Nice character sheet from Armory

[Samathul]

This kind of character sheet came up in a discussion thread about SR nerf for shadowpriests. Apparently her tanks are able to keep aggro off from her with even the nerfed SR.

armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#character-sheet.xml?r=Korgath&n=Cherrie

Check the amount of +shadow damage on her while she's (apparently) raid buffed

[gomli]

Wow.. Mind you shes in one of the best guilds raid wise, I think DnT was first on a hole load of boss kills

[Samathul]

The rumour goes, that the most plausible explanation for SR and VE nerfs to priests are a direct result of high end guilds (like DNT) featuring shadowpriests (like Cherrie in that link) with extreme +shadow damage on them.

Basics goes like this: Have a group consist of one extremely high DPS (over 1000 +damage) Shadowpriest and 4 Paladins. The Paladins casts constantly Holy Light on MT creating a combined HPS of excessing 5000 while never running oom. This tactic trivialized most of the content as they created a MT that couldn't be killed and the guilds were boosting through content with ease which wasn't the idea what the company was expecting.

Blizzard was left to either nerf Paladin healing or directly nerfing Priest DPS. Both of those fixes would have caused an unimaginable uproar on the game and the forums compared to the second method which they in the end opted to use: undirectly nerfing priest DPS through SR and "fixing" VE.

Remains to be seen how well they ended with it.

[Felbane]

If you can reach that kind of powerful results with min/maxing, it means the classes you use are overpowered and needs a nerf. simple as that. Question is just how exactly this nerf is supposed to be shaped, and wether it should be a direct or proxy nerf. One could argue that the shadowpriest + 4 paladins tactic is a clear sign that the group bonuses from other classes than shadowpriest are too weak, or one would gain more out of the above configuration by for example exchanging one paladin for a treeform druid.

Imo, the ideal class balance is when the raid leaders end up striving for one of each class in each group, with some separation between caster and melee classes.

If you, after this, end up with one class dealing less damage than the other, or healing more, I find that of secondary concern. the two main things should be desirability in a group, and entertaining gameplay.

[Samathul]

The funny thing is, that SR and critting VE has been around since the launch. Priests had their VE buffed with improved VE a year ago in their big class revamp. VT has been around since August 2006 in BC beta. And still no one in Blizzard thought about the possibility of mixing a shadowpriest and paladins and create an immensely powerfull healing combo, which occurred to about everyone else in the game who knew about how SP and Paladin classes will work in the game.

The signs were up in the forums, but no one bothered to check it in Blizzard and the classes entered the game as they were. The alarms should have rang a long time ago preventing the situation, which we see now in the live, ever rising.

Pure incompetence.

edit: The character sheet at the first post has been updated with showing her without raid buffs. While the "maxed out shadow damage" sheet was up, she had +1291 shadow damage.

[Tardon]

Well... its the same thing with "noticing" that Counterspell was off the global cooldown, along with "noticing" that people were critting several times on a frost nova... after... what,, 2 years? o.0 I call BS on that. Bad excuse for nerfing things you didn't think would be that powerfull.

[Tardon]

gomli said:

Wow.. Mind you shes in one of the best guilds raid wise, I think DnT was first on a hole load of boss kills

Afaik Death and Taxes, along with Nihilum (which I think is slightly ahead of DnT) are still the top two raiding guilds, right? At least has been for a very long time.