Shadow Priest Buffs! Simple Math To Work Out How Good Your Gear Is!
September 13, 2009
Taking a break from my more general style of blogging for some proper Priest blogging on this Priest blog… Go figure!
First up, PTR buffs for Shadow Priests!
Earlier this week we got a new PTR build and an updated set of patch notes that contained this little gem:
- Improved Spirit Tap: Mind Flay periodic critical strikes now have a 50% chance to trigger this talent. (No change to the mana regen effects.)
- Twisted Faith now grants spell power equal to 4/8/12/16/20% of spirit, up from 2/4/6/8/10%.
Let’s check out the first change to Imp’ Spirit Tap. Looking at this change first off most people would say “Why?” but when I see it I say “Infinite mana due to 100% uptime of IST”. This is also a minor spirit scaling boost as IST gives us 10% more spirit while the buff is us as well as +33% mana regen rate for the 8 seconds. This when stacking with the new Twisted Faith, that I will get onto soon, and Glyph of Shadow will mean more spell power gain as well so it also boosts the DPS value of the talent. Overall it’s a nice change but it’s not going to fix our single target DPS issues at all.
Now the Twisted Faith change is another patch up job. Out of all the caster classes Shadow Priests scale the worst with spirit despite Priests being THE spirit class. Funny huh? Anyway this is a nice little buff again but is not going to change much, it’s a nice spell power boost but our DPS problems are coming from not being to utilise the haste on our gear properly due to only having two spells that scale with haste properly. End of the day any buff is a welcome one and maybe these two changes will give the developers the confidence to give our haste problem a good old fixing soon… We can live in hope I guess.
Now, if you want some numbers to look at I had a scribble down and based off a Shadow Priest with 800 spirit and came up with the following:
Today:
Glyph of Shadow ~ 95% uptime
IST ~ 45% uptime
IST + TF + Glyph of Shadow = 163 spell power
3.2.2:
Glyph of Shadow ~ 95% uptime
IST ~ 95% uptime
IST + TF + Glyph of Shadow = 258 spell power
3.2.2 changes:
Gained 95 spell power on an 800 raid buffed priest
Spell Power per Spirit (with raid buffs) increased from .2038 to .3225
Conclusion: Spirit is still bad but now not quite as bad by a small amount!
How good are these epics, really?
Next up I am going to go over some basic gear based stuff. I use an application called SimCraft (http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/) to run DPS simulations for my gear, now the kicker here is you can use simcraft to help you with gear by getting the “Value” of a stat.
Scaling factors according to SimCraft:
Priest_T9_13_00_58 Int=0.35 Spi=0.39 SP=1.56 Hit=2.39 Crit=1.12 Haste=1.07
In order to compare the stats to each other we use Spell power as the base. This results in the following PP (Pseudo power or spell power equivalent) values:
1 SP = 1
1 Crit = 0.72
1 Haste = 0.68
1 Spi = 0.25
1 Int = 0.22
1 Hit = 1.53
Now a lot of gear has gem sockets and for a fair comparison we include the best gem for that slot into the overall item value calculation.
Runed Cardinal Ruby (23 SP) – 23PP
Potent Ametrine (12SP + 10CRIT) – 19.2PP (This means it is worth going for a socketbonus if it is > 4 SP, > 6 crit/haste Rating)
Purified Dreadstone (12SP + 10SPI) – 14.5PP (for the Metagem, This means it is worth going for a socketbonus if it is > 9SP)
Now to use these values to determine how good a bit of gear is we can do a simple calculation!
SPELLPOWER+CRIT*0.72+HASTE*0.68+INT*0.22+SPIRIT*0.25+GEMPP+HIT*1.53
Ok so not so that does not look so simple but you just have to break it down. To show you what I mean I have two sets of bracers here:
Let’s take the Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers for our first example.
Looking at the bracers we can see the stats so we do each part of the calculation:
SPELLPOWER – 80 = 80
CRIT*0.72 – 42*0.72 = 30.24
HASTE*0.68 – 50*0.68 = 34
INT*0.22 – 58*0.22 = 12.76
GEMPP – 23 (Runed in Blue socket as bonus is <9 spellpower and no socket bonus)
So we add up the totals and end up with:
80+30.24+34+12.76+23 = 180PP
So we can see that the Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers have a item value of 180PP. These happen to be best in slot for shadow priests and are Tailor made and BoE so they are a MUST have for any raiding shadow priest.
