Personally, I say rebuild it. ANY new bugs would be better than the pile of bugs we have now.

Just considering the slowness to tick (likely due to invisible travel time on the missles), in pve or pvp this is a HUGE annoyance. In PVP it means when I'm trying to finish someone off and MB/SW:D are down their healer has another .5sec to get a heal off. In PVE it means that mob at 20hp that I'd like to MF the last little bit takes me almost 1.5sec to take down. (Nevermind the terrible issues with clipping that will permanently haunt spriest dps and never keep them at your tested numbers if things stay the way they are. There's a reason simulationcraft added a simulated lag aspect and spriest dps dropped the most out of any of them.)

Possible easy fix: use arcane missles code with ice lance travel time? Still a recode, but possibly less of a tweak than it was. :P

Edit: On your mention of being "absolutely necessary": It's the core spriest dps spell. If frostbolt was broken, would you leave it alone?

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Q u o t e:
Can anyone else comment on Misery falling off? It could get overwritten by Improved Faerie Fire and if you're playing with a sloppy Moonkin, it's possible they put the debuff up and then let it fall off.

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I don't raid with a Moonkin, so I know it isn't that. I've seen Misery fall off, however, I've gone with enough hit to be capped even without misery and initial casts of mind flay still miss. I'll try to get a parse this weekend where it occurs.

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im at 17.07% chance to hit with my gear/aura/talents and misery up, and i have been seeing many resists on boss fights. we do not have a moonkin druid that raids with us atm, and the only way i should be seeing resists is if misery falls off, or if there is some unknown thing that is causing my spells to be resisted, when that should not be able to happen it also mainly seems to be on mind flay, as odd as that may sound. either misery is falling off, or mind flay is not being applied due to the debuff limit or something like that.
and my armory has not updated recently apparently. i sit at 127 hit rating, not 122.

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WWS of the fights on bosses? It will show your resist rate and depending on the fights where resists are encountered and your raid comp may lead to the answer.

wouldn't it make more sense for mind flay to tick in the same way penance does?

It doesn't make sense for mind flay to work how it does in its current incarnation... While doing raids there are so many dots up on an enemy that its impossible to keep track of the mind flay ticks so who knows how many we could be clipping through the course of a boss fight lowering dps.

I'd rather have it rebuilt to work properly than have it right now where we're spending full mana to only get 2/3 ticks.

Misery seems to have a very wonky behavior to it right now.

Sometimes it falls off right when all DoTs or Mind Flay fall from the target. Other times, it seems to stay up until its entire debuff duration.

Also, is there any chance of getting the talent Improved Shadow Word Pain fixed? The game still thinks it has 6 seconds left on it as it falls off.

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The problem in this case is that the glyph did not remove the snare -- it just set the effect to zero. So the trinket etc. still could cancel the spell. Because there is no easy way to have the glyph remove the snare component entirely, we recently made a change so that the glyph instead lowers the snare to a very small percent.

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That's interesting. I wondered how that worked.

The travel time seems directly linked to the graphic coming out your hand, cut that graphic off before the 3rd tick and you lost it. Whats bad is you can clip the 3rd tick even with a nochanneling macro because the channel cast bar its self ends before the 3rd tick and graphic ends. The new MF does not (appear to)work like AM you dont get credit for the cast/tick when the spell leaves your hand but instead when it hits the target and all the while you must maintain the MF graphic connection.

The is a very broken spell in its current form.

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It doesn't make sense for mind flay to work how it does in its current incarnation... While doing raids there are so many dots up on an enemy that its impossible to keep track of the mind flay ticks so who knows how many we could be clipping through the course of a boss fight lowering dps.

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Go to Curse, get Rogue Power Bars. Open both the buffs and debuffs.lua files in Notepad, enter in the aura effect you want to track as a buff or debuff, and customize the UI as you see fit. Viola! You now have on screen timers that you can customize for nearly any aura.

I use it to prevent clipping rip, letting mangle fall off, rupture, rake, gouge, KS/CS, and to manage my ignites and scorches.

I didn't level my Priest in TBC so I can't comment on MF it's current incarnation. The first tick problem due to client/server latency is an old one.

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we recently made a change so that the glyph instead lowers the snare to a very small percent.

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Oh, and what's this? Are we going to be getting a 10% snare or something?

It would be nice compensation for the druids that shift out of my 36 yard mind flay so they never get damaged :P

As it currently stands, you have to wait for the 3rd tick to go before you recast mindflay. Whats worse is that that tick does not happen until after the spell is finished casting. Rebuild the spell, do something. Right now its a significant dps loss which is probably why no one is getting the same DPS numbers blizz says we should be getting.

If the spell is to be reworked it might be nice to have the damage ticks spread out as follows:

1st tick - on cast
2nd tick - 1.5s into channel
3rd tick - 3s into channel

This would change Mind Flay into an ability that would allow us to quickly tag mobs which is something we currently lack. (We don't like to count SW:D since it damages the caster and is on a cooldown.)

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The problem in this case is that the glyph did not remove the snare -- it just set the effect to zero. So the trinket etc. still could cancel the spell. Because there is no easy way to have the glyph remove the snare component entirely, we recently made a change so that the glyph instead lowers the snare to a very small percent.

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Sounds like your in-house tools need work imo. More modularity!

Please redo mind flay. It is really bad right now with any kind of latency. Even nochanelling doesn't work. We still lose ticks + we lose casting time since it is a client check and not a server check.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

How about going back to the old Mind Flay that couldn't crit and significantly upping its damage to compensate for the loss of crit? At least that spell worked properly!

