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Spiritual Guidance: Top 7 shadow priest questions about patch 4.0.6
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Wednesday's shadow-specced version of Spiritual Guidance was taped before a live studio audience. Shortly before patch 4.0.6 went live, I took a glance at the final version of the patch notes. There were hundreds of changes, spread out across each and every class. And yet, with all those changes, there were really only four of major consequence to the practicing shadow priest. Taken from yesterday's official patch notes: Patch 4.0.6 Official Notes The mana cost of Power Word: Shield has been increased by approximately 31%, but its effect has been increased by 208%. Mind Blast now does 18% more damage than Mind Spike. Mind Sear can now be channeled on friendly targets in addition to enemy targets. In addition, Mind Sear's damage has been increased by roughly 15%. Shadow Orbs benefit from mastery has been increased by approximately 16%. source No, shadow priests, your eyes do not deceive you -- that is indeed four consecutive buffs without a single nerf. Together (especially the last three), they add up to a solid DPS increase. That's clearly good news for us, but it doesn't tell the whole story of 4.0.6 -- there are still some yet-to-be-resolved questions. Is haste still our best secondary stat, or should we gem for something else? Do the changes mean we should now be hit-capped? How do the changes in 4.0.6 affect rotations? If you still have questions about patch 4.0.6, then today's column is for you -- it's all about answers.
Spiritual Guidance: The calculus of shadow priest hit in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Every Wednesday, the shadow specced Fox Van Allen takes over Spiritual Guidance, doing all the hard work so you don't have to. So you can spend more time ... I dunno, trolling trade chat or something. NOTE (Feb. 8, 2011): With patch 4.0.6 now having gone live, I recommend all raiding shadow priests cap at 17% (1,742 points of hit). Every once in a while in my heroic PUGs, people get talkative. That can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. It depends entirely on the person talking. See, I've learned a lot of good information about bosses and strategy from complete strangers. I don't play a warrior, so it never occured to me that disarming Forgemaster Throngus would make the encounter so much easier on the healer. It was a pretty good day when an impatient healer showed me a shortcut around the Lockmaw trash in the Lost City. And it took me far longer than I'd like to admit to notice the slipstream teleporters in the Vortex Pinnacle. But for all the good advice, there's been just as much bad advice. The worst of it came from a healer who said, in a copy-and-paste that he likely shared with every random group he was thrown in, "Cataclysm heroics are hard. If you are not hit-capped, you do not belong here. Please drop group, re-gem, and re-enchant until you are at the cap and re-queue." That's bad advice for shadow priests on multiple levels. Managing hit caps in Wrath was easy -- get to 263 (or 289) points of hit and you were done. Cataclysm is a whole different animal, though. There are a number of important hit cap numbers to know. And getting to the ridiculously high new raiding hit cap doesn't improve your DPS. But you should probably cap out anyway. Unless you're running heroics. Shadow priest hit in Cataclysm is a complex beast. Let's ... discuss.
