Another Tale of the Damage Meter

Despite Jay doing my Shadow spec spell rotation research for me, I couldn't help but do a little myself. I found a great resource that made it through the work filter at shadowaffinity.com.

Their recommended approach to dealing damage as a shadow priest is not a rotation, but rather a priority list. I rearranged my spells so that the first four are together...well, let me just draw you a picture:
Since I am a clicker, I like to get some sort of order to my buttons. The red arrows show the initial cast order with the blue arrows diverging depending on single target vs. multiple targets.

One thing I found out last night is that I need to find an addon that will either make my dots/debuffs much larger (easier to see) or will be a separate display like MagicRunes is for DK's.

First up was a HToC. This damage meter was reset after the mounted combat.
I was pretty happy that I sustained over 3K DPS for the entire instance. It gave me a lot of confidence in the Priority list playstyle, as well as let me know that I'm competitive.

Next up are some screenies from a PuG H. Culling of Stratholme; I was able to mostly follow this order with some departures that just hit SW:P, VT, and Mind Sear. Here is the result for the entire run (I died twice - once in the gauntlet and at the very beginning of the optional timed boss).Yeah...I carried them! CoS is a nice instance for AoEers as almost all of the trash is in tight packs. I was already happy with my AoE DPS; Mind Sear is just that awesome. But what I really wanted to improve was my single target DPS.

From the last fight, against Mal ganis, I present to you, the damage meter:
Mission accomplished! What helped out was only getting targeted for nap-time once. I followed the Priority list religiously, and obviously, the results speak for themselves.

Lastly, I have the breakdown of the entire HCoS damage by spell.
What really surprised me was that Vampiric Touch is my number two spell despite only being cast 97 times (vs 162 for SW:P). I'll still be following the priority list as Mind Flay refreshes SW:P, so I can keep it up all the time on a single target.

But, for sure, I'm going to keep VT up all the time. Oh, and by the way, it will last 6 seconds longer thanks to the T9 two piece bonus. Yeah, got me two items of the set! Woot!

G2G2 work.