Can we have wings?

Finally something worth blogging about. A new beta build is out and it includes some very interesting new talents in early discipline to get our shadowy juices flowing. (Don't linger on that metaphor too long.)

Evangelism revamped — you have a 100% chance when you Smite and a 40% chance when you Mind Flay to gain Evangelism. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts for 15 sec. Evangelism (Smite ) — increasing the damage done by your Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance spells by 2/4% and reduces the mana cost of those spells by 3/6%. Dark Evangelism (Mind Flay) — increases the damage done by your periodic shadow spells by 1/2%.
Archangel revamped — consumes your Evangelism effects, causing an effect depending what form you are in. Archangel (Caster) — instantly restores 3% of your total mana and increases your healing done by 3% for each stack. Dark Archangel (Shadowform) - instantly restores 3% of your total mana and increases your shadow damage done by 3% for each stack.

This is seriously cool shit. This is what makes me want to play a shadow priest. I know it's just words on the screen right now, but these are powerful, evocative words. This is crack for roleplayers. I don't care about the numbers, I just want WINGS.

And paladins, don't give me none of that avenging wrath snowflake crap. I'll swap you the wings for prayer of mending (it's basically a healing boomerang, you were totally robbed to start with).

Oh, and weirdly, mind flay is now five seconds long. I have no clue what that is all about. I might get around to thinking about it. Then again, I might not. Who cares, I am a DARK ARCHANGEL.

Hmm, maybe they could try saying that out loud a while and clip it to DARK ANGEL.

I AM A DARK ANGEL.

Oh god, it's like a drug.

New talent trees: awfully familiar

MMO Champion is reporting that new talent tree system has been released on the Cataclysm beta realm. This is the one where you lock yourself into a single talent tree at level 10 and work your way up to the 31-point talent before unlocking supporting trees. The number of points you get to spend has been halved.

The interface screens show that, for opting to go shadow, you are rewarded with mind flay instantly, plus threat reduction and pushback protection on shadow spells. Some of the other classes have a bit more meat on their UIs (shaman for example), so I'm hoping there may be more bonuses for shadow in a later build.

I'm unable while at work to fully check MMO's talent calculators, but from the priest class page I can say the new talents look... awfully familiar. If I was confident that these were accurate and thought-out by Blizzard, I would be disappointed to say the least. In a world where talent points had been halved to allow more interesting and dynamic talents, I would not expect to have to spend two of them on improved shadow word: pain, for example, which was never much of an improvement to start with. And I am rather alarmed to see that our crit bonus looks like it's been slashed to 40 per cent.

But I'm not going to panic. I'll just assume that these are placeholder talents while the Blizzard boffins crack their heads together and come up with something inspiring. Please. Pretty please.

Edit: home now. Here's the build Leigh talks about in the comment below. Everyone seems to be in agreement that they haven't 'done' shadow yet, so I'm just gonna chill...

Forget Forumgate, we haz talent newz

Yesterday, Blizzard was left bloody and mauled over its plans for using real names on the forums and the disaster was about to go nuclear. But today… who cares? We have a COMPLETE TALANT OVERHAUL to coo over. Coincidental timing? Unlikely. This is a very smart move by Blizzard to take back control of the agenda. Very smart. They might have been planning to share this in a few weeks, with some of the details fleshed out. Never write off a PR machine, they are the cockroaches of the corporate world.

This blogger is no Glamour-reading, celebrity-whoring pushover. I do not forget so easily. Real ID is a total screw up and I’ll be back to crow and gloat just as soon as it comes back to explode in Blizzard’s face. And it will.

But I am forced to reluctantly admit that the aforementioned COMPLETE TALENT OVERHAUL is far too compelling to ignore. It is no less than a single brilliant solution to all the problems the talent system has ever encountered. Or nearly.

You remember recently when we were shown the new priest trees for Cataclysm? Despite all of their ambitions for removing passive talents and making talent trees more dynamic, little had changed. Recognising this, Blizzard has come back with a fresh approach.

The number of points available to spend will be halved, relieving Blizzard of the need to pad out trees with volumes of passive bonuses. And classes will be locked into a single specialisation up to level 70, leaving Blizzard free to position talents in a more logical order, free of the worry that players of other talent specialisations will be able to nab the juicy ones for themselves. Some of the class-defining core talents will be given not through talents but as rewards for choosing the relevant specialisation, excluding them completely from the reaches of everyone else. Potentially, we’ll be able to get our mitts on these spells and abilities at more convenient times, and raiders will be less at the mercy of PVP-balancing compromises. Win-win.

The dull business of boosting a character’s power in their chose role, by increasing damage, crit, defences and the like, will be intrinsically linked to a character’s chosen specialisation.

The mastery bonuses we have read about will also change as a result of this overhaul but I expect shadow priests will retain their shadowy orbs in one form or another.

You will be unable to spec into secondary trees before spending 31 talent points in one tree, but I don’t think this will be much of a hardship for most. I only ever recall going into a support tree early on once, as a demonology warlock for suppression, and we know they are reworking hit talents anyway.

