Well, much of the qqing done by shadow priests has apparently not gone unnoticed by the devs. Blizzard has finally given shadow priests a good once over, and we shall be getting some really nice buffs come 3.3. With the haste changes to our dots, etc. the cast priorities and rotations, as well as the simulators and mechanics will be pretty much overhauled. Here's the changes listed thus far:
- Power Word: Shield: This spell can now be cast on non-raid/party friendly targets. This was apparently an unintended consequence to the spell. This is more pvp related, esp. in Wintergrasp.
- Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%. This is quite a buff giving us double damage on DP's initial hit.
- Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, 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. I will try to log on the PTR today to test this. We'll have to see the scale of how much the haste effects the dots, etc. but either way, it's still a very nice buff. The mana reduction cost was to match the druid shapeshift mana cost which has apparently been an issue for a while in pvp.
- Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff.This is fantastic. This can be used before the pull and never has to be reapplied. This will save us many cooldowns when trying to max out our VE especially when casting on multiple targets. Our healing from VE will now be much more predictable as well as boosted due to the fact that multidotting targets will all contribute to our VE without having to recast it.
- Mind Flay now has a 30 yd range. (Up from 20 yd) It's about time we didn't have to glyph Mind Flay just to get to 30 yards. The glyph is changing as well which will bring us a dps boost.
- Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain changed to - The periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell restore 1% of your base mana. Since this is up on our main targets near > 95% of the time, this is pretty much a bonus 1% mana regen. Spriests don't typically have mana issues and generally only run into issues when multidotting. This is probably to help address the obvious change with our hasted dots/abilities we will be recasting more often. Hopefully this will help to balance some of the increased mana usage from recasting those spells.
- Glyph of Shadow now increase your spell power by 30% of your spirit for 10 sec. (Up from 10%) This is quite a buff. Currently, we usually have ~500-600 spirit raid buffed (depending on gear). This equates to around 100-120 SP bonus from this glyph and since our gear has substantially more crit in T9 than in T8, we are looking at a much higher % of uptime that this glyphs buff will be active.
With all these great changes, I'm fairly confident that spriests can now begin to start competing with pure dps classes on the same level against single targets. We do well with multi-add fights, but still fall short of other pure dps classes on single target boss encounters. I feel that we could see some experienced shadow priests topping meters in multi-add boss encounters, which would be refreshing. Let the theorycrafting begin!
