Patch 3.3 Buffs Up Priests

Reading the patch notes on 3.3, I noticed the hefty buff to priests, yet the 1-liner for warriors. Regardless, priests have waited their fair share for this one. Albeit, the changes across all classes are mostly to deal with the cross-realm arena changes to spell cooldowns, but shadowpriests are going to enjoy this one.

Priests
Divine Hymn: The cooldown on this spell has been reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.
Power Word: Shield: This spell can now be cast on non-raid/party friendly targets.

Shadow Talents
Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.

This will not increase the total damage that the spell does. Instead, it just makes the initial cast of the spell more powerful, and by so doing, the DoT weaker. It will likely up over-all DPS for priests though, as many DoT's don't take full effect because the target dies before the duration of the DoT. Since the initial spike of damage is higher, you're unavoidably going to get more damage off on the opponent. You could potentially get more killing blows or something like that, but likely you'd use Shadow Word: Death instead.

Mind Flay: The range of this ability has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.

About time they up the range on this spell. Still not quite comparable with arcane missiles. I don't forsee much of a DPS improvement based on this change, although it could help slightly. It just allows us to be further from the melee damage. Mostly just convienience, but it is possible that since we don't have to keep repositioning ourselves, that we may put out a slight amount more DPS on that.

Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch to benefit from haste. Both the period length and the duration of these spells will be reduced by haste. In addition, the mana cost has been reduced from 32% to 13% of base mana.

Here's a major change. Haste always means higher DPS. The implications of making the DoT's tick faster though, is that it will be re-applied more often, causing increased mana consumption. You might note that the mana cost has been decreased by 19% of base mana, but I'm not sure what that entails in the long run. This works well if you've got good mana regen based on MP/5, but you're most likely still going to be running lower on mana than you were before.

Vampiric Embrace: This talent now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff and only generates healing for single-target shadow damage spells.
Pet

This is how I always thought the spell should work. Since VE no longer needs to be applied to every target, you automatically gain spell-casting time. One more spell can be cast for each mob which will deal damage instead of being an inactive cast. This obviously means an increase in DPS, but also implies that your first cast will be damage dealing, and thus you will have higher initial agro. Another consideration is that many shadow priests don't use VE because of the loss of DPS so a sudden resurgance of the use of the spell might cause trouble for shadow priest aggro. You will now be generating more threat based on DPS as well as healing aggro. This is indicitive of multi-mob groups where the tank must get control of all of them. But then again, maybe those shadow priests out there will actually use it and help us holy priests heal a little.

Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

A nice tidbit so that you can use your shadowfeind without losing it to other AOE damage happening around it. I take this to mean that it can now get AOE'd in PvP, but makes it more viable for PvE.