a Darkened Soul

• Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.
• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, and Vampiric Touch to benefit from haste. Both the period length and the duration of these spells will be reduced by haste. In addition, the mana cost has been reduced from 32% to 13% of base mana.
• Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain- The periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell restore 1% of your base mana. (Old – Your haste now reduces the time between the periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell. PTR Only change)
• Glyph of Shadow: While in Shadowform, this glyph causes non-periodic spell critical strikes to increase spell power by 30%, up from 10%, of the priest’s total spirit for 10 seconds.
• Glyph of Mind Flay: This glyph now increases the damage done by Mind Flay by 10% when the target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.

As you can see the changes being made to Shadow are substantial to say the least. Some estimates are saying that there is no way that this many buffs will make it to live servers. However, from resources including several very good players and several posting on Shadowpriest.com its looking like this will put shadow priests right on par with some of the best dps classes in the game without necessarily being to OP.

One of the biggest arguments in the Shadow Priest community right now is whether or not it will even be a good idea to cast Mind Blast in our regular rotation. Here is a great thread on Shadowpriest.com discussing the math of casting Mind Blast in 3.3. In case the math is too much for you here is a quick breakdown of how things look.

The magic number for spell power seems to be 5162. Meaning once you reach this much spell power through whatever means(buffs, trinkets, bonuses) you can at that point leave MB out of your rotation because dotting and MF will be higher dps. However, since the average player will need advanced 3.3 gear, a tier 10 4pc bonus, and full 25 man raid buff to even have the possibility of coming close to that magic number, it seems that at this time it is best to leave MB in our rotation. But the debate rages on as we get more and more data from the number crunchers. Keep an eye on this thread for more details.

Now as for the changes themselves I think they are pretty self explanatory but here are some specifics that have been worked out.

-As with spell power dots will be adjusted by the haste that you have when the cast goes off. So if you pop trinkets, use, pots, or get a proc and then cast SWP then that amount of haste will apply to it until the dot wears off or is removed. The refresh of SWP by MF does not reset the haste amount, it retains the amount from the original cast.

-Glyph of Mind Flay is now what Glyph of Shadow Word Pain used to be so that Glyph of SWP can give us the mana  regen necessary to constantly renew the DoTs that are now going to be effected by haste. The old effect of Glyph of Mind Flay is now a part of the actual spell without any penalty. The new permanent range of Mind Flay is 30 yards.

-Vampiric Embrace is now a 30 minute buff instead of a target debuff. While this buff is up any enemy that is damaged with your shadow spells (except for Mind Sear) will give health to the player and his/her party.

For those of you that are into the the nitty gritty details of things, here is a great quote from Griemak ( a regular contributor on Shadowpriest.com) on the effects of haste on shadow spells.

Griemak says:

New Casting Time = (Base Casting Time)/(1 + (% Spell Haste / 100))

% Spell Haste = (haste rating / 32.79) + (major-buff * minor-buff * lust-ism)

1.5 GCD becomes capped at 1.0 seconds with 50% haste

25% haste on gear is 820 haste, perhaps at the end of 3.3, but not at the beginning without raping crit rating. 650 is more appropriate…

650 / 32.79 = 19.82% haste

Potion of speed is added to this as it increases haste rating.

Minor-Raid buff is 3%
Major-Raid buff is 5%
Bloodlust/Heroism is 30%

w/o potion or lust-ism
(650 / 32.79) + (1.05 * 1.03) = 27.97%

w/ lust-sim
(650 / 32.79) + (1.05 * 1.03 * 1.3) = 60.415% 

w/ potion + lust-ism
((650+500) / 32.79) + (1.05 * 1.03 * 1.3) = 75.665%

MB and VT cast time
27.97% = 1.17
60.415% = .935
75.665% = .8538 

New time between DoT ticks and Non 4piece Tier 10 MF cast time
27.97% = 2.34
60.415% = 1.87
75.665% = 1.62 

MF 4p T10 cast
27.97% = 1.95
60.415% = 1.56
75.665% = 1.42 

Troll berserking is 20%, under lust-ism and potion of speed it would result in 103% haste.

MB and VT: .74
DoT and 3.0MF: 1.48
2.5MF: 1.23

To some people that won’t make a lot of sense but its basically a break down of different Haste buffs, procs, and pots and how much they effect different spells. Since our biggest buff in this patch will be that our DoTs finally scale with haste you will be seeing a lot of these set ups in the near future so don’t get overwhelmed. Pretty soon I will be putting together some chats that show easily readable haste buffs and how to use them effectively in your rotation.

Speaking of rotations there are going to need to be some slight adjustments to our regular rotation to account for these new changes in 3.3. Our starting rotation for fights that do not require a run in will most likely be

VT, DP, MB, MF then SWP when the 5 stacks of shadow weaving are up.

After that then you go to a priority list that looks like this

DP>VT>MB>MF

For fights that require a run in different methods can be used but mostly likely the best setup will be

SWP, DP, SWD, VT, MB, SWP

I would also like to point out that according to the numbers given in the Mind Blast Math post, casting SWD right after MB is a dps increase until you get tier 10 gear.

Even thought these are the currently confirmed best rotations at this time we are still in the PTR phase of 3.3 and like all of these facts these numbers could change at any time.

I hope to get into even more detail on some of these items very soon in specific posts so stay tuned.

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