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Through all of the dev panels there was very little said about shadow priests, but we can come away with this. Shadow priest damage is too low on beta and they plan to raise it. Secondly, from the second class panel the devs are happy with dispersion and they expect 51 point talents to be situational. The latter statement is probably not what people want to hear, but it seems that we are stuck with dispersion in its current form.

I just recently put up 1985 DPS, 740,000 total damage and 3rd on our DPS charts in our most recent M'uru kill. During this encounter I tickled 2300 DPS at some points, and got a rush thinking this may be a place no priest has gone before, or at least very few. The fact that other DPS classes hit these numbers on a regular basis can bring a shadow priest down very quickly, but it is still a personal achievement of which I am very proud. Check out my article about the encounter.

Article: M'uru / Entropius 1985 DPS

While every spec of priest is getting a significant overhaul, it appears that shadow spec is being transitioned back into pure DPS instead of the highly penalized "hybrid."

Shadow

- Shadow Resilience re-designed. Now called Mind Melt - Increases the critical strike chance of your Mind Flay, Mind Sear and Mind Blast spells by 2/4%.
-Shadow Power: Now 20/40/60/80/100% critical strike damage bonus, also works with Mind Flay.
-Improved Shadowform - The chance to remove all movement impairing effects when you Fade is now restored.
-Psychic Horror - Redesigned. Now reduces all damage done by targets when Psychic Scream ends by 15/30%. Lasts 6 sec.
-Dispersion - 90% damage reduction is restored.
-Misery - Now has 5/10/15% bonus spell power to Mind Flay, Mind Sear and Mind Blast.

... Shadow - Obviously a single target sustained DPS, with Mind Sear now should be one of the strongest AOE classes.

... Oh, forgot Misery. It has 5/10/15% bonus spell power to Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear.

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Since utility is being spread around to most classes the idea of pure and hybrid DPS is grayer than ever before. Vampiric Touch is no longer dependent on our DPS, so people can close the book on that debate. The wild card here is Vampiric Embrace which has largely been ignored by blue posters. With DPS scaling at a rate greater than health it seems that VE might be much more powerful than intended.


People may remember back in the beginning of The Burning Crusade shadow priests were consistently hitting #1 on the DPS charts. That was largely due to shadow priests scaling well with pure +damage while being able to ignore +hit and having access to tailoring gear that was of equivalent worth to Tier 5 and Tier 6. In a short sighted response Blizzard flailed the nerf bat around without regard to long term scaling and ignored their "baby steps" doctrine that they preach to priests when class buffs are perceived to be inadequate. This was also done with no attention paid to the penalties in PvP combat, and then later we were told in response that shadow simply wasn't intended to be a PvP spec anymore like it was in WoW classic.

In recent beta builds shadow priests have been seen numerous buffs and subsequent nerfs, but it appears that we are taking two steps forward and only one back at this point in time. The only recent change I am very disappointed with is the weakening of improved spirit tap to 20% regeneration and +10% spirit on proc while casting. This causes it to be wildly inferior to meditation which is active 100% of the time. Unless Blizzard plans to bring back stacking regeneration mechanics this talent is now very conflicted and unintuitive.

Blizzard finally acknowledges that shadow damage scales pretty poorly and has responded by introducing a MF coefficient boost in addition to the ability for it to crit. It is unfortunate that it took other classes nearly doubling our DPS on pure encounters and an xpac revamp for the issue to be addressed. This change should be hitting beta servers soon.

We'll be increasing Mind Flay's coefficient (base) by roughly 30% to start, and allow Mind Flay to crit. We may also do some tuneups to the Shadow tree as well, but as other players have mentioned the tree is really not the problem, just the base spells not scaling.

Hopefully we can get the new Mind Flay in the next build, but allowing it to crit involves rebuilding the spell completely, which may take some time.
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I continue to sift through the WOTLK beta changes for shadow priest info, and this is a pretty big one.

Silence (shadow) removed global cooldown.
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Shadow priests have inquired for years why we're the only caster with a silencing ability on the global cooldown. I guess Blizzard finally read the feedback.