Misery slightly less miserable
by Alex Ziebart 
Sep 6th 2008 at 4:00AM
Last night's beta push, 8905, introduced another change to Misery. The former 5 point talent has gone through a number of changes already, and the latest one seems to be an attempt at healing the wounds of its previous nerf.As of 8905, Misery now supplies its 3% spell hit as well as a 15% spell power coefficient increase on Mind Flay, Mind Sear, and Mind Blast. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and just how much a difference that makes. The original version of Misery was 5% spell damage across the entire raid, including your personal damage. Mind Blast and Mind Flay are definitely huge sources of a Shadow Priest's damage, but it's less than half of the spells used in our damage 'rotation.'
Will 15% more damage on those spells make up for the loss of 5% damage on all spells, as far as your personal damage is concerned? It's certainly possible, probably even likely. While the damage from Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death (especially Pain) shouldn't be underestimated, Blast and Flay are definitely the major players here. Plus we have news that Mind Flay's coefficient is going up and gaining the ability to crit soon, so an extra 15% on that spell will scale very, very well.
Now that Naxxramas has opened up on the beta realms, we should start seeing some numbers and math soon. However, the new Mind Flay isn't implemented yet, so how this scale may completely change when that happens. At the very least, the bare minimum, this is an improvement over what they did to it originally. How much of an improvement remains to be seen.
Edit: Fixed to reflect the talent's wording.
Filed under: Priest, Expansions, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Raukus Sep 6th 2008 4:20AM
So it looks like, yes, blizzard knows what they're doing with shadowprests in WotLK. But as a priest that was shadow for BC PvE, I'm a little sad to see what was once a great new archetype for the pve setting reduced to "viable dps".
my2cents Sep 6th 2008 4:43AM
"As of 8905, Misery now supplies its 3% spell hit as well as a 15% damage increase on Mind Flay, Mind Sear, and Mind Blast."
Correction: The damage of Mind Flay, Mind Sear, and Mind Blast is increased by 15% *of your spellpower*. Huge difference =)
Gorehorn Sep 6th 2008 6:30AM
Indeed! The change only means Misery will increase the coefficient of those 3 spells by another 15%, this should be updated in the post.
Bindulax Sep 6th 2008 4:46AM
Well, another Raidwide +3% to Hit Buff (or debuff in this case)? Though the discussion about that kind of Buff is going on, it seems like Hit-Rating is one of the Stats we will not need to gear up for in LK Raids.
Ascot Sep 6th 2008 4:45AM
Finally some positive change to Misery. Even if it will be not-so-good as the 5% to entire raid, it's still lot better then only 3% hit :B
Waiting for more changes in Spriests...
Radiophonic Sep 6th 2008 4:58AM
Do we really need so many hit buffs? What's the new hit cap for mele, ranged and caster dps? Hmm...
Is there maybe a new hit mechanic we don't know about?
Kymali Sep 6th 2008 7:47AM
There's a non stacking of buffs rule that was introduced so only one of those 'many' buffs will apply. They're building in redundancy in buffs to avoid 'must have' classes.
Bloodletter Sep 6th 2008 5:32AM
Another "Misery" post.....
*sigh*
Balasan Sep 6th 2008 7:48AM
I'm guessing you don't raid in BC.
Shadowpriests are almost a neccessity in raiding in TBC, and a lot of new SPs played them for the sole purpose of being mana batteries. Many played because they *enjoy* the feeling of being absolutely needed (heck the SPs in my guild has the highest DKPs out of anyone else, even the raid leader).
Come WotLK, this neccessity has been not only removed, but the many tricks, primarily a 5% increase in spell damage to the entire spell-casting part of the raid being nerfed, well, not that many SPs are happy.
Put yourself in people's shoes, etc etc.
crsh Sep 6th 2008 10:58AM
I'm still not seeing anything I'd call "improvement" here.
Blizzard's idea of nerfing our raid utility to address our poor DPS scaling is wrong on so many levels. I'd like to slap the poor soul who comes up with this trash, and then fire him.
/shakefist
Eric Sep 6th 2008 11:00AM
The upside here for shadow priests is that now there's no excuse not to buff your personal damage. Because mana return used to be scale with damage, it wasn't acceptable to give you the same damage output as a mage or warlock (ceteris paribus, and once the other casters our out of FSW, spellfire, etc gear). Fantastic group utility comes a price; it seems blizz's goal is to lessen the utility of the utility classes, boost the utility of the 'pure' dps classes, and even out everyone's DPS to a great extent. This is exactly the kind of change you'd expect to shadow priests on that model.
Bootsanator Sep 6th 2008 6:01PM
Mind flay will be keeping SW:P up, so that's 1 GCD that won't be devoted to casting SW:P every however-often (like is the case in live), which gives time to throw in more flaying/time and make it (misery) more worth it in it's current form (in beta).