I know it must be quite un-nerving to see me in a positive, optimistic mood, but these changes really do feel instinctively… right — and I haven’t been able to say that about much for a long time. What do you think?

Cataclysm: priest talent preview

I'm sure you've seen these already; I'm a little late to the party. I'm moving jobs this weekend, from one department to another, which may give me some more time to blog again. It's been hell, so I can pray for a breather:)

We're told: "These talent trees aren't done. They're just far enough along that we're seeking feedback." Which is good. I'm not sure though, looking at the priest, what exactly they want feedback on.

This is not revolution; it's not even evolution, so much as it resembles tinkering. And that's fine if you think the priest is solid. If pressed, I'd say they're in a pretty good shape. I like shiny new things though, and this certainly doesn't deliver on that count.

We have, so far, a shadow tree that very closely resembles live. A few talents are missing (we knew about those already) and a few have filled the gaps, notably:

• Spirit tap now returns 15 per cent of total mana when you deal the killing blow, in addition to increasing mana regeneration by 100 per cent for 15 seconds. So much improved for the levelling priest, but without improved spirit tap, it's back to near-useless for the raider.
• Dark thoughts, a new tier one talent, now reduces spell pushback by 70 per cent at max rank. We used to get this from improved shadow form (more on that in a sec) but this position will make be handier for smite spam at low levels and could save burning through mana on shields.
• Empowered shadow orbs, a new talent on tier four, boosts the effectiveness of our mastery bonus.
• Mind melt has undergone a bit of a transformation. It now increases shadow word: death damage by 30 per cent on targets under 25 per cent health, and it empowers our new nuke, mind spike, to reduce the cast time of mind blast by 50 per cent, stacking twice for an instant mind blast. As mind blast sits on the global cooldown anyway, this is clearly aimed at pvp. I'm not sure if we'll even be casting mind spikes in a raid, but if we do, it will only be a small help on highly mobile fights.
• Shadowform has lost its innate threat reduction. I'm not surprised, either. It was silly to have two talents in the same tree that both reduced threat; nobody bothered picking up shadow affinity. Now we'll need to again.
• Instead of reducing pushback, improved shadow form now includes a five per cent crit aura, like a shaman's elemental oath and moonkin form. Improved moonkin form still increases haste of course, which we were once lined up to get instead of crit. I'm sure Blizzard's raid buff strategy will all become clear with time; right now, I'm lost.
• Our new talent, shadowy apparition, makes an appearance at tier eight. Shadow word: pain ticks have a six per cent chance to summony a shadowy version of ourself that moves slowly to the target and deals 15 per cent of our mind blast's damage when it arrives. So far so forgettable. 15 per cent of mind blast damage is fairly lame. But the chance to increase a shadowy form jumps by 60 per cent when moving. Expect to see a lot of twitchy shades at the target dummies while they figure out if this is worth trying to force in a fight. My guess: probably not.
• Pain and suffering has not changed. I bet it's still buggy as hell too.
• Twisted faith now increased spell hit by 20 per cent of our spirit. Apparently it's a crutch for offspec healers who go dps in their holy togs but it's also going to make healing gear more attractive to shadow priests under the hit cap.

So there we have it. For now. As others noted instantly, there is a dearth of supporting talents in the discipline tree (holy, we have been told, will never be an option for a secondary tree). So the current build would enable you to pick up every single point in the shadow tree and still have one point left over at 85. I suppose you could go for inner focus instead, and have something like this. Still more points than we need. 

So that's where Blizz needs to concentrate. Either discipline must be more useful to shadow at lower levels or they need to throw in a few more shadow talents somewhere.

Merlot feels whelmed

Chastity: I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?
Bianca: I think you can in Europe.

— 10 Things I Hate About You

Good job I went to bed instead of waiting up for the priest preview: it turns out there wasn't much to wait up for after all.

Brief shadowy summary (and the full thing for those who haven't see it yet — thanks, as always, to mmo champion):

• New spell: mind spike, learned at level 81, which deals 'shadowfrost' damage and debuffs the target to increase the damage of the next mind spike. Short cast, spammable, and will not be locked out with other shadow spells.
• As per the warlock preview, confirmation that all hots and dots will benefit from crit and haste innately, and that haste will not reduce the duration of the spells but increase the number of ticks. Unlike the warlock preview, though, no hint that we'll be able to stop worrying about clipping.
• Devs are determined to give shadow word: death a place in the shadow arsenal as an execute spell (good luck to that).
• Shadow should be better equipped for short fights and less susceptible to school lock out.
• Shadow talents are in for a bit of an overhaul to strip out all the passive boosters.
• The misery hit debuff will go.
• The shadow mastery bonuses will provide spell power, crit and a chance to create 'shadow orbs' — which boost spell power and may interact through talents with other spells.
• Lots of noise about healing, power word: barrier's back on the table, but you're all going to be ooming every five minutes.

These few statements of intent are fair enough — and the noises about burst and spell lock out should be cautiously welcomed particularly by pvp priests, I think.

