Generic WoW

v3.2

So you’ve been playing WoW for a while.  You’re probably into raiding, but not necessarily.  Something happened last week.  You don’t know what triggered it (or perhaps you do), but you realised you’re just not into WoW that much anymore.  What do you do?

I’ve seen this plenty of times.  It’s most obvious with the higher profile guild roles like guild leader, raid leader, officers and to a lesser extent your core raiders.  The player isn’t online as much anymore.  They probably just turn up to raid and then log off.

Perhaps they take a break from Wow for a few weeks.  I’m not talking about the players who go AFK due to holidays/work/school/etc.  I mean the ones that actually say stuff like, “i’m taking a break from WoW for a while’ or just say nothing.

No one hears from them.  No one knows what happened or if they are coming back or anything.  Some players become concerned about the missing players absence. Guild organisers are left wondering if/how they should be managing the situation.  Should they be recruiting to replace the person who stopped logging on two weeks ago.  Or perhaps just demote them to a social rank for the time being and hope they come back.

What no one, except the player, realises is that your regular raider has quit wow.  Perhaps they are bored and have found another game.  Perhaps they have real life stuff which precludes all WoW playtime.  There is always a reason, but no one knows it.

Don’t be that player!

Guilds all have a social atmosphere of some description.  Most players who participate in this guild community have established relationships with other players.  If you are leaving the community by quitting WoW don’t terminate those relationships abruptly and just leave the other halves of them dangling, wonder what is going on.

There are a few very basic things you can do to make quitting WoW easier for all.

1)  Decide what you are going to do.  Perhaps you need to stand down from being raid leader (or insert other position of responsibility) and become a social guild member for a while.

Don’t go through the motions.  WoW is a game.  It is supposed to be fun.  If you are not having fun do not play. If you don’t want to raid for a while or even play WoW anymore, make that decision.  Don’t just turn up to raids, week after week, because you think is expected of you.

2) Once you have made your decision tell someone.  At the very least whisper someone.  Ideally use the in-game mail to send an email to you guild leader or raid leader.  That way if they are busy or AFK they aren’t going to miss it.  Posting on your guild forums is another option.

3) Do it!  Do what you said you were going to do.  Do not make excuses about leaving the guild and then turn up a week later in another guild.  This gives you a bad reputation and annoys people.  If you want to change guilds follow this process – make the decision, tell someone and then do it.

Here are a couple of examples.  I’m not naming names and if you know who i’m talking about don’t take this as anything other than an example of what i’ve outlined above.

Two core raiders (a husband and wife team) suddenly stop logging on.  Both are good raiders and valued members of the raid team.  No one knows what is going on.  The pair get demoted to social status and are almost kicked from the guild after a couple of months of not logging on.  Guild leadership starts recruiting to permanently replace them.

Suddenly they reappear to announce they’ve had a child.  Great news and much rejoicing!  They may not care, but unfortunately it will take them a fair while to get back onto the A Team, as they are now considered unreliable (not because they had a child, but because they didn’t communicate with anyone).

All they needed to do was to log and send an in-game mail to one of the guild leadership team saying that they’ve had/are having a baby and won’t be around for a few months at least.  Problem solved.  They probably still get demoted to social status, but now the guild looks forward to them returning and hearing about their new arrival.

A second example is a little more complex.  A guild leader and his partner, who is an officer, want to take a break from WoW for a while.  They may or may not actually intend to quit, but they at least need a break.  They have communicated this with the other officers in the guild, but the unwashed masses are starting to wonder what is going on.  Why isn’t their guild leader online anymore?

A guild with an AFK guild leader is in a vulnerable position.  Players start to lose confidence in the direction of the guild.  If you are planning on taking a significant break from WoW pass the guild leadership to one of the established officers.  Communicate with the guild.  Let them know you are taking a couple of months away from the game and you’re not sure if you will be back.   The more stable guilds will absorb this information and move on.  Fear of the unknown, i.e. what is happening with the leadership of the guild can be quite bad for raider morale.

Hmm, this is starting to look a bit like i’m having a ranty, so i’ll finish up.

If you’re quitting WoW make the decision, communicate it to someone in your guild and then do it.  Don’t disappear mysteriously and without warning or turn up to your WoW job and be unhappy about it.  As I said above,

WoW is a game.  It is supposed to be fun.  If you are not having fun do not play.

Game on!

