Less miserable

In the latest build, misery has been reworked to include a little bit of scaling for us:

Misery (Tier 8 ) changed to: our Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay and Vampiric Touch spells also increase the chance for harmful spells to hit by 1/2/3%, and increases the damage of your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by an amount equal to 5/10/15% of your spell power.

See, that wasn't so hard was it?

On a more sombre note, I'm sad to announce for elemental shaman the knock back range of thunderstorm has been slashed from 20 yards to five. Can't say I didn't see it coming but I was really enjoying those videos. Let's have a moment of silence for shaman please.

Misery and spell hit in patch 3

Edit: a couple of people have told me that spell hit mechanics will be changing in Wrath, along with the talents. If that's the case, most of this post is pointless and you can skip to the next blog in your reader. But if you know what's happening and when, please let me know!

Spell hit talents are being standardised across casters in Wrath of the Lich King, and for some, this means quite a big nerf. Arcane mages, affliction warlocks, elemental shaman and shadow priests are the biggest losers as they are the classes who currently benefit the most from spell hit talents.

These changes will likely land ahead of the expansion, with patch 3, so any caster who intends on continuing to raid may need to check their gear and enchants to ensure they are as close to the hit cap on bosses as possible.

For shadow priests, the shadow focus talent is being changed to provide 1/2/3% chance to hit, down from 2/4/6/8/10%. Misery is being reworked to provide 1/2/3% chance to hit against the target, instead of 1/2/3/4/5% additional magic damage. Because misery is a debuff, and therefore must be applied first, we effectively have a 'soft' hit cap, as well as a 'hard' one — until you reach the 'hard' cap, your spells against higher level mobs will have a greater chance to miss until one of them lands.

The following table summaries the hit rules and the implications of patch 3 for shadow priests. This table assumes the caster is level 70, because spell hit values differ according to your level. At level 70, 12.6 spell hit rating is required to improve your chance to hit by 1%. And remember: all spells have a 1% chance to resist, regardless of all other factors. (And if you know why there's a huge gap in my post, please let me know cos it beats me!)

Spell hit	Lvl 70 mob	Lvl 71 mob	Lvl 72 mob	Lvl 73 mob
Base chance to hit	96%	95%	94%	83%
Base hit rating to cap	38	51	63	202
Hit rating with talents now	0	0	0	76
Hit rating for patch 3 soft cap	0	0	0	126
Hit rating for patch 3 hard cap	0	13	26	164

As you can see, for raid trash, this won't make much difference, but for bosses the gap we will have to make up is considerable.

The good news is that you will already probably have more spell hit than you can shake a stick at. Even Merlot, with his very modest raiding career, has enough to spec only 4/5 in shadow focus and still be capped. But if you find yourself significantly short of hit come the patch, there are a few options open to you.

The most obvious way to bridge the gap is via gems, and the most efficient and economic way is via yellow ones — great golden draenite, great dawnstone and great lionseye, depending on your budget. I suspect the price of these gems will soar when the patch hits, so my advice is to snap them up now.

If you're feeling flush, you could jump for purple gems instead — specifically, glowing shadow draenite, glowing nightseye and glowing tanzanite. If you are replacing pure damage gems to get your hit up, these will enable you to save a few more spell damage. But it's not a lot, and you'll need twice as many gems for roughly double the cost of the yellow gems.

If you had the foresight to stockpile your spell hit gear as you progressed, you could also switch back to it. Only you can evaluate if that would be better or worse for your damage than re-gemming. If you are scryer, you can pick up the bloodgem and swap it out for another trinket. Compared to the icon of the silver crescent, for example, the loss in damage is roughly equal to re-gemming, but much much cheaper. There are a few other rep rewards out there with hit, plus badge gear, that you may want to look at.

One thing I won't be doing is swapping my glove enchant for spell strike (15 hit rating). Not only is this a poor trade-off for the 20 spell damage enchant when compared to gems, the materials are likely to be similar in cost to the gems if not more expensive.

So those are the options. But the question is, how much hit do we need? Misery clearly presents us with a dilemma. It is only of benefit to us as long as we remain short of the hard hit cap. But until we reach the hard hit cap, we have a reduced chance of applying it.

