Reasons I’m Going Insane: Respeccing for the healers!

So, we have been having some… difficulties… I will call them on Ragnaros since getting to him and we are approaching our 3rd week on him full time now. We cant quite figure out what the problem is, but we know for the most part it comes undone right at the second transition phase at 40% when all hell (no pun intended) breaks loose.

So in addition to our post-raid chat wrap on how we performed, I decided to look at my own spec for raiding and see how I could help the situation at all.

I ran a variation of a raiding shadow spec (9/0/32), with one point in Psychic Horror and maxed Mental Agility (3/3). It was the spec below:

Good for throwing a shadow stun on those unsuspecting players in BGs, not ideal for raiding though.

So I decided that I could do some small changes to my spec, the first being to drop Psychic Horror for 1 point in Inner Sanctum (-2% spell damage), which left me wondering if I could reach for the next rank(-4% spell damage) by dropping another point in Mental Agility (-7% cost) yet still be effective and not go OOM. With the way the tier 12 set bonuses are, the first lowering the cooldown on shadowfiend by 75 seconds, in addition to the 1 minute taken off by Veiled Shadows puts it on a base cooldown of 2.75 minutes. Combined with the critical strike chance on mind flay to reduce the remaining cooldown by 10 seconds per crit, you essentially have a trinket built into your spec (it times up nicely if you have the Rune of Zeth or Fiery Quintessence giving your fiend a little extra kick when it deals damage).

After putting the test spec to use, even on a mana intensive fight like Shannox where you are constantly swapping targets to reapply dots, I had no issue with making sure I did not run out of mana.  The current spec I run (10/0/31) looks like this:

Quick to the draw you may say:

“But Srs, Shadow Priests already have 15% passive damage reduction from all sources. Do you really need those talents as opposed to being more mana efficient and increasing your effectiveness?”

Lets take a look.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-2rhoa04afcw2xe27/details/1/

There is a link to our last night of attempts on Ragnaros, with the amount of damage that I took over the course of the night. The total amount is 13,745,672. We’ll subtract the melee damage since that wont get mitigated by Inner Sanctum for a total of 11,950,958. Since this is the damage taken with 2 points in Inner Sanctum, divide 11,950,958 by .96 to find out how much one would have taken with 0/3 in the talent.

11,950,958 = .96x

11,950,958/.96 = x = 12,448,915

So, with 2/3 in Inner Sanctum we can see: 12,448,915

12,448,915 – 11,950,958 = 497,757 damage less taken.

That is 2.5 full health bars of your main tank in damage mitigated over the course of 1 night (18 pulls). And this will apply to the total number of priests in your raid, since we usually run with 5, this means on this given night:

497,957 x 5 = 2,489,785 damage mitigated.

Over the course of one night it might not seem like a lot, but I would bet money if you ask any healer, if you had the choice of playing a comfortable spec, or tweaking a few points to take 2.5Million less damage while having the same level of output, none of those healers are going to say: FUCK YEAH I WANT TO HEAL 2.5MILLION MORE DAMAGE! BRING IT ON!

A small loss in mana efficiency for me, a greater peace of mind for the healers (I hope).

So if you see a priest in your raid, and you see them with talent points in Inner Sanctum, make sure to give them a hug for making the healers’ lives a bit easier.