I'm struggling to see at this stage how dots can scale smoothly with haste if their length doesn't vary, but no doubt this will all become clear over time. And I wish the developers had a consistent view of how dots will behave for shadow priests and warlocks — if locks can't clip their dots, surely priests shouldn't be able to either. But it could be an omission, or indeed a very sensible distinction. No need for nerd rage yet. Edit: an enlightening, if not emphatic, clarification came from Ghostcrawler later, to the effect that they'd like to prevent dot clipping in general.

Mind spike doesn't interest me. No doubt it will have its uses, but it just doesn't grab my imagination. The shadow orbs, however, could be very cool, if only visually. I hope they resemble the old troll priest racial, like our very own purple water shield.

Of course, it's just a very early preview. We don't have enough information to speculate about shadow performance or talent builds or any of the things we're itching to hear about. The fact that we are loosing the misery debuff might worry priests who rely on their utility to secure raid spots. But I say it's too early to panic.

In fact, this preview exercise leaves many questions unanswered — and raises a few more than it answers. I got pretty excited about the shaman preview, so why do I feel so underwhelmed by this?

Forget everything: class preview incoming

Our first fleshy taste of what Cataclysm will mean for priests is due tomorrow (Wednesday, 7 April), as Blizzard prepare to release a full range of class previews.

In the words of Bashiok:

"The type of information you can expect from these posts are a list of the news spells from 80-85, the new passive mastery bonuses for all talent trees, a brief outline of some of the talent changes we're currently planning, and in some cases new low level spells for select classes."

It's only a day away, but I can't help speculating a little about what we're going to see for shadow priests. Plus, it's a Tuesday morning, and fantasising about WoW is infinitely more pleasurable than the pile of work haunting my inbox.

Wrath has been a bit of a rollercoaster for shadow priests, but I think our current situation is solid. Our mechanics allow skill to shine over gear, and our array of spells enables us to do competitive damage, scale well, and adapt adequately to most circumstances. I think the basic design philosophy of 'keep dots up and use filler spells to their maximum' is unlikely to change. What we can expect is a more varied array of 'active' talents and a stronger focus on managing our own resources in long fights.

Mana management
We've already been warned that spirit will not be a dps stat in Cataclysm, so I am braced to say farewell to spirit tap. It's not the great talent it used to be, but for all of its shortcomings, it remains the only way a priest has of regaining mana beyond drinking until they hit Outland and eventually pick up dispersion and shadowfiend. So I hope that in the shakeup of talents and spell acquisition, we see changes designed to address mana issues early in a priest's life.

And I hope to finally see the death of replenishment in raids. If developers are serious about balancing mana regeneration around a class's own talents, and making a clear distinction between healers and dps, then they really ought to drop this elephant in the room once and for all. I could live with it as a self-only effect, as long as they drop the silly, druidy name and give it a title more becoming of a master of dark powers.

Better still, if we must have it, please unlink it from it's clumsy mind blast trigger. Vampiric touch was once conceived as a leech effect, it would be nice to see a return to that evocative design.

Dee pee ess
As I said, I think raid damage is in a fairly good place right now, but levelling priests could do with a boost to early damage. Damage before mind flay is shameful. It takes a glyph and holy fire at level 20 before our key nuke, smite, can even match a lowly wand. Other classes have it much easier, particularly melee.

They could fix the situation easily by increasing shadow word: pain's base damage — the spell is massively underpowered, particularly at low levels, let along in end game. Inner fire could also provide spell power from the start instead of only at higher ranks.

Developers have also hinted in the past that we may get an entirely new, spammable nuke in Cataclysm — something I currently struggle to see the need for in raiding but which might be a perfect fit for early levelling (more on this below).

New talents and spells?
New spell ranks are going — or rather, won't be learned but will increase automatically as we level. I'm curious to see what this will mean for our regular visits to the trainer. Currently, new spells are learned very unevenly: there's a huge glut of them early on, and large gaps without any between the round levels (20, 30, 40 etc). Could we learn spells less frequently, will the present higher-level spells be learned earlier on, or will there be a mass of new spells to fill the gaps?

We'll almost certainly get new spells as a reward for levelling to 85. My biggest hope is finally to get the dark prayer I have been pleading for for so long. A channelled spell that boosts damage (and possibly healing) temporarily would be a dream. Please Blizzard, I would only write nice things about you from now on :)

As I mentioned above, there was talk a while back of a possible new, spammable nuke, and while I can see this having some application early on, I'm not sure how it could work in end game. Two possibilities that I can see so far: one, it replaces something from our active range of spells (what, I'm not sure), two it becomes an addition to our active range of spells. The first option doesn't appeal to me, the second frightens me. I'm a simple shadow priest, I don't want to have to manage another variable. But it's too early to worry, we don't even know if a spell is incoming.

Finally, we've been promised more active talents and fewer passive 'improves x by y' talents. I don't think we'll see the full talent trees tomorrow, and even if we did it would be way too early to speculate about builds. But we're likely to get a feel for the way the new talents will go. It would be nice to see some possibility for hybrid builds, or even just more variety in build options.

Roll on Wednesday!

Cataclysm: new world order

We've been given the first concrete information about how the new gear stats will work in the expansion, Cataclysm. As you'd expect from something with such a name, it's going to be a bit of a shakeup.

