- Both Light and Dark Essences moved into Exceptions, Arcane Empowerment joined the club.
- Post updated for 3.3 changes, it seems they haven't touched the refreshing mechanism.
- Exceptions added.
- Icecrown fights added. So far only the Queen fight alters SW:P.



Refresh, soft refresh - Happens when your MF places its debuff on the target already affected by SW:P, the timer is set back to 18 sec, but it's still the same spell you casted before.

Recast, hard refresh - When you hit button "Shadow Word: Pain" and a completely new spell is casted. 99% time while doing this, you loose a tick.


Facts :
1) Spell power is recalculated with every refresh.
2) Shadow Word: Pain does NOT scale with haste (ignoring a gain from shortened GCD triggered by casting the spell), no matter how much you have, there is no way your SW:P will tick differently than every 3 sec.
3) Refreshing by MF doesn't affect ticking. Even with 1 sec MF channeling, there isn't damage loss nor gain.
4) When a target is affected by your SW:P and 1st tick of MF deals damage to the target, duration of your SW:P is set to 18 sec. There must be at least 1 tick remaining for the spell to be refreshed, if there isn't, it will fall off.
5) Standard DoTs (VT and DP) with 0 haste tick 3 sec after the debuff is applied and then every 3 sec until they reach 0 when they tick for the last time. Refreshing by MF causes a disparity between duration and ticks (SW:P no longer deals damage at 12, 9, 6, 3, 0 sec, but rather like 17, 14, 11, ect), falling off after the last (5th) tick, possibly before reaching 0.
6) Crit part of Inner Focus doesn't work, has never worked and probably will never work with our DoTs because critical strike (MB, MF, SW:D, Imp DP) and periodic critical strike (VT, DP, SW:P) are coded differently. Imp. DP does benefit from IF, but we have better spells to use IF with.

When you recast SW:P :
1) Almost certainly a tick is lost
2) You use one GCD which is nearly equal to a whole MF
The actual damage lost by doing this may look like :
( swp_average_tick * ( 1 - ( %crit_chance / 100 ))) + ( swp_average_crit * %crit_chance / 100 ) + ( mf_average_tick * ( 1 - ( %crit_chance / 100 ))) + ( mf_average_crit * %crit_chance / 100 ) .
Using Trevar's BiS normal 25 + 10, 10000 iterations, 500sec fight length, all buffs but Focus Magic and Heroic Presence, elite skill, numbers are : (1741 * ( 1 - (58,8 / 100 ))) + ( 3640 * 58.8 / 100 ) + ( 2873 * ( 1 - ( 51.7 / 100 ))) + ( 6005 * 51,7 / 100 ) = 717,2 + 2140,3 + 1387,6 + 3104,5 = 7349,6 damage lost.




Below you can see general events that can occur during a boss encounter, somehow changing dps of Shadow Word: Pain. This post doesn't tell you if it's worth (overall dps point of view) to recast ticking SW:P in order to gain higher overall dps or wait a few seconds for every buff / debuff to be present on a boss and a player. It depends on a length of the fight, kind of buff / debuff and is up to every Shadow Priest to decide for himself.
For insight look when recasting SW:P is worth, please have a look at PiousFlea's post.

Table shows general situation, example of a spell that triggers it, if Pain and Suffering can handle the change and a small comment.

If you feel busy during encounters to keep an eye on all the stuff, you may use Shadow Green Light addon.


NO – You don't need to recast SW:P, damage (tick, to be clear) will change right after you hit the target with Mind Flay.
YES – You must recast SW:P to gain the benefit.



Gear change

+ % crit gained through equip (on use effect)- YES
Situation has significantly changed with Nevermelting Ice Crystal (Pit of Saron 5man heroic) which can be used for an extra 20% rolling crit chance on SW:P if used right before applying the spell on a target.For an additional info about the trinket, please look here.

Changing weapons for better crit rating ( / ) - YES
You have a staff with high amount of crit and MH + OH with haste, but higher spell power.Equip the staff, cast SW:P, switch back to MH + OH.Your SW:P will be ticking with the crit bonus from the staff for the rest of the fight.Please note that changing weapons during combat triggers the global cooldown.Math can be found here.

+ spell power item proc (Flare of the Heavens, Muradin's Spyglass) - NO
Amount of spell power SW:P is ticking with is recalculated every time you refresh the spell through P&S.If your trinkets proc, just keep dpsing as usual.



Buff on player

+ % spell damage (Shadow Weaving, Tricks of the Trade, Arcane Empowerment) - YES
Well known and documented situation.The very reason why we have an opening sequence (More info).You should cast SW:P AFTER all 5 stacks of SW are present on you.If you cast SW:P with 4 stacks (and gain 5th with the spell), SW:P will be ticking for 2% less.
For Tricks of the Trade, you just need to synchronize with "your" rogue and cast SW:P within 6sec given window.

+ % critical strike chance (Moonkin Aura, crit part of Potion of Wild Magic) - YES
Moonkin aura or Elemental Oath needs to be present on you while casting SW:P in order to receive the crit bonus. In patch 3.3.3 Elemental Oath has become raid-wide aura, but the buff works the same way.

+ Special stuff (Hodir's Storm Cloud) - NO
No special comment needed.

+ % damage done (Sanctified Retribution, Ferocious Inspiration) - YES

Shadowform - YES
You need to be in Shadowform while casting SW:P to make it capable of crit.




Buff on boss

+ % spell damage taken (Leviathan encounter - System Shutdown, Mimiron – Magnetic Field, Icehowl's Staggered Daze) - NO
No special comment needed.



Debuff on player

+ % critical strike chance (Loatheb – Fungal Creep) – YES
No special comment needed.

