A tricky fix

From mmo champion's latest blue post report I spotted this bug fix:

Rolling curruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely. This is really more of a bug fix than a nerf. The problem here was that players could inflate the initial cast of a corruption and have the spell tick for that damage indefiinitely as long as it was refreshed. This resulted in some "jaw dropping" damage. Technically this was a tricky one to fix but we wanted to keep the glyph of quick decay and were able to ultimately find a solution. When this fix goes live, the hasted corruption should correct itself to your current haste within a tick or two of the spell being refreshed.

Huh. Tell me again how difficult it is to fix the rolling refresh on shadow word: pain?

Addon crises and epic instances

I think the to-do list definitely helped because the addon crisis, when it arrived, wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared.

DoTimer was up to its usual patch-day hijinks, plastering every single timer in existence on the screen. But instead of ignoring the problems and praying for a speedy update as I normally do, I bit the bullet and went shopping for something new. And boy, am I glad I did.

Based on recommendations on shadowpriest.com and various blogs, I installed fortexorcist. The interface is a little scary, but I quickly discovered that the addon is very simple and intuitive to customise — at least, to my level of detail.

By default, it places two bars on your screen — one for timers, and another for cooldowns. So far so DoTimer. But to customise anything you see, you just have to right click on it to open the interface; it even knows which section to open at. The options, which are many, often have useful tooltips, which are a huge help, and give you a lot of power when it comes to setting up your display. What this means in practice is it's very easy to stand in front of a target dummy casting spells and setting it up on the fly.

But it's the cooldowns display that really impressed me about fortexorcist. Instead of a huge list of yet more timers, it gives you a single timeline. The icons of your spells move along the timeline until they drop off in a flourish, indicating that the spell is ready again. You can scale this bar, have it run horizontal or verticle, and have the timers run to the left or right. It's a brilliant piece of design.

I've got my cooldowns running perpendicular to my timers, so I can easily track both in the same space (they run up the side of my timers list). This is a huge improvement on my DoTimer setup where I had cooldowns in a different part of the screen to avoid visual conflict with the timers. As one of my biggest failings is not casting mind blast enough, it will be interesting to see if this setup has a positive impact on my dps. If you promise not to faint in shock, I'll try and remember to take some screenshots tonight for use as illustrations!

The only downside I've noticed so far is a slight lag between casting a dot and seeing it on the timer list; DoTimer is completely instant.

After I'd sorted out my addons, I signed up for the new 5-mans as scheduled and trotted off to look for the entrance. I didn't know about the teleport thing. How cool is that? All that time and gold I've wasted flying to Nexus! Sadly I ended up healing, so can't tell you what's happened to my dps, but in the process of running them I managed to collect several items that pushed my haste up to around 600 with only a minimal loss of spellpower and crit. Must get to a dummy tonight to test it out.

I was a bit too focused on Grid to fully explore the new instances, but I was generally very impressed with the designs, the way they were held together by a fantastic storyline, and the way they climax in a truly epic final encounter. I never fully appreciated how intense Sylvanas was before last night. You couldn't go out with her, could you? It'd be exhausting.

But the highlight of the night? The funky porno-style music during the Bronjahm fight. Seriously, so good I nearly died humming along to it.

And I am loving the new daily dungeon quest — 10 badges for spanking Patch on 10 man? Yes please! Even better, according to today's hotfix, you can now upgrade emblems of triumph for emblems of frost. I'm not sure this is the right thing for the game, but it's certainly the right thing for me. Bring it on!

My next job is to replace ag_unitframes, a prospect that fills me with dread every time I consider it. I've heard good things about shadow unit frames but I don't think it's on Curse (I couldn't live without the Curse client). If you are all selfishly keeping the world's best unit frame addon to yourself, now is the time to take pity on me and break silence.

