Last night's beta patch brought a new round of Shadow Priest changes and glyphs (along with every other class), some good and some bad. Some of them are rather exciting like the addition of Devouring Plague to our repertoire and the changes to Dispersion, but I'll let you dig right into things.

• Devouring Plague cooldown has been reduced to 30 seconds (down from 3 minutes) and has had its mana cost greatly reduced.

Holy cow. Not only did they make the awesome move of finally getting rid of the horridly unbalanced Priest racials, but Devouring Plague will now be firmly in every Shadow Priest's damage rotation. Not only will this be a solid DPS boost, but the healing on it will be fantastic to offset how often we Shadow Priests like to punch ourselves in the face.

• Dispersion's new groove: You disperse into pure Shadow energy, reducing all damage taken by 90%. You are unable to attack or cast spells, but you regenerate 6% mana every 1 second for 6 seconds. Dispersion can be cast while stunned, feared, or silenced. If Dispersion runs its full duration and you are not the victim of any damage or harmful effects during its duration, your spells gain 25% damage for 1 min.

The health regeneration that was attached to this is still gone, but I think that in PvP this form is better. Since it can be used through stuns and the like, it's going to come through in a pinch moreso than the healing. Plus, the spell actually fades out your character model entirely when you use it. You can't even see you anymore. That's awesome. It's not quite Vanish, there's a nebulous foggy blob that moves around, but still cool.

In PvE, this just got awesome. Not being able to DPS for 6 seconds before pretty much sucked, because forced lost DPS time is never, ever good. Now, though? A lose of 6 seconds for +25% damage for a minute, every 3 minutes? Yes! Yessss!

• Psychic Horror has lost its Horror effect and has become: Causes your Psychic Scream ability to inflict Psychic Horror on the target when the fear effect ends. Psychic Horror reduces all damage done by the target by 15/30% for 6 seconds.

Eh. Losing the Horror effect is lame, but there were a lot of complications that came with it so I can understand a change. -30% incoming damage is still pretty nice. It'll slow down a focus train, but it fails as an escape mechanism.

• Vampiric Touch has been changed to only trigger Replenishment when you deal damage with Mind Blast while VT is on your target. Replenishment changed to regenerate 0.25% of max mana every second, down from 0.5%

The mana regen from Replenishment has been nerfed for all classes that can supply it, so while that's pretty lame, I'll cope. Mind Blast triggering Replenishment is a really, really awkward change since it's some bizarre parasitic relationship between the spells, but it was a needed change. Replenishment triggering off of all damage was causing the buff to refresh more frequently than it could tick the regen, so it was regenerating... nothing at all.

I would much rather see it trigger off of Vampiric Touch's own damage, but maybe there were timing issues with the buff there, too. I'm curious if it's going to happen again with Mind Blast.

• Improved Shadowform gives you a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when using Fade while in Shadowform again.

This is just returning Imp. Shadowform to what it was two builds ago.

• Misery changed to - Your Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay and Vampiric Touch spells also increase the chance for harmful spells to hit by 1/2/3% lasting 24 sec, and increases the damage of your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by an amount equal to 5/10/15% of your spell power.

Again, this talent was just returned to its former self.

• Shadow Power now increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Mind Blast, Mind Flay, and Shadow Word: Death spells by 20/40/60/80/100%.

This talent no longer supplies crit chance, only bonus crit damage. If this talent supplied 15% Crit on top of Shadow Priests now actually gearing for crit, it would be pretty wild. Getting our money's worth out of our more plentiful crits in Wrath will be nice.

• Shadow Resilience replaced with Mind Melt, which increases the critical strike chance of Mind Blast, Mind Flay, and Mind Sear spells by 2/4%.

We can make some of our loss up here, I suppose.

• Glyph of Fade - Increases the duration and cooldown of your Fade spell by 50%. Prior to this build, this glyph increased the effect of Fade by 100%.

This is an interesting change, now that Fade drops -all- threat for the duration. This would give a 15 second duration on Fade and a 36 second cooldown, talented. Worth it? I'm not sure. It may be worth it on some encounters, and not on others. This is likely a glyph you'll switch out a lot.

• Glyph of Shadowfiend - Receive 5% of your macimum mana if your Shadowfiend dies from damage.

Sweet merciful crap I hate that little guy, at least I'll get something out of his stupid face running off to dance in a bonfire when I can't see him through the huge boss mob. Shadowfiend: Awesome when it works, endlessly infuriating when it doesn't. This'll take the edge off a little.

Stupid Shadowfiend.

[ Unofficial patch notes courtesy of MMO-Champion, commentary my own ]

Tags: build-8962, devouring-plague, dispersion, glyph-of-fade, glyph-of-shadowfiend, glyphs, improved-shadowform, mind-blast, mind-melt, misery, psychic-horror, replenishment, shadow, shadow-power, shadow-priest, vampiric-touch, wrath-beta

Filed under: Priest, PvP, Wrath of the Lich King