The plan is for these changes to come into effect before the expansion is released, probably alongside wholesale talent revamps, so we have the joy of logging in one day in the not-too-distant future to see our gear reworked and our talents completely overhauled :)

It's much too early to worry about what this might mean for shadow priests. At this stage, in fact, very little would appear to be changing. Spellpower will vanish from our gear, while intellect and stamina will increase. Intellect will provide spellpower indirectly, so that we won't miss the lack of spellpower numbers on the gear. Hit, crit and haste will stay the same, and continue to function in the way you're used to. And spirit will probably vanish from most of our items.

The changes to spirit may be a cause for intrigue. This stat will no longer provide any benefit to caster dps. So we can expect talents such as twisted faith to disappear, as well as our mainstay glyph of shadow. We are promised mana regeneration in other ways — perhaps through buffs to dispersion and shadowfiend (although how shades are expected to level to the point where they can get them is another matter; this, we are told, will change too).

Divine spirit will go too, I assume, as we are told there will be no raid buffs for spirit in the new world order. To be honest, divine spirit was never the best buff in the world, but I like it. I like the shiny-blue-man icon, I like the connection it gives priests to spirit (their most idiosyncratic stat), and I like the fact that it's something melee don't want (I'm so sick of those DK buffs clogging my screen and making my hands glow). So I will mourn divine spirit and remember it fondly.

The spirit changes could actually cause many dual-specced priests a problem: we might be left with some big holes in our off-spec gear if we're not careful. It really depends on how Blizzard decides what gear currently constitutes "dps", how they convert that gear, and how they rework mana regeneration for healers. There is a chance discipline priests will need spirit as much as holy priests, so all those months of stocking dps cloth could leave us with a bit of a headache. We'll have to wait and see how this one plays out.

In the longer term, this change to spirit might go someway to restoring the once-rigid dividing line between healing and dps gear, and reduce the competition on healing priests for gear.

The introduction of a new "mastery" stat on items should also dissuade leather, mail and plate-wearing casters from rolling on cloth, because the intention is for this stat (function still a little vague at this time) to only apply to that item's primary class types (e.g. druids for leather, shaman for mail etc).

Things are starting to look interesting again. I can't wait for the bun-fight on talents to begin.

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!

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.

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.

Some more on spirit

WoW blogs are more promiscuous than viagra spam. My feed reader is already stuffed more solidly than a turkey at Christmas and each day I have to elbow extra into it. But I do my best to keep on top of all things priestly, if only in the hope that I can nick a good idea.

A Priest Blog is the latest to grab my attention, thanks to this nifty post that does the maths on the incoming spirit buffs (I'd love to know how a priest blog ended up with the "nerfdruids" subdomain!)

You perhaps won't be surprised to know it's not a huge buff. As Lyn concludes: "Spirit is still bad but now not quite as bad by a small amount!"

To be honest, that's good enough for me. Spirit should have a function in dps, but it doesn't have to be of critical importance.

What I'm itching to know is why the developers have taken this action, and why now. What was going through their minds when they decided to boost the utility of spirit to shadow priests? The motive is crucial, because this might be a loose end, spirit-wise, or it could be the simplest and first in a series of balancing acts. The big question: will haste ever benefit dots, and if so, will we see it in this expansion?

/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 :)

More on mind flay

It's been at least a week since I last complained about our appalling glyph selection, plenty of time for you all to prepare yourself mentally for the next assault. This latest bout of crabbiness was triggered by a US forum post from a player named Martya, who asked (rather optimistically, I thought):

Although I'm glad to see in 3.2.2 that you are finally getting rid of the snare reduction component on mind flay, which was a needed change, why did you only half-fix the problem?

This being the US forums, where community interaction counts for something, ghostcrawler actually responded. He could have saved himself the trouble by answering the question properly in the class Q&A, but now I'm just being snippy. Here's what he had to say:

Your weakness in one area (in this case range) is supposed to be made up for by strengths in other areas (say dots ticking while you move). If Shadow priests were at a horrible disadvantage because of their short range, then we’d likely make adjustments. But Shadow does totally reasonable dps on most fights and really high dps on a few. Most raids are thrilled to have Shadow priests. While there are things we can improve with the spec (like we can with every spec), we don't think the range is a huge liability (and you do even have a solution if you can't stand it).

And:

Let’s consider for a moment a glyph that improves your damage. Your class is balanced around the use of that glyph. Why? Because the alternative is you are balanced without that glyph, and then when you take the glyph you do more damage than everyone else. What fun! Yet if glyphs didn't improve damage (or healing or whatever) then they would feel merely cosmetic, like shirts or companion pets. With Mind Flay, you are arguing as if the glyph brings it from a negative number back up to baseline. But that doesn’t really make sense. It is making your spell better – it is a buff.

And finally:

Now, where I think there are some valid complaints are on the topic of glyph choice. For DPS specs, someone is going to prove (or strongly suggest) which glyphs provide the most DPS, and raid-focused players are going to tend to take those. It would be nice if you truly had the freedom to pick whatever glyph you wanted. But it would be nice if you truly had the freedom to pick whatever talent specs you wanted too. We'll try to improve both over time, but I don't really get the "I shouldn't have to take that glyph" arguments.

