My Shadow Priest has felt the pain of not being invited all too well. This explains the why of it.


Hi Damage Dealer forums, CMs and anything that doesn't meet either of these first 2 groups. My name is Funeralpyre and I play a shadow priest on Kael'Thas US. As you can see from my armory I am well geared and I have seen some 10 man normal and hard mode action as well as some 25 man action. I have completed 10 man Hard Mode Hodir, which should be a reasonably good demonstration of my ability to DPS, and we are a clean Flame Lev kill away from 10 man champion of ulduar which should demonstrate my raid awareness.

Initially I was curious to see whether the WMO averages held up under proper statistical scruitiny and made some spreadsheets which got the shadow community talking about why exactly we were so far behind. 2 post capped thread and many offshoots later here we are, still with a bevy of questions and naught by a vague answer about hybrids, healing and the effect of needing to shift form to use those spells. Over that period I have gone and got parses of real raids I was involved in, raids other notable shadow priests were involved in, dummy parses, simulated data and theorycraft to demonstrate the validity of every claim I have made so far. While the ideas of what can be done to rectify some of these problems vary from priest to priest, the problems themselves are widely accepted and acknowledged. I only feel comfortable speaking about the PvE situation but no doubt one of the PvP shadows will come along to help fill in the PvP situation we currently face.

So without further ado here are the things that concern us and why:

For % of total dps values I will refer to this parse of a recent thorim kill with the arena/gauntlet section removed to give an indicator of single target dps with no gimicks.
http://www.world​oflogs.com/reports/AT​eIBzSved6nAnTM/sum/da​mageDone/?s=0&e=2​07

Poor haste scaling
45% of our damage comes directly from DoTs. Haste, which takes up a significant part of the item budget of our Tier set and most of the caster best in slot items gives absolutely no benefit to dots. The other class heavily affected by this situation are Affliction Warlocks. Generally they overcome this problem by respecing to a more nuke orrientated build to take full effect of the haste on their gear.

Poor gear itemization
This is largely due to the situation with haste, but also situations such as our t8.5 leggings should be looked at. Why are the ilvl 219 healer legs better for dpsing than the ilvl226 dps legs?

No on-demand burst cooldown
Your raid leader calls for heavy burst dps on a target, what do you do?

A 51 point talent in our dps tree that decreases our dps
The only other DPS tree with a 51 point talent that doesn't directly increase DPS is the mages frost tree. Combining half a innervate with an almost as good pally bubble is probably about a 21 point level talent, but it silences us.

Having to waste a major glyph socket to increase the range of mindflay to be the same as all the other shadow spells
Having to use a major glyph slot to make a spell functionable in raids is pretty poor, especially when we end up losing one of the things that makes it have such a low spell damage coefficient to start with. This would probably be a bigger concern though if we actually had 3 good major glyphs for Shadow.

Our 4 set is shocking with the current haste situation
The 4 piece DPS bonus is largely useless, the level of care and latency required to get a DPS increase is absurd. Worthless set bonuses is not a new feature of the DPS tier bonuses unfortunately.

Imp. DP is bugged only critting for 150% damage and not getting affected by hit talents
It misses when cast by a hit capped priest. It also does not benefit from any of our crit bonus increasing talents.

The shadow tree as a whole is ambiguous and repetitive
Shadow Weaving and Darkness. Many talents live double lives to prop up both PvP and and PvE such as shadow affinity, and as such are widely regarded as trash by both because they offer so little to each focus. Some talents defy belief, such as the tooltip on shadowform or the wording of Misery. Even after you tried to clarify the tooltip most shadows still don't realise that the debuff and the damage boost are seperate.

So after that rant we have some questions we wouldn't mind an answer to:

Do the developers believe there is an inbalance between Shadow AoE dps and single target dps?

Do the developers feel the Haste Scaling concerns of DoT based classes / specs are valid?

Specifically addressing any of the other points would also be welcomed.

I've been working on updating the Warcraft Nagging Questions Page.

First off, I found an incredible gem of inane crap. This one is the worst piece of crap I've seen on the boards in a long time, so check it out.

There is a new Hunter page if you haven't checked in a while as well as an updated Warlock page also. As I keep working on this stuff, I ask that you be patient. Stealing and modifying like this takes a tremendous amount of time to do. In the meantime, happy reading!

I might have to rename this blog to "Crabism" or something like that. In any event, this screams "archive me before it gets deleted:



Q u o t e:
Given it just got buffed recently, I'm not sure saying "keeps getting nerfed" is entirely accurate.


