Best Practices for the Shadowy Arts

I probably still heal more than I DPS, though I DPS as a greater percentage of my raid encounters than at any time in my raiding history since I had a retribution paladin as my main. However, I have no fascinating insights about healing right now. Maybe I will if I sit and think through what I do a bit more carefully--one consequence of working hard on my DPS is that I think a lot less about healing than I once did. I think I still do a good job, but I depend a lot more on gleaning best practices from other people than I once did.

However, shadow...I have all sorts of things to say about that right now, as I suppose my recent posting history suggests. ("All sorts of things" defined as "something every three or four months or so.")

 A couple of the people I read have been doing some "best practices" posts, about restoration shamans and healing priests, respectively. If you really want to read about healing, check them out. Wait, wait...on second thought, no, don't click away from this post. They get enough traffic.

Vampiric Touch Is A Last Resort

Vampiric Touch is not a vitally important spell. In fact, there are only two situation in which you should use it. Admittedly, those two situations will ensure you use it a lot, but it's useful to understand why you're using it so that you don't overuse it.

• Situation 1: You are fighting one or two opponents and you have nothing else to cast except Mind Flay. Getting Vampiric Touch's damage rolling is worth a Mind Flay GCD (which will, in fact, lead us to another shadow pillar in just a moment). But you should literally place every other rotational spell (Devouring Plague, Mind Blast, FDCL Mind Spike, Shadow Word: Pain refresh, Shadow Word: Death, Shadowfiend/Mindbender, the level 90 talent you've chosen) ahead of casting or refreshing Vampiric Touch.
• Situation 2: You are fighting multiple opponents that will live for a decent amount of time and more opponents will join the fight. In this case, you do not want to put Vampiric Touch on every monster. You want to put Shadow Word: Pain on every monster and Vampiric Touch on just a few of them, before resorting to Mind Sear (and things like Mind Blast, Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Death, etc, when possible). 

The reality is that in situations like the second one, every Vampiric Touch cast is a DPS loss because you can no longer replace Mind Flay ticks with it...between all the Shadow Word: Pain casts and refreshes, important single target casts and Mind Sear, you always have a higher DPS offering. The sole reason you want to cast Vampiric Touch in this case is for the mana regeneration. Lots of Shadow Word: Pain casts is mana intensive and you don't want to run out of mana (being unable to cast is an even bigger DPS loss). A good rule of thumb is that one Vampiric Touch for every two Shadow Word: Pain casts will keep you approximately mana neutral. Of course, if you're only getting one wave of adds and they won't be around long enough to keep refreshing your Shadow Word: Pain, you don't need to be mana neutral...you just need to not run out of mana before the adds die, at which point you'll presumably return to your single-target rotation, which is mana positive.

So, in general, you'll just want to cast Vampiric Touch when one of two conditions is met: you're only replacing a Mind Flay tick with it or you need the mana regeneration from Vampiric Touch.

All GCDs Are Not Made Equal

Whenever you make a choice as a DPS, the main resource that you're spending is not mana, it's GCDs. It's still ultimately an opportunity cost decision...a healer generally has to weigh casting a spell against the possible spells they could have used the mana on, while a DPS has to weigh casting a spell against the possible spells they could have used the GCD on.

However, there is a big difference: mana is a fungible resource, a GCD is not. Every bit of mana is essentially identical in value for the purpose of casting spells, whereas a GCD's value varies wildly due to cooldowns. You can't use every GCD on Mind Blast, because the spell is cooldown constrained. So which spell you could have used the GCD on determines the GCD's value. A GCD in which you could have cast a Mind Blast is extremely valuable whereas a GCD in which you could have cast, say, a Vampiric Touch is significantly less so.

(It bears noting, of course, that healers also have cooldowns to contend with and therefore GCD analysis can come into play for them as well, especially when not mana-constrained, as was the case at the end of Wrath of the Lich King.)