In Blizzard's brave new world of raid buffs and debuffs, one other class can provide the same spell hit benefit as misery — balance druids, via improved faerie fire — but you won't find many taking it, because unlike shadow priests, they have to actively cast the spell to apply the buff. It takes a global cooldown, when we don't even have to think about it. Totem of wrath, incidentally, will no longer increase spell hit. So if you thought you could avoid the Hobson's choice altogether, you were wrong. Thanks to Cdin of the awesome Gray Matter blog for putting me straight there.

You might, when patch 3 lands, choose to aim for the soft cap first, depending on your current level of gear and budget. I think that would be fine. Long term, unless something changes significantly, I suspect shadow priests will end up gearing for the hard hit cap while retaining the talent. Why? Because it benefits the raid. Other casters will be able to leave their hit deliberately short of the cap and focus on stats that improve their damage output in other ways.

It's a gamble for the raid though. What if your shadow priest can't make it? What if they die in a fight? What if your focus is split over two mobs? Perhaps, ultimately, all casters will decide it's safer to aim for the hard hit cap, at which point this talent becomes obsolete. There's a risk, in fact, that shadow priests will be dropped as raids progress and pick up better gear. Once again, scaling rears its ugly head.

From racials to faiths

Blogs are like dinner parties, forums are like biker bars. (Bear with me, there's a point to this eventually.)

A blog is like a meal with your mates, warm and cosy and satisfying and unhurried. You talk about sex, politics and religion in the same breath, you eat enough to kill a small horse, and you always leave feeling more positive about the world. But the most exciting thing you'll do is play twister and it's considered rather rude to get drunk and throw up in your host's bathroom.

Forums, like biker bars, go quiet when strangers walk in. There's broken glass on the floor, and some hairy bloke at the bar who kills anyone who looks at his chick. But everyone is completely smashed and the jukebox is awesome. It's not exactly enriching, but it's a blast.

There's a time and place for both, but these days I'm more of a dinner party kind of guy. My days of getting blind drunk and picking fights are, for the most part, a thing of the past. Which is simply a way of explaining why I hardly ever visit the class forums and nearly missed this great suggestion on priest racials.

Priest racials are those spells you get at levels 10 and 20 following simple quests. The spells differ depending on your race, hence the term racial.

They've always been rather controversial. The spells are considered by many of variable functionality and the fact that they are not available to all priests leads to the inevitable arguments about which are better. The Dwarven priest racial fear ward caused such a loud and persistent outcry that it was eventually baselined for all priests, while the human spell feedback suffers from the opposite problem — nobody wants it.

I never use my racials, I think they are both distinctly underwhelming. And to be honest, I'm not sure I would bother using any of the spells, regardless of my race, although I think some have the odd situational use.

The problem is that racial spells — priestly or otherwise — must necessarily be weak to avoid bestowing a particular advantage on a specific race. They are primarily there for flavour.

Jesinta suggests replacing priest racials with a system of faiths. It's a beautifully eloquent solution that manages to fix the balance issues while enhancing the unique role-playing facet of priests.

Under this suggestion, priests would be able to align themselves with one of several faiths (Jesinta suggests Elune/Mu'sha, Holy Light, and Forgotten Shadow). You pick up spells according to the faiths which could perhaps enhance your chosen role or help to identify you with your chosen faith. The point is, they would be available to all priests, rather like an enhancement to the talent system. This way, you would have much more freedom to make the spells unique and useful.

I love it. When can I have it?

Anothering interesting thing about this post is how it breaks my forum/blog rules. No louts stumbling around bottling people in this thread, no sir. It feels more like a wine bar than a biker bar, lots of people standing around chatting and tapping their feet to the music.

So what about you? Are you a dinner party person or a biker bar bruiser?

Koraa throws a bone

Mind flay's spell co-efficient will be boosted by roughly 30% and the spell will be able to crit, according to class designer Koraa.

This statement was made in a post on shadowpriest.com and picked up by Wow Insider last night.

Koraa also hinted at a broader review of the shadow tree but remained cautious about the extent of changes. The statement in full:

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

Hopefully we can get the new Mind Flay in the next build, but allowing it to crit involves rebuilding the spell completely, which may take some time.

