm; Shadow should be included in the ability to burst. In Live we only have access to Inner Focus and Shadowfiend as 'DPS' cooldowns, neither of which function very well in that manner.
