Hey all,
I was thinking about leveling my shadow priest and as I look at the talent trees, it looks you can spec into an MS-centric build, or MF build. My question is, depending on how you build, can you drop one filler from the rotation completely, or do you still use both, regardless of talent selection?
If you take mind melt without MFI or screams of the void, you never press mind flay. This isn’t a real build, youll always end up using either mind spike procs or MFI casts depending on your talent combo alongside the othe filler.
So using the Yogg build on wowhead as an example, you’d basically only use MF after proccing MFI with DP, correct? With MS procs taking priority?
Correct. Mind spike would be your casted filler spell when you have nothing better to do.
Cool, thank you. The number of spells/rotation spriest has is intimidating at first glance. I still wish we could build into one filler and completely drop the other, but this isn’t as bad as I thought.
Something to keep in mind if you are newish to spriest in DF is that you dont cast your fillers nearly as much as other specs cast theirs. I will go long periods of time not hitting either filler button. Don’t be afraid to cancel mind flay early. I can’t remember the last time I full casted a non insanity mind flay. Which filler you want to prefer I think depends on your talent choices. There are better minds than me you should probably look up to know for sure but for just starting out its not a big deal. One thing to keep in mind though is if you went dark evangelism you might cast mind flay / void torrent early to get your stacks or cast mind flay for one tick to maintain them.
This is very true, if you;re playing the standard yogg saron + ysharrj build for single target you can go a full minute without ever having to resort to a hard cast mind spike. There’s so much other stuff to be doing.
I’m kind of surprised that the cast speed decrease + crit increase from Mind Melt is not worth stacking before casting MB. It doesn’t seem like you play around it at all–it’s just more of a passive bonus from MS procs.
I thought it was always a DPS loss to cast Mind Spike without a Surge of Darkness proc over Mind Flay. Is that outdated theory, or is that only true if you’re running C’thun?
Only true with cthun
hate to tell this OP but its not Mind Flay vs. Mind Spike but almost all(if not all) builds have you taking Mind Spike unfortunately.
you can make a build that doesn’t use one or the other, not sure how much it hurts your damage
At this point like 7-8% to not run spike, at least. You also lose void torrent which is huge in all content.
Is this true? I thought you wanted to cast an instant MS before mind blast.
There’s no specific reason to have 2 stacks of mind melt before casting mind blast.
I don’t read guides or run sims, but my flowchart is:
mind flay insanity
devouring plague
void torrent
instant cast mind blast if you have 2 mind melt stacks (from casting 2 mind spikes)
instant cast mind blast if you have shadowy insight proc and 0 mind melt stacks
mind spike
I never cast non-instant mind blast is because it’s basically always on cooldown; better to buff its crit chance via mind melt or else you could end up casting extra mind spikes that you don’t get mind melt value out of.
If you have shadowy insight proc and 2 mind melt stacks, it only eats the mind melt stacks when you cast mind blast, so you can do 2 instant cast mind blasts back to back if both charges of mind blast are up.
If you have shadowy insight proc and 1 mind melt stack, it eats both when you cast mind blast; I don’t do this because you get no value from the cast speed reduction of the stack of mind melt (I assume you get the crit chance though). There is a slight temptation to use the proc right away (otherwise it’s mind spike → mind blast → mind blast before the proc is used), but in my last dungeon run I had 0 shadowy insight reprocs.
I don’t rush to spend surge of darkness procs (instant cast triple damage mind spike) because they stack to 3. Maybe you could prioritize it higher if you’re at 3 stacks to reduce the chance a reproc gets wasted, but I don’t watch the stacks. My last dungeon run I had 74 procs 25 reprocs so the chances any were wasted is pretty small.
You CAN lose shadowy insight, surge of darkness, or mind melt just due to the short duration, primarily from mind devourer procs (20% chance for mind blast to give free devouring plague or mind sear). You get one of these procs at the same time you have enough insanity for mind flay insanity, and suddenly you spend several seconds doing devouring plague → mind flay insanity → devouring plague → mind flay insanity. Losing shadowy insight isn’t that big a deal because the proc still gave you a charge of mind blast. Surge of Darkness should probably be used before it expires because it’s a decent piece of damage. Mind Melt should probably be used if 2 stacks, losing 1 stack isn’t so bad.
I don’t know if it’s optimal, but there is reasoning in my above post
Thank you for this reply. Hopefully I can somewhat master what is the current chaos that is the shadow priest rotation.
And it shows man. Theres a lot suboptimal choices and decissions made with your “rotation”. It is completely fine to try your way and play what you like and how you like it. But imho its a litttle bit iffy to come and preach it to others and new players that have little to no knowledge of the class, teaching them bad habbits and wrong rotations knowing that youre propably wrong isnt realy all that nice, again imho. 
OP wasn’t really specific what level of content he intends to do. If you’re just farting around like me, go with an MF build + C’thun, because spawning tentacles out of the ground just never gets old. And it feels like you hit the lotto when you get 4+ of them up at once and go all “RAWR, I AM THE HOUR OF TWILIGHT”