Posted in Blogging

v3.2

Recently Blizzard introduced the first microtransactions into WoW in the form of purchasable vanity pets (a panda monk + Lil’KT).  This caused a variety of reactions from the blogging community.  Some were unhappy, others were unfazed.  In my experience the in-game community barely noticed.

So what’s the big deal about microtransactions?  A number of other games already use them to varying effect.  Blizzard is just continuing its course of re-using good/accepted ideas from other games and building them into WoW.

Currently you can use real money to buy vanity pets, which have no real in-game effect.  In future there is no reason to expect Blizzard would not offer other ‘upgrades’ as microtransactions.  It would make sense for Blizzard to offer the purchase of high end gear as micro transactions, instant level gains and of course more vanity pets and mounts.  This would mean more money for Blizzard and happier players (at least happier individual players).

Perhaps the only commodity I can see issue with is using real money transactions to buy gold.  Not for any higher moral ground type reasons but for the simple reason that it encourages in-game inflation.  Blizzard would have to design new and better ways of removing money from the game (money-sinks) to combat this.  I can already see the QQ as prices spiral and those who cannot, or will not, purchase gold from Blizzard complaining.

Pets and mounts are easy targets.  Other than keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ there isn’t any reason to own these items.  Players who have these items have no real advantage, other than perhaps bragging rights, over players without them.

Purchasing high-end gear or instant levels might be more controversal, but they both seem valid and likely in my opinion.  Blizzard is already trivialising the leveling process to a significant degree with the introduction of Recruit-a-friend and experience bonus heirloom items.  This might be the jaded view of a player with three maximum level toons already, but if Blizzard was offering instant 80’s i’d be interested.

Purchasing high-end gear sounds bad when you first read it, but it appears to fit with the current design philosophy.  The ‘bad-old-days’ of The Burning Crusade, when the elite, high end, raiders could parade in their exclusive gear are long gone.  At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, as has been written about to death, gearing is very much non-exclusive.  Pretty much any player with a decent amount of time and skill on their hands can get pretty much all the loot in the game.  There are a few hard to obtain items, but aside from a couple of exceptions such as the legendary weapons, they have low-visibility to the general WoW populace.

So, in my opinion, we’ll see more microtransactions in WoW in the new future.  The recent vanity pets tested the water, so-to-speak, and I think its more a case of Blizzard taking their time determining how to best take advantage of this revenue bonanza, rather than them debating the value of doing it.

Gobble gobble.

Posted in Blogging

v3.2

Ok, one more post on this topic before I move on (or perhaps get moved on).  Previously I posted about AoE tanking heroics on my baby warrior.  Well I think he’s grown up and this is going to be some thoughts on where he is at and where he is going.

Firstly I dropped the Glyph of Sunder and returned to Blocking.  The extra sunder appears to have been generating a bit more threat but nothing really outstanding.  I have nothing quantitative to prove this but thats my feeling after tanking half a dozen heroics with it.

I think a significant chunk of the ‘trouble with AoE tanking on a warrior’ is actually lack of experience and perception.  OMG!  I was about to say i’ve tanked about 20 instances in the last few weeks, but it’s actually a few more   Pug Checker tells me its more like 40!  I had thought it took me about 20 clears of normal Trial of the Champion to get The Black Heart, which I finally got over the weekend, but it as actually 29.  It dropped three times in those 29, the first two I lost the rolls on.  I’d be lying if I said I loved the last ten of those runs.

Anyway i’ve a bit more experience tanking now, and although i’m far from an expert, i’m comfortable with my ability to generate AoE threat.  Some of this better gear, true, but a good amount of it is that I am just now more used to the Thunderclap + Shockwave + Cleave ‘rotation’ and i’m better at clicking runners and taunting them straight back.

I’ve tanked heroic Trial of the Champion a couple of times and it is probably the hardest of the instances so far.  Despite being very familiar with it phase 2 of Black Knight, where he summons all those adds, it can still get ugly.  In normal they die fast enough and/or the DPS aren’t as strong.  In heroic the adds take longer to die and/or the DPS are ripping them off me.  I can hold them for about a dozen seconds with Challenging Shout, Thunder Clap, some Cleaves and Shockwave, but after that it can get messy.

It was the first time I tanked heroic Trial of the Champion that I realised that I can actually tank heroics.   Before that I was like, “is it an easy heroic like Utgarde Keep? No.  Hmm, better just DPS it.”  Having a well geared druid guildie healing me, probably gave me confidence too.  Once I did that one I started just assuming I could tank heroics and so far so good.