All of this means that you can significantly minimize the consequences of actions by replacing Mind Flay GCDs. I like to say that casting Mind Flay is better than casting nothing, but not much better. Which means you have a lot of almost free GCDs to fit things in when necessary. One example is the above principle; it makes using Vampiric Touch a DPS gain because all you're losing to get it up and refresh it is an occasional Mind Flay tick.

Another example is (now) purely theoretical: The original patch 5.2 redesign of Shadow Word: Insanity was fairly simple: whenever you had three of your own DoTs up on a target (so all of Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague), your Mind Flay would be buffed. This means that the Mind Flay buff is constrained by Devouring Plague up-time (since the other two DoTs you can keep up virtually at all times). The natural behavior that this encourages is to cast Devouring Plague every time you have a single shadow orb. Devouring Plague scales linearly with the number of shadow orbs consumed, so you lose no Devouring Plague damage by casting it with less than three orbs. The cost of doing that is you consume more GCDs for the same Devouring Plague damage, so it's a DPS loss to cast it at less than three shadow orbs.

However, when you consider that A. each Devouring Plague gives an equally long and strong buff to Mind Flay regardless of orbs consumed and B. the lost GCDs would essentially be taken from (unbuffed) Mind Flay, it became entirely obvious that it would be a clear DPS benefit to cast Devouring Plague at one shadow orb.

Blizzard realized this and didn't want shadow priests not ever saving up shadow orbs, so they quickly changed the design of Shadow Word: Insanity such that the buff you get to Mind Flay is based on how many shadow orbs were consumed by Devouring Plague, which returns it to the original state: you don't gain any extra DPS by using less than three shadow orbs, so you only lose DPS from the extra GCDs spent on Devouring Plague.

You can see, though, this principle in action with these changes. Losing unbuffed Mind Flay GCDs is simply not a particularly large loss, so nearly any DPS gain will be worth losing them.

You can put this into effect in various ways. A big one is movement. Movement is a DPS gain in that if you die, your DPS plummets. When possible, if you can time your movement for times when you'd otherwise Mind Flay, you'll lose a lot less DPS than if you move when you could be casting, say, Mind Blast. Another example is if you want to cast a Power Word: Shield during a high damage phase, it's ideal to cast it when you're only stealing the GCD from Mind Flay.

It should also inform your gearing. Haste is very useful for reaching a haste plateau for Devouring Plague but, when you can't, it's pretty nearly worthless to gear for. Added haste that won't get you an extra tick of Devouring Plague will only shorten your spell cast times...which means more Mind Flay time. It's far better to get critical strike, which will improve the DPS of all your spells, or even mastery, which will improve the DPS of all your DoTs.  Both will benefit you much more than being able to channel Mind Flay more often will benefit you.

Master The Art Of Multi-Dotting

This tier (and quite likely the other tiers of this expansion) feature a lot of fights with adds. To get the most out of such fights, you need efficient methods to keep DoTs rolling on as many targets as possible (again...the major one to distribute is Shadow Word: Pain; only put Vampiric Touch on multiple targets when you need the mana regeneration or your only other possible action would be Mind Flay).

The techniques I've found to be most valuable in managing multi-dotting are as follows:

• Set a focus, track your focus, make it obvious which of your DoTs your focus has (and time remaining on them) and make it easy to apply DoTs to your focus. The best way I've found to easily maintain DoTs on my focus is using shift-modifiers on my usual Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch keybinds. So, if 4 is Shadow Word: Pain and 5 is Vampiric Touch, then shift-4 puts Shadow Word: Pain on my focus and shift-5 puts Vampiric Touch on my focus.
• Make sure frames for boss1, boss2, boss3 and boss4 are enabled and easily visible in your UI. These are unit frames that Blizzard makes available by default for major adds that pop up during a raid encounter or for each member of a council boss. For example, the active quilen in the Stone Guard encounter of Mogu'shan Vaults are represented by boss1, boss2 and boss3 frames. The two tendons (right and left) in the Spine of Deathwing encounter of Dragon Soul were represented by boss1 and boss2 frames. These allow you to quickly put DoTs on different active creatures, and track those DoTs, whether you want to use an addon like Clique to click DoTs onto those frames or use mouse-over macros to apply DoTs via those frames.