To-do list

Wednesday, 9 December

• Install patch.
• Update addons.
• Log in.
• Stare at character selection screen swallowing back mounting panic.
• Take deep breath, log in on priest.
• Check talents, glyphs, gems; decide you are too poor to change them even if you wanted to.
• Open LFG, stare with horror at alien interface.
• Alt-tab to wow.com's handy guide.
• Return to LFG with renewed confidence, list for new instance.
• Fly aimlessly round Icecrown looking for new instance.
• When UI freezes with six-figure lag, realise you have found new instance.
• Run into instance, stare with wonder at shiny new interior.
• Start casting spells.
• Panic as ALL addons go MENTAL.
• Perform like brain-dead gold farmer through most of instance.
• Ninja all caster gear.
• Leave quickly.
• Alt-tab to Curse for the bad news on buggy addons.
• Waste hours trawling forums to find fix is months away.
• Realise with depressing clarity that all addons need replacing.
• Log resolving to deal with it tomorrow.
• Go to be early for 5.30am taxi to work (yes, 5.30am).
• Wake up at 1.30am remembering you are guildless.
• Resist urge to log back in to look for guild.
• Dream fitfully about the insurmountable challenge of fixing addons AND finding guild before the entire world has killed Arthas and moved back to Kalimdor to take up farming and crafts.
• Go to work. At 5.30am.
• Resign. Find new job.
• Start to-do list for Thursday, 10 December.

3.3 survival guide (for the extremely ill-prepared)

• Haste is the new black
• Mind flay finally hits 30
• Arthas is begging for it

The final major content patch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is here, opening Icecrown to raiders and setting the most intrepid among us on a collision cause with the Lich King himself.

For shadow priests, this could be the New Hope of patches. Through improvements to shadowform, vampiric touch and devouring plague will now benefit from haste, essentially increasing the speed at which the dots tick. And mind flay finally gets the base range that many of us have argued for some time it rightly deserves. A couple of glyphs have been altered to reflect the new world order.

The haste change will have a huge impact on how you evaluate gear, while the new glyphs will give you some more freedom in how you augment your spells, though the overall effect on your dps will probably be minimal.

Before I say more, here are the important bits from the patch notes.

• Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.
• Mind Flay: The range of this ability has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.
• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague 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 and only generates healing for single-target shadow damage spells.
• 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.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain: The periodic damage ticks of Shadow Word: Pain now restore 1% of the priest’s base mana with this glyph.
• 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.

Haste
If talents have a budget, Blizzard has just officially blown it on shadowform. For just one frugal point, a priest can increase damage by 15 per cent, reduce incoming damage by 15 per cent, reduce threat by 30 per cent, enable their dots to crit — and now it will speed up two of their three dots through haste. It puts the crappy improved shadow word: pain to shame. (It hurt just to type that.)

This is the big one of the patch, the one you’ve probably been slipping off your seat in anticipation of for some weeks. There can be no doubt that this is going to increase shadow damage considerably. But there seems to be some lingering hesitation among more informed players than me over whether it will increase it enough. And clearly, it’s disappointing that Blizzard didn’t want to tackle shadow word: pain’s many bugs to allow it to scale properly alongside every other spell.

Plus, there’s a catch. With faster dots, not only will you have to adjust to a different rhythm, but you will be expending more mana and casting them more frequently. The glyph of shadow word: pain is intended, I think, to compensate, but more on glyphs below.

All of this means haste is much, much more attractive to shadow priests than before — which is a particular shame if, like me, you avoided haste and stacked crit instead. What a shitter. The excellent theorycrafters on shadowpriest.com suggest haste is now pretty much an even 1:1 with spellpower, although this may well change as they gain a better understanding of the mechanics and practicalities.

I really can’t compete with the brilliant folks on that site so I strongly urge you to visit this thread, take time to understand the arguments, and then apply what you’ve learned to your own gearing strategy.

Mind flay
What can I say about this except it’s been a helluva long time coming? Now that’s it’s actually happening, I’m surprised to see there is no catch whatsoever, no tradeoff for a ranged snare that once was considered too powerful to permit at a 30-yard range. The game has changed, I suppose, and I’m just glad to see Blizzard changing with it. All I can advise is to make the most of it. Without the need to glyph for an equitable range on our primary filler, we are free to select a third glyph that suits our personal needs (as slim as those pickings may be).

Vampiric embrace
Just a quick word on this change. As a self-buff, this ability has probably recovered its place on our toolbars. There’s no excuse not to always have ve ticking away now, regardless of the healing it provides. The fortunes of this spell have declined sharply in this expansion, but I have hope for a comeback in Cataclysm.

Glyphs
Hoorah for shadowform, spirit’s a little less crappy than it used to be. And good riddance to that ten-yard nonsense glyph.

