I’m a bit disappointed with Blizz regarding the revealed Spriest rune, Pain and Suffering, for a few reasons.
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It forces a talent choice that is not currently taken.
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It tries to save you a global when refreshing SWP (which has a whopping 24sec duration), but if requires you to spend that global casting a suboptimal filler, Mind Flay… which you have to spec for.
- Using my spriest (which is nearly full bis, no buffs, and 0 stacks of Shadow Vulnerability), Mind Spike hits for ~295 (197dps) and increases the damage of your next Mind Blast by 50% (due to it increasing Mind Blast’s crit chance to ~100%). Mind Flay on the other hand (without the Twisted Fate rune) ticks for 127dps (albeit you would have to either get 1 tick over 1.5sec or commit to 2sec to get the 127dps and delay your Mind Blast cast by 0.5sec to 6.5sec between casts each time).
- Even the Spriests who run Twisted Fate are not opting to take/cast Mind Flay given the buff to Mind Blast’s crit chance from Mind Spike.
- Upkeep of SWP is not an issue, especially in single target encounters given the 24sec duration, so I am not really sure what this rune is trying to solve for.
Using the 99th percentile Grubbis statistics from WCL (it’s a single target encounter and he doesn’t have a punitive armor value), Spriest is at the bottom and would require a whopping 53% dps increase to match the top spec. The specs performing near Spriest also have other specs with materially higher DPS and therefore their DPS is likely biased due to players opting to play the stronger specs for DPS. As gear improves, we get more talent points, and given the current proposed changes for P3, I’d expect this gap to only widen.
Alternatives
- We could add Shadowy Apparitions which would increase the damage from Mind Blast and Death casts without materially increasing their power in PvP given that the damage from the apparitions is delayed.
- If you want to push Mind Flay over Mind Spike, increase its damage and range and cause its damage to have a chance to reset the CD on Mind Blast.
- Twisted Fate itself could also be significantly buffed. With it, top parsing Spriest’s Mind Blasts crit for roughly 1.6k whereas incinerates from similarly parsing Warlocks HIT for 1.5k (and can be spammed… they crit for 3k given Ruin) and Chaos Bolts (which have a 12sec CD vs Mind Blast’s effective 6sec CD) crit for 4k. Keep in mind that without spamming Mind Spike, our Mind Blasts won’t be likely to crit.
- Add some ramping mechanic where SWP/Mind Flay damage increases the damage of your next Mind Blast by x%.
3 Likes
It could just be thrown in as a red herring.
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That’s exactly why it was. They are offering a buff-bot rune as an alternative.
However, it was recently mined that it’s being changed to work off mind blast rather than flay, so community input worked.
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At least it working off of Mind Blast isn’t a DPS loss; it allows for 1 more Mind Spike cast every 24 seconds which is incredibly marginal for a spec that is already materially underperforming on DPS.
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If you tab blast on multi-target fights it’ll actually end up quite handy (looking at Menagerie-esque situations).
But yes, agreed, this does almost nothing ST… except now there’s almost no reason to take imp: sw:p, which opens up some interesting talent choices 
I’m not sure the value of the 2 additional talent points for throughput since we already have shadow weaving, darkness, and improved mind blast. Also, for menagerie and multi target situations I think you are still much better off taking the AOE SWP rune because you wont get a lot of value from Homunculi, and tab targeting Mind Blast would be a DPS loss due to the Mind Spike debuff being a debuff (and not a buff on you) and the other targets likely not having the full 5 stacks of Shadow Vulnerability.
Yes, my sarcasm was the winky face. We can get 1 pt in imp range lmao.
You can take both, but fair point. Forgot about the mind spike debuff.
I’ll try it, see how it goes, but more than likely I’m going to be a CoS buff-bot 
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The rune is a joke… thanks for putting in the word. Not many people are posting about Priests. Just a bunch of Shaman QQ. Mind Flay definitely needs a buff regardless.
Yeah this rune at least seems kind of pointless, and I’m not sure why they created or showcased it tbh. Hopefully talking about it helps the discussion a little bit if anything. I get that Vamp Embrace is maybe a bit too strong in some situations and that you don’t want an spriest to be top DPS AND be able to provide that kind of raid healing, but I think that the DPS viability of Spriests is still something that folks want.
Just spitballing here but if Vamp Embrace is the reason why they are reluctant to increase Spriest’s DPS, then maybe they could add a rune or something that caused Vamp Embrace to act like Psychic Link as opposed to healing (with the damage from Psychic Link also being applied in a single target encounter).
make mind flay give mana to group like Seal of Martyrdom or have a chance to “proc” any active dots.
trying to give ideas w/o ability bloat
2 Likes
I think giving Mind Flay an ability to proc dots is kind of interesting. It’s a little weird though because Void Plague (our strongest DoT, if taken accounts for 15%-20% of our damage) is a chest rune along with Twisted Faith (increases Mind Flay and Mind Blast damage by 50%). So, depending on the proc chance, you’d be taking a weaker Mind Flay (i.e., running Void Plague > Twisted Faith) but then switching your filler from Mind Spike to Mind Flay. I don’t think taking Twisted Faith would be very good in that case given that you wont be filling with Mind Spike to further buff your Mind Blast and SWP is significantly weaker than Void Plague (for color, currently those taking Twisted Faith still do not cast Mind Flay despite the 50% damage buff - they take the rune for stacking the Mind Blast buffs).
I kind of do like the additional modifiers to damage outside of crit for Spriest though (having DoT ticks proc increases the overall spell power contribution you get from the cast), since crit chance is a very poor stat for the spec (no additional modifiers like Ruin/Hot Streak/Etc. and as a caster, crits only add 50% damage… also, currently, DoTs can’t crit and Mind Blast already has a 100% crit chance, so only a small portion of your overall damage would be affected by crit chance). The additional modifiers to damage make the spec scale better with spell power which gives you a stat to prioritize and helps you scale better with gear.
2 Likes
They need to delete this rune and move VP to helm, honestly. Would only make sense.
Also I’ve been asking for VT for two phases now.
yeah anything to make runes useful. happy for anyhting tbh. its my alt after all!
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Exactly! Ideally the runes are useful and show that Blizz put some knowledgeable thought into their design and implementation. And, tbh, I think they missed that mark here (along with probably some other runes).
I have been saying VE needs to be nerfed since P2 started. I literally outheal healers sometimes. That’s not okay. Until they address 30% permanent VE shadow will not be able to do good damage 
I’m not sure SoD dev team cares about this. Have you ever raided with a restokin?
going to a 20 man raid size is effectively a 50% nerf to VE. Even then, it’s only useful for unavoidable raid-wide damage.
I enjoy having a Shadow Priest in my group as a Lock. It lets me tap without guilt.
VE is insane for literally all damage. VE is even insane just for tank healing if needed. There is no damage profile that VE is not insanely broken for. It’s basically retail disc priest with 5 permanent atonements and the dps of a mediocre dps instead of high healer dps. It’s insanely strong and has needed to be nerfed since day 1 of phase 2 lol. Until they nerf VE they will not be letting shadow actually do good damage because of how out of control the healing from VE would get
If mass healing based off damage done was as insane as people seem to think it is, they wouldn’t have given mage a healing spec based entirely around it that’s over twice as powerful as anything a shadow priest can put out (With the added benefit of deciding which group receives the healing, and always having it heal the tank as well). The fact of the matter is, that raid healing isn’t nearly as important as dedicated tank heals, and having 1 less group to worry about in terms of raid healing takes a very minor amount of pressure off healers. The only time VE has ever been actually meaningful is on Loatheb in classic Naxx.