With Clarity of Power you basically had 2 ways to play it. People gave them the names “Dot Weaving” style and “CoP Light”. I will explain.
Firstly for what CoP is…
Clarity of Power: Your Mind Spike, Mind Sear, and Shadow Word : Death deal 40% additional damage to targets not affected by your Shadow Word : Pain or Vampiric Touch. Also reduces the cooldown on Mind Blast by 3 sec and makes it instant cast.
Secondly, the interaction between orbs and the talent “insanity”.
Insanity: Consuming Shadow Orbs transforms your Mind Flay into Insanity, and your Mind Sear into Searing Insanity, for 2 sec per Shadow Orb consumed. These spells deals 100% additional damage.
Lastly, when you use Mind Spike, it removes your dots from the target if you have any on it (that is important to know).
Note: Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death acted liked “Builders” in that they grant shadow orbs at base and both had a CD so you couldn’t spam them. Then you can take the talent “Auspicious Spirits” to get more Shadow Orbs from Shadow Word: Pain CRITICAL damage ticks. But that was a Max level talent that competes with CoP.
CoP used in “Dot Weaving” worked in the way that you start fights by casting Mind Blast and then fill in with Mind Spike until Mind Blast came off CD. You continue this until you reached 4 orbs. Then you apply your Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch followed by Mind Blast to get 5 orbs then you cast Devouring plague consuming 3 orbs and with the talent “Insanity” you cast mind flays until Mind Blast is off CD then cast that Mind Blast to get back to 3 orbs and followed up with another Devouring Plague and finish off with Mind Flays until MB is off cd again. At that point your dots will be dropping off target and you start building up again back to 4-5 orbs and repeat etc.
Things to note:
You are able to generate Shadow Orbs via Shadow Word: Death. But since you could only use this on targets at 20% health or lower, it was not part of the spec’s normal rotation and that once you get to the 20% range, then the rotation changes as you can double tap SW:D and using MB to get 3 orbs and begin to use Mind Flay Insanity a lot more often where it was almost worthless to recast your other dots because of the high up-time on Devouring Plague, Deaths, and Mind Flay Insanity.
- Its worth noting that even if your main target might not be at the 20% range, you can “snipe” low health targets with SW:D to quickly built up orbs to keep high DPS up time. This was VERY satisfying to pull off and as such, you were always on the lookout for low health targets to snipe orbs from as it felt good to do that instant ranged execute massive damage and gain orbs to dump into DP and MFI into your main target.
“CoP Light”
This involves taking the talent “From Darkness comes Light” over “Insanity”
From Darkness comes Light: Periodic damage from your Vampiric Touch has a 20% chance to cause your next Mind Spike to not consume your damage-over-time effects, become instant cast, cost no mana, and deal 50% additional damage. Limit 2 charges.
The way to play this is to start dotting up all your targets and usually by the time your first targets dots are falling off or you leave 1 target dotless, then you get procs from all your VT dots to start unloading massive + damage modifiers into 1 dotless target when you can go back to back from casting Mind Blasts into Mind Spikes into Devouring Plagues into Shadow Word: Deaths for massive burst damage windows. I used this a lot in 5 mans and PvP. Its weakness was single target only fights but in groups of targets it worked great.
I put several videos in a thread post that show off the various playstyles of both these specs. Link is below.