Remember that positioning doesn't matter for applying DoTs...you can cast DoTs onto even targets directly behind you. So the challenge is just in swift targeting and tracking among multiple monsters.

Survival Priests

Shadow priests have a lot of survivability utility, both for themselves and for others...make use of it. Some fights, especially on heroic mode, can be extremely healing intensive and if the raid can just survive a little bit longer, the raid can get the boss kill. Help your healers out when it makes sense, especially when healers have to be cut in order to make an enrage timer.

• Glyph of Dark Binding: This is my least favorite option. When it affected Binding Heal (during the beta), it had a ton of potential. Now that it only affects Renew, Prayer of Mending and Leap of Faith, I think there are significantly better glyph options. I don't consider Renew or Prayer of Mending to be particularly great options for shadow priests, but if you can find ways to weave them in such that they're useful and don't hurt your DPS too much, it's definitely worth considering. One point worth making here: getting a Renew or Prayer of Mending on someone below 25% health can trigger Twist of Fate for your damage dealing.
• Glyph of Fade: I like this glyph quite a bit, especially on a fight like heroic Gara'jal the Spiritbinder. By fading off 10% of the damage I take when I'm a Voodoo Doll, I also reduce the damage all the other Voodoo Dolls in the raid take. There are various fights where dropping your damage taken is well worth the GCD (again, remember...if you're replacing Mind Flay ticks, it's not a major DPS loss).
• Glyph of Inner Sanctum: This is particularly nice simply because it's passive. Since you should always be using Inner Fire as a shadow priest, this is a flat reduction to magic damage at all times. Any fight in which you can expect the raid to take a lot of magic damage, this can be a very valuable glyph to slot in and it doesn't require any mental overhead once the encounter starts.
• Power Word: Shield: The old priest stand-by. As an instant 60-70k health buffer, this can be a great use of a GCD either for yourself or for a raidmate. If you see someone on the verge of death, especially a healer or tank, giving them an immediate buffer gives the healers a chance to get them back up to safety before they actually keel over. This also has the benefit of not kicking you out of Shadowform when you use it.
• Vampiric Embrace: This is the big one. The one you should be making your healers and/or raid leader aware of, because it can very easily be a raid-saver. Any DPS you do during the duration also provides HPS (healing per second). If you glyph it (and I strongly suggest that you do), it's like having an extra healer for the duration, while not losing any DPS at all (it's off the GCD, so you don't even lose a GCD). The reason that I suggest glyphing it is that, generally, raid health is only in serious danger for short, intensive bursts. Spiking your raid's healing as much as possible for one of those times is a bigger benefit than dribbling out a smaller amount of healing over a longer period of time.

Figuring out how and when to use abilities, talents and glyphs to help keep you and your raid alive, without hurting your DPS much, is a very important part of mastering playing a DPS role in raids.

Do Priests Need Mind Spike In Their Spellbooks?

I suppose this blog was in danger of becoming abandonware, considering my last post was before Mists of Pandaria launched. It wasn't that I didn't want to write, nor was it that I wasn't enjoying World of Warcraft: Mists of Panadria, nor was it even that I didn't have time.

What I didn't have was anything interesting to say. I suppose readers will judge whether I've ever had anything interesting to say, but I don't do recapitulation of news, nor do I tend to do standard healing/DPS guides, nor do I tend to document my own adventures. I try to write when I think I have a point that I haven't seen represented elsewhere and isn't (from what I can tell) common knowledge/common sentiment. In other words, dear reader, I try to shut up when I don't believe I have something worthwhile to say, much as I'd like to push my blog back up people's readers with a new post.

