Nukes:

Many will say that Mind Flay is the signature Shadow ability, and they're right. It's a fun spell and sets us apart from other DPS classes, but it does have it's drawbacks. The primary one is channeled spells' interaction with latency, and therefor latency's impact on DPS. Latency is a factor in all server / client games, but other classes have a workaround for it in the spell queue.

Moonkins (for instance) across the spectrum of latencies can achieve very similar numbers because they can repeatedly hit Wrath or Starfire while casting their current spell without any penalty. The next spell will begin casting immediately after the completion of current one. This means whether you have 20ms or 200ms you're still going to be very close to Moonkins of a similar gear and skill level.

Shadow Priests are not in the same boat. Every cast of Mind Flay comes with the risk of loosing the final tick of damage or delaying the next cast which means loosing significant cumulative DPS time. On live servers the problem is exasperated by incredibly fast Mind Flay cast times, but the problem still exists when the cast is three seconds long.

There are certain ways to 'work around' this issue in both [nochanneling] macros and in using Cast Bar addons with latency overlay. Both of these again cause problems. [no channeling] macros, while preventing the loss of the final damage tick, cause even more delay at the end of every cast. Ultimately unless you're in a very low latency environment they will cause more DPS loss than not using them. As far as latency overlay on cast bar mods: they suffer from temporal inaccuracies. That is they are calculated based on the latency at the start of the cast and are not updated during the cast. This means that any fluctuations in latency will cause it to be inaccurate and promote either a loss in damage by clipping the last tick or by increasing the delay after the cast.

Is it fair that Shadow Priests have to use a spell that is so vulnerable to unstable latency while other classes have casted spells? We want skill to be the largest factor in our DPS, not lag.

At the announcement of Cataclysm in 2009 there was mention made of a cast time nuke for Shadow. We understand that part of that plan was rolled in with the Frost spell to create Mind Spike (which in it's current design) that is decidedly not a proper spammable nuke. Both in it's high mana and threat it's set up to be a PvP and niche spell.

What Shadow Priests need is a solution to this: we need a proper spammable nuke. Having Mind Blast (and even Shadow Word: Death) in our rotation is great, but in between there we need something that will allow our DPS to be based more on our gear selection and skill than it is on how good our connection is. Whether this comes in the form of a mechanic change to allow channeled spells to be spammed without loosing damage ticks (essentially allowing them to use the spell queue), a Medium or Prime glyph to convert Mind Flay into a Cast time spell, adding a new spell, or changing one in existence to suit that need.

Another thought would be to have a choice, a casted nuke, equal in terms of mana consumption, dps output and utility to Mind Flay, that would provide an extra option, but not replacing it in every situation.
If you have great internet connection or want to enjoy "the melting feeling", use Mind Flay.
If you have fluctuating ping (who doesn't) or lag spikes, casted nuke will provide the stability in DPS output.

Mind Blast is also considered a strong Shadow ability, but at the end of Wrath we're seeing many Shadow Priests at the T10 level leave it out of their rotation. This is something that needs to be rectified in Cata. Mind Blast has a cooldown and we spend valuable points in Shadow to reduce that: we expect big things from it.


Cool Downs:

Shadow Orbs in it's current form is not an 'on demand' DPS cool down, but rather RNG burst. Throughout the game there have periods in encounters where high burst damage is required to progress through it. Shadow Priests aren't allowed to participate in those heightened times of DPS frenzy, and we feel rightly left out. If that aspect of encounter design continues into Cataclysm; Shadow should be included in the ability to burst. In Live we only have access to Inner Focus and Shadowfiend as 'DPS' cooldowns, neither of which function very well in that manner.

Mind Flay -- This is a technical explanation, but basically we had to rebuild it for Lich King to get it to benefit from haste correctly. Now that we have tech to let all periodics scale correctly with haste, we can change Mind Flay back to the way it used to work. The "latency" issues you experience today should be gone. You can just mash the Mind Flay button and the periodic won't clip.

Mind Blast -- With some increases scaling and the Shadow mastery, Mind Blast should always be your highest damage button (other than SW:Death).

SW: Pain -- Pain and Suffering refreshes SW:Pain with your current haste, crit etc. values. All damage-over-time refresh mechanics and talents should do this now. You shouldn't have to recast a dot to benefit from a temporary buff or proc or whatever.

