I don't remember Shadow Priests being this weak

I have no clue what I’m doing wrong. My apparitions just stand next to me and never hit anything. The other day I watched one walk away in the complete opposite direction of the fight up over the ramp, sometimes they just stand next to me. If I run, they run but they never hit a boss.

I have 31+% haste yet it doesn’t seem to have an effect on my throughput and my dps at ilevel 370 is lower than most classes who are still in the 360s.

I’m pushing intel and haste. There’s so much crit on all of the Priest gear that it’s a challenge to get any helpful amount of Mastery. I’m not having fun with it.

I’m looking at WoWTBC and they are telling Shadow Priests to reforge everything to Spirit, and my assumption is because Shadow goes oom at the top of pretty much every fight if they don’t take professional dance lessons first. But I can’t imagine spirit would give me anything than lots of hit and faster mana regen when I’m not in combat. I go to Wowhead to see what they suggest and they have it as we all know it, Intel/SP - Haste & Mastery

I don’t remember Shadow Priest being this weak or mana challenged in original Cata. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, I dunno. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.

editing in, this is not my Shadow Priest. I probably should have posted on that one but I’m unsure if it would matter because Warcraft Logs snap shotted me in my PVP gear for some reason. I probably forgot to switch out on our last raid. The toon in question is Annabotix. There should be some logs up later tonight.

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Are you hit capped? 17% spell hit. The reason WoWTBC might be reforging to spirit is because the gear shown there is low on hit/spirit. So the reforges go into hitting the spell cap. If you aren’t spell hit capped, your dps will be inconsistent because you’re running into resists and misses. As for the apparitions, not sure. Pathing can be weird sometimes

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Close enough. I’m at 16.91%. Haste is 31.17%. SP is 7542 which may be low in order to get hit capped.

Are you using addon to do your reforges?

It might be able to get you much closer to 17% since it is basically forced to go to at least 17%

It will even take your spirit into account since you also get hit from spirit.

I use reforge lite.

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I tried Pawn but it didn’t seem to be accurate. Will try reforge lite.

Try Reforge Lite.

Once you install the addon, when you interact with the reforge npc, it will open up the addon for you.

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Ok. I don’t think that’s wildly too low to have a large enough impact. I’d have to leave it to people that play spriests then. Just chiming in with a general question that would have explained a lot without going into much detail about rotations, etc.

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Another good tool I like to use is WoWSims. If you google for “spriest sim cata”, you’ll find it near the top. You have to input your gear manually, so takes a bit more time than an addon. But it comes with a “Suggest Reforges” button that will do the work. After you run a sim, you can also look at the spells cast in order, damage breakdown, etc, but admittedly it can be a bit intimidating to read through. I’ve often found that it can find ways to reforge I never thought of to exactly hit 17% too. It’s pretty neat

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I love wowsims, also something else I use after I do my reforges.

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The wowsims reforge tool was built using reforgelite as a reference at the very least. Either option should give very similar results.

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Just looking at some of your logs from the last tier and the raid from your last lockout:

Your DOT uptime is pretty low, with the pandemic mechanic now in the game you should be upwards of 95% uptime on all 3 DOTs and it looks like you let them fall a lot.

You’re opener is also… not great. It should look something like this:
Precast mind spike → shadowfiend → SWP → mind flay → mind flay (now you have an orb hopefully) → mind blast → vamp touch → DP → wings

Right now you’re not stacking all of your modifiers on your first set of dots, you use wings before you apply VT/DP and lose 10% damage on both those spells, you press mind spike 2 much and you dont use fiend early. All those things add up.

Shadow is a spec that requires ramp, you’re effectively making your ramp take an extra 15-20 sec by pressing a ton of these things out of order and you gimp your first set of trinket procs, too. Apparitions do like 3-4% of your damage, so dont worry if they bug out right now.

You should see a significant improvement if you change these things

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Actually you’re right. It was a late patch boost and I wasn’t using any dot timers. I added one after raid last night and can see how I’ve been gimping myself.

My opener is fine, no? 3 spikes > MB > SWP> Flay to Archangel >MB > VT/DP. I’ve been holding fiend for my alchemy haste and hero. I have indeed been holding VT and DP for wings because I feel they are wasted casts, it’s just more mana usage to refresh them 2 seconds later. I think you hit it right on with my dots falling off though.