So here we have an attempt to explain the logic behind mind flay's restrictive range, a deliberate weakness which, we now learn, is an attempt to balance our otherwise overpowered class.

I admit, it sounds reasonable, but this argument really doesn't hold any water. For one thing, range isn't our weakness. Mind flay is the only one of our damage spells without a 30-yard base range. Even mind sear has a 30-yard range, and that is arguably the one spell in our arsenal that ought to have a bigger downside. This isn't a conscious design directive, no matter how convincingly ghostcrawler tries to push it. It's an anachronistic situation that has simply been allowed to fester.

And besides, just what would this idealised super spriest look like? Most raiding shadow priests use the glyph right now, and the ones that don't get very little benefit from the dregs of dps glyphs remaining to them. The fact is, if Blizzard extended the range of mind flay tomorrow, nothing would happen to shadow dps.

Our complaint with mind flay isn't really about dps (although I would argue mind flay's range has a direct correlation). At its heart, the issue is about parity. Ghostcrawler very often talks about how the designers try to avoid things that aren't much fun for the player base — things like healers having to spam non-stop, or dps only having one button to press. Well this is one of those things. It isn't very fun for shadow priests to have to choose between standing in the fire or not doing damage, or taking more time to find range on mobs than other classes. We are the only class that has to make these choices. Valid choices for dps would be choosing between high or low mana spells, long cast times or instants, high damage or survivability, raid utility or dps — all the ranged dps classes have these difficult decisions, including shadow priests.

Ghostcrawler is right in a way, mind flay's range really isn't such a huge issue for shadow priests in isolation, but he is wrong when he says it isn't valid to compare our situation to other classes. It is only in comparison that you see just how stupid it is to restrict us in this way. If the range really isn't that big a deal, why not just normalise it and allow us that parity with the rest of the ranged dps?

My only consolation from this exchange was his final comment about glyph choices. Perhaps he's finally beginning to wake up to just how insufficient our glyph range is for raiding. With or without mind flay's range issues, we do not have a fair selection of choices for raiding as it stands.

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!

Priest Q&A: the end of the affair

Health warning: grab a cup of tea and some biscuits, this may take a while.

It has been a long, strange journey, but yesterday Blizzard brought its epic player Q&A series to an end with the priest class.

There's no easy way to take hundreds of questions from hundreds of players and distil them into a comprehensive, digestible response. But to Blizzard's credit, they have at least made this process transparent. We all see the same questions, helping us to form an impression of the most popular concerns — while at the same time, unavoidably, creating a sense of expectation. In short, we thought we knew what was coming.

Things look very different today. I'm not at all convinced that the questions posed by the developers are all representative of the community's submissions, nor am I satisfied that the community's top concerns are all addressed here. In fact, in some instances, it even appears that the question has been crafted to fit the statement Blizzard wanted to make.

The cynic in me can't help but observe a general degradation in the quality of responses as this process has gone on. Am I being unfair to think that perhaps this has proved too time-consuming, or too boring, to allow the same level of effort on each Q&A? Is it a coincidence that the priest Q&A is last?

You may accuse me of expecting too much. It's true that I have placed a lot of faith in the outcome of this process. But I don't think my expectations were too high. By it's very nature, this Q&A event is a significant and exceptional occurrence in Blizzard's community relations. It's not unrealistic to expect the responses to be comprehensive. And while I must admit that in my wildest dreams I imaged a long list of promises, in reality all I ever expected was an acknowledgement of concerns and a stake in the ground from Blizzard on how they saw them. Yes, we know you are worried about this, but don't be — or, I'm sorry, that's not something we intend to address right now. Disappointment is better than apoplexy.

But here we are. Merlot is nothing if not a pragmatist! We have some straws to clutch at, and some deep brooding to undertake. Let's look at what they did say, before grouching briefly about what they didn't say, and finally considering where we go from here.

I'm not going to reprint the Q&A in full here, but if you haven't seen it yet and want to, here's the full horror courtesy of mmo champion.

Highlights
There aren't many of them, but I'll start with the most revealing and relevant question and spend a little time on that. I've skipped some pvp questions, don't hate me.

Q. Since a lot of damage a shadow priest does builds with damage-over-time spells, are you concerned about them being well rounded enough to do adequate damage in shorter pve encounters, 5-player dungeons, or in the arena?
I don't think anybody gives a shit about shadow's 5-player damage, or even 'shorter' pve encounters. I'm sure there are pvp concerns, but in pve the big issue is target-switching and burn phases. Given Blizzard's recent concerted efforts to tone down burst damage in pvp, I don't think anybody expected a lot of promises, but the big hope was for some cooldowns or executes. These hopes weren't even acknowledged. What we did get was some recognition from Ghostcrawler that our talents are primarily focused around long-term damage via dots:

"Many [talents] say basically "while your dots are ticking". This means in the situations where the dots can't tick (say those very short pve fights, or sometimes in pvp) you are doubly punished since now those talents aren't pulling their weight. The shadow tree could benefit from more talents that affect all damage and not just the dots."