That's just an aside explanation for why so long between posts...this isn't a stealth "let me get a new post up by explaining how I don't just write filler posts." That would take chutzpah, and I don't have the chutzpah necessary.

No, this post is about Mind Spike. Or, at least, primarily about Mind Spike. Rather, we could say this is about Mind Spike's role in the shadow arsenal leading into a broader (or maybe narrower) point about shadow as a whole. Though, ultimately, it's about something else entirely. It's complicated, but you'll see if you read on!

One more piece of business to attend to before I get to the main event: The last post was about shadow and this post is about shadow, but I am not now a pure shadow priest and this is not now a pure shadow priest blog. I still heal a lot...in fact, I think I still heal more than I DPS. I DPS any fight in which we only need two healers, and we're three-healing most progression fights right now, especially as we push further into heroic raid encounters. I DPS a lot of farm encounters, though! (And even a few progression fights. I consider it important and even necessary to be on top of my shadow game.)


Why Mind Spike?


Mind Spike joined the priest toolbox with the advent of Cataclysm. When it was added to the class, the rationale for it made perfect sense: it was a situational nuke for a specific situation--an add that needed to be burned down quickly, too quickly for damage-over-time (DoT) spells to be useful.

Shadow priests have traditionally been a long ramp-up-time DPS spec; that is, it takes them a while to go from zero to 60k DPS, because they need to get DoTs up and get shadowfiend out and the whole thing is a lot of up-front GCDs when you're fighting something that needs to die quickly. It's the difference between sustained DPS and burst DPS...a spec that can do a good amount of DPS over an 8 minute fight may not be able to effectively contribute to a 30 second burn phase and vice versa.

Both are important. It goes without saying that one's total DPS over a fight is generally the most crucial aspect, but hitting "burst windows" can often be just as, or more, crucial in certain fights. The Spine of Deathwing fight in the Dragon Soul raid had a tendon that became available to destroy for short periods of time, and getting it down within the necessary time frames was required to defeat the fight, especially on heroic mode. In this tier, the Elegon encounter in Mogu'shan Vaults has waves of adds that must be burst down before they reach a certain place in order to stack an increased-damage-taken debuff on Elegon that's necessary to meet the enrage timer.

Going into Cataclysm, shadow priests really didn't have much burst potential. Mind Blast had a cooldown and DoTs and Mind Flay were too slow. Mind Spike was supposed to fill that niche: a damaging spell that would allow priests to start blasting something immediately but, thanks to its DoT-extinguishing mechanic, couldn't be used rotationally. This suggested that Mind Spike could be a really powerful but really situational spell, useful for adds that you didn't want to DoT because it wasn't supposed to survive that long.

Now, I'll admit it: I have no idea if it was successful in that role in Cataclysm, because I barely played shadow in Cataclysm. I was a committed discipline priest going into Cataclysm and I spent the first two tiers switching around my off-spec several times a week, trying to find a spec I was comfortable with alongside discipline. I eventually settled on holy in T13. I followed the news generally about shadow (as I do about a lot of classes and specs, because I'm a bit of an obsessive geek), but I didn't have any serious experience.

That has changed with Mists of Pandaria. I was tired of being one-dimensional--just a healer. Not only did I feel limited in what I was capable of, I felt like it constrained our raid team, not to have a proper swing-DPS. So I picked up a shadow spec and committed to learning it fully, tailoring a UI for it and both figuring out and researching tricks to optimize my play as a shadow priest.

All of which has led me to one question: Why Mind Spike? The above rationale for it makes sense--it just doesn't fill that role as we stand in Mists of Pandaria.

As a hard cast, Mind Spike's damage is virtually never worth casting. The damage is uninspiring and it removes the DoTs that you have rolling on your enemy. So it isn't worth using in your rotation and the low damage makes it a poor tool to spam on adds that won't be around long enough to be worth putting DoTs on. It's better than nothing, but not much better than nothing.

It seems, then, that when you consider that you can't use it rotationally nor can you use it a short-term nuke, Mind Spike really doesn't occupy a useful niche...except for one.


