Alright so I’ll preface by saying I’m not in great gear but I just didn’t expect to be this bad. My dps is usually lower than the tank. I’m making sure to put on Vampiric Touch on everything to help the mana users in the party. I follow the rotation I read on Icyveins and wowhead. I do mind blast whenever possible and it does quite a bit of damage but it has a long cooldown. Does it get better when I get geared? I feel pretty useless.
I know shadow priests are more for support but…I thought I’d do a little more dps than this.
Also, is there an addon that will show me how much mana I’m giving people? I can see how much HP Vampiric Embrace is giving but not the mana. Maybe that at least will make me feel less useless lol.
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wont get better till wrath truthfully
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Do you have logs to look over?
Learning how to play the spec better and getting the appropriate gear will go a long way to improve your damage. The Shadow Priest in our raid does very well. You won’t do as much as the highest DPS specs, but you will still be able to compete.
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Until wrath yes it’ll be mediocre.
It looks like you’re still leveling though and dungeons aren’t really a good indication because most things die too fast for your dots to do much. They’re significantly better in raids, though you’re still not going to be competing with the hunters or the locks
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I think you need to be a bit more selective on the targets you place this on because you need to prioritize the damage to yield the best mana in return. Also, the way it is currently scaled is for later phases. The gear isn’t optimal to make the mana returns very noticeable at the moment.
Your player shows up as level 62. Im not sure if that’s a delay or what level you currently are. In dungeons try to only keep it on one mob and maximize shadow damage on that specific mob when you have it up for 15 seconds. Dont place it on every mob. Dot everything, then focus on one mob.
Spriest gear gets a bit stuck around the phases and does not improve much. Your character will sort of feel like hunters in vanilla with t2 being bis until the later phases. We are very gear dependent but you also much be efficient with your mana in order to provide mana in return to your group.
Hope this helps!
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In dungeons, DoTs don’t have enough time to tick and thus your damage per cast time drops off severely compared to raids. Not going to lie, though, shadow priest personal DPS is dead last among all DPS but raid contribution to DPS can be among the highest in the game.
Oh, I didn’t know about logs, tbh. Gonna google it.
If the tank is doing more than you on trash its not the end of the world Most of the time dots and trash wont last long enough for you to get effects from them. This goes double for normal. In heroics it depends more on the make up of the group.
On bosses on the other hand you should be able to out dps the thank easily.
Detials has Mana restored information but its not a metric to hang your hat on.
Warcraft logs TBC, not sure if anyone in your run logged the data, if they did we can see where it’s possible to improve.
Logs can be misleading tho, so take top parses with a grain of salt because often their values look higher because it’s damage done under ideal conditions while using burst cooldowns in tandem with class stacking top specs making some things possible that aren’t possible outside of those very specific conditions.
I’ll make an example that’s easy to understand for anyone reading. The higher the overall DPS average in group the better a rogue will parse even though rogue is not considered top Tier we can be; because as the overall DPS Climbs the greater the % of the fight is done under our offensive DPS Coooldown states of Adrenaline Rush and Blade Flurry. Another way to look at it is rogues parse high on short fights but decent on long ones.
Also fights that are done in a less than ideal way due to odd group comp can have great impact on your output; this does not make you a bad player, just illuminates how misleading DPS meters and logs can be.
Improving your skills is job 1, but equal to that is team work and having fun. Those things should be considered above all other things. If you guys are cleaning content don’t let your DPS values get you down, just focus on improving where you can.
Warcraft logs (TBC) can be a useful tool because it shows you what a player did, what buffs tbey have, consumables used, when things were used, duration on those buffs, when spells are cast, even shows you location on players and movements, interrupts, kinda everything.
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Meh.
My dps has been lower than the HEALERS for 16 years and look where it’s gotten me.
cries
But, seriously, you’re doing all the right things. Watch some videos, read some guides, practice, keep leveling. You’ll get better, the important thing is to keep having fun.
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Sounds like you are fundamentally doing something incorrect while playing the priest.
If you log your run and take it to the priest classic discord they will be able to help you fix your issues.
Even if you gear isn’t the best (assuming you aren’t playing in questing gear and greens) you should be able to beat the majority of tanks on raid encounters unless you’re playing with a 75%+ parsing tank focusing on DPS.
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I leveled as shadow and yeah in dungeons my dots didn’t tick long enough to do much damage.
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Check out the YouTuber Meta Goblin, he’s a shadow priest and literally just put up a guide for pre-raid bis, and bis gear. Compare your gear to his and see what’s up.
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Thank you everyone for your feedback! I tried to respond yesterday but I kept getting an error that said [object Obect] (?)
Anyways, I will watch the videos suggested and join the priest discord and take logs on my next run. You’ve all been very helpful.
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I second this notion as there are raid nights that I am top healer according to logs and raid nights I am not. And neither of it matters since we are clearing what we are able to clear.
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The problem with retail wow is blizzard is trying to make every class useful and able to do good dps which totally break the purpose of each class. I feel a priest shouldn’t be doing good dps since priest is known to be healing and dps is secondary so being subpar in dps is normal.
Putting VT on everything is a mistake, following rotations on guides is a mistake, use consumables. Generally using VT on a pac that is going to die in under 30 seconds is a waste of cast time.
Long story short unless your rotation is “shadowbolt” then you need to use what spells make sense in the scenario,
Cleave pull; shadow - word pain every target and mindflay priority target. Explenation; you wan’t to minimize your downtime / time you have to drink.
Aoe pull; focus on keeping shadow - word pain up on targets greater than 50% health. if they have less than 50% you probably won’t get the full effect and makes it a waste of mana, mindblast and shadow-word death to snag killing blows for spirit tap.
Single target; Use rank 1 shadow word pain to stack shadow-weaving then max rank devouring plague with inner focus and max rank shadow word pain. Next think about how long you expect the fight to go. If it is a long fight 5+ minutes don’t use mindblast and just mindflay and keep up your dots. If the fight is short then mindblast on CD.
Lastly download details and actually look at your damage breakdowns after bosses and dungeons and trash pacs, this will inform you largely what is and isn’t working. We’ve had spriests maintain 700 dps which is pretty good, they just can’t do it for 5 minutes straight.
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Yea this is bad
Spriest will do middle of the pack dps which is substantially higher than the tank
What does your gear look like, are you doing the proper rotation etc