This is confusing two issues — while it's true that a lot of out talents boost the power of dots, and are therefore wasted when we don't apply those dots, it's not true that "many" shadow talents "say basically 'while your dots are ticking'". One or two at most. Our only significant glyph also says this, but that's a different (unanswered) issue. But the point is taken — any class that is designed about dots is going to be gimped if they don't apply them. That's a given, isn't it?

The unsatisfactory but straw-like implication of GC's words is that we may find shadow word: death, mind blast and mind flay getting a few small buffs here and there to compensate. I'll reserve judgement on the final execution, but already I see problems with this approach. How do you buff spells which are a part of a class's single-target damage repertoire without inadvertently increasing their overall damage? And even when you do, how is this a good solution when the class happily acknowledges that dots comprise the core of its damage potential?

I'm afraid GC completely fluffed this answer, which is a shame given that it was his opening gambit. Already, shadow priests the world over are shuddering.

Q. Are developers happy with the functionality of dispersion and is it considered to be an adequately valuable final talent in the shadow tree?
Short answer: yes. This isn't an issue for raiding shadow priests, we've come to terms with it and moved on.

Q. Would you consider removing the cast time for mind blast to make it a more desirable direct-damage spell given that it already has a cooldown?
I'm very annoyed that this question even made it into the final cut. Apart from the fact that I didn't notice hundreds of priests jumping up and down for it (and don't consider it an issue myself), this is simply a proffered solution to the first question — in other words, this is very sloppy work Blizzard. You answered this over all the other questions we had? You wrote two long paragraphs on why you won't remove a spell's cooldown instead of telling us why we won't scale properly with haste?

Q. As many players report that vampiric embrace and vampiric touch lack viability in pvp settings and vampiric enbrace tends to generate too much threat in pve settings, are there any plans you can share to improve the functionality of these spells?
OMG. Every time I read this question I think I'm having an aneurism. Where are all the priests who think their HARDEST HITTING DOT lacks viability? Or the MORONS who can't handle ve's threat? SHOW ME.

Quite rightly GC told these fictitious priests to fuck off. What a waste of a question.

Q. How about increasing the range of mind flay?
No, you've got a glyph, piss off.

Q. Shadow word: death was once a spell that priests used frequently in pve, but has basically dropped off their bar. Are there any plans to improve this?
Well apparently, they think we have enough spells to use so don't want to "necessarily" go back to us using it on cooldown. GC goes on to talk about how they might consider toning down the backlash, which is categorically not something any shadow priest gives a flying fuck about. We don't use it more because it's an insignificant increase on our dps, not because it causes damage. This question, like so many others in this thread, should have been better phrased.

Q. Have you considered providing a talent to increase the duration of shadowfiend as a mana regeneration mechanic for longer boss fights?
You mean instead of a talent to lower the cooldown of shadowfiend? Like veiled shadows? Who came up with these questions?

Black hole
This Q&A is arguably more revealing by what Blizzard didn't address. As mentioned already, when talking about shadow's burst potential, they conveniently side-stepped cooldowns and executes altogether, something which many players called for in the threads.

The issues behind many of these questions are either misunderstood or overlooked. Take mind flay as a case in point. We asked about its range because we don't want to have to give up a valuable glyph slot just to achieve parity of spell range with other casters. So to dismiss the concern because there's a glyph to fix it is missing the point entirely.
Glyphs too were a major concern to many contributors but the topic was skipped.

Pain and suffering bug? Ignored. Out-of-mana regen? Ignored. And the biggest concern of all shadow priests in those two long lists of questions — haste scaling — ignored. Some of my issues could, just, be passed off as marginal; there is no excuse for skipping this.

Shady Pines here we come
I fear this Q&A will leave many shadow priests felling rather insecure and uncertain about their future raiding careers. It didn't address many significant issues, and those it did touch on were not answered to any great satisfaction.

I'll probably continue to melt faces, not only because I've got a blog to maintain, but because my guild still finds the misery debuff and replenishment of some use. But that won't last forever. More and more of the casters are hit capped, and with replenishment so readily available, it may well prove easier to switch a hunter to survival than carry me into the Coliseum.

This is the point where you tell me I'm over-reacting. surely, it's not as bad as I think it is?

P Day

It's live. Go read. Breathe. Come back tomorrow, when I'll have gathered the will to respond.

Edit: you know what, it's not going to take me a day to write this. There's not that much to say. Give me a couple of hours to channel my fury into diatribe.

Groundhog day, replenishment style

I'm not a fan of replenishment. I have not been shy in sharing this. I think it's a clumsy, unsophisticated mechanic, the proverbial nut-cracking sledgehammer. It doesn't fit with the nature of any class that provides it, its benefits are wildly unbalanced across a raid group and it scales crazily. Replenishment is the elephant in the room, a significant cause of Blizzard's mana regeneration headache and the single biggest reason why they are apparently struggling so much to solve it.

So it comes as no surprise that it's getting nerfed in patch 3.2, though it does provoke from me much tutting, eye rolling and exasperated sighs.

