I suck at PvE - please help my shadow priests

[Owltoid]

Granted, my gear sucks, but I should have no problem running regular UK (yes, the level 70 instance) using my 80 druid and 4 79 shadow priests. The problem is my priests are running out of mana like crazy. I can do the whole instance without wiping, but I have to pretty much drink between every single pull, which kind of defeats one of the goals (to get gold before Cata).

Please help!

My priests (for armory gear):
Thisuglyguy
Thatuglyguy
Whichuglyguy
Otheruglyguy

My "tank":
I think it's the Owltoid where the i is the left slash hash mark (alt-141)

A typical group of trash mobs goes like this:
Run in with the druid, and basically spam swipe the whole time (yea, this needs to be improved, but focusing on the SP right now)
After a couple seconds of aggro, the SP all cast renew on the tank
Cast sequence for the mobs is SW: Pain, Vampiric Touch, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Mind Flay (mob is usually dead)
If the shit hits the fan, then I holy nova or shield themselves as needed.

I typically stay out of shadowform, but if it's going to help that much then I can go into it. Typically that one round of renews is enough to keep the tank alive with the passive shadow healing.

My gear is god awful, I mean really bad. I haven't looked at my druid's tanking gear, but I bought it basically just to boost. My priests gear is mainly quest gear (up to level 75 or so) but focused on being holy/disc build (my original plan before the beta changes).

Why am I running out of mana so easily? Is it just a function of gear and I need to put up with it until I upgrade?

The other goal of doing this team is to get practice so I can hit the ground running in the expansion. I'm not looking to gear these toons out, and I have very little gold so AH boosting isn't a big option unless it will help a ton.

[Tehmuffinman]

The minimum lvl for UK is 65, how are you running it with 4x 49th lvl priests?

[Owltoid]

heh, oops, 4 79 (I know, sad).

I'll change the original post.

[Tehmuffinman]

But as far as your rotation... on my SP I never cast SW:P on trash. I go back and forth between Vamp Touch -> Mind Blast -> Mind Flay spam or just Mind Blast -> Mind Flay spam depending on if I feel like proccing replenishment. When you get better gear/more mana and the mind sear spell, it trumps mind flay for packs of trash.

[Tehmuffinman]

You should also stay in Shadowform. More dmg = stuff dies fast = less mana used...

Also one of your priests should probably be a dedicated healer (i.e. not SP)

[Owltoid]

I'm only doing like 550-600 DPS... something is seriously wrong. I'm going to try staying in Shadowform, but on mobs that are so much lower level I would think that even in caster form they would be dying quickly.

[Oatboat]

when you get Mind Sear your dps will go up pretty good.... its the mind flay aoe.

the Shadow Glyph helps pretty well too. Its the one that gives like 15% of your spirit as spellpower after a mindblast crit.

[Owltoid]

But as far as your rotation... on my SP I never cast SW:P on trash. I go back and forth between Vamp Touch -> Mind Blast -> Mind Flay spam or just Mind Blast -> Mind Flay spam depending on if I feel like proccing replenishment. When you get better gear/more mana and the mind sear spell, it trumps mind flay for packs of trash.

I'll give the mind blast/mind flay rotation a shot. It seems like my SW: Pain gets a full cycle (my DPS is that bad) but I'll try to watch more closely to see if the mob is dying too soon.

[ILikeTwins]

I don't have access to armory at work but are your spells missing alot? It could be a spell hit thing. I would think that you can just basically spam Mind Sear (you get it at level 75?). If you can target multiple different mobs it would spread the mind sear out (since it doesnt damage its target) and cause tons of damage to all the mobs

[Starbuck_Jones]

My advice is not going to help much as I have not played a priest past 70. But I was never impressed with shadow. (its been a while) But Channeling mind flay and waiting for Mind blast cool downs while trying to stack the shadow dmg debuff to me was lame. I used Holy Moon Fire and smite. AOE I just glyped holy nova and went to town with the no threat and the reflecto damage shield ftw.

[Coltimar]

I just ditched my SP at 80 and converted him to holy. He was doing bad dps and going oom quickly, too. Not doing SW:P on trash is essential, like everyone has said. I do use SW:D in my trash rotation. I also have Mind Sear (don't recall if you have it at 79) on an AoE hotkey. I usually do Mind Blast, SW:D, MF, MF, MF then repeat on trash. You may need to do some tweaking with 4 priests.

Your gear is horrid, but that's what you are working on, right? I did dps = to 80% of my Spell Power. That's terrible, I know, but it was about all I could manage until the very end. I tweaked my spec and macros and managed to do around 2700 dps with 2450 SP.

You can check out Coventar (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Coventar&group=1) and his macros (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Coventar&group=1) to see if you find anything useful. My DS is still shadow.

One side note, it is definitely worth keeping SW:P up on bosses, but you should only have to cast it once if your talents refresh it. Also, making sure Shadowfiend was out 100% of the time is was available and having a hotkey for Dispersion (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=65544)

Good luck!

[Greythan]

My 80 priest damage in shadow spec sucks. Just sucks. Tried all variants of click macro's from these forums and just gave up. She's back tol holy spec and sitting on a shelf as I run now with a druid healer.

[Multibocks]

SPriest is very hard to macro and get good dps. I was checking a statistic site the other day and SPriests are last in dps in all raids (average) and not by a small margin. I solo PuG icc with one and I have to work my ass off to keep on the charts with 13k dps hunters/mages/rogues/warriors. If the spriest has to move at all your dps starts dropping massively. They have only DP and Shadow Word death for instant damage and neither are any good. It makes me sad because I actually enjoy the class.

[Slats]

I'm saving my Dk + Spriest team till Cata because I just cant level them. They just OOM too badly which was exactly their problem in TBC. I'm hoping they get a whole bunch better in Cata and I might continue to level them in the xpac.

I was going to do 1 Holy Priest, 3 Shadow Priest and a DK Tank.

[Multibocks]

Make sure you are using glyphed dispersion on cooldown. That should help a ton (well when you are high enough level for it)

[Owltoid]

Thanks for all the good advice. I will take SW: Pain out of my trash rotation, and look into getting the glyph. I know my gear is horrid, but it sounds like they will always have mana problems until 4.0 (who knows, then).

[Catamer]

I tried priests once, 4xpriest + pally and I hated them for the same reason.... no mana.
they were fat from all of the drinking they had to do.
I know you can cast the pet every so often and as long as the pet is doing dmg you get mana back.
I like starbuck's idea of disc priests.

[Multibocks]

Dispersion + Pet + Replenishment... you shouldn't be drinking that much. I only run oom on very long boss fights.

edit: of course Im forgetting low level peeps that don't have access to these talents =X

[Mercurio]

Saw your post and decided to work on my SP macros for a while.

This is what I came up with:

/stopmacro [channeling]
/target [harm,nodead] [target=raid1target,exists,nodead] [ target=party1target,exists,nodead]
/assist focus
/stopmacro [notarget]
/use 13
/use 14
/startattack
/castsequence reset=target/combat Vampiric Touch,Shadow Word: Pain,NIL
/castsequence reset=combat Mind Blast,Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Vampiric Touch, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Vampiric Touch, Mind Flay,
/castsequence ,Shadowfiend,,,,,

This works a TON better than what I was using before - try it out and see if it helps. Improve it if possible, I'd love to see it made better!