Now they are only best in slot if you are hit capped, as hit is only useful until you are at 288.55 hit or 289 for simplicity. Let’s take our second example the Bindings of Dark Essence.
SPELLPOWER – 91 = 91
CRIT*0.72 – 57*0.72 = 41.04
INT*0.22 – 65*0.22 = 14.3
GEMPP – 19.2+5 = 24.2PP (Socket is yellow with a 5SP bonus so we can use a Potent Ametrine and we get the 5PP bonus that we add on to the gem PP)
HIT*1.53 – 43*1.53 = 65.79
Now the way to look at gear with hit on is to give it two values, one with hit and one without.
91+41.04+14.3+24.2 = 170.54
If the hit from this item is not used then the item has a value of 170.54PP but we have 65.79PP’s worth of hit on the item. Now if you use the hit from the bracers:
91+41.04+14.3+24.2+65.79 = 236.33
So those bracers are best in slot if you can use all 43 of the hit on them but if you don’t need the hit then the Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers win best in slot position.
Now the beauty of this math is… you can put it into a WoW Addon called “Pawn” that will give you the Item Value in PP on the tooltips of your items, my only problems with Pawn is that it does not support epic gems yet and can bug out with enchants and epic gems. I keep a notepad next to my computer for quickly rushing this sort of math on items I have no clue about.
Hopefully this will give you guys some insight into how to make intelligent gear choises by yourself without having to rely on someone else making a “Best Gear” thread on the WoW forums.
Big shoutout to Shadowpreist.com that gave me tonnes of info into the scaling numbers and how to get SimCraft running properly!
MUUUUUSIC TIME!
First up something totally awesome:
Bloodhound Gang – Mope
Next up something Epic from the team behind “The Guild”
The Guild – Do You Wanna Date My Avatar
Guess what’s been on my Spotify Playlist for the last few days?
Bloodhound Gang – It’s Tricky
And last up is something a theme tune from one of my favourite TV series of all time.
BBC Wales Orchestra – Doctor Who Theme 2008
Until next time!
/Lyn
Hey, would you like me to open the floor? Sure? Ok… LOL JK I DESPAWN NOW
September 7, 2009
After a… eventful evening playing with the instance server boss (on hardmode he hits your sanity for 99%) we finally got into Trial10 to play with Anub’arak.
Start of the reset there was a bug with the instance that made the floor respawn after a soft reset if you left only Anub’arak alive in your instance save, they hotfixed it. Wait, no that didn’t work lets hotfix again. Almost got it now, lets hotfix the last two hotfixes so they work. Ok that will do. The ending result is that you have to open up your instance, activate the bugged floor event and all NPCs just despawn. Then leave for 30 mins, or as we got told 20 so we had to wait an hour in total, then go back in and pray it works now all the NPCs are back. It worked for us so INSTANCE SERVER BOSS DOWN ON HARDMODE!
Onto Anub’arak. We had 30 attempts left from the last night of playing and we tweaked our tactics but kept loosing people in phase 3 for silly reasons. Attempt 25 at 18% SOMEBODY taunted the boss and wiped us causing us to lose our bonus loot from the tribute chest. Three tries later and he died and all I could do was sigh.
The fight itself is really well done, you have to really push DPS and healing with only two healers and two tanks that both take a load of damage but we should have got it on Friday night but phase three is really hard to control properly with our level of gear. You have a healing (Good luck if you don’t have a 50% MS effect in your raid) Anub’arak that does 20% of your current HP in damage every second and four to six adds on your offtank as well as a frost debuff that ticks for 4000-6000 damage (Good luck without Frost Res’ Aura Mastery) all going on at the same time, if you get one thing go wrong, a bad avoidance chain on the maintank a high frost crap tick its game over.
Our final setup for Anub’arak was DK Tank, Warrior Tank, Resto Shaman, Holy Paladin, Shadow Priest, Moonkin, Warlock, Mage, Blood DK and Arms warrior.
I could not FRAPS it like I wanted to due to PSU issues (my 12v rail is really screwed…) and only being able to have 1HDD plugged in without my PSU saying no and crashing me. So perhaps next time I can capture the fight.