The nerf — reducing the effect from .25 per cent of maximum mana per second to 1 per cent of maximum mana over 5 seconds — represents a 20 per cent reduction in the buff's effectiveness. I'm not sure how the shift from a standard rolling return to a ticking 5-second return will be enacted. Right now, replenishment lasts 15 seconds. Does this mean it now lasts only 5? That could mean a bigger nerf than the numbers imply. For now, I'm going to assume best case scenario which says over the course of an average fight mana users simply receive 20 per cent less mana from replenishment than they do now.

However the nerf manifests, the effect is impossible to quantify on paper. Replenishment depends on many factors, not limited to the number of sources in a raid, the number of mana users, the maximum mana pools of targets, the remaining mana of targets, and the effectiveness of the sources in maintaining the buff. But we can see clearly how this nerf affects all mana users equally. Holy priest? 20 per cent less. Arcane mage? 20 per cent less. Enhancement shaman? 20 per cent less.

Can we then assume that Blizzard considers all mana users to have it too good right now?

Well, actually, no we can't. Blizzard has only shown any real concern (to date) about three groups of players — healing priests, healing druids and healing paladins. As far as this nerf goes, the rest of us are just collateral damage. The joke is, this change will probably hurt those it is targeted at least of all because they have the highest base mana regeneration to start with and have probably prioritised intellect much more than anyone else.

In a warped, twisted way, Blizzard are right to target replenishment — again. It IS a problem, just not in the way they think. Replenishment IS too powerful — but only for SOME players. They have created a monster. The only way to fix this problem is to scrap it and start again. Get rid of replenishment, manage each class on its own terms and in its own ways, then you can be confident of actually achieving your goals, not just condemning yourself to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Target healing priests, cast slap

The 3.2 patch notes are out and notable by their rather blunt and brief address of priests:

• Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%.
• Penance: Cooldown increased to 12 seconds, up from 10 seconds.
• Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target's armor.

Ouch and ouch. The third bullet may or may not be awful, someone put me out of my misery.

And that's it? Shadow? Not even on the radar.

A new priest levelling spec: 10-40

You know when you've been drinking and it's late and you're really, really tired and just want to get home and you wish you could teleport to your bed instead of struggling with the Tube or night bus or taxi or interminable walk?

Your first 39 levels of life as a shadow priest are exactly like that. It's painful and boring and you just want it to end NOW but stick with it, because the comforting, snug warmth of your shadowform bed is mere moments away.

Like your drunken stumble home, there's no one right way to go. But levelling, as I have discovered, is painful enough as it is without hamstringing yourself with a stupid build. So we're going to have a stab at picking an optimum route all the same. Think of me as that chilli kebab you snatched from the takeaway to sustain you on the journey, and try not to think about the indigestion it will give you.

This isn't a fun process. Most of these talents are tuned for raiding and balanced around shadowform's damage modifier (hold onto that, it does get easier). The absence of many shining talents at least means there's plenty of wiggle room in the build. I'd encourage you to deviate in both the order and placement of points wherever you think it would work better for your play style.

Let me know how it works out for you :)

Levels 10-12 — spirit tap
Since the nerf to base mana regeneration, this talent has lost a lot of its lustre (two thirds, to be precise) but it's still one of the strongest early talents for levelling. If managed correctly it will help reduce downtime and keep you killing for longer. ('Managed' means ensuring you're out of the five-second rule when your target dies. It's a very, very boring way to level and we're going to break this rule as soon as we can. Around level 30 or so...)

Please under no circumstances put points in improved spirit tap — at least until you get shadowform and even then not unless you are running dps in instances a lot (I still wouldn't advise it). The buff from improved spirit tap, which is very weak to start with, can only be triggered by a mind blast crit (at least for now) — which is in itself a very rare occurrence at your level (5 or 6 per cent crit, am I right?) — and is overwritten by spirit tap anyway. This is a Talent You Should Not Take (TYSNT).

Levels 13-14 — shadow power
This is a beautiful talent that is almost utterly worthless to new priests, but you're going to spend points here because the alternative is worse.

Level 15-17 — shadow focus
Half your spells at this level are still holy, and this only affects shadow spells. Nonetheless, improving your chance to hit with spells is important for efficiency and there's nothing worse than wasting mind blast's cooldown for no reason.

Levels 18-20 — shadow power
We're going to go back and fill out this talent in the absence of anything better. Are you spotting a pattern here?

Levels 21-24
This is where it gets really miserable. You need to spend four points to get to tier four and have a plethora of mediocre talents to choose between. You can discount shadow affinity (a TYSNT) and take your pick between the rest of the shite:

• Improved shadow word: pain (2) — an abysmal talent even when raiding, two points here will boost your pain ticks by about two damage. Remember, your wand hits harder...
• Improved psychic scream (2) — it helps speed up fear-flay grinding (I'll explain in a minute) and it's a pre-requisite for silence, but neither of those things are strong arguments for blowing points here
• Improved mind blast (5) — reducing the cooldown on a spell that you probably only use once per mob is a silly thing to do, surely?
• Mind flay (1) — the iconic shadow priest spell, but a stiff breeze causes more damage than rank one, the base range is gimped, and until you get pushback protection from improved shadow form, there's no use spamming this point-blank

I personally went 2/2 in improved shadow word: pain and 1/1 in mind flay on the basis that I'd have to get them some time. Then 1/2 in improved psychic scream for fear-flay, but not feeling particularly happy about it.