One of the strangest was tanking heroic Nexus with three 6k DPS guildies.  I’d get about three global cool downs before the target would evaporate in a cloud of dead bits. It t’was surreal.

Trial of the Champion is a great bridging instance both for fresh 80’s in normal mode and for better geared 80’s preparing to raid.  Especially in normal mode, where you can run it half a dozen times in a row, you can get a number of good upgrades out of it, and it’s not overly challenging.  My first hand experience with this instance as me quite curious about the new 5-mans appearing in 3.3.

Moowall is now ready.  He really needs to raid to get better gear now.  I’m happy with his set up now The Black Heart has finally dropped.  He can sit quietly until 3.3 arrives and he can get mass Emblems of Triumph from heroics or the occasional raid, where I can fit it in.  I’m still also glad I chose a warrior with lots of buttons instead of one of the other classes to tank with as I think he’ll keep me learning for a while yet.

It’s quite a noticable change gearing him now too.  Initially its was ‘everything = defence’ just to get to the 535 heroic defence cap.  Now he has 546 defence and i’m putting in expertise and hit gems.

It’s amazing how some people think.  I’ve had to convince the leaders of 5-mans that yes I am tanking with Black Knights Rondel.  Yes I realise it’s not a ‘normal’ tanking weapon. Yes I do realise the Peacekeeper Blade is what I ’should’ be using.  Hello!?! Until the Peacekeeper Blade drops Black Knights Rondel will actually do the job just fine.  In fact it is a better weapon for generating threat, which seems to be more useful in heroics anyway.  Perhaps I should run around with my old Hammer of Quiet Mourning equiped, after all its a ‘proper’ tanking weapon, and sneakily equip the Black Knights Rondel at the first pull.  Some people!

Gobble gobble.

Posted in Warrior

v3.2

My sneaky little call for 24th November being the Ice Crown go live date is starting to look better and better (if I do say so myself).

Wow.com have a couple of useful posts about the 3.3 patch which are very relevant to raiders. With an influx of more detailed information about a major patch usually comes a patch soon after.  But anyway on to the posts…

Firstly, there is a post quoting a blue post on the official forums outlining exactly how the Ice Crown raid is going to be released and how it’s going to work progression-wise.  The short version is that it will work pretty similarly to how Trial of the Crusader does with content slowly released over time and the heroic mode being restricted until all the raid is live.

I’m not going to repeat all that’s in those links but this bit is interesting, “Over time, after all bosses are defeated, players will begin to get a buff, making defeating bosses easier”.  That’s new

Secondly there is a post about the Tier 10 purchasing plan.  It’s not well explained but it appears that you buy the base item (think T9 from v3.2) using Emblems of Frost.  You then need to wait for a tier token (think T7 and T8 tokens) to drop, presumably from a boss.  You then return to the vendor trade in you base item and the token and get the upgraded version.

This has some interesting side effects.  Firstly for T10, if you buy the base item it will no longer be wasted if you get a chance it upgrade to the T10.5 version.  This is a great idea.  Chunks of the more serious raiding community completely avoided the base T9 gear because it made more sense to save the Emblems of Triumph and wait for your trophy to arrive.  This way you can get your base item and then upgrade it when you get the chance.  This means more incremental upgrades for raiders.

Another side effect, which probably isn’t that important, is that there will be less surplus base tier gear getting disenchanted.

The prices have inflated to help deal with all extra emblems from the new raid weekly quests.  Quoting from wow.com, “Gloves and shoulders can be bought for 60 Emblems of Frost, while the Helm, Legs, and Chest can be had for 90.”

Game on!

Posted in Priest

v3.2

In the red corner we have Gevlon the goblin, poster of interesting, radical, but often difficult to follow posts (not always WoW related) about sociology, the economy and his view of the world.

In the blue corner we have Markco, Master of the Gold Guide.  Markco’s Just My Two Copper blog alternates between attempting to sell his WoW gold guide and posting some very good gold making tips.

We pick up the brawl as some of the proverbial smelly stuff has hit the fan.  Markco has approached Gevlon to host links to his gold guide.  Gevlon has outted Markco in his usual blunt style and now the fight is on.  Supporters are lining up on both sides and one of Markco’s comments on Gevlon’s blog has been deleted.  It appears Markco threatened to sue Gevlon…

Tobold has been dragged into the fray.

Viewers are eagerly awaiting the next punch from Markco on his blog.

Exciting interwebs drama or just another blog post to ‘mark as read’?

Gobble gobble.

