Please respect other members. Please do not post links or information about hacking/warez/cheats.
Read the rules of these forums as we rarely warn before banning. Lost or need RSS check the forum map.
I don't mean "Once we have it on farm we let someone go shadow for fun." I mean - does your guild have a spot for at least 1 Shadow Priest on a regular basis.
If yes - does it work? Do you find yourself short on DPS? Are there any drawbacks?
If no - why not?
Last edited by Steamboat; 31-08-2006 at 05:04 PM..
A "good" Shadow Priest is very very valuable to a raid. I think a lot of guilds completely over look the value of a shadow priest. When we have 5 priests for a raid our one shadow priest usually runs as the 6th priest but in shadow form. He is usually put in the rogue group and with Vampiric Embrace the rogues almost never need healing from the other healers saving thier mana for other more important targets.
Also we run Damage meters on all raids and our Shadow Priest is almost always in the top 10 for damage as long as he dosen't have to pop out of shadow to heal. Also his mob debuffs make the other casters even better. Warlocks love him as well. Never under estimate any good player as they can always find a way to add to the raids over all success.
1) SP consumes too many valuable debuff slots (Weaving, SW:P, MF, VE).
2) MF and MB scale very badly with +dmg gear. A shadowpriest can hold her own in MC and BWL, but once you get to AQ40 and Naxx, the difference between SP and other DPS casters becomes too big to ignore.
3) Horde = No JoW/BoW = Shadowpriests running OOM very quickly.
When you have had Shadowpriests up to BWL, have they been allowed to collect just as much +dmg gear as the other members of the DPS team?
I do understand that SP's scale very badly with gear, but I'm curious if they were further gimped by not being allowed to gear up as well as your other DPS.
We have two Priests who are shadow specced in our guild (and we don't ask anyone to respec) but there is no dedicated slot for a shadow priest. Primarily for the reason that Priests are still needed on a lot of our raids to play the role of primary healers. When we have 5-6 in the raid it will be allowed. However, when it comes to gear +dmg gear will always go to mages and locks first unless they already have an epic piece for that slot.
We have a 0-sum system for gear, so you get the gear if your points are higher.
We have a couple shadow priests, one of whom used to be a main and was in on our progression raids (he has since switched his main to a Rogue) and the other who is a main but does not do much progression content because he is on a much different time zone from the server.
The understanding our Shadow Priests have is: you can DPS on trash, where healing isn't needed as much. You can DPS on bosses only if we have enough dedicated healers (Priests, Paladins, and resto Druids).
It's the same situation for our feral Druids, our Moonkin Druid, and our retnoob Paladin. They DPS on trash, and they're allowed to DPS on bosses if the fight doesn't need any more healing.
(Note that our regular progression group used to have a Moonkin Druid, a Retnoob Paladin, a Feral Druid, and a Shadow Priest ... who all regularly got to do what they wanted. The Shadow Priest has since swapped to his Rogue, and the Moonkin and Retnoob are AFK for RL issues.)
We have a 0-sum system for gear, so you get the gear if your points are higher.
We have a couple shadow priests, one of whom used to be a main and was in on our progression raids (he has since switched his main to a Rogue) and the other who is a main but does not do much progression content because he is on a much different time zone from the server.
The understanding our Shadow Priests have is: you can DPS on trash, where healing isn't needed as much. You can DPS on bosses only if we have enough dedicated healers (Priests, Paladins, and resto Druids).
It's the same situation for our feral Druids, our Moonkin Druid, and our retnoob Paladin. They DPS on trash, and they're allowed to DPS on bosses if the fight doesn't need any more healing.
(Note that our regular progression group used to have a Moonkin Druid, a Retnoob Paladin, a Feral Druid, and a Shadow Priest ... who all regularly got to do what they wanted. The Shadow Priest has since swapped to his Rogue, and the Moonkin and Retnoob are AFK for RL issues.)
^^ My Exact response minus the bit about the moonkin. I think there are only 2-3 60 druids on my server who have such a spec. Ive only seen one guilded.
I'm pretty sure that an average caster at the AQ40/Naxx level would have at least +500 spell dmg. If you look here: http://smulan.se/priest_dmg/ and calculate Shadow priest DPS for someone with +500 spell damage, you come up with about 330DPS on Mindflay, and 105 DPS on SW:P. If the raiding shadowpriest isn't using Mindblast at all he'd be contributing 436DPS along with 130 Healing Per Second (from VE). And he is raising the damage of the warlocks by 15% through shadow weaving.
I know this is a bit of a simplification of what can be a complex scenario, but I guess I don't see why 436DPS, 130HPS, and 15% increase of warlock damage isn't enough to be viable above BWL. Are Mages and Locks at that level honestly cranking out a steady 500 or 600 DPS?
Edit:
I did the math for a warlock with +500 in dmg gear. (Using a calculator created by Peanalope from Warsong US.)
The warlock in +500 dmg gear does 496DPS with just shadowbolts, 77DPS with corruption added, and another 75DPS if curse of agony is added. DPS drops a tiny bit if the warlock adds both dots because he'll need the global cooldown to cast each of them - but it roughly works out to 648 DPS for the warlock in +500dmg gear. The warlock beats the shadowpriest DPS by 212.
But if you have 2 warlocks in the raid, shadow weaving will increase both their DPS by 97.2. So:
We have a couple of shadow priests, moonkin, and feral druids in our raids. The shadow priests use shadow weaving to help the warlocks (like Steamboat's math shows it really helps), a couple of moonkin + caster parties for the moonkin aura's and a couple rogue + feral druids for LotP parties.
We've got most of MC on farm, so we're not nearly as far as the rest of you guys though. As with Oatmealsmurf's guild, we don't try and control one's spec. My class lead is a feral druid... and the soon to be priest class lead is a shadow priest..... not to mention the warrior class lead is a dps warror (he out dps's most of the rogues... he's sick).
The wonders of support classes... you're wanted not because of what you can do yourself, but because of what you can do for the rest of the raid =]
Linear Mode
