A Dwarf Priest

Clarity isn’t my forte, so it was only a matter of time before I posted something delightfully vague enough to get a smattering of e-mail calling me wrong. And let me say: I’m not wrong! I may suck at explaining the most basic of things at times, but in this case I know what I am talking about.

Okay, so what am I talking about here?

A few days ago I made a post about Priest DPS in raids and instances. I attempted to talk about Vampiric Touch and praise it for the utility that gives shadow priests. Here is what I originally said:

Vampiric Touch is the defining utility spell of shadow priests. If you can keep the spell up 100% of the time, then you will be regenerating 25% of your shadow DPS as mp5 for your whole party (example: a priest doing 800 DPS, or “damage per second,” of shadow damage would be giving 200 mp5, or “mana per five seconds,” to his or her party if Vampiric Touch is kept up the whole time).

Okay, so that was not entirely clear. I get that. I have since gone back and cleaned up the language a bit (and by “cleaned up” I probably mean “made more confusing”).

However, I feel the need to post an elaborate explanation as well.

Vampiric Touch (rank 3) says on its tooltip:

Causes 650 Shadow damage over 15 sec to your target and causes all party members to gain mana equal to 5% of any Shadow spell damage you deal.

Now, according to the spell’s tooltip, 5% of the shadow spell damage you do is returned to your party as mana. It clearly says 5%. However, I had stated that Vampiric Touch returns 25% of your shadow DPS as mp5 for your party.

… and that is where I started getting e-mails.

So, to explain:

• Let’s say you do 800 DPS, that is 800 damage per second.

• So, every second you are returning 5% of that as mana to your party.

• That is 40 mana a second.

• But, we don’t think in terms of mana per second, we think in terms of mp5, or mana per five seconds.

• So, (40 mana per second) x (5 seconds) = 200 (mana over 5 seconds).

• Your 800 damage per second is worth 200 mp5 for your party.

• And 200 is a quarter, or 25%, of 800.

• So, if you have Vampiric Touch up all the time, 25% of your shadow spell damage will be returned to your party as mp5.

Make sense?

The whole 5% vs. 25% thing is just a matter of units of measure. The tooltip on Vampiric Touch indicates that you get 5% of your shadow spell damage back as mana, but we measure DPS as “per second” and mana gain as “per 5 seconds.”