In other Raid news: Beasts of Northrend 25man is hard!
And Phase Two have got a Fresh New Drake!
Music Time!
First off lets go classic (and live):
ACDC – Back in Black is one of those tunes that everyone knows and loves, more so if you loved the Ironman movie like I did.
Stowers & Young – Ocean (Sly One vs Jurrane Remix) is just one of those random tracks that popped up in my playlist recently that I fell in love with so I figured I should share it.
Last up something funny:
The Lonely Island – I’m On A Boat (ft. T-Pain)
Til next time!
/Lyn
Why I want a Blood Spec Shadow Priest and Trial10 Hardmode Impressions
September 5, 2009
In Phase Two we have been discussing lately what we need in our raids to make them work smoother or what setup we should take for progression and the same phase has been thrown around at every corner and it pops up like this.
“Ok so we have a balanced setup here but we have a spare spot for another DPSer.”
“Just throw another blood ArP hero in there.”
This got me thinking, why was blizzard so short sighted as to let melee classes scale so well with single stats such as ArP and have amazing survivability with cooldowns such as Anti Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude while classes like mages need a whole number of stats to work at a good level and at the same time only have one five minute ‘oh crap’ button and lower base HP than any other class.
Thankfully as a faithful follower of the shadows on my priest I am blessed with the 15% less damage taken and a nice two minute cooldown 90% damage reduction ‘oh crap’ button that also gives me 30% of my mana back when I use it. But at the same time I need to balance my matrix of offensive stats to get the most out of my class and my single target DPS can go to crap if I mess with a cast or have to move due to void zones or Algalon’s big red balls. (Yay! Got a balls joke in before I got to the Trial section…)
Granted on this subject blizzard are going back and trying to fix the ability to reach the Armor Penetration cap in 3.2.2:
“The nerf to armor pen in 3.2.2 is intentional. Compared to the recent buff where we increased the value of armor rating to 125%, this nerf would take it back down to 110%. While we are still evaluating the effects of this change in the 3.2.2 build, we did want to let you know of the possibility in case you were about to spend a lot on armor pen gems.”
-Ghostcrawler @ http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19717353372&sid=1
All this will do is make some classes go back to stacking another stat and doing almost the same damage as they are now, ArP will still be a powerful stat even without being capped but I gather that the point of this nerf is to make other stats more attractive again.
In the ideal world I would be able to stack only Spell Power on my priest and do OMGWTFDPS but I can’t. I need a certain level of critical strike chance and haste or I end up clipping spells or having 0.2 second gaps where I cannot do anything and that dead time stacks up and is a DPS loss compared to my Blood Hero friends they just have another button to push such as Death Coil when they can’t C-C-C-CLEAAAAAAVE their way into whatever happens to be in the way.
Maybe the new nuke Shadow Priests are getting in Cataclysm will fix all these problems but I don’t want to be a affliction warlock 2.0 that DoTs stuff up and then nukes with one spell until it’s time to renew dots. I enjoy the rather complex priority system that a SP has and it makes me feel personally good when I pull off DPS comparable to mages and hunters with my little ‘hybrid’ Elfling.
TLDR: Nerf Deathknights in PvE more please and make melee classes harder to play at a top level.
/End Rant
/Start PvE Blabble
Talking of balls jokes… This week saw week five of Patch 3.2 – Call of the Argent Filler Content and that means… Anub’Arak!
After storming into Trial of the Crusader 25man normal on Wednesday and face rolling our way up to Anub’ and he took us two tries. First we used my tactical advice “Screw looking it up, let’s just zerg it” (Note: Tactic not advised, can lead to dead tanks and wtf moments on vent.) This allowed us a chance to get the idea for the fight and give Narcus another repair bill. Second try we killed it with no real problems and I got myself a new whacky stick! Yay I now have a mace with the same stats as the legendary, with no healing proc granted but meh… Only thing I need to worry about now is getting back up the EPGP standings in time to pick up the Reign of the Dead trinket when it drops.
That night’s two hardmode tries was short lived due to server lag so we went to poke Algalon and out offtank’s net died at 14 mins left on the clock. BOOO Lithuanian internet connections!
