Vampiric Touch - Is it worth it? (to ME?) - Yeah, kinda is.

I've gone back to Vampiric Touch.

I took it again just to check it out, I am sorely disappointed by it's mana return amount. It gives .25% max mana per second... So, 4 seconds for 1% of your mana... and it lasts 15 seconds... So, that's just under 4% of your maximum mana regenerated over 15 seconds. That kinda sucks, if you ask me.

To add insult to injury, Vampiric Touch no longer STACKS on multiple mobs, AND it no longer does the mana return on it's OWN... What you do is cast Vampiric Touch on the target, then you have to hit it with a Mind Blast while it's affected by Vampiric Touch. WTF? You can cast Vampiric Touch all you want, since it has no cooldown (beyond GCD), but you can only Mind Blast once every 5.5-8 seconds. So, it puts an artificial cap on how often you can activate the mana return. But that wouldn't matter anyway, since because it's a mana regen BUFF called Replenishment, you can only have it once anyway. Gone are the days of casting VT-SW:P combos on as many mobs as possible to get lots of regen going. Now it's just one at a time.

My initial reaction to VT, as you can see above, is that it sucked. But I wanted to test it out for it's damage. It's a 1.5 second cast DOT that does reasonable damage. What I didn't notice before is that they slashed it's mana cost almost by half. It used to cost me 300+ mana to cast, and now it's just over 200, and I'm several levels higher now. Also, because it's a 1.5 second cast, that means it goes very well with either SW:P or VE in a cast sequence/spell rotation so that you can land both at the same time. So, I've decided to use VT as my opening blast, followed by either SW:P or VE depending on if I want DPS or Heals.

Here's my priest spell rotation for DPS that I'm currently using:

Vampiric Touch - 1.5 second precast time
Shadow Word: Pain - as soon as VT hits, so they hit at the same time.
1.5 second global cooldown - I can move during this time to try to get some distance
Mind Blast - 1.5 second precast time - gotta stand still now
Mind Flay - As soon as MB fires, MF starts instantly after MB.

Note that because VT and SW:P are dots, they haven't started ticking yet. They both take 3 seconds for their first damage tick to go off.. so, they each tick at the same time as Mind Blast and Mind Flay starts.. that means when I start attacking, I get 3 seconds of NO damage based threat. At 3 seconds, I hit like a truck with 3 damage sources at once, and MF starts it's first tick one second later, so it can be easy to pull a mob off a tank if they haven't built their threat yet. Be Aware.

I'll MF again after the first runs out, and follow that up with another Mind Blast. The second Mind Blast is done before VT wears off, so it restarts the Replenishment buff. Also, but this time, almost any even-con level mob is about to die, the second MB usually finishes them off.

Also note that with the Pain and Suffering talent, I don't ever have to recast SW:P. I have a 66% chance to restart SW:P every time my MF hits, so it gets restarted plenty.

If I feel I need some extra punch, I'll add Devouring Plague in, but since I almost never take damage, I usually keep it in reserve.

The macro I use for all of this also checks for Shadowform. If I'm not in Shadowform, it shifts me before it starts attacking.

Here's the macro for all this:

#showtooltip
/castsequence [noform] Shadowform; [nochanneling] reset=target/combat/12 Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay
#show Mind Flay

Note that in a long fight, I'll do the rotation by hand to skip SW:P, since I only ever have to cast it once.