UPDATE - After Zarhym's post in this thread, we received yet another hotfix to Sin and Punishment. Blizzard managed to make the dispel effect a horror, which means that it's no longer subject to diminishing returns on our main CC ability, Psychic Scream. This is fantastic! However, the biggest issue remains: The dispel effect still DRs with itself, and thus becomes worthless after 3 dispels. Dispellers will still spam dispel our DoTs, because there is no worry of falling behind any more than 5 total seconds of horror. Sin and Punishment DRing on itself is our main concern, and I can only hope that the only way to fix it is a client-side patch, and that the issue will be fixed in 4.06. I'm not sure how likely getting another blue post in this thread is, but if this is an issue you care about, then I ask you to keep this thread alive and help facilitate discussion as to why Sin and Punishment MUST not DR upon itself to be a viable and useful talent.
If Sin and Punishment suffering DRs upon itself is intended, and the primary reason is that there is a 10 yard AoE horror effect, then I and the rest of the shadow priest community beg you: PLEASE remove the 10 yard AoE effect, and make it so that Sin and Punishment does not DR upon itself. I understand that homogenization is something that's tricky to deal with, however, Sin and Punishment will be practically worthless unless it is a consistent threat to people who want to spam dispel our damage and not worry about it. If the DR effect is not removed, then priests will want to spec OUT of Sin and Punishment so they do not have to worry about a reduced DR on Psychic Horror.
What other priests have to say about the talent:
I'm not even sure that Sin and Punishment necessarily needs a buff. It just needs to be equally punishing to the dispeller, but less punishing to the spriest, because currently this is the trade-off:
Dispeller - Dispel an spriest's DoTs
1. Negative: Eat a 3 second horror, all further dispelling is essentially free for the duration of the 15 second DR (2nd horror: 1.5 seconds = GCD).
2. Positive: Negate a very large mana investment from the spriest with a relatively cheap dispel (compared with healing through the damage).
3. Positive: Prevent a ton of damage and halt the spriest's momentum.
4. Positive: Put Psychic Horror on Diminishing Returns.
Spriest - DoTs are dispelled
5. Positive: Healer eats a 3 second horror for one VT dispel per 15 seconds.
6. Negative: Loss of mana.
7. Negative: Loss of damage/momentum.
8. Negative: Psychic Horror is on Diminishing Returns on the healer, and potentially anyone he caught in his fear. Difficult to know in disorganized circumstances where exactly the horror DR is on the healer and his allies.
For something that is supposed to provide a negative consequence for dispelling, this seems like a problem to me. Specifically, dispelling should be effective at (3)/(7) — that is what dispels are for. It should not be as effective as it currently is at (2)/(6), and (4)/(8) is just poor design. A completely separate ability becomes unreliable because of a talented mechanic that someone else has complete control over (the dispeller).
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1869407322?page=22#422
Original post can be found on the DD forums here:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1869558287