As for my apparitions, they aren’t hitting. They usually either don’t spawn at all and when they do, they just stand next to me. I doubt Blizz will fix them.

One thing I also noticed last night is I’m pushing too much haste at the cost of intel. Moving my stats around along with the addition of a dot timer does make a difference.

Thank you

Edit - I looked at reforge lite and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Sims is much better.

Main reason I like reforge lite, if I want only 2,000 haste on a certain spec, I can manually set reforge lite to the “at least” setting and it will get as close to it as possible.

If I’m just playing an alt, I’ll pick one of the presets it has for the spec I want to play, hit calculate, click show then hit reforge. It reforges all my gear for me.

That is very wrong. Join the classic priest discord. They have the guides you need.

Its 1 spike into SW:P into flay until orb, MB with orb, then VT & DP, then archangel and fit in 3x MB while its up. This is the short version, theres some changes if you get bad shadow orb rng.

Sounds like you are ignoring shadow orbs entirely so thats huge. You need to maximize dot uptime with empowered shadows buff, and our dots snapshot, so you have to cast vt & Dp with that buff up already.

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PvP perspective on shadow here

Our damage profile is so different than any other time period.

In pvp dots do next to no damage, even empowered, compared to spike + mind blast spam

Like a 3 orb mind blast with archangel crits 75k…or… i can tickle them with dots that do less than recuperate heals a rogue for

In pvp it FEELS like dots are only good for swp procing shadow orbs or for dispel protection with VT. Thats about it. Our dots dont create pressure like afflic lock or even halfway that much. In pvp the only time a spriest is scary is spamming spike + blast with wings up

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You’re missing 10% dot damage from the 5 stacks of evangelism if you use archangel before you apply VT/DP. Thats a big dps loss on your first set of dots that will probably have trinket procs increasing their damage as well.

You only mind spike once in the opener and dont mind blast until you get your first orb.

There’s no reason to save shadowfiend, even less of a reason with the new 2 set. If your group isnt lusting on pull, you’ll have it up again before you use lust.

The opener you’ve been doing is wrong and is a major reason why you’re doing less dps than you could be.

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In pvp, you cant reach the haste breakpoints that really start to make DOTs dangerous (around 30%). Same with mind flay.

The spread pressure can be good in some situations, but you need an orb up and 5 stacks of evangelism for it to do anything.

It’s good to spam VT so you can eat kicks, too. Then you’re free to spike.

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Reforge Lite also has support to do an import from the JSON you can export from WoWSims.

Addons you’ll need:

  • Reforge Lite
  • WoWSims Exporter

Basic flow is:

  • Get your in-game character export data for WoWSims
  • In-game: /wse
  • Copy that information to clipboard
  • On the WoWSims site, go to Import->Addon & paste the info
  • Select “Suggest Reforges”
  • Tweak whatever WoWSims stuff you want to do for max output
  • Go to Export->JSON & Copy the data to clipboard
  • In-game, go to the Reforger – it will auto-open Reforge Lite when you interact
  • Scroll down a smidge on the right-panel and select the option to import from WoWSims
  • Paste in the JSON data from WoWSims and click the ACCEPT (not close) button
  • The above step auto-closes that subsection
  • Click on the “Show” button
  • Then complete the reforging by clicking the button (forget name off-hand, not at gaming PC)

In general Reforge Lite is pretty good using its built-in information but I find WoWSims to be more correct with all the little nuances… also really easy to get that information applied to your in-game gear.

FWIW I mained a Shadow Priest back in original Cataclysm and, while they weren’t the top DPS in Firelands back then (or now), they should be settled somewhere in the middle-of-the-pack. The most fun fight, by far, in Firelands as a Shadow Priest will definitely be flying on Alysrazor – once more comfortable with it and ensuring flight buff doesn’t fade, swooping down to dot up all the enemies on the ground is where you really shine.

Probably just not your class… You need to look up some better rotations or your not snapshotting your spells…

Also spriest aren’t the top DPS class so at the point it’s kinda like why does it even matter…
But I will say wowhead is a bad place for reliable information such as bid lists and stats

Has it changed? I thought 3 spikes procs orb for MB?

@fearsnakes, are you using wowtbc?