This is a repost from the Shadow Priest Discusion on the EJ forums
all credit goes to Althor of Ascension
This should explain the issue of mindflay clipping and other SP bugs in game currently


Where *I* have concerns about Shadow Priests currently in PvE has nothing to do with small tweaks to the numbers of various spells and talents or how far behind or ahead we are from other classes. With all the recent buffs I do feel that Blizzard will make sure that we (at least for their test cases and those of top US/Euro guilds) end up pretty much where it is they want us to end up on meters. And they'll make changes until they feel that's correct.

Now, I happen to think that at some point down the track they'll either have to give our DoTs some better scaling with +haste rating or tweak some of our other talents to compensate as ilvls increase in T8 and T9 etc. Obviously I feel improving our scaling with +haste would make more long term sense, but we'll see what happens there.

Where my main problems lie with the Shadow Priest class in PvE currently are with mechanics and bugs. And, being lucky enough to be in Beta I've been helping test and posting various bug reports for this.

Some of the outstanding issues are:

1) Mind Flay and Mind Sear are buggy currently in a number of ways. There's a large delay between the application of the debuff on the target and the first tick of damage. This ends up with the last tick of damage happening after the end of the channel. And this has the effect that especially if you're using Quartz etc. to determine when to recast, you can clip that last tick even though you think you're safe to recast. However it's *also* causing the same problem (albeit less often) if you're using the client side [nochanneling] option in a macro. Why does this matter? The extra delay alone decreases our DPS from the theoretical maximum and from what low ping testing would show. The loss of ticks further increases the loss of DPS and it shows up more with people on a higher latency. This means that Shadow might feel balanced in internal testing or in US or Euro guilds but will perform relatively far worse for Oceanic guilds compared to other classes.

2) Misery has a large delay before it's refreshed from Mind Flay and randomly falls off entirely (even when the debuff limit hasn't been reached). This increases the number of spell misses especially on Mind Flay because even if Misery was already up, a recast of Mind Flay can remove the Misery but not refresh it like it should until a second or so after the hit check for the Mind Flay. This is just a pure bug, however it's somewhat lag dependent it seems and thus again might effect higher latency guilds more. In this case however it would have an effect on all the casters.

3) Channeled spells in general have significant issues compared to direct cast spells. They suffer more from pushback (any pushback suffered will ensure you lose at least 1 tick even with say 2/2 Improved Shadowform). So with Mind Flay if you suffer any pushback at all you're going to lose at least 33% of that Mind Flay's damage. This however might be an intended balance compared with direct cast spells due to getting it's damage out sooner or something. A bigger issue however is how you can interrupt your current channeled spell at any time (once the GCD has passed) by pressing a new spell button unless you're using [nochanneling] macros everywhere. This is different behaviour from cast time spells where, once casting you won't interrupt the cast by spamming another (or the same) button.

Why is this an issue? It's an issue because it makes it impossible to effectively and efficiently chain cast a channeled spell or cast a new spell after the channel ends. The current options are to use [nochanneling] macros everywhere or to use a 3rd-party mod like Quartz to *guess* when it's safe to cast a new spell without clipping that last tick. Quartz is just a guess of course because latencies change. Even if you did manage to land it in the red zone, you might still end up clipping that last tick. (I'm assuming of course that Issue #1 is fixed). As for [nochanneling], quite aside from it forcing you to make up a bunch of macros for all of your spells that you might want to use after you finish a channeled spell, it is a client side only check which has the unfortunate effect of making your average time per channel equal to the correct channel time plus your latency (or maybe half of your latency).

Again, this is something that effects people on larger (and more variable) latencies more than someone at Blizzard HQ or playing with a low ping. And it effects only those classes that use channeled spells often in their rotations.

If channeled spells were changed so that they're not interrupted by new button presses, just like direct cast spells, then there wouldn't be the need to rely upon the *luck* of guessing when it's safe to cast thanks to a 3rd-party mod or using

Any news on the P&S bug that would knock off SW:P even if it had 2+ seconds left? GC posted once to a thread about it saying it was lag, but that doesn't seem to be the case. My experience: I cast SW:P, it drops to 3 seconds, I go 'o%@!%' and cast mind flay at around 2.5s. SW:P then disappears. It doesn't refresh, it doesn't run out to its final tick, it just straight up disappears. I haven't tested this with 3/3, just 2/3, so it may not happen with a 100% refresh rate, and it doesn't happen all the time. If I had to guess I'd say the mechanism rolls a dice to see if SW:P is refreshed, and if it rolls poorly, not refreshing SW:P, AND SW:P would have fallen off during the mind flay cast, it just clears it. Not a big bug, but could cost a tick of SW:P. Of course, if it DOES occur with 3/3, it's a bit bigger of a bug :)

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Q u o t e:
How about going back to the old Mind Flay that couldn't crit and significantly upping its damage to compensate for the loss of crit? At least that spell worked properly!

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this is a step in the wrong direction. we (and blizz too) want crit to be a meaningful stat for spriests. i would definately like to see this problem fixed as soon as possible but not at the consequence of causing problems in end game wotlk.

if it takes rewriting the spell to make it work how it should, rewrite the spell! this is a core spell and spriests need this fixed.

The icon doesn't refresh properly. So your ticks aren't happening in their usual spots as per the icon.

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this is a step in the wrong direction. we (and blizz too) want crit to be a meaningful stat for spriests. i would definately like to see this problem fixed as soon as possible but not at the consequence of causing problems in end game wotlk.

if it takes rewriting the spell to make it work how it should, rewrite the spell! this is a core spell and spriests need this fixed.

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I know, my comment was meant to be more sarcastic because I'm unbelievably frustrated with all this junk. I suppose I should've put a "/sarcasm" or something at the end of it, my bad. >.>