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.

Intellect or Spirit?

Five Second Rule (FSR)
"Whenever mana is expended for any purpose, mana regeneration is interrupted for five seconds. This is most often caused by casting spells, but diseases that drain mana will also interrupt mana regeneration. During this time, no spirit-based mana regeneration takes place unless the character has certain talents; there is also the fixed regeneration from mana/5 items, which is never interrupted for any reason." (www.wowwiki.com)

Due to the FSR, spirit will only help you regenerate mana if you spend a considerable amount of time doing nothing.

Mana regen is a difficult thing to gear for since it depends wildly on the tank you're healing. If the tank has low HP, you will most likely be needing to heal him constantly, and therefore receive very little regeneration. However, the opposite is also true. A well geared tank that takes less damage will allow the healer to rest between heals and therefore get some regen.

The actual mana regeneration from spirit equation is as follows for level 80 characters:

mp5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(Intellect) * Spirit * 0.005575 ) * 0.60

I took this equation and graphed the results in excel with varying intellect and spirit values. I assume here that stacking intellect means that you have 500 spirit + varried intellect, and that stacking spirit means that you have 1000 int + varied spirit. Those are realistic values at level 80.

These graphs make sense. Since the mp5 varries with the square root of total intellect, the player receives diminishing returns for regen when stacking intellect. However, mp5 varies proportionally with spirit as to create a linear trend. Initially, this looks like it's obvious that stacking spirit is the wise choice.

However, this is not the entire picture. Sure, you'll end up with more regenerated mana, but what about your total mana pool?

Woah, not what you would have expected, eh? It looks like from this graph that stacking spirit actually ended up with far less mana than did stacking intellect. Well, that's because the graph was only for a 60-second fight, allowing only for 20 regen ticks at most. Furthermore, I assumed a FSR of 50%, meaning that you were casting half the time. Realistically, most boss fights are longer than that. While fighting Kael'Thelzud, the last boss in 10-Naxxramas, the fight lasted 15 minutes. Let's re-examine these graphs when a longer fight is assumed.

Now there's a drastic change. Even with a low amount of spirit, the regneration based on spirit scenario ended up with more total mana in the end because of the base amount of intellect that you'll have anyway. It compounds as spirit is stacked, resulting in a difference of 49k mana. That's a lot... more than 3 full mana bars than the stacked intellect case.

Ok, so you still don't think that's realistic. You don't think you'll reach 50% FSR. Yeah, that's probably not realistic. So let's look at 20%FSR. That's 12 seconds out of every minute, you don't cast. (Well, actually 17 because you have to wait 5 seconds before regen starts)

Here, we see that the two trends are almost parallel. So at every amount stacked in either case, the total mana availiable increases proportionally. However, the spirit case still ends up with the large of the two by about 10k mana. That's for a 15 minute fight, the less time, the worse the spirit case appears.

So the break even point is 13% FSR for 15 minutes while stacked at 2100 spirit 1000 int. Remember that the x-Axis is not time. The x-Axis is amount stacked. It's also important to realize that priests in the best guilds on my server only have 1300 intellect and 1100 spirit. They're not stacking one over the other, and it's highly unlikely that any priest would be able to stack 2100 intellect or 2100 spirit.

The Ideal 5-Man group Make-up

I love this group make-up for 5-man instnaces and here's why:

Warrior Tank
Warriors were made to tank. It was an afterthought that possibly paladins and druids should be able to tank too. If you had to swap someone, you could change out the warrior for a paladin tank, if they were awesome. That way, the pally could hand out Kings or Wisdom to the party which would all benifit immensely.

Priest Heals
The priest is the only true-blood healer in the game. There are very few things that a resto shaman, resto druid, or holy paladin can offer that a priest can't. While druid heals offer more HoT's, the priest's Prayer of mending and renew are usually a much more efficient use of mana. Throw in Fortitude and Spirit which would be immensely useful for all other players in the party.

Mage
Not to mention the heavy DPS, polymorph is probably the best CC in the game. Arcane intellect would be beneficial to every other person in the party. The mage has the most consistant AOE damage of any class.

Shaman
Totems are freaking awesome. Tremmor totem to mass-dispel fear, mana regen, windfury, and a fire nova totem for AOE. I'd prefer enhancement here as the DPS is just amazing.

Druid Moonkin
Throw in a battle rez, innervate, and a 5% crit aura. Very nice spike damage and AOE capability here as well.

It also helps that having a pally, priest, shaman and a druid means that you have 4 people who can throw out an extra heal / rez if needed. If you consider their common off-spec, this is a pretty versitile group if things needed to be switched around in a pinch.

You could easily have:

Druid Tank
Pally DPS
Shammy Healer
Mage DPS
Priest DPS