Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to 8.3 crazy sim time. With the recent blue post we will soon be able to purchase corruption and effectively tailor-make a best in slot gear set (with enough corruption resistance). This won't happen instantly, as it looks like you will need to farm a bit to make this possible, so we figured we would write up a little post guiding you through this insane amount of DPS.

Keep in mind nothing in this post is gospel, and should not be taken as the end all be all. With the way gearing works, there is a near infinite amount of combinations that would take years to sim properly to know what is "BIS". That being said, there are some assumptions we can make to guide folks in the right direction.

As always you can use RaidBots to sim your character to find out what makes sense for you based on the gear you have. Be cautious though, simple Patchwerk 1 Target sims won't be accurate for all fights and encounters, so experiment with Light Movement or multiple targets before making purchasing decisions.

Shadow Priest loves Haste and Critical Strike, so naturally you will get great value out of the Severe and Expedient Corruptions. Aside from these traits, you could stack Infinite Stars for pure Single Target, or Twilight Devastation for Mythic+, but both of these traits are quite niche and extremely RNG so we generally wouldn't recommend stacking them.

We did some Mythic+ Sims and saw similar rankings to what you find below, but we would suggest doing some personal testing on what builds feel best to you. Generally speaking you can't go wrong with these traits.

The charts below take several of our top traits (Rank 3 Severe, Rank 3 Expedient, 1x Gushing Wounds, and 1x Rank 3 Racing Pulse) and sim some combinations with a Corruption Budget of 170-180 depending on the build. It's not currently possible to remain under 60 Corruption with these setups, but at max cloak upgrades you can sit in the 35-45 range depending on the build.

Corruption Combination Sims

IMPORTANT: This is just a small slice of combinations and should not be taken as the "best in slot list", just an idea of what to target trait wise and what gives you value where. 

3 Chorus of Insanity

Nyalotha Composite

Actor DPS Increase
Severe_4_Expedient_4_Gushing_1 108909 38.80%
Expedient_5_Severe_3_Gushing_1 108551 38.34%
Severe_5_Expedient_3_Gushing_1 108424 38.18%
Expedient_5_Severe_4 107607 37.14%
Expedient_6_Severe_2_Gushing_1 107542 37.05%

Single Target

Actor DPS Increase
Severe_4_Expedient_4_Gushing_1 96127 39.15%
Expedient_5_Severe_3_Gushing_1 95846 38.75%
Severe_5_Expedient_3_Gushing_1 95652 38.47%
Expedient_6_Severe_2_Gushing_1 95049 37.59%
Expedient_5_Severe_4 94691 37.07%

3 Spiteful Apparitions

Nyalotha Composite

Actor DPS Increase
Severe_5_Expedient_4 110517 43.76%
Severe_5_Expedient_3_Gushing_1 110394 43.60%
Severe_6_Expedient_3 110320 43.50%
Severe_6_Expedient_2_Gushing_1 110175 43.31%
Expedient_5_Severe_4 109913 42.97%

Single Target

Actor DPS Increase
Severe_5_Expedient_3_Gushing_1 96702 43.31%
Severe_6_Expedient_2_Gushing_1 96464 42.95%
Severe_5_Expedient_4 96434 42.91%
Severe_6_Expedient_3 96200 42.56%
Severe_4_Expedient_4_Gushing_1 96193 42.55%

