Javaed posted on October 13, 2009
Well folks, a Blizz rep has finally admitted that our single target DPS is low. In response to a post in the General Forums of the Blizzard message board, we got the following post from Community Manager Ancilorn:
We do recognise that Shadow priest single-target damage is on the low side. In 3.3 we plan to have some changes coming to bring them up a bit. Most of the changes will likely be made on the glyph side of things, something along the lines of trying a glyph to let SW:P scale with haste or similar.
So that's somewhat interesting right there, as the Shadow Priest posting community has spent a large portion of this expansion trying to get Blizzard to make such a direct statement. It's also very interesting, in light of comments made by Ghostcrawler not to long ago that were to the opposite effect.
Now, in his defense, GC has stated before that the version of WoW he operates in isn't the version we have live. He's usually thinking in terms of changes that are comming to the game "soon". However, many of his statments in the class QA and on the forums have been harmful to the morale of our community. Perhaps GC should either refrain from making such statements, or should make sure to indicate when he's referring to the live environment and when he's referring to future changes.
That aside, there's been some very interesting information posted on the DPS forums from some of the top Shadow Priest theory crafters. First, expectations are that if all three of our DoTs are allowed to scale with Haste, we'll see our single target DPS boosted to about the same levels as Balance Druids. Not bad, and something to hope for. There have also been some recent posts regarding Mind Flay clipping, with some interesting data that shows that it's not always a DPS boost do clip a Mind Flay in order to cast a Mind Blast. I'll be posting more on this later.