This is basically what needs to be addressed:

1. Shadow Word: Death is obsolete in our current rotations.
It's an instant cast spell and useful for when we have to move however the lash back damage combined with a low scaling coefficient and a low base damage have made omitting it standard practice. It simply does not benefit us enough to justify attempting to weave it in to our rotation. I'm confused at what Blizzard's plans are for this spell. There's major glyph for it, our t7 bonus, and lash back reducing talent suggest that they see it as an important skill in our PvE arsenal. A buff to it's damage, or an on effect buff gained once used would help us re-include it into our rotation.

2. Haste Scaling
Haste currently soft-caps for Shadow Priests just short of 300 haste rating. This amount of haste brings our Mind Flay cast down to 2.75 seconds, allowing us to fit two full casts in between our 5.5 second Mind Blast cool down. After this point our benefit from haste is much diminished as it becomes difficult to acquire the right amount of haste to fit an additional tick of a Mind Flay cast in between our Mind Blast cool down. Furthermore, haste does not even effect our DoTs besides reducing the GCD on their initial cast. Our problems with haste scaling is galvanized by the disproportionate amount of haste on our t8 gear in comparison to other casters, and our t8 4-piece bonus which grants us haste rating after every Mind Blast.

3. Spirit Scaling
Shadow Priests convert 20% of all spirit into spell power. An additional 10% conversion would bring us in line with other casters (elemental shaman aside), and might help out scaling issues.

4. Glyph of Mind Flay
Glyphing Mind Flay to increase it's range to be on par with the rest of our shadow spells is a mainstay for all PvE Shadow Priests. It hurts our DPS and scaling when instead of increasing our damage we have to spend a major glyph spot to increase the range of one of our bread and butter spells by 10 yards. It really feels like a clunky solution to a range problem that's been plaguing us since TBC.

5. Devouring Plague Cool Down
This is mostly a problem with how many encounters work in Ulduar. When there are multiple quick-dying mobs that need to be single targeted down this spell may have 10+ seconds still on cool down by the time we start focussing the next mob. Could the cool down on this spell possibly reset once the mob it's on dies? Could it be lowered to 10 seconds instead of 24? I think the best solution would be to make it so you can only have it up on one mob at a time, but remove the cool down.

6. VE Utility
TBC Shadow Priests were low damage but high utility bringing powerful party heals, mana regeneration, and magic damage buffs. In WoTLK we may have been slightly over-striped of it. Currently our claims at utility have been pared down to Replenishment, 3% hit, and VE. Compared to a Moonkin who brings 3% hit, 13% spell damage, 5% crit, and 3% haste our utility pales a bit. Vampiric Embrace has long been a defining spell in the Shadow Tree's arsenal, however it's current raid utility is much weaker than Judgement of Light and even Leader of the Pack. Perhaps turning it into a caster version of Judgement of Light is the answer, or reworking the spell to perform completely differently as suggested in this thread.

7. Lack of On Demand Cool Downs
Other DPSers have significant cool downs they can utilize for on demand burst while shadow priest rotation remains the same regardless. In Ulduar short-lasting significant damage buffs are a part of almost every encounter. Popping Icy Veins in a rune of power or Beserk on the Heart of the Deconstructor is what can really jostle the damage meters.

Bug Fixes:
- Instant damage from Devouring Plague not benefiting from Shadow Focus.
- Shadow Word: Pain not counting current buffs or debuffs when refreshed by Mind Flay.
- Devouring Plague's initial application critting at 150% instead of 200%.
- Devouring Plague not properly benefiting from our t8 2-piece bonus.
- A delay in our 4-piece t8 haste bonus after each Mind Blast so that our next Mind Flay isn't benefiting from said haste. (mixed reports, could be a latency problem?)

Obviously not all of these would have to be implemented to tweak Shadow Priest DPS a little bit, and Blizzard might simply decide it's easier to tack on a flat damage multiplier to one of our talents or decide that they're happy with where we are. However I think these all address mechanics that feel "clunky" or frustrating as a Shadow Priest, and would help give our class a boost in the competitive dire

One of the main problems with spriests is how shitty our damage scales compaired to most other classes. This was highly evident in TBC & appears to be just as evident now.

I'd love to see our damage buffed, but I highly doubt it will happen. Really they can just re-adjust the the mind flay equation (similiar to the bug we experienced for a day in naxx) and we'd be in good line. The goal for us (and other hybrids) would be for us to fall behind the pure dps classes, with good players being able to match pure DPS classes. (assuming a stationary boss)

While lag/latency affects each class, it espeacially affects shadow priests, where timing is basically everything. I usually average about 300ms to the server, but nights where i'm in the 100s I can see an inc of a couple 100 dps.

The vodka sp's are pretty low though to be honest.. 5300 isnt that great considering that was attainable on patchwerk if you had max gear and good internet connection.

I would love to have other peoples comments on this not just as a bashing session but to also help better myself if there needs ot be some improvement from me.  I am not sure that I need improvement but I do learn from others advice and am willing to take it if it is legitimate and researched response based on statistics.

I've realized that SP damage has been off for several months now.  I look at lots of parses from other guilds and there is lots of evidence that SP damage is not where it should be - they just are not scaling properly.

Knoppix makes an impressive showing every week because he really plays his class at close to maximum potential.  Our raid doesnt have many pure dps classes that play at the top of their game.  Most of our hybrids dont do nearly the dps that they are capable of either.

Our raid parses skew the SP arguments but it's because many of our other DPS players are just not playing at full potential.

This isnt limited to 'only' our dps classes.  Its a common issue across our raid and jobs. Out of 25 raiders we are lucky to have 50% who play near 'best of class'

I'm thankful we have players like knoppix who give it 'all they have' 100% of the time.