The buff to mind flay's coefficient is a good starting point. A 30% increase will take it from 57% to 74%. That's still far short of other three-second cast spells, but it's a move in the right direction.

The crit component is very interesting and it will be fun to see how it plays out in testing. Crit isn't something we've worried about before. Even with a new talent to increase our crit bonus, it wasn't going to be something we stacked in Northrend. But if every tick of mind flay has the potential to crit, a la arcane missiles, the value of crit jumps massively.

[Edit: thanks MD!] Improved spirit tap suddenly looks rather overpowered, as it could easily become a de facto permanent buff with just a modest crit rating. I would expect some changes to how it works in order to balance the synergy with mind flay. If, indeed, the mind flay changes survive. I suppose if they expand improved spirit tap to cover mind flay crits it would be up practically all the time and overpowered. But there's a chance they will look at this when they review the talent tree. It would be nice for mind flay crits to proc the buff, even if it meant removing the proc from mind blast and shadow word: death.

I think it's great that someone from Blizzard is finally out there talking about shadow priests. While the development of other classes has been an ongoing process with two-way dialogue and discussion conducted on the forums and in the blogging community, the silence on priests has been conspicuous. I hope this is the start of a new and more open approach to our class's future.

That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger

I can't find one shadow priest who likes what she sees in the latest talent and spell changes. We're in danger of being buried by all the bad news. And yet, in principle, they have done nothing that I haven't asked for. This may well become a cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for, but I don't think we're at that stage yet...

To recap then, these are the highlights:

• Vampiric touch now grants replenishment to the ten players in a raid with the lowest mana. This buff regenerates 0.5% base mana every second 'while you deal damage'.
  
• Shadow weaving: we get the same effect for three talent points, but it no longer buffs the damage of other players.
  
• Misery: for three talent points, this now increases spell hit against the target by 3%.

The changes to vampiric touch are absolutely the right thing for the spell. As long as it was linked to damage done we were never going to be allowed to scale properly as a class. Wrath will be a world where no class will have the monopoly on mana regeneration and that, believe it or not, is a good thing. I'm still concerned that the improved water elemental is overpowered, but now I can stand shoulder to shoulder with hunters and paladins on an equal footing — at least, where mana is concerned. The only question mark over this spell now is how exactly it works — the wording is odd, to say the least. If we put vampiric touch on the target and did nothing else, would replenishment tick 15 times (every second for the duration) or five times (only when we deal damage)? Let's hope it's the former, otherwise we're going to end up tying ourselves in new knots trying to get the most out of this spell.

The shadow weaving nerf goes hand in hand with a similar change to improved shadow bolt, which also no longer buffs the damage of other players. Taken together, you can see that Blizzard is trying to break the co-dependency of locks and shadow priests. I don't have an issue with that, but given that this talent was nerfed from 15% a couple of patches back specifically to manage warlock damage, it seems very petty not to give us that 5% back. But at least they dropped it to three talent points, which is a marginally better investment cost for this unremarkable talent.

And now we come to the tear-jerker. Misery was a mediocre talent before, but it was unquestionably a buff for the raid; now, it's worthless. That's because the whole point of this reorganisation of buffs and debuffs was to ensure raids would not need to stack particular effects — just as now, all classes will be striving to reach their personal hit cap in Northrend. The minute they do, this talent is rendered obsolete. It also adds to our scaling issues of course, because while it might help a raid in the early stages, nobody is going to be raiding high-end instances 3% short of the hit cap. 5% was 5% though, at any level.

Before we give up hope entirely, we have to remember two things. The philosophy of this reorganisation is to ensure that no class or spec is essential for a raid. What that means in reverse is that any class or spec should be viable. We absolutely have to believe that our functionality will be improved in other ways to balance these nerfs.

And that brings us to the second thing, which is that Blizzard has said repeatedly that they are not done with the class yet. The coffin lid may be closed, but the nails are still missing. If you have a beta key, I hope you are doing everything possible to put shadow priests through their paces and provide solid evidence to Blizzard that we are simply not prepared for the brave new world of Northend.