It is a shadow of what it once was.

It is NOTHING like it was in its original design.


You say it was a bug? I beg to differ.

Here's why:


Ghostcrawler started out by posting this:

The main problem was that Chaos Bolt ignored resilience. When one class (spec even) can get around the major stat that is supposed to let characters live longer in PvP with a heavy hitter like this, you're bound to have problems.

We didn't want to nerf the burst damage because it was finally hitting for a reasonable amount. But it didn't feel fair to have it ignore resilience. The other damage reducers didn't feel like a big problem either way. It still ignores resistance and absorptions, which is technically all the tooltip said in the first place.

The Warlock community was in shock. However, the community started shouting "BUT IT IS EFFECTED BY RESILIENCE GC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

They were basing the nerf on a "rumor" or "speculation" without having done ANY personal testing on their part. They just knew they wanted it nerfed. And they would use any means necessary to implement the nerf.

THEN, we got Ghostrcrawler to say (in the same post):

EDIT: As it turns out, Chaos Bolt does NOT ignore resilience. When the developers went to make this change, they found out that the resilience bypassing was just a myth. They still thought making the change to have CB not bypass other damage reduction affects was an appropriate change. I try to stay on top of all of the changes my team makes, but it's a big game and we typically make a lot of changes every day. The mistake was mine, and I do apologize for any confusion.

TLDR: The 3.1.3 change remains, but resilience is not (and never has been) affected.

You see, they got caught in the act. EVEN then, they said "They still thought making the change to have CB not bypass other damage reduction affects was an appropriate change".

Thus proving that they wanted it NERFED by any means necessary. They pulled this nonsense out of their hat to get what they wanted done. Personal agenda using whatever means they could to spin it into their favor. A typical political move.



The reasoning behind it (my opinion)?

I personally think that we were getting dangerously close to countering Death Knights. We were able to penetrate Frost Presence and Icebound Fortitude. Which was extremely useful when we could get the jump on them and get them low to be able to wait out their Shell or a Strangulate.

Now, we are even more countered by DK's since this nerf. Yes, I call it a nerf because I think they had an agenda to keep us from countering them.


Just my opinion though. You can call it a bug all you want, but I'm just not buying it. Death Knights are VERY marketable right now. Warlocks are not.

Dirty Politics at work ...


Sorry for the wall of text...just had to get it off my chest.

It's sad, but it unfortunately true:


I have played this game for five years, since it's release. I have seen every single wave of overpower/underpower qq you could possibly imagine.

The one thing I have noticed throughout the years........is blizzard does not give a %%*! about you or your frustrations.

First class I rolled was a warrior, and a lot of you probably don't remember these days, but there was a time when warriors were HORRIBLE. I mean not just bad, absolutely terrible. Literally the only thing they could kill were rogues who didn't use poisons.

I hated it, we @*#@%ed, and @*#@%ed, and @*#@%ed and nothing ever changed. Same as now, a patch would come out here and there and we'd be excited as a six year old rich kid on Christmas, but nothing would happen. They'd buff one or two abilities slightly and the class would stay the same as it always was.

I remember when bg's first came out, before cross server bg's even existed and you had to play the same people from your server all day long. There was a shadow priest who would run up to me EVERY time he saw me, and kill me in 5 seconds, then run off.

Eventually I was like "You know what !!!! this! This is some ol bull%%*! right here, I'm making an undead shadow priest and just rolling my face on my keyboard all day and watching %%*! fall over dead." So I did. My shadow priest in crappy blues and greens killed every high warlord on that server, it was the most op, obnoxious pile of crap I had ever seen.

Then BC came out and shadow priests sucked, warriors were awesome, and everything was different. Bare with me I am going someplace with this, my warlock homies.

When has something serious ever changed in a patch? 3.1 didn't do %%*!. As a destruction lock, I kill and lose to the exact same classes in the exact same ways I did before. I can not tell even the slightest difference. Every single class in the game can still kill me, and I still have to have every cool down up, trinket up, a portal in a perfect spot, and do every move in exactly the right order to have a chance against anything. Even..........a !!!!ing prot warrior. Wtf?

Anyways my point is this. Patches have never changed anything. I have never once seen a patch come out then all of the sudden a class be completely more powerfull than they were before, or be way less powerful. Nothing changes until an xpac drops. Ever.

And basically how blizzard nerfs and buffs classes with xpacs is this. One class gets some completely slap your grandmother in the face with a tuna fish ridiculous moves and facerolls everyone, and is op. The majority of the other classes get really adequate skills and spells and are all relatively balanced with each other and pretty powerful. And one or two classes don't get %%*!, and run around cutting themselves and sucking for years trying to figure out what went wrong.