To see the full results of the sims check the Github Repo

Notes

  • The Ny'alotha sim is a composite sim with multiple targets and movement throughout the sim
  • The Single Target sim includes movement combined together into a composite weight, so this will be a bit lower than your typical Patchwerk only sim
  • The number corresponds to the amount of Rank 3 of that Corruption you have. So Severe_4 means you are using 4 Rank 3 Severe pieces. If you are unsure what rank corresponds to what try checking out this addon.
  • The only piece to use Gushing Wounds is placed on the ilevel 485 piece from Mythic N'Zoth (Ring of Cosmic Potential). This is due to the scaling of Gushing Wounds with ilevel (see below chart). The Base in the sim uses Crit/Haste gear to compare with the slot that is swapped out. However, if you have the Mechagon rings (see below) you would opt to use those instead over using this Gushing Wound piece, but might see an increase instead putting Gushing Wounds on the Carapace Legs. Based on the Gushing Wound chart below, using this corruption on a non-485 piece is likely not worth depending on your options.
  • All Base gear is 475
  • The Azerite Neck is scaled to level 85
  • The sim uses the Memory of Lucid Dreams Major with Focused Energy, Blood Soaked, and Lethal Strikes minors.
  • A healthy mix of Haste/Crit sockets/enchants is used to help keep haste and crit somewhat even.
  • Sim Files

What about this Spiteful Apparitions build?

Shadow Priests have discovered that running high amounts of critical strike paired with Severe corruptions can net some pretty solid results if you use 3 Spiteful Apparitions, 2 Chorus of Insanity, and 1 Whispers of the Damned trait as opposed to the traditional build (see above results). To pull this off you need to have roughly 2000-2300 base Critical Strike rating BEFORE Severe increases are added. If you can get to this level of Critical Strike you will see some positive increases on multi-target fights scaling about 1% high DPS per target.

Mechagon Rings

The above gear set is not technically "full BIS", as you could stack more optimized gear pieces, such as the Mechagon ring set. Using this set can net you a decent amount of damage, so if you can get some base rings (465) to add corruption to this is worth using over the N'Zoth ring with Gushing Wounds depending on your setup/availability of the rings. We did some sims on these earlier this patch you can check out in the Github Repo.

Assuming you have the 2 BiS Mechagon Rings, you could instead put your 1 Gushing Wound trait on the Legs from Mythic Carapace, but this might be a wash depending on your levels of haste/crit, since these Legs are not perfect stats.

Gushing Wounds by Item Level

As many of you know, Gushing Wounds scales with item level. So we did a quick sim showcasing the value of this trait by ilevel. If you decide to use this trait, try to put it on high-ilevel pieces to get the most use out of your purchase. NOTE: This sim has been updated post-hotfix nerf to Gushing Wounds.

 

Nyalotha Composite

Actor DPS Increase
Gushing_Wounds_485 79836 5.26%
Gushing_Wounds_480 79514 4.83%
Gushing_Wounds_475 79199 4.42%
Gushing_Wounds_470 78903 4.03%
Gushing_Wounds_465 78645 3.69%
Gushing_Wounds_460 78394 3.36%
Gushing_Wounds_455 78108 2.98%
Gushing_Wounds_450 77886 2.69%
Gushing_Wounds_445 77650 2.38%
Gushing_Wounds_440 77451 2.11%
Base 75847 0.00%

Single Target

Actor DPS Increase
Gushing_Wounds_485 70751 5.45%
Gushing_Wounds_480 70486 5.06%
Gushing_Wounds_475 70183 4.60%
Gushing_Wounds_470 69912 4.20%
Gushing_Wounds_465 69696 3.88%
Gushing_Wounds_460 69441 3.50%
Gushing_Wounds_455 69194 3.13%
Gushing_Wounds_450 68996 2.83%
Gushing_Wounds_445 68785 2.52%
Gushing_Wounds_440 68614 2.27%
Base 67094 0.00%

TLDR

Feel free to keep the same Azerite Build we use currently, and just fill your corruption budget with combinations of Severe and Expedient (ideally keeping haste == crit). You can still use 1 Gushing Wound effect, but ideally this would only be on a 485 ilvl piece. Following this will get you a decent enough build, but be sure to sim yourself/combinations available to you to get results tailored to your character.

Changelog


1 Comment

Oblyz · May 21, 2020 at 12:30 pm

Hi, thank you very much for this detailed post! Can we expect an updated version of the sims with the recent nerf made to gushing wound? Is is still BiS on 475 pieces? Thanks 🙂

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