PS. Yes I know this isn’t my usual genre, but i’m feeling contrary this morning.

Posted in Blogging

v3.2

Links to good stuff and a short story of self congratulation to follow.

Tell me its not true! Llyra @ Healing Way is calling it a day   Go visit and read up on her stuff before it evaporates from the interwebs.

There are still crazy people out there!  Check out Xel’s Smite Leveling Guide.  I actually leveled 59-80 as Discipline and it worked fine.  Easier than Shadow?  Probably not.  Feasible?  Definently.  T’was just a bit slower than Shadow, but healing instances was a lot easier

Maintankadin forums has a very interesting post about Faction Champions and how the threat in this fight works.

Speaking of Faction Champions, curse you ToGC 10 Faction Champions!!   Can you guess what i’m gonna say? My short story goes like this.

My guild has been doing ToGC 10 for a few weeks now with a couple of clears under their belt.  I’ve missed all of them mainly due to being on holidays.  Thursday night we attempted ToGC 25, but gave up after an hour of wipes on the beasts. WTB better DPS.  Main issue was not enough big DPS types.  We had two healers off spec DPSing.  My 4.5k DPS just doesn’t cut it in this fight.  We got to Icehowl after Bloodlusting vs the worms, but we were about 40s behind the enrage timer…

Anyway ToGC 10 forms and i’m healing.  We have an alt paly tanking and about 4 or 5 people who’ve never one the ‘hard mode’ version of Trial of the Crusader.  Me and the tree, who hadn’t done it before, were excited for a bit of a challenge, but after smashing Northrend Beasts without too much trouble we were a bit disappointed.  Lord Jaraxus gets smashed in short order.  The first attempt on Faction champions one of our main interrupters dies early.  Finally a healing challenge!  We end up wiping it up and we get it fine on the second attempt.

Twins get smashed with only me dying.  I turned to change auras and took one step towards the portal and realised six orbs were converging on me.  Three of each colour.  Dodge them and get killed by the channeled death or grab the aura and suck up three orbs or the wrong colour.  Lesson learned, three orbs of the wrong colour kill you

Anub gets smashed, just.  Both the other healers died in phase three, but we did enough to one shot him.  Achievement spam!!  Followed my much back slapping and the realisation that we accidentally cleared it with 49 attempts remaining!  Curse you Faction Champions!

Gobble gobble.

PS 3.3 to go live 24th November.  You heard it here first

Posted in Blogging

v3.2

So there is this new patch coming out soon and with it comes the new tier of raid instances.  The Ice Crown raid will bring with it tier 10 (T10) gear and in theory T10 raiding challenge.

Some of you might be looking for a guide post or target for your stats.  So as a healing priest where should my stats be at for the start of T10?

These are all unbuffed stats.  They are all targets, and you might be over or under them, but I provide them as a general indication of size.  For discipline spec priests tier 10 will look like this:

• T10 – Spellpower: 2600, IFSR MP5: 350, Spirit: 900, Int: 1300, Crit: 28%, Haste 15%

This leads to discipline stat progression looking like this:

• Heroics – Spellpower: 1200, IFSR MP5: 200, Spirit: 500, Int: 800, Crit: 12%
• T7 – Spellpower: 1400, IFSR MP5: 230, Spirit: 600, Int: 900, Crit: 14%
• T8 – Spellpower: 2000, IFSR MP5: 320, Spirit: 700, Int: 1150, Crit: 20%, Haste: 15%
• T9 – Spellpower: 2200, IFSR MP5: 350, Spirit: 800, Int: 1200, Crit: 25%, Haste 15%
• T10 – Spellpower: 2600, IFSR MP5: 350, Spirit: 900, Int: 1300, Crit: 28%, Haste 15%

Based on the well geared holy spec priests in my guild i’m going to say tier 10 for holy looks like this:

• T10 – Spellpower: 2800, IFSR MP5: 420, Spirit: 1100, Int: 1200, Crit: 25%, Haste 16%

Tier 11

I’m just going to throw this out there as a guesstimate of what our stats will look like at the end of T10. i.e. at the start of T11.

Discipline T11 – Spellpower: 3100, IFSR MP5: 350, Spirit: 1000, Int: 1450, Crit: 32%, Haste 15%
Holy T11 – Spellpower: 3400, IFSR MP5: 420, Spirit: 1300, Int: 1300, Crit: 25%, Haste 15%

I’ve got more to say, but this was turning into a giant wall of text.  I’ve split it so expect a post on:

1. Spell power >= Base heal
2. Gear/stat inflation
3. Stat simplification in v4

Or perhaps several posts

Gobble gobble.