The people who work at blizzard are too busy driving around in ferraris doing lines of coke off of hookers asses to care about us, and that's the way it's going to be.

We are going to suck for a long......long.............time.

My poor lowly ShadowPriest stands a chance against a lot of other classes, but some of them...well, let's just say it looks like I suck at PvP. I'll look at this by class:

1. vs the Death Knight. I'm dead. Simply put it seems like nothing I do helps against them.

2. vs a Druid. Kitty Druids take a hair of talent for me to kill, but Bears I have a much easier time with. Trees just heal through any and all damage I can deal out. Moonchickens are wonderful to just silence, Psychic Horror, and then just have a good ole time.

3. vs a Hunter. I always Scream the pet, Horror the hunter. Then it's 10 seconds of free killing, unless they are Beast Mastery and pop Beast Within, at which point I'm screwed.

4. vs a Mage. I'm dead. A DoT-Fear using class against a Mage with Mage Armor is dead.

5. vs a Paladin. Silence, DoT DoT, Horror, DoT, Mind Blast, Scream...he just bubbled...damn, I'm dead. I always get a Pally when their bubble is ready.

6. vs a Rogue. I'm dead within a stunlock because my resilience rating sucks. Maybe if I get resil from 500 to 800, I might survive long enough to get a scream off or have Cloak of Suck (Dispersion) ready to go.

7. vs a Shaman. I did a SW:D on the Stoneclaw Totem once, not remembering that dazes you when you hit it. After a good laugh and not getting hit (surprisingly enough), I went back to business. Honestly, though, I don't fight enough Shamans to really know what to do with them.

8. vs a Warlock. Typically I die, because all the SPriest is is a gimped Affliction Warlock. I get DoTted up and work the dispel game, but I still eventually die.

9. vs a Warrior. I don't run into them too often to make an opinion.

Does this mean I hate PvP? Nah, I still like it and like it enough to stay Shadow. It just seems really bad that I have to stack at least 800 resilience to get to the point where I'll stay alive a few more seconds while getting focused.

It's choo choo time, and for the sixth consecutive season, Warlocks just get the holy hell beaten out of them. This time though, it's without a healer, so things look bad:


Taken from http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/World-of-Warlocks/Train-the-Warlock

The classic strategy in arena that everyone instinctively knows, "Just train the Warlock", still applies for the 6th consecutive season. Why? Because Warlocks lack the means to escape from melee.

In arena, warlocks are the #1 target for just about everything. While mages have Ice Block and priests have arguably overpowered heals, Warlocks are left with their ever-visible Demonic Circle: Teleport and fear to defend themselves. While it's nice to be able to get away every 26-30 seconds, the ability still lacks a lot of what Warlocks need, the only map that this ability proves truly effective in is Blades Edge Arena, sometimes it can even prove useful in the RNG-friendly Dalaran Sewers. Back in Burning Crusade, warlocks had the tools to tank melee long enough to get peeled off of, or get a heal. Now that we're in Wrath, damage has increased almost 300%, while our health has increased <100%, leaving warlocks without the tools to do what they were intended to do, tank melee.

Training the warlock also has other benefits for opposing teams, if that warlock is Destruction, it negates any real damage that the warlock would have otherwise been able to put out. This problem isn't exclusive to Warlocks, mages, elemental shamans, boomkins, all offensive casters have this problem.

Distance closers are just another reason Demonic Circle: Teleport is almost completely ineffective against melee on most maps. After using DC: T, that warrior is simply going to intercept/charge you again, right back where you started.

What needs to change:

1. Warlocks need to be given the tools necessary to tank melee, or they need to be given the tools to avoid it.
2. DC:T needs to remove stuns
3. DC:S needs to be invisible to enemies

These changes alone would help warlocks survive better in arenas against melee.

Well, I finally updated the Warlock page. More to come.

Some are old, some are new, some are borrowed, none are "blue."

1. Why is it that some classes have to have over 1,000 resilience to be viable in PvP?

2. Why is it that I have to stand perfectly still and have the enemy within line of sight in order to cast a spell while a Night Elf Rogue can seemingly do their little rolling jumps while still dealing damage? It's like this, stand still, start casting, and hope you don't get stunned out of the cast.