With mind flay’s range extended, the glyph had to change. What do they do? They nick shadow word: pain’s glyph, something I argued all along was mislabelled anyway. So you’ll want to keep mind flay’s glyph after all.

Shadow word: pain’s glyph now restores 1 per cent of a priest’s base mana per tick of damage, which equates to approximately 64mp5. I’m not sure yet how much we will feel the mana drain of hasted dots — personally, with only 440 haste right now, I’m guessing not much to start with. But this might become a mandatory glyph for a well-geared shadow priest heading into Icecrown.

The alternatives are rather lacklustre. Dispersion might be tempting, reducing its cooldown by 45 seconds, but at only a two-minute cooldown already, I don’t see how you’ll need it. Plus, it seems counter-intuitive to pass over what amounts to a passive mana-regeneration glyph for one that requires six seconds of silence to work. No, if you really want to swap out shadow word: pain for now, shadow word: death is probably the best of them.

Icecrown
Some guy with a rasping cough will shortly be available for butt-kickings. And there are three new five-man instances collectively named the Halls of Reflection for grinding badges and some item level 232 gear, which for Merlot is mostly win. Look out particularly for the Nevermelting Ice Crystal, as well as the Shriveled Heart (which doesn't seem to be on wowhead atm). I will be boiling one puppy every hour until somebody hands them over to me.

And that’s all you’re going to get from me for now. Leave your questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to track down some answers. In the meantime, check out the full patch notes on mmo champion for a lot more, including a new interface that promises to put the fun back in pugging. (Puggifung?)

Best of luck with patching, and don’t forget to update all your addons!

Don't panic!

The patch is here, goddammit. Survival guide tomorrow. Promise.

The big time

You know you've hit the big time when your company's firewall blocks your blog. I feel like a pornographer.

Thankfully Blogger is still fair game (for now at least) so I can keep the site ticking over.

Mmo champion is predicting that 3.3 will drop next week, which if true, is the worst piece of news I've had since I last tried to get in my favourite jeans. But I'll do my best to throw a snappy survival guide together before the blasted thing hits live. Let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to see in there and I'll make sure to include a link to shadowpriest.com the relevant information.

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.

Bad timing

If you are ever bored enough or autistic enough to read through every post on this blog (and I wouldn't recommend it) you'll notice a patter emerging. All announcements of any significance pertaining to shadow priests happen while I'm NOT HERE. Case in point. It's like those corny living statues that appear wherever tourists congregate - they only move when you turn your back.

So anyway, I take one tiny little holiday and all this stuff happens. Stuff I need to read more about before I decide to jump up and down and make whooping noises. But in my head I am already practicing the snoopy dance. If all it takes for Blizz to buff shadow is for me to take a holiday, I'll gladly zip off more often. Now accepting donations to the Shadow Buff Fund.

I'm sorry dear reader(s), a proper blogger would have worked through their vacation to bring you the news as it happens, along with baffling equations and a pop-up graph. You deserve better. But I promise to blog through any Shadow Buff Fund vacations, which after all probably count more as a business trip than an actual holiday anyway. For tax puposes.

I'll be back soon, post jet lag, with those whooping noises.

Mind flay fail

Patch notes: glyph of mind flay no longer reduces the magnitude of mind flay's movement reduction

Not patch notes: talent tip shows mind flay's movement reduction as 15 per cent

Thank you to Alazais of Skullcrusher for flagging this.

Before you fly off into a nerd rage like I did, the spell's tooltip still shows 50 per cent and the movement reduction with the glyph, while hardly scientifically tested, does *feel* like a 50 per cent reduction.

Mind flay is still the most mockingly limp glyph ever designed, but the movement reduction appears to be as promised.

/Clap! /Cheer! /Dance!

Buffs incoming!

• Twisted faith now increases spell power by up to 20 per cent of your spirit, up from 10 per cent
• Improved spirit tap now additionally has a 50 per cent chance to trigger from mind flay crits

Not mind-blowingly awesome, but super small improvements to dps. Every little helps :)

Patch day torment

Patch days are torture. I have nearly 40 addons, 10 characters, four dual specs, and - worst of all - two computers with different screen sizes to update, which even ordinarily are a headache to manage. The pain is usually offset by the excitement of new features and content, but for some reason I just can't get worked up by this patch. Clearly there's nothing good for priests, and even the new raid hasn't got my blood pumping. It's just not that... exciting.