Levels 25-26 — shadow reach
You are probably still pulling with holy fire at this level, which is not affected by this talent. But it does mean you can make more use of mind flay's snare as the mob runs towards you. Marginally useful.

Leve 27 — improved psychic scream
We're going to finish this off to ensure fear is off cooldown pretty much every mob we take on. This is essential for effective fear-flay grinding, which I'll stop hinting at cryptically and now explain.

So — line up your mob, cast your opening nukes, and dot the mob as it runs at you. If you move back while dotting, you should have time to get in one mind flay before it reaches melee range. Now you cast fear and mind flay it while it flits around. (Fear-flay, see? Well I didn't promise anything complicated.)

You rely on the range (with shadow reach) and snare of mind flay to keep the mob under contol. You can almost always find room to do this outdoors, and mind flay usually keeps the feared mob in range. You've got to be prepared for an add or two occasionally, but the original mob is usually dead by the time the add arrives, so no big deal. In fact, the biggest problem with this method is fear breaking early, but it's pretty reliable until later levels (Outland, as I recall, although fears now apparently break after less damage — I'll do some intrepid testing for you another time!)

You learn rank 2 of mind flay at level 28, and from that point the spell gets much easier to use — especially if combined with the glyph of shadow word: pain (more on glyphs in a later post.) This method is more mana-efficient than shielding, but then you are more likely to be casting when the mob dies, wasting a good chunk of spirit tap. I'd say the disadvantages pretty much balance out. This method wins for me because it's more interactive, and killing with mind flay is a helluva lot more fun than wanding. Try it out and see what you think. If you really don't think it's for you, those points in improved psychic scream would be better spent elsewhere. Improved mind blast, perhaps.

Levels 28-29 — shadow weaving
Oh god, is this the best we can do? Clearly I think the answer is yes, otherwise I wouldn't be recommending this talent next. But it's really not a good talent at this stage of your levelling — again, it's something that will be much more useful later on.

Veiled shadows, in case you haven't already realised, is a TYSNT.

Level 30 — vampiric embrace
Levels 31-32 — improved vampiric embrace
Continuing our theme of picking up talents that will be much more useful later on, these really will be points well spent eventually. In shadowform, you can pretty much take a beating one-on-one without loosing health. If you want, you can defer picking them up for a few levels, but the alternatives aren't that much better.

Level 33 — silence
I admit, silence is a situational spell, but it comes in handy while levelling to reduce incoming damage and pull ranged mobs into fear range. If you didn't take improved psychic scream, take your pick where to throw this point.

Level 34 — shadow weaving
We need to spend one more point to move up a tier and finishing this talent off feels as good a place as any to start. If you move between mobs quickly enough, you can ensure this buff is maintained at a full 10 per cent for as long as your mana holds out.

Levels 35-37 — improved devouring plague
This talent boosts devouring plague's tick value way above shadow word: pain — these are points well spent, even at this level. The mana cost and cooldown mean you probably won't be using it on every mob, but it's great for tougher mobs and to set-and-forget on adds.

Levels 38-39 — mind melt
The increased crit chance to mind blast and mind flay are pretty useful but we're really interested in this talent for the boost to dot crits — yet another thing we won't have till shadow form. But look, we're so very, very close now.

Level 40 — shadowform
Thank fuck for that. Your talents should now look something like this. It's been a complete pain in the arse, hasn't it? Was it this hard the first time round?

Don't worry, it's all over now. From here on in it's a complete joy :)

I'm going to take a break from talents to talk a bit about early gear choices, spells and glyphs next. We'll come back to talents and finish up levelling after that.

Is threat dead?

While I flex my fingers and prepare to launch into an epic wail about how inexplicably painful priest levelling is now, I thought it was worth a quick detour back to the post about shadow's floating talent points.

After much gnashing of teeth, I dropped two points into improved shadow form and one in veiled shadows.

I was a little concerned about dropping shadow affinity altogether, but threat has not been a problem. Threat, in fact, is a non-issue. I used fade maybe twice a raid before the respec, and that's still true today. I am blessed with good tanks to be fair, who are generally better geared, but I doubt skill or gear alone could compensate for such a big chunk of threat. I can happily wail on a mis-marked off-tank target and still not pull agro.

I keep Omen switched on for the sake of the tanks, but I don't need it anymore. I don't even know if it's working.

I see melee taking hateful strikes on patch and guess that extra 30 per cent still counts for something, but for me, threat is no longer a consideration.

That point in veiled shadows is a complete waste, by the way. I'm certainly glad I didn't spec out of inner focus to max it out. To be fair, I'm not raiding Ulduar yet. Honestly, I'm not that motivated, and anyway I'm failing to put out the kind of dps my guild is looking for. But as far as pre-Ulduar raid content goes, I don't need a reduced cooldown on my shadowfiend. I've only ever had mana issues once, and that was from a really unlucky string of detonate mana targetting on Kel'Thuzad.

Now the question is, can I find a better home for that lone point?