From Darkness, Comes Light (And Beyond?)


The one time that Mind Spike is worthwhile to cast is when a shadowpriest has the From Darkness, Comes Light talent and Surge of Darkness procs. This makes Mind Spike instant (the value of which is that it allows you to use it when moving, as the cast time is the same as the GCD consumed by an instant), significantly increases its damage and causes it to not extinguish the DoTs you have rolling.

This is a fairly potent ability (made more so by the Glyph of Mind Spike) but considering that this is the only time that it's worth using, it seems a little unnecessary to make it a spell in one's spellbook...why not simply make it a button you can use when you take the talent, like many other talented abilities? Not that it's a particularly big deal that it resides in the spellbook, but it seems like a rather wasted spell in the arsenal.

Unless...we extended the concept of From Darkness, Comes Light a bit and also fixed another problem with the shadowpriest toolkit: lack of a burst DPS cooldown. As I noted above, it's important to have a way to occasionally shift into another gear when necessary and shadowpriests don't have that. If we consider a single-target fight, we have one speed: normal. Add that needs to be burst down right now? Normal single-target rotation. Execute phase with the enrage timer seconds away? Normal single-target rotation. It not only takes away versatility and decision-making, it's also unsatisfying.

However, what if we repurposed Mind Spike to fill the niche that it was originally supposed to: burst DPS? But we want to make it a cooldown, something we can only use once in a while, but is quite powerful those times. Well, shadowpriests used to have a bit of a cooldown in Cataclysm (of varying power)--Dark Archangel. But Dark Archangel is gone, leaving only the nifty wings graphic in the form of a minor glyph that appears when you use Devouring Plague.

It would be nice to have Dark Archangel back in some form, it would be nice to have some sort of DPS burst cooldown and it would be nice to use Mind Spike a bit more, considering it's a real spell in our real spellbook.

With that in mind, I present an entirely new spell (in concept, numbers could be tweaked because hell if I know how to balance numbers across all classes):



This is obviously built upon the existing functionality of From Darkness, Comes Light but would not require that talent. It steals the mechanic (because it's a very good mechanic, in my opinion) but is independent. You could have both, but even if you took another talent from the tier, you'd still have this Dark Archangel cooldown.

This would provide a significant opportunity for burst DPS. You would still weave in Mind Blast (and Shadow Word: Death if the target were at 20% health or less) because you'd still want the resource generation, and you'd still use Devouring Plague to dump your shadow orbs, so that future orb generation wouldn't be wasted but, otherwise, you'd use Mind Spike as filler during the duration of Dark Archangel instead of Mind Flay, which would be a major increase in DPS for the 15 seconds (or whatever professional class designers considered balanced).

Ultimately, I think that shadowpriests need a burst DPS cooldown in order for the spec to have the needed variability in play. That's the foremost concern here, even if the post title is misleadingly about Mind Spike. However, with the Mind Spike spell going to waste outside of one talent, and a great graphic that used to be tied to a great concept being wasted on a minor glyph, it seems like the opportunity exists to synthesize these issues into a single solution.

Shadow And The Constraint Model Of DPS

The more time I spend working on DPS (first my hunter and now my shadow priest spec), the more I realize that DPS is built around a constraint model, far more so than healing is. Constraints, of course, are limitations on the system you're working with, either organically arising from the nature of the system or (as is always the case in games) artificially arising from the rules applied by the designers of the system.

Healing has some pretty simple constraints: cooldowns (global cooldowns and the cooldowns on abilities) and mana (and holy power, in the case of holy paladins). There are helpful mechanics that you can make use of, but those are more tools to help you survive within the above mentioned constraints. Without those constraints, healing would be a simple matter of casting your "best" (combination of power and speed) spell over and over (and that has happened at times in the history of WoW when designers didn't make the constraints compelling enough).