3. Why does Demonic Teleport not work while stunned?

4. Why does stunlock still exist? Don't give me any bull here, it still exists even with over 1,000 resilience.

5. Why is it that we need to get Soul Link in order to be viable. Kalgan even said once that we shouldn't have to be tanking melee, but without an escape mechanism, we can't PvP without Soul Link in order to tank melee. Now even with Soul Link, we're still not viable because:

6. I have pets that are so squishy, certain classes can kill them off in one shot. Why is this?

7. Why does Molten Skin exist? I thought we weren't supposed to be tanking damage anymore. Who is right with Warlock design, Kalgan or Ghoscrawler?

8. The ultimate pet (Felguard) is 2-3 shotted and can be mauled by a 0/0/0 Hunter pet. Do you not see the problem with this?

9. The ultimate pet (Felguard) is prone to "miss/dodge/parry" by the enemy mob/player. Do you not see the problem with this? To that extent, being able to change out his armor (since HE IS THE ULTIMATE PET) would help out a ton, because then he can stack +hit.

10. Why does Demonform have an Area of Effect TAUNT if the form isn't permanent?

11. Why does Chaos Bolt not pierce through invincible bubbles?

12. Why do Soul Shards not stack?

13. First it was, "Wait for level 80, everything is balanced around level 80!" Well, that didn't work and now it's "Wait for Resilience, everything is balanced when everyone has resilience!" That didn't work either, and now Warlocks are now getting "Wait for the next major patch, everything is balanced in the next major patch!!!" Well, none of those ideas actually WORKED, so what the hell do we do now?

14. Why do we not have Demonic Swap? Trading places/debuffs with our pet would help a lot and I promise I won't sue if you use this idea.

15. Why are Warlocks and Priests the ONLY TWO CLASSES that have cast times for their 41 and 51 points talents? Add to the fact that cast times are useless because of stun mechanics and you can see a definite problem lurking here.

16. Why is it that we still continue to receive useless itemization bonuses, such as our gladiator gloves -.2 seconds to casting fear, when classes like Rogues are receiving things like additional silencing effects?

17. Why are we heavily balanced around a Fear mechanic that is utterly useless to us as a defensive mechanic, and so unreliable as an offensive mechanic that the best you can hope for is a momentary spell interrupt?

18. Why does haste not truly affect DoTs?

19. Why does Blizzard want us to use spirit by giving us wonderful bonuses for it, yet our end game PvP itemization HAS NO SPIRIT? Speaking of spirit...

20. Why is spirit "working as intended" when it comes to Life Tap? Shouldn't it just give out more mana instead of taking away more of our HP pool to give us more mana?

21. Why can't Curse of Doom be cast on players?

22. On the affliction tree, I am left with 12 points. This is just enough to get Soul Link and Fel Domination. The Destruction Tree leaves me with 20 points or 12 points again enough to take out Soul Link and Fel Domination. Since I have to tank damage, I am forced into taking Molten Skin, which means full Affliction PvP is impossible.

23. Why is Unstable Affliction able to be removed/dispelled without giving the damage effect it is supposed to? The entire point of it was to make sure nobody dispelled our DoTs, but Blizzard decided to make it so that everyone had an escape from the damage component on Unstable's dispel.

24. Even with all the changes to allow us to "tank more damage" we are still considered a free kill. Do you not see the problem with this or are you too busy farming Warlock kills?

25. Why is it that Master Demonologist was deemed "too strong" and revamped, but the same logic isn't applied to Mage Armor?

26. Kalgan is quoted as saying, "Mages will get new abilities in the expansion too, believe it or not. In fact, we intend to tone down how strong of a counter Warlocks are to Mages through the WotLK spells/talents." Why has this logic not been applied to the severe mismatch of Rogues destroying Warlocks? Again, are you too busy farming honor from us to even care about it?

27. Why is Improved Felhunter on the Affliction tree? Demonology is about the Warlock/pet team. It needs to go there.

28. Blizzard wanted our pets to scale better so we got a talent for it...deep in the Demonology tree. Then it got upped so everyone could take this and now it doesn't offer any kind of pet scaling. WHY ARE MY PETS NOT ALLOWED TO SCALE BETTER?

29. Why does Glyph of Health Funnel exist? Why is so important that we not lose channelling time from this spell?

30. Why was Glyph of Souls changed to the point where nobody wants it anymore?

31. Why can't some of our glyphs remove the reagent cost like other classes' glyphs do?

32. Why was Nether Protection nerfed? A random chance at getting 60% damage reduction is not overpowered. It was never guaranteed to happen after any attack, which leads me to believe...

33. You are balancing this game based off the crying and screaming of a few players in the total WoW player base. DO YOU NOT SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS???