The damage potential of Shadow Priests depends heavily on how lucky you are with orb generation in the opener.
In a normal opener, spriests will typically use 4 ticks of Mindflay and have 1-2 ticks of Shadow Word: Pain(depening on haste), giving a 63-70% chance of getting at least one Shadow Orb by the time Dark Evangelism is fully stacked.
If you don't get an orb by then, you have to hold Mind Blast and can either decide to send dots without the ~30% buff or keep spamming only Mindflay for an increased chance of getting an orb. None of which feels good.
This randomness can lead to situations in which you don't get a single orb in the first 20 or 30 seconds of an encounter, which can be very frustrating.
To counteract this, you could save orbs from trash packs, but this requires pulling the boss within 60s of the pack dying, and you can't activly play trash because you don't want use your orbs.
Another option is to get the orbs outside of raid and be summoned before boss. I think we can agree that no one wants this. However if nothing changes this will probably be done by several people before the end of the phase.
I would therefore suggest to add a reliably way to gain a Shadow Orb that doesn't involve porting out of the raid.
This could for examle be that once every 60s you gain a Shadow Orb when you enter Shadow Form, either as a major/minor glyph or as a baseline change to the spell.
The DPS increase compared to "good" trys would be minimal, but this chage would greatly increase the consistancy of shadow gameplay.
Description
The damage potential of Shadow Priests depends heavily on how lucky you are with orb generation in the opener. In a normal opener, spriests will typically use 4 ticks of Mindflay and have 1-2 ticks of Shadow Word: Pain(depening on haste), giving a 63-70% chance of getting at least one Shadow Orb by the time Dark Evangelism is fully stacked. If you don't get an orb by then, you have to hold Mind Blast and can either decide to send dots without the ~30% buff or keep spamming only Mindflay for an increased chance of getting an orb. None of which feels good. This randomness can lead to situations in which you don't get a single orb in the first 20 or 30 seconds of an encounter, which can be very frustrating.
To counteract this, you could save orbs from trash packs, but this requires pulling the boss within 60s of the pack dying, and you can't activly play trash because you don't want use your orbs. Another option is to get the orbs outside of raid and be summoned before boss. I think we can agree that no one wants this. However if nothing changes this will probably be done by several people before the end of the phase.
I would therefore suggest to add a reliably way to gain a Shadow Orb that doesn't involve porting out of the raid. This could for examle be that once every 60s you gain a Shadow Orb when you enter Shadow Form, either as a major/minor glyph or as a baseline change to the spell.
The DPS increase compared to "good" trys would be minimal, but this chage would greatly increase the consistancy of shadow gameplay.