DPS would seem to be somewhat similar, but while cooldowns still exist as constraints (especially global cooldowns), the main power source (like mana) often doesn't. Healing decision-making revolves around selecting the right targets and dealing with the above mentioned constraints of cooldowns and mana. DPS decision-making revolves around a more precise prioritizing of abilities based on the constraints each ability places on every other.

That was probably as clear a winter's night in Seattle (Seattle is perpetually overcast and misting/raining during all seasons except a couple of months in summer, but especially winter) so let me explain what I mean by using the shadow spec as an example.

What Are The "Core" Abilities Anyway?

Here are the abilities that will make up the vast majority of shadow DPS:

• Mind Blast
• Devouring Plague
• Mind Flay
• Shadow Word: Pain
• Vampiric Touch
• Shadow Word: Death
• Mind Spike
• Shadowfiend

For clarity, I'm only talking about single-target damage on boss-like creatures, not low-health adds. So Mind Spike will only be relevant if you take the talent From Darkness, Comes Light (FDCL). I've chosen that talent, so Mind Spike will be a part of the analysis. A similar exercise can be done with the abilities you gain from the other two talents on the tier (and the level 90 talents will add further constraints, though not particularly complicated ones it appears).

Mousing over those abilities, you can see some basic constraints, like mana costs and cooldowns. Those aren't the particularly interesting ones (mana is virtually impossible to run out of, in fact I can't drop below 95% mana or so--my healer heart weeps at the injustice), so let's get to the meat of the matter.

Constraints? You Mean, Just Cast The Best Ability Off Cooldown, Right?

That's the usual take on DPS and it'll work to some extent. This is the type of thing you'll usually see about the current shadow rotation, for example:

Shadow Word: Death > Mind Blast > Devouring Plague (with three shadow orbs) > From Darkness, Comes Light Mind Spike > Shadowfiend > Vampiric Touch = Shadow Word: Pain > Mind Flay

Basically, this means, use whichever of Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, three shadow orb Devouring Plague, instant Mind Spike or Shadowfiend is available, with that order of priority if multiple options are available. If none of them are and either Vampiric Touch or Shadow Word: Pain are near expiration, refresh them. If neither of the previous two sentences applies, use Mind Flay.

Doing this in a machine-like fashion won't yield terrible results, you'll do reasonable DPS...but it won't be optimal. To optimize, you need to juggle in your mind all the constraints I'm about to discuss in order to make the best choice on a moment-by-moment basis. 

Let's get to it! (I'm going to omit mana costs and cooldowns, because we've already noted them. Also, remember that I'm discussing single-target damage on boss types of monsters, so I'll also ignore the duration of the damage-over-time [DoT] spells as a constraint.)

Mind Blast

Benefits: The second hardest hitting shadow spell, provides a shadow orb

Constraint(s): None, right? Actually, the constraint is that you can only have three shadow orbs at a time

Shadow Word: Death

Benefits: The hardest hitting shadow spell, provides a shadow orb

Constraint(s): See above. Also, technically a constraint is that it can only be used when your target is below 20% health (unless glyphed) but we'll ignore that by lumping it into "cooldowns" since this constraint is irrelevant to what I'm describing

Devouring Plague

Benefits: A hard-hitting DoT spell, fantastic damage per casting time invested (DPCT)

Constraint(s): Requires three shadow orbs (technically, you can use any number of orbs, but you only want to use it with three)

FDCL Mind Spike

Benefits: Hits about as hard as Mind Blast (though it doesn't provide a shadow orb)

Constraint(s): You can only have two charges saved up, further procs will be wasted

Shadowfiend

Benefits: Better DPCT than the spells listed below

Constraints: None beyond the long cooldown

Vampiric Touch

Benefits: Better DPCT than Mind Flay

Constraint(s): Cast time (this has greater relevance for a DoT than a conventional spell, I'll explain later)

Shadow Word: Pain

Benefits: Better DPCT than Mind Flay

Constraint(s): None, practically

Mind Flay

Benefits: Better than a hole in the head (more correctly: much better than standing idle)

Constraint(s): None, practically

(I ignored mana returns as a benefit for a couple of abilities because, as I said, mana is close to irrelevant. You can price that benefit in for fights which contain as a gimmick taking away all your mana, ala Yor'sahj the Unsleeping.)

