a Darkened Soul

I am not saying that this is a disaster because Shadow is still getting about a 15% damage increase in 3.3 but it still stings.

Quote from Blizzard staff Priest
Shadow Word: Pain and Haste in Patch 3.3
We removed Shadow Word: Pain from scaling with haste because we thought Shadow dps was too high with all 3 dots hasted.

There is a bug where you can get big SW:P dots and then keep them rolling at that magnitude forever since the spell gets constantly refreshed. It’s a nasty bug to fix. However, that isn’t why we removed SW:P from Shadowform.

It’s important for classes to want the stats that appear on their gear, but it’s not a goal that everyone requires all stats in the same 1:1 ratio. It’s a bit unfortunate in the best-in-slot-or-nothing mindset of some of our players that the second and third best stats sometimes get labeled as junk even if they still boost dps beyond a non-trivial degree.

Our stance on simulations remains that they can be good tools when used correctly. We will continue to not pay a lot of attention to posts that simply say “Sims say our dps is too low. Please buff.” You can’t just accept a simulation’s estimate of your dps as what you’ll actually see on an encounter. Sim output is fundamentally not empirical data — it is a model; an attempt to imitate what will really happen. Simulations can be really useful for predicting say an optimal talent or gear configuration for your character. Players have learned a lot of things about class mechanics from the better sims out there. “True dps” is not one of them.

This is a very frustrating issue for me for two reasons. One is that Blizzard got us hyped up about Shadow changes with the headline “SWP Scales with Haste!” Now we have all sorts of sides but the main course is no longer on the menu.

The second reason I am pretty pissed is that this blue post is a weak answer for why SWP haste scaling is being dropped completely. It seems that there have to be a dozen work arounds so that players can’t stack buffs causing unfair dps . If not give us a good reason why you can’t change it. I can’t stand this run around crap about gear and players only going for the “Best in Slot”, of course we are all going for best in slot. Thats the point of PVE isn’t it. If they didn’t want us to all go after the same stats then why is Blizzard making such a push to consolidate stats. This seems like either an excuse or a step backwards from Blizzards announcement about the direction they want to go with stats in Cataclysm.

In case you don’t understand what the consequences of this change are. Shadow Priests have had a long term problem since Vanilla WoW with scaling. At the beginning of each expansion we do extremely well in early raiding because of our Spellpower coefficients. As gear gets better other classes start catching and then surpassing us. There have been several reasons for this in the past but most recently is our inability to make efficient use of Haste. At a certain point we reach a soft Haste cap and the stat, while abundant on high iLevel gear, becomes much less valuable then it once was. Adding Haste scaling into Shadowform was an excellent solution because it didn’t put a temporary fix to our situation. It allowed us to scale like other classes as the gear iLevels increases.

Its important to note that both Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch are still going to be effected by Haste, only SWP has been removed. The real reason SWP has been removed from the Shadowform buff is because players found out that stacking pots, flasks, temporary buffs, trinkets, and racials could allow SWP to reach ludicrously fast speeds. That in itself wasn’t the problem though. The problem was that after SWP had benefited from the Haste buffs a player could keep those buffs going forever with Mind Flays ability to refresh SWP. The Haste buffs will last until SWP runs out or is removed from the target. This, I will admit caused an unreasonable increase in damage that Blizzard could not allow to happen. However, instead of a fix to the problem our SWP buff gets the axe. I hope the Devs take a look at this and see if there is anything they can do because it seems to me that they are not only nerfing our damage with this change but they are also nerfing our scaling.

Hopefully this is not the final word before 3.3 is released and we see so sort of buff to make up for this loss or at least another excuse as to why we aren’t getting one.

On a side note, Shadowpriest.com has some posts up stating that the bugs with Shadowcrawl and the ability to Focus cast Mind Flay. Which are both nice fixes that we have been needing.

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