Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Shadow Focus and Misery

This may be a bit of a "duh," but spell hit is one of the first stats you should stack at 80. It doesn't matter how hard your spells can hit or how often they crit if they're missing half the time.

Shadow priests get two talents that increase hit:
Misery at rank 3, which increases your chance to hit with spells by 3%, and
Shadow Focus at rank 3, which is another 3%.

Here are the numbers for how much hit you'll need:
  • 289.55 hit is the cap with 6 points between Shadow Focus and Misery
  • 314.78 hit before you can go to 5 points
  • 341.02 hit before you can go to 4 points
  • 367.25 hit before you can go to 3 points
  • 393.48 hit before you can go to 2 points
  • 419.71 hit before you can go to 1 point
  • 445.94 hit before you can go to 0 points
(taken from Shadowpriest.com)

Back in Burning Crusade, it was okay to add more hit on your gear then take points out of Shadow Focus to put into other talents. Now that we're in WotLK, it's just dumbtarded to take points out of either of these skills.

Shadow Focus, in addition to the hit, reduces the mana cost of your Shadow spells by 6%. I guess if you've got nearly 400 hit, and like a bazillion mana that you can afford to throw around, feel free to drop Shadow Focus and pick up, I dunno, like Improved Psychic Scream and Silence.

Misery... don't throw this out. Even if you do have the 446 hit (which I don't know WHY you would stack that much hit.) Misery is a debuff that goes on the mob that you're fighting, which not only helps you, but every other caster in the raid. But here's the really great part about Misery: it
increases the damage of your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by an amount equal to 15% of your spell power. And what, you hate when your spells hit for a buttload or something?

Because of the wonderful bonuses that come along with the hit of Shadow Focus and Misery, there is really NO point to go for more than the 290 hit cap in order to put points anywhere else.

My guess is that shadow priests in BC were complaining about how Shadow Focus (which used to be,.. what was it, 8%? and that was our hit talent) was kind of useless compared to other talents that we could take to up our DPS, and other casters were complaining that SPriests got SO much free hit just out of talents.
I honestly had no problem with the way it was in BC, it made getting hit capped easier than hearthing. I was OVER hit capped without even trying, which meant I was free to stack as much spell power as humanly possible.
Now, in WotLK, I'm still a few points short of the hit cap, and I'm having a bit of trouble managing to get the hit without sacrificing too much crit or spell power.

Though, I am hitting like a semi-truck now, compared to the motorbike that I was back in BC. So out of BC hit talents vs. WotLK hit talents, I'd take WotLK any day.

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