Javaed posted on October 09, 2009
Patch 3.3 has been up on the Player Test Realm for several days now, and over the past couple of days quite a bit of information has come out. Some of it has been faultly, but now that some of the numbers have been corrected I think it's time to share with ya'll what's going on. Good news is, Blizzard is considering some significant buffs to PVE Shadow Priests. Bad news, these buffs are only being considered, they're not definate.
The biggest proposed change is to finally allow some DoTs and HoTs to scale with Haste. The Blizzard programmers have been busy coding the functionality for this change to the game mechanics, and have done so in a manner where they can apply Haste functionality to individual spells. The current plan is to test this concept out on a limited basis, through Shadow Word: Pain.
The exact changes are as follows. Glyph of Mind Flay will be removed from the game, with range boost provided by the glyph becoming a baseline component of the spell. We will get a new glyph that allows both the duration of SW:P and the time between each tick of damage to scale linearly with Haste. If we have 10% haste, the spell will last 13.5 seconds, and will tick every 2.7 seconds. Depending on the results of PTR testing, we could wind up with all three of our DoTs scaling with Haste either through talents or as base-line abilities.
This is a huge boost to our gear scaling, and will help close the gap between our single target DPS and that of other DPSers. Current theory-craft is predicting that we'll be on par with Balance Druids should all three of our DoTs scale with Haste, which is a significant DPS increase.
We've also gotten an early look at our Tier 10 set bonuses, and for the first time in a long time I'm very excited about our next level of Tier gear. Here's the bonuses:
2 Piece - The critical strike chance of your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells is increased by 5%.
4 Piece - Reduces the channel duration and period of your Mind Flay spell by 0.5 seconds.
Both of the bonuses are huge, and with the increased Spirit scaling we've been given, coupled with possible Haste scaling, we're going to want to actually grab a full tier set =).