I can’t comment firsthand how the hardmode progression went on Thursday due to sitting a raid out but from what I was listening to on vent it sounded like some progress was made on how to deal with the worms but I fear Icehowl will still be the major PWNT to this encounter, if the tanks can live through impale that is…
Friday is for FREEEPICSDAY or 10man instances as some call them. We started the night pulling a one shot on the normal 10player mode of Trial as expected for a guild in Ulduar25 hardmode(ish) and Trial25 Normal mode gear. Onto the hardmodes!
Beasts of Northrend
I found myself able to play this fight pretty well straight off, due to just listening to vent from the previous night, had a few wipes due to Icehowl’s iPwnt splatter charge 9001 ability but otherwise it went nice. The DPS challenge for the fight seemed to fit our gearing perfectly. Phase three was close but he went frenzy while stunned and died before the stun wore off so that didn’t count as failing! Apparently the timers on 25players are stricter and that sounds good to me as it might be a proper challenge and not a “gimmick” like so many Ulduar hardmodes. Oh and I finally took the plunge and sorted my hit gear so I can use a run speed enchant on my booties. Going to slap anyone that says they don’t need it and then gets iPwnt 9001’d on Sunday/Tuesdays raids.
Jaraxxus
This encounter has a few changes that I like. First of all add portals/volcanoes being attackable is a genius mechanic that means if you fall behind on portal DPSing you get punished with more adds to tank so you have to keep your raiders on their toes. I noticed people taking a lot of spike damage while mistresses where running around (woops we didn’t DPS the first portal until 3 adds spawned…) but otherwise the same old encounter. Difficulty wise it’s a lot easier than beasts, more so on 25man if what I have been told is true.
Faction Champions
Well yea… we got a rather easy setup but still as long as you have good DPS and good crowd control for the first 30 seconds you can gib one of them with a bloodlust up and then as long as you keep melee off me… erm… clothies and healers it’s all easy downhill coasting with a mortal strike debuff up you can out DPS their heals with little problems.
Twin Balls Jokes
This was very enjoyable as well, not much has changed since normal mode besides the shield being a bitch to get down in time if it was on the light as swapping to dark then moving into range took too long we found. Only other things I noticed was that touching the balls of the wrong colour is only gay if there is a white one on top of the dark one at the same time… and you can get a nasty debuff that requires you to swap colours for a moment to dispel it. I think this debuff can stack and in some cases was stacking on the tanks but they didn’t swap for it from what I saw.
Anub’Arak
This one we have not killed quite yet (GG 10% wipe). Our setup for this is:
Main Tank, Add Tank, MT Healer, Raid Healer, DPSx6 (Shadow Priest, Warlock, Mage, EleShaman, Moonkin, Arms Warrior)
Our tactic outline is this:
Pull
Shoot down 2 Permafrosts
DPS Anub to 90%
Adds Spawn
Warrior and Warlock kill off adds
Anub is on about 70%
Second Wave of adds spawn, off tanked until phase 2
Bring Anub to 55-57%
Phase Two (90 Seconds)
Kill off two adds
Kill off scarabs asap
Bring down the other permafrosts during this phase
Anub pops back up after I can’t remember how long
DPS to 50%
Adds spawn, DPS break off to kill them
DPS rejoin on Anub who is at about 40% here
Adds spawn around the time Anub hits 30%
Phase 3 starts should kill off adds here but we didn’t (We will next time we go), then Bloodlust
Focus fire on Anub with lust until he dies.
We kept screwing with the idea of tricks to keep the add tank alive with 4 adds on him and it just didn’t work or something ended up dying for whatever reason. Going to be going back this reset with 30 tries left on our clock and hopefully get him before the 24 tries left marker so we get a flashy achievement. Also going to try to sort out my rig for frapsing this one so I may put out a mooovie of it later!
Last but not least: MUSIC!
Just one flic today as this post is already rather long but I have been a fan of Placebo for ages and love the Sleeping With Ghosts album. This is the first track Bulletproof Cupid.
Also the album artwork is somewhat awesome I think!
/Lyn
Welcome to my (first? only?) contributor!
September 5, 2009
A big welcome to my first, and possibly only contributor (if I can’t persuade Nithel to write about disc): Lynessa!
Lyn plays one of the sub races, i.e. a belf, on Defias Brotherhood horde, and is a rather superb shadow priest in one of the leading guilds over there, <Phase Two>, so hopefully we’ll be hearing more from the dark side (both in faction, and spec) very soon!
