Yes, that data exists. On the upper limit, you can expect a 10% DPS increase from PI.
The question is, why would you balance a spec around doing ~10% less DPS than it currently is if PI’ing that spec is the default strategy?
Ah yes, “Blizzard factors in externals when balancing”. Truly the “9/11 was an inside job” of WoW.
Even without PI, Holy Priests would be the best healer in the game. Now granted that Holy being good is the exception rather than the norm. But the idea that Priests would be bad without PI is silly, especially in a raid environment.
Man, I don’t even care about parsing, but externals have gotten silly. There is an Anduin parse with SIXTY FIVE externals being given out.
That’s not what I said and you know it. What I said is that you’re trying to establish PI as the cause of class nerfs rather than a correlating factor. Obviously Blizzard considers PI when making balance decisions. But they’re not stupid enough to keep nerfing good PI targets without thinking that maybe they should take a look at the common denominator.
In order to determine if PI is balanced or not you need to look at how much impact it has on the group’s DPS, not an individual’s DPS.
We’re going in circles at this point and there aren’t any stakes in this discussion. Feel free to believe what you want, PI isn’t going anywhere.
My mistake then, I apologize. I think I confused you with someone else who was making that argument. These PI discussions tend to blend together after a while.
I think that’s also not quite the case though, as even if you nerf PI then Heroism becomes a problem. Not every class scales equally well with Heroism and that’s a big component of a raid’s damage. I’m not convinced that Blizzard balances classes around how much they benefit with Hero either.
With that in mind, I think my preferred solution wouldn’t be to nerf PI, but rather to introduce more external cooldowns that aren’t haste-based in order to broaden the specs that benefit from external cooldowns. If every spec is balanced with the idea in mind that they could potentially get an extremely beneficial power boost from their friends then balance becomes a lot easier. And I personally like the idea of externals being more varied than straight damage boosts.
I think the current PI should change, become a buff for the whole group.
for example, having the PI give 10% haste to all party members for 20s.
the Sun Twin Priestess feat causes the PI to grant the Priest 5%/10% increased haste. getting 20% for the priest and 10% for all party members
would still be a good cooldown for shadow priests, and would still help all party members without becoming toxic in raids
Priest was my main for many years but you are better off switching mains like I did.
They are at a true low. Hunter is so much more fun.
I was so tired of standing around in a purple fart haze covering my transmogs anyway.
Tuning a spec around PI means that if it scales too well with PI, it’s gunna get hit with the nerfhammer. But that doesn’t mean every spec that scales well with PI gets nerfed, because a lot of them (UH DK as an example) don’t get nearly out of hand as stuff like Venthyr Boomkin or Demo Warlock did.
I think Blizzard absolutely balances specs around how well they scale off of Heroism. It’s incredibly prevalent to the point where having a Heroism is considered the first step in group building.
But Heroism is balanced by the fact that it doesn’t stack and is raid-wide. There is no value in stacking Heroism classes and it causes very little interpersonal drama since everyone is getting Heroism and they (usually) know when they’re getting Heroism so they can plan ahead for it in regards to their own cooldowns.
I don’t mind externals, but I think they need to be better designed than PI is.
PI is basically the posterchild of how to design bad utility since it has such a huge variance in power based on who it’s used on, when, and of course the whole interpersonal drama.
My bandaid fix would be to make PI just give flat damage and attribute that damage to the Priest. Boring? Sure, but it solves basically every problem PI currently has. If you wanna spice it up, I guess you could make it duplicate the damage like how Dragonwrath worked.
I see. So the issue isn’t PI in concept but rather PI in execution. I don’t really have too much to add to that conversation since I mostly just want to protect the spirit of PI. If PI individually needs to be adjusted then I’m fine with that. But I’ll leave that up to people who know haste scaling math better than I do.