So these notes lead us to a logic that's a bit more complicated than the basic priority system laid out above.

Putting It Together In Practice

First some logical consequences...

There's little question you want to cast Mind Blast the moment it is off cooldown...unless you have three shadow orbs.

Which means that a Devouring Plague with three shadow orbs is the top priority...except that the only time pressure on Devouring Plague is the next Mind Blast. As long as you cast it before your next Mind Blast is available, there's no DPS loss.

Which can be handy if Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch is about to expire or you have two charges of FDCL Mind Spike.

That leads me to FDCL Mind Spike. It sits higher in the priority list than the DoTs...but since you can save two charges at a time, one charge of FDCL Mind Spike isn't a pressing priority. It's better to refresh a DoT that's near expiry before burning a charge of FDCL Mind Spike if you only have one charge.

But if you have two charges of FDCL Mind Spike, then you want to burn a charge of that off pronto, probably even above casting that three orb Devouring Plague.

Shadow Word: Death pretty much follows the same rules as Mind Blast when the target is low enough in health that Shadow Word: Death is available.

Shadowfiend should be used any time it's off cooldown and, since it has no constraints, could be used ahead of Devouring Plague or FDCL Mind Spike with one charge, but could also be pushed behind refreshing Vampiric Touch or Shadow Word: Pain.

This leads to some complicated decisions at times. Let's take an example:

Shadow Word: Pain is 2.5 second from expiring

Vampiric Touch is 2 seconds from expiring

You just completed a cast of Mind Blast, giving you a third shadow orb

A charge of FDCL Mind Spike just proc'd

The usual priority chart would have you cast Devouring Plague, then Mind Spike, then refresh the two DoTs. However, if you hold the Devouring Plague and Mind Spike in abeyance and first refresh Vampiric Touch and then the Shadow Word: Pain, then cast the Devouring Plague and then the Mind Spike, you'll see better DPS, since you have no opportunity cost for withholding the Plague and Spike for a few seconds, whereas the opportunity cost of holding back on the Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch is letting them expire (costing you DPS and procs from talents like From Darkness, Comes Light and Divine Insight which is further DPS).

This, however, creates a few more caveats...

The reason I mentioned using Devouring Plague before Mind Spike in the above example is because I did take the Divine Insight talent, which means that Mind Blast is always at risk of having its cooldown reset. Which means I actually do want to get Devouring Plague cast off as quickly as possible, so that if I suddenly have an unexpected Mind Blast to cast, I don't have to push it back to avoid wasting the shadow orb it would generate (and pushing Mind Blast back is a DPS loss). Which is a further constraint on Devouring Plague, if you use that talent. However, if you don't use that talent, then you'd actually want to cast the instant Mind Spike first...because your next Mind Blast will be coming at a predictable time (and you should be able to plan to get Devouring Plague cast before Mind Blast comes off cooldown) whereas you might get two quick procs of FDCL while you're casting Devouring Plague (and then waiting out the global cooldown it initiates) which would cause one to be lost if you already have a charge of FDCL (you can't hold three charges at a time).

Getting back to my earlier mention that cast time is a constraint when it comes to a DoT, if you had Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain close to dropping off (say ~2 seconds away) and both about equally close to dropping off, then you'd want to cast Vampiric Touch first. A cast time spell followed by an instant will lead to both spells being cast more quickly than the instant followed by the cast time spell, because the latter puts a GCD between the casts. Of course, in the case of the former, the GCD will still happen after both spells, so the total time used is identical...but since the lower priority of the DoTs means you'll generally be following it up with something non-mission critical (Mind Flay, oftentimes), you're better off pushing that follow-up spell back rather than adding extra time to the DoT refreshing if there's a risk that one of the DoTs could drop off your target altogether.