For the first hour last night I was stuck in a logon loop that saw me kicked instantly every time I tried to access any character in Dalaran, like some digital sisyphus. I spent some time on my enhancement shaman Uglybetty instead (female troll, natch), and was very annoyed by the earth shock change. Now I have to hotbutton wind shock too. (Who said this game was getting easier?)

When I eventually did get back on Merlot I went straight into a raid with no chance to test my addons. I discovered the hard way that dotimer had decided to helpfully display EVERY debuff on the boss and EVERY raid-wide buff on ALL 25 PLAYERS, ag_unitframes had given up changing names on target frames and showed the same name regardless of who I targetted, and grid had reset my profile and lost all COLOUR. That's right, my grid is now black and white. There were the brand-spanking new patch day updated versions, too. I had no choice but to continue raiding through the chaos, automatically closing lua error windows every couple of minutes as we went. Badges are badges, right?

We raided so long I didn't have time to look at the problems afterwards. So I have one computer in complete chaos, and all of this to look forward to tonight when I log on to the second.

The patch mess will pass, but I still need to think about how I can simplify the general customisation process. The two-computer setup is a problem, but it's not going to change as long as I spend my weeks at two different locations. What I need is shared network location for my addon settings, or an easy way to sync the two. Is there one easy folder I could backup to the internet, perhaps?

On a more positive note, I also trialled a neat little addon called mind flay timer last night. You probably have this already, right? It's really simple: it posts a raid warning and chimes every time your mind flay ticks, so you can keep track of them. I don't like nochannelling macros so this is a better solution for me to ensure I don't clip my flays. What I discovered while using it is just how erratic my mind flay ticks are. The first two ticks often bunch together, and the third tick quite often doesn't kick in till the channelling animation and cast bar timers have ended. This sounds like a bug that appeared when Wrath first launched, but it's been long fixed. So I am assuming this is either a symptom of my own lag or an issue with the addon itself. I'm guessing it's lag. When I eventually get my timers back I'll be able to spend some time on the dummies to work it out.

All in all, a very frustrating night, but no worse than any other patch day.

The emergency guide to 3.2

I'm running behind with patch news thanks to the awfully timed priest Q&A. I'm not going to give you a comprehensive overview but if you only have five minutes to spare before patching and want a (very) brief reminder of what to look for when you log in, try this.

Shadow stuff

• Replenishment has been nerfed. The patch note is rather obtuse, but it simply means replenishment now ticks for 0.2% maximum mana instead of 0.25%. Big thank you to Lodur of World of Matticus for confirming this for me.
• Psychic horror no longer has a 'travel time', so will take effect instantly.
• The dispersion cooldown has been reduced from 3 to 2 minutes.
• Improved mind blast now also provides a mini mortal strike debuff, reducing all healing done to the target by 20% for 10 seconds.
• Vampiric touch now does twice the amount of damage if dispelled.
• Glyph of shadow can now trigger from dot crits.
• The cooldown on devouring plague has been removed; this spell can now only exist on one target at a time.

Healing stuff

• The amount of mp5 on all items with this stat has been increased by about 25%.
• Prayer of healing has been nerfed. Its spell power co-efficient per target has been lowered from 80.7% to 52.6%.
• The penance cooldown has been increased from 10 to 12 seconds.
• Inspiration now reduces physical damage taken by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target's armor.
• The heal from glyph of power word: shield can now proc divine aegis.

General stuff

• There's a new raid and a new 5-man instance in ice crown. The new raid has normal and heroic modes for both 10-man and 25-man versions.
• The emblem system has changed. Heroic 5-man bosses and all raid bosses up to Ulduar now drop emblems of conquest. Bosses in the new raid, crusaders' coliseum, drop emblems of triumph. You can get emblems of triumph from the daily heroic too. Emblems can continue to be converted 'down' to the lower versions, but not up.
• Loads of 'quality of life' changes have been made to further improve the levelling experience and general world environment. These include cheaper mounts at lower levels, an orgrimmar-thunder bluff zeppelin, portals to the blasted lands, a flight path direct from the stair of destiny to shattrath and more post boxes in major towns.
• Loads of changes and improvements to professions.

See mmo champion for the full patch notes and more general information.

And if you know of anything priesty that (like the devouring plague change) isn't listed in the notes, please let me know!