RIP SW:P

In a recent test realm build shadow word: pain vanished from the tooltip for shadowform, removing it from the list of shadow priest dots that benefit from haste.

I didn't jump on it at the time, although with hindsight the writing was clearly on the wall for shadow word: pain. This weekend, a blue post confirmed the change and explained why:

We removed shadow word: pain from scaling with haste because we thought shadow dps was too high with all three dots hasted.

There is a bug where you can get big sw:p dots and 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.

That last sentence is completely baffling because unless I have just developed sudden onset aphasia that's exactly why they did it. So we'll just ignore that bit. There's some other stuff about best-in-slot gear and theorycrafting, I stopped reading. The message to take home is that Blizz thought shadow was doing a little too well on the test realm and they've come up with an easy way to rein it back in.

I'm completely ok with that. If I'd wanted to be top-dog dps I'd be playing my lock right now, or my hunter, so I understand when Blizzard takes action to maintain class balance. But, as usual, I'm a bit disappointed about the way they've gone about it.

Shadow word: pain is already the weakest of all our dots. It has been riddled with bugs from the start of the expansion, outpaced in damage by devouring plague, and practically dwarfed by vampiric touch. Without haste scaling, that weakness is only going to be amplified. This for what was, in Burning Crusade, a class-defining spell and one of the most lethal dots in the game.

I know this isn't game breaking: if Blizzard gets their numbers right, whether one spell ticks for two hundred or two thousand is irrelevant at the end of the day. I'm just very sad to see such an iconic spell decline so miserably over the course of only a few months.

The designers have taken a very pragmatic approach — they needed to tone damage down and they found an easy way to do it. But it's not good game design to go around making two essentially identical spells work in different ways for convenience's sake — or to use flaws in the game that they have ignored since the expansion launched as the excuse for doing so.

Ok, so the bugs are too tough to fix: remove the refresh mechanic then, or nerf it to one of those 'extends duration by up to xx seconds' deals. Or nerf vampiric touch's spell co-efficient, which was basically doubled as a quick-fix buff to start with. There are a hundred ways you could balance shadow's dps without guaranteeing that one of the class's core spells fails to scale with gear and falls more and more into disrepair.

We'll all continue to cast shadow word: pain because it is basically free damage — and maybe that's the real point of the spell's current fortunes. But I'd gladly put up with a few more complications to see it restored to its former position of fear and respect and see it finally scaling properly with gear.

Goddess

Queen Lana'thel. She's a blood elf. And a queen. And a vampire. Sorry, vampyr.

Have you seen her abilities? Vampiric bite, essence of the vampyr queen, shroud of sorrow. You might as well add "immune to shadow priests", we're all going to be too busy gasping in awe and reverence.

Do you think it's possible to defect to the Scourge? Does Arthas accept living recruits?

LF tank, last spot

The perennial tank shortage has struck Darkspear again. Pugging heroics is torture, even for the daily. And what fills me with dread is the thought of competing not only with my server for a suitable meat shield, but the entire battlegroup.

Because that's the worrying prospect facing us in the next patch when Blizzard introduces the new grouping tool. It sounds fantastic on paper, and wow.com has certainly spared no expense in singing its praises. Group with anyone, get transported automatically to the instance, and pick up a bunch of special rewards in the process. But look at the facts: take one server with a tank shortage, lump it with half a dozen similarly tank-deprived servers, and the problem grows exponentially. Has anyone done the maths on this?

The picture for healers — once in the same endangered boat as tanks — is very different. Not only do we see plenty of main-spec healers, but a decent proportion of main-spec dps have healing off-specs. On my resto shaman, I even find myself in the ludicrous position of going off-spec dps because of a healer surplus.

The duel spec facility saved healing, so why then are we still scrambling around for tanks? The same number of classes can tank as heal, and while I don't have the numbers on server populations, there must surely be a roughly even split between the two groups. There ought to be more tanks flying around than there are, even if most of them were off-spec.

What I think is that tanking is harder than healing or dps — not that all dps and healers faceroll, but the baseline for skill strikes me as much higher for tanking. And the entry bar for gear is a little higher too, so that potential tanks have to spend a little time collecting gear before they can throw themselves into heroics — moreso than healers and unlike dps who are good-to-go on the ding. And there's nowhere you can train yourself to tank, you've just got to bite the bullet and jump into an instance.

