This is in response to Moonsongs post about improving dps. Here are my thoughts. Shadow Priests do great dps, but it's meant to work in function with utility functions like VE and VT. I have found that Shadow Priests that fall in to the category of lazy dps are ones that spam mindblast and mindflay with the occasional dot, but no one here falls in to that category Taking a look at the two Shadow Priests I have been with in the last few raids, Birdiewd and Vinya, we all do no less than 700 dps according to WWS. So lets do some math:
VT returns 5% of dmg in mana to your group. Lets assume we keep VT up all the time during a boss fight (or pretty close).
700dps is 3500 damage every 5 seconds. 5% of 3500 is 175. So by keeping VT up we are giving our group an average of 175 mp5! That's a lot! Now looking at WWS from Mags on the 28th, Birdiewd and I kept VT up pretty good, but in theory, we should have it up as much as we have Shadow Word Pain up. The total dmg from VT for each of us was about 50k less than the dmg from SW:P so what this shows me is that we need to work a little harder to keep that VT up.
Now as for VE, with improved VE you return 25% of the dmg you do in health to your party members. For mags on the 28th I did 721028 dmg. So 25% of this is 180257. Multiply this by 5 and you get 901285. WWS says I healed 1 036 793 hp using VE. The overhead is due to +healing stats that comes with dmg gear. Birdiewd is in the same ballpark as well. So looks like we have no problem with VE here. VE is easier to keep up as you only need to spam it once a minute.
These are just some thoughts that I have about the function of a SP in a raid. We are doing really well, we just need to keep our VT up a little more and we are where we should be for an SSC/TK run.
What are your thoughts about this?