In Summation

This is a pretty long wall of text and may or may not seem like a lot to bear in mind, but it all starts to feel pretty natural and instinctive once you've practiced on a dummy enough and put those constraints into practice. 

The real point is that while basic priority systems give you a general idea of what matters more and what matters less, you need to look at the constraints of all your abilities, as illustrated above, to understand how to fit your abilities together in real time.

From Light...Comes Darkness?

I've done the unthinkable. I've crossed over from the Light to the shadow. From the light side of the force to the dark side of the force. A shadow has passed over my soul.

Oh, not entirely. I did drop my holy spec for a shadow spec, but I retain my trusty, true-blue discipline spec. You can have that when you pry it from cold, dead, pixelated hands.

That said, this does signify a bit of a twist in the road for me. I've dabbled in DPS, but generally on other classes and mostly in Wrath. In Cataclysm, I pretty much lost the way with DPS and healed all the things with all the things. I have one of each healer type at max level and that's pretty much all I did. Until recently, that is.

Starting a couple of months ago, I began getting back into my hunter, mostly neglected since Wrath except to level her up to 85. I realized that the reason I was pretty mediocre each time I took a half-hearted stab at DPS this expansion was due to never setting up a proper UI specifically for DPS. Even more so than healing, in my opinion, you need a really good informational set up about your abilities. The old maxim that DPS is a science, tanking is a skill and healing is an art really holds true to me. You obviously need a good informational set up to heal, but it's a different set of information, in my opinion. Healing has a large "feel" component, DPS is all about sharp precision. That's overly simplified (healing requires its own set of precision, DPS needs a feel for certain things) but I think it conveys the general idea.

Anyway, starting with my hunter, I began figuring out how to build a really good DPS UI for me. A UI that created an informational flow that made hitting the right ability at the right time feel natural. I had some good results on my hunter and I think hunter is a blast. If I could weld a discipline priest spec to a survival hunter spec on the same character, I would.

I can't, though, and I do want a proper DPS spec on my main character, which will continue to be my priest, Shanthi, into Mists of Pandaria. The biggest motivator was to be versatile, for the sake of my teammates. Having been the healer with two healing specs (discipline and holy), I was obviously never going to be doing anything but heal. For most of tier 13, we had three healers, which was fine until we hit heroic modes and dropped to two healers for various encounters. At that point, we usually needed one of our healers to go DPS and guess who it wasn't going to be? I felt bad that someone else always had to shift, never me.

So that was the primary motivation. Wanting to be useful as more than a healer. I often run five-mans with friends and one of those friends is a main spec healer also. Since you very rarely two heal five-man dungeons, she always had to switch to accommodate me. I needed more versatility.

However, as I've spent more and more time, since patch 5.0 dropped, working on my shadow UI and rotation, I've found it to be a lot of fun. I've been asking to go DPS as much as possible in raids to get practice keeping my DPS as high as possible while handling mechanics...it's a lot of fun handling a different role. Also, it's a lot of fun melting the faces of monsters.*

*Additionally, shadow has far cooler minor glyphs than discipline or holy. So there's that.

So now I feel very comfortable about heading into Mists of Pandaria as a discipline/shadow priest. I'll offer my raid more options in terms of composition and it really won't be any kind of sacrifice for me...it'll be fun whether I'm healing or DPSing.

This was going to be the introduction to a post in which I talk about my observations of the best way to play shadow (hey, we're all new to 5.0 class mechanics and I've been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about shadow DPS, even if I'm not a long-time shadow priest)...but this "introduction" got a little longer than I expected, so I think I'll just leave it as a stand-alone post about what I've been up to and follow it up in a few days about my thoughts on shadow priest DPS.

I believe that this blog will still mostly focus on healing (with a bias toward priest healing) but there will probably be some posts about DPS (with a bias toward priest DPS) now and again.