I don't know if tanking should be easier or the rewards greater. Or maybe, for the people who do tank, it should actually be harder: more challenging, not less. Either way, I don't think the problem is going to go away. I think when the new patch lands we'll see a momentary glut of tanks trying out the new instances and farming the next tier of badge gear. But if the underlying problems (whatever they are) aren't fixed, we'll be back in this position in a couple of months, but with an even greater surplus of frustrated dps.

Tales from the test realm #14

KT: FOOLS, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME HERE. NOW YOU WILL D... You there priest, what is that?

Priest: Hmm? Oh, you mean Lil KT, he's my new pet.

KT: Pet? It's a... mini... me....

Warlock: Haha, "groovy baby"!

KT: SILENCE MINION! Where did this abomination come from?

Warlock: What did he call me? He did not just call me that.

KT: Oh sorry, I thought it was the imp talking.

Warlock: Can we burn him now already?

KT: WAIT.

Priest: I bought him, innit. Those Kirin Tor dudes are breedin em like puppies.

KT: ...

Warlock: Prepare to die, lich bitch...

KT: Lich bitch? — Priest, how much did you pay for that monstrosity?

Priest: Ten dollars.

Warlock: Ten what?

KT: What are these dollars of which you speak?

Priest: dollars, you know. They're like a virtual currency you buy with gold.

KT: I don't understand.

Priest: You know those shady dudes that hang around in starter towns and whisper you? You give them gold and they hand over these dollars.

KT: How much gold?

Priest: It varies. The dollars don't have an innate value, they're like a commodity, so the amount fluctuates according to the economic principles of supply and demand. It's called an exchange rate.

KT: HOW MUCH?

Priest: A grand, square up.

Warlock: Pwnd!

KT: But why trade in this virtual currency, why does not this mage just charge 1000 gold thereby rendering the undesirable peasant middleman obsolete?

Priest: Erm...

KT: Surely your Horde would prohibit such a pernicious trade for fear of undermining the global economy?

Priest: Huh?

KT: Well, if people start trading in these dollars instead of gold, the value of goods becomes increasingly unstable, devaluing the gold standard and potentially leading to hyperinflation. Hmm, that gives me an idea...

Priest: Dude, it's just a pet.

KT: Warlock, how much for my wand?

Priest: What are you doing?

Warlock: I do not need to buy your puny wand frosty, I'll rip it out of your cold, dead hands.

KT: Yes yes, but how much?

Warlock: Ten dollars?

Priest: YOU CAN'T BUY GEAR.

KT: Deal. Whisper me later...

Priest: Can we fight now?

KT: I'll swap you my robe for the mini me...

Consolidating healing buffs

So as we've seen, if the current PTR iteration of vampiric embrace makes it to live, the spell will become a 30-minute self buff, providing its health regeneration effect to our party passively. It's a nice change given the sad state of neglect the spell has fallen into in recent patches, and means it's much more likely to find some use in future raids. But it's not going to fix the spell's two biggest problems — the party-only restriction and the minimal amount of health returned.

One way to put vampiric embrace firmly back at the core of shadow priest design is to push its effect raid wide. It's not as if there aren't already raid-wide healing effects in the game. The most significant is judgement of light, a spell so effective that in some fights it can hold its own alongside the healers, but death knights and feral druids can also provide healing effects through talents.

The healing from these abilities admittedly is only accessible to some or all of the dps, but they have one significant advantage over vampiric embrace: while the utility of vampiric embrace deteriorates as the raid size increases, for these other effects, the benefits actually increase.

In a world where just about every kind of buff imaginable has been dished out and duplicated across multiple classes, healing effects stand out as messy and inconsistent. If Blizzard were to consider all of these effects as a whole, they could easily establish some rules to ensure they don't stack uncontrollably and become overpowered, while giving shadow priests a compelling reason to value the ability and possibly even reconsider the 'improving' talents.

While they're at it, they might also like to look again at healing stream totem, which suffers from similar problems. I could say a lot more about water totems, but this is supposed to be a priest blog :) It's also not a good time to start comparing classes unfavourably to paladins, given the recent assault on our holy brethren. Our prayers are with you guys.