+ % damage done (Yogg-Saron - Sara's Fervor, Thaddius – Charges, Blood-Queen Lana'thel - Essence of the Blood Queen) – YES
During the Queen fight, even if you are bitten for the last minute of the fight (which is very unlikely), refreshing repays itself after +-16sec. Do it anyway.



Debuff on boss

+ % crit (Improved Scorch, Totem of Wrath) – YES
You need to manualy recast SW:P every time a boss gains a crit modifying debuff.

+ % damage taken (CoE, Ebon Plaguebringer, Earth and Moon) – NO
No special comment needed.



Annotation :
Every event has been tested ingame, mostly on encounter stated in brackets or with training dummy. I would like to apologise everyone in the Naxx / Ulduar 25 man PUG who saw me running bone naked on Hodir, Loatheb, Yogg and Mimiron.Also thanks are in place to my fellow guild mate druid Tellinnor who spend exciting 10mins with me staring training dummy down.

Right, I never really wanted to add exceptions here, because in my opinion they usually bring more confusion that they clear. Anyway, to keep this topic accurate, look below.

Exception is a situation, which happens during an encounter, but won't obey any rule listed above.


EXCEPTIONS

Debuff on player

+ % damage done (Twin Val'kyrs - Light Essence - Dark Essence - Empowered Darkness and Empowered Light) – NO
Changing overlays doesn't force you to recast SW:P since the damage is recalculated as soon as you swap Light or Dark Essence. Thanks to bobbylam.
Further testing needed - Thaddius' stacks reevaluation; Twins in ToC, no Essence on player, SW:P on Twin, grab Essence, observe.

Fixt. The 13% increases are on the boss, not the player so you don't have to worry about recasting it.

this needs a sticky or something

Sorry, my bad, just tested it again.....thanks for letting me know.

Would you mind testing this again?

This doesn't match my experience when I tested it a long while though it's possible it's changed since then.

Sure, no problem with that.What I did(yesterday) is that I removed all my gear, ended up with 2,27% crit chance, "unspecced" Mind Melt, asked mage to throw scorch up, waited until the debuff is almost gone, threw SW:P on the dummy and rolled for 500 ticks, ended up with 3,12% crit.
I will check it out again tomorrow.

Urgh, yeah, when I tested it last we got the direct dmg% from crit% before they let our DoTs actually crit.

500 ticks however is probably not enough to be sure.

I did some testing on the PTR dual-boxing with a pre-made Shaman.

I also removed all my gear (had 2.28% listed crit). I did still have 2/2 Mind Melt, so that would put my SW:P crit rate at 8.28%.

I build 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving (for what it's worth), then had the Shaman drop ToW and then I cast SW:P.
I then recalled the ToW and I proceeded to roll the SW:P with Mind Flay.

After 1500 ticks the crit rate on SW:P was 10.4%. After 2586 ticks it was 11.6%

Note that the ideal crit rate if the Crit Debuff rolls would be 11.28%.

Would look like that the crit debuffs still function like they used to. i.e. you do need to recast SW:P if the target gains a new crit% taken debuff.

The sample size should be big enough. If scorch were really to be rolled into the crit chance, then the crit chance would continue to be 7.27% for all 500 ticks. And the chance of getting an crit rate of 3.12% in 500 tests would be less than 0.1%. i.e. we can be 99.9% sure that when scorch drops off the target it immediately reduces the crit chance of SWP (or at least reduces it when SWP is next refreshed via MF).

That's of course assuming the mage threw up a full stack of 5 scorches for a 5% crit increase. If the mage just threw up one stack of scorch then the analysis would be very different.

Fair enough, 500 ticks may not be sufficient (or RNG just doesn't like me).
I've just edited the OP to reflect actual situation.



It was with fully stacked imp. Scorch, 1 stack wouldn't really make noticeable difference.

Excellent resource. From here, where knowledge is finally gained as to what buffs need a recast, the discussion if "SHOULD" you recast can begin. SW:P just doesn't do alot of damage, the GCD to cast it must gain a benefit large enough to overcome the loss of an average MB or 2 x MF tick average.

Does the crit from Wild Magic (player buff crit chance) carry throughout the fight via P&S refresh of SW:P w/ MF? I was in belief that the new cancel all aura system put in place during BC wouldn't allow that to happen. (when Wild Magic wears off, it "cancel aura" on all of your current and future abilities).

I've been under the impression since before 3.1 that the wild magic pot crit buff does stay with SWP for the rest of the fight as long as it doesn't fall off.

I haven't actually checked for proof on this yet though. Can anyone varify this for sure or not?

Yes, dps difference isn't gamebreaking, but it still matters, because damage per second is the reason we are brought to raids.
When writing the original post, I was actually thinking about suggestions when you should recast SW:P.But there are so many variables (raid setup, your spell power, your dps, kind of buff/debuff, how long is the mob gonna be alive, ect.), that it's almost impossible to say "Now you should recast SW:P" unless it's very specific fight (Thaddius, Loatheb comes to my mind).
You should also think that when you recast SW:P, you loose 1 tick (99%) and your dps x 1,5(GCD).Before you hit the button, remind yourself - is the damage I loose worth?






When we talk about the crit portion (200 crit rating) of Wild Magic, it works the same way as Moonkin aura or Elemental Oath (stated above).So if you want to benefit from the crit bonus, you have to cast SW:P while under effect of the potion.Otherwise you will have only extra 200 sp for 15sec.

Hi.

Just have a question regarding this :



Does this mean that changing weapons mechanism will consider differenly Crit and Spell Power ?
=> I cast SW:P with my Crit-Staff
=> I switch to my SP-staff and refresh with P&S. Why will my crit chance on the spell remain unchanged, and still my "new Spell power" updated on it ? (maybe the answer is simply : because that's the way it is, but I just find this pretty inconsistant )