Spec options -- We have some plans to make early Disc more attractive to Shadow. There are probably fewer of us than you imagine, and we just can't work on every class at once.

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Q u o t e:
So in PVP when I am being focused and hit rage cap because I am unable to bleed it off I am supposed to suffer the consequence of 50% MORE RAGE COST ON MY ABILITIES??? 45 rage for my MS and then crippling my ability to use anything else???

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Again, you're just looking at the ability as "sometimes, your abilities cost more," which of course makes it sound terrible. In your hypothetical situation though, you are taking so much damage that you can't spend your rage fast enough. You hit 100 and then theoretically got to 120 or 150 or possibly 200 rage. Except all of the rage beyond 100 is just gone into vapor. Inner Rage lets your convert some of that excess rage into damage and gets you down below 100 rage again so that you aren't wasting it. If for example we let the rage bar go to 500, then we wouldn't need the ability because you'd never waste anything. So you are comparing 45 rage Mortal Strikes that hit harder to 45 rage Mortal Strikes (the normal cost, plus all the rage you wasted) that hit for the normal amount.

And as I said above, maybe 50% isn't the right number. However if for example the numbers were 10% more rage for 50% more damage, every warrior strategy guide would say "Don't hit ANY buttons until you get to 100 rage," which we don't think would be very fun.

Also, CAPS and MULTIPUNCTUATION make my arguments STRONGER!!! :)

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Q u o t e:
Well... you might see warriors doing this with inner rage. OR, you might see them "standing in the fire" in order to proc it, or in order to max out their DPS. If a few ticks of fire damage, mean we can fill a rage bar and use all our abilities on cooldown, and use heroic strike where we want to, you can bet you'll see warriors running into the fire.

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That's an issue with rage though not with Inner Rage per se. If you aren't getting enough rage and figure you can max your dps by standing in fires, then that might be attractive. I'm just pointing this out because I think the "we'll stand in fires" argument is being used as justification for removing Inner Rage, but if standing in fires gave you more Heroic Strikes, then removing Inner Rage won't fix that.

The "on paper" design of the Lich King relics sounds pretty cool: you have your choice of which of your spells or abilities you care about the most. Maybe a Resto druid takes the Rejuv idol over the Regrowth idol. In reality, what happens is that we make 3 druid idols per tier so the Resto druid is stuck with whatever idol we make. If we make the Rejuv idol, awesome. If we make the Lifebloom idol, probably less awesome (or at least much more situational). Of course we could just make the Rejuv idol every tier, but really that's not much different than the stats. The procs are designed to mostly be always up, so it's just clutter in the buff section of your UI.

With the new model, there is less risk of having the "bad luck" of having a bad relic for an entire tier for your spec. In fact, it should even offer a little more choice because you could choose the crit relic over the haste relic. Currently you don't get a choice because we have to offer such specialized relics. The gem socket is to make them at least feel slightly different from the ranged items that can shoot.

To be brutally honest, I wouldn't call our ranged weapon slot a success for any class. Warriors, rogues and all wand users don't care much about their ranged weapon slot except as a stat stick. Warriors and rogues use their ranged weapons once in awhile, but we really don't like the model where a caster wands everything while leveling instead of using their actual spells. The only class that really cares about the ranged slot is the hunter, and they in turn don't care much about their melee weapon. Furthermore, the hunter doesn't get the same kind of stat budget out of their primary weapon that the melee guys do. Believe me, we have had many meetings just to discuss the ranged slot. We don't have a solution yet that we think is better than the current Cataclysm implementation, but it's the kind of thing we're going to keep working on for a long time.

Archangel and Evangelism don't stack. The intent is that Dark Archangel is used when burst matters more than sustained damage (Dark Evangelism = Sustained, Dark Archangel = Burst), and not really something you'd do rotationally. In PvE you might do it if the target is going to die soon (when sustained dps really doesn't really matter), for target swapping, right before Bloodlust etc.

There are some additional Shadow changes that are upcoming, including a slight re-design for Mind Spike. The role for Mind Spike is still something you can do when you don't have the opportunity for your full blown rotation, but we also don't want you to feel like you have to work it into your normal rotation.

Mind Flay is going back to a 3 sec cast time. As sometimes happens in beta, the data were pulled right while we were changing the spell, resulting in it being bugged. Sorry. :)