two quick 3.1 thoughts.

First off- TIER 8.

2 piece, good.
4 piece, wtf.

Improved Mind Blast

For some reason, MMO-champion has Improved Mind Blast listed as creating Nightscape Shoulders.



If I got a level 37 green in my inventory every time I casted Mind Blast, I would be a grumpy spriest. >:[

3.1 IS MAKING ME A GIDDY SCHOOL GIRL

• Shadowform now gives the the periodic damage from your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells the ability to critically hit for 100% increased damage.
• Mind Melt now also increases the periodic critical strike chance of your Vampiric Touch, Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain spells by 3/6%.

Okay, ain't no one that can call this a nerf now. This sounds awesome.
Gonna try the PTR momentarily.

PvP Changes for 3.1

Saw these changes up on MMO-Champion:

• Psychic Horror (New Skill) - You terrify the target, causing them to tremble in horror for 3 sec and drop all weapons for 10 sec. (16% of base mana, 30 yd range, Instant cast, 1 min cooldown)
• Vampiric Touch now cause 680 damage (at Rank 5) if the effect is dispelled.
• Shadow Affinity now gives the priest 5% of his base mana when his Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch spells are dispelled.

Definitely improvements, and definitely geared towards PvP.

Psychic Horror to be a skill in and of itself means that we now have two fear effects, and the weapon drop- that is pretty significant against them warriors and DKs that always seem to tear my face off in two seconds flat.

One of the problems with shadow in PvP is that we rely on our DoTs ticking. We have little to no front end damage. And if our DoTs are dispelled, then we have nothing. So allowing the spells to do damage, and restore the mana we spent on the spell, upon dispelling- that's quite nice.


I won't be posting too much about shadow PvP in general, because I really do not PvP. And once dual specs come out, I will have a disc/holy build as my secondary spec for PvP and general healing (since our guild seems to be losing healers for various reasons.)

ugh.

I tried making a wordpress blog instead, since I felt the options here on blogspot were, I dunno, limited. That site is like trying to wrestle your way out of a mile long sheet of bubble wrap. I'm sticking here with blogspot.

PTR!

So I finally got on the PTR, and I'm messing around with some stuff.

My SP is currently 1941 (with inner fire up,) and crit is 20.5%

I'd like to put up some completely unbuffed numbers, but finding a target dummy with out a warlock putting up curse of elements or something like that is pretty impossible right now.

My DPS on a training dummies is around 2.5k. That's about the average of all the attempts I made. Sometimes there were debuffs on it from other people fighting it, sometimes there weren't. So I did about 5 attempts and took the average.

Here's what my spells are hitting for on the PTR: (all numbers are rounded

....................hit...crit..DoT Tick..DoT crit
Shadow Word: Pain................1000......1500...
Vampiric Touch...................1300......2000...
Devouring Plague....900...1400....800......****...
Mind Flay........................1300......2500...
Mind Blast.........2400...5400....................


*****I can't seem to make it crit at all. DP WHY WON'T YOU CRIT.



Here's what my spells are hitting for on live: (all numbers are rounded)

....................hit...crit..DoT Tick..DoT crit
Shadow Word: Pain................1450.......n/a...
Vampiric Touch...................1400.......n/a...
Devouring Plague..................800.......n/a...
Mind Flay........................1000......2000...
Mind Blast.........2000...4000....................


You know, looking at these numbers... in order for it to be an accurate test, I need to get on a dummy on the PTR where warlocks aren't putting up curse of elements. I swear, they put it on EVERY SINGLE dummy. even the level 60 ones they aren't fighting. Just to throw me off, I bet D:

(Changed to a weird courier thing instead of an actual table, because it was making HUUUUGE gaps in my post)

more 3.1 spriest info

From this bluuuue post:

I think Shadow priests will be in a good place. For PvP they got a much-needed tweak to Psychic Horror, but I won't spoil it here.

For PvE, I think the changes will help their scaling in the long run. I suggested in another thread that we might need to make their Shadow spells crit at 200% in order for the Shadowform change to actually be a buff. But we are fully committed to having the dots crit. The game just works better that way.

The Shadow Ulduar 4 piece set bonus is pretty sweet too.


4 piece set bonus!? OH BOY I hope it makes greater heal have an additional 10% chance to crit! Cause seriously, that would be as useful as the Naxx 4 piece set bonus.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound grumpy. I really am liking what I'm reading so far.
Psychic horror... I suck at PvP, this has been established, and maybe it's because I never spec for it. I've never had psychic horror. But for the sake of my fellow shadow priests, I really hope that we become more than a wet paper bag in PvP.

As for the shadowform changes- I am not big on math. I used to be wonderful with numbers and math and equations... anymore, I could care less. So I'm not going to sit here and calculate out the difference between the constant addition to DoT damage based on crit percentage, or the ability to just flat out crit. Instead, I'm gonna just try it out. Once I get my character copied to the PTR, I'll spend 5 minutes with my normal rotation on a target dummy on the live servers, then the same thing on the PTR. And just look at the numbers myself. I'm math saavvy enough to be able to look at two numbers and know which one is bigger than the other.

I'm not gonna QQ too much until I see how things work in practice.