Posted in Priest

v3.2

Following on from my previous post about struggling a little with Aoe threat in heroics I have made some changes to improve my situation and they seem to be working.

Before I start a couple of caveats.  I’m a noob warrior tank and have only tanked about 15-20 instances so far.  So I might be wrong.  Secondly this is aimed at newer protection warriors tanking heroics, not at well geared raid tanks.

Right now thats sorted, on to the good stuff.

I changed two areas in my play style to generate more AoE threat, skill selection and glyphs.

Firstly skill selection.  I have replaced Heroic Strike with Cleave.  As per standard advice I was using Heroic Strike to bleed off excess rage (60+).  I have replaced this with Cleave as it seems to be helping me build threat quite nicely on multiple targets.  Cleave costs 5 more rage per use, does less single target damage and less single target threat, however on two (or more – see glyphs below) targets it produces more total damage and more total threat.

I have found warrior tanks have little issue generating single target threat with skills like Shield Slam, glyphed Devastate, Concussion Blow and Revenge.  I am yet to notice the reduced damage and rage cost from Heroic Strike on a single target.  I am currently not using Heroic Strike at all and I am Cleaving single targets if I need to dump threat.  This is less than ideal, but i’ll work on that later.

So Heroic Strike out, Cleave in.

Secondly Glyphs.  I had been running with Blocking, Devastate and Shield Wall for a fair while and they were doing fine.  However to match the change to my skill selection I have dropped Shield Wall for Cleaving.  In heroics having a 2 min CD for Shield Wall was rarely used.  For starters the boss fights rarely last 2 minutes.  So it seemed a waste.  Cleaving means I am now hitting three melee range targets with each cleave.  This is awesome and great for AoE threat generation.

I have also dropped Blocking for Sunder Armor.  This is still on trial.  I use Devastate quite a lot to build threat on my current target and this applies the sunder debuff to another melee target (including the threat) each time.  The extra block from Blocking has quite a bit of synergy with my talents so i’m still testing this one.  I think it’s a good idea…

Now to the action.  How am I pulling and building AoE threat?  Well its not rocket science

Heroic Throw a caster and Charge {skull}.  Thunder Clap now and, for the first 20-30 seconds of the fight, on cool down.  With the Thunder Clap minor glyph for a little extra radius this should get the attention of everything.  Shield Slam and then Concussion Blow and/or Revenge {skull}.  I usually drop one or two Devastates on the main target also.

Thunder Clap again.  Usually about the time your Thunder Clap is ready to use a second time your rage has gone off the meter, so start Cleaving.  I have a Power Aura set up to alert me as soon as my Rage goes over 60.  If some (all) of your DPS is doing AoE then often about now is a good time to Shockwave.  This has excellent threat and that combined with the 3 second stun might be enough to keep all the foes focused on you.  Otherwise it will give you a chance for a couple of Cleaves before things turn ugly.

Usually by now you have plenty of threat on your main target.  I tab around and share Shield Slam and Revenge love around.  If they aren’t ready for use the fill the blanks with Devastate.  Keep Cleaving when you have excess rage.

In heroics the pulls are often about four foes and after about three Thunder Claps (or sooner) the first target is dead.  I tend to stop Thunder Clapping and just focus on using my global cool downs to Devastate/Shield Slam and Revenge.  These do more damage than Thunder Clap and when there is only a couple of targets they generate better threat. Between Cleave hitting three targets and Devastate hitting two threat is usually strong on all the targets.  Worst case scenario is I do what the pros do and actually tab around and focus on those with lower threat.

If DPS really need to AoE then I ask them to single target until they see that second Thunder Clap.  Its an easy visual sign and once that’s landed I usually have enough of a lead to handle all the AoE they can throw at me.

Don’t forget (like I do often) to Vigilance you highest threat DPS or healer.  I currently do a DPS but i’m starting to think I should do the healer due the AoE nature of their threat.

For the record, on single targets i’m still dumping rage via Cleave (but less so) and using Shield Slam, Revenge and Devastate to build huge rage.  Devastate spamming with the glyph of Devastate very quickly build huge threat.

Gobble gobble.

Posted in Warrior

v3.2

I’m discovering as an up-and-coming warrior tank, who is just starting to tank heroics, that there are some perception issues about what is normal for a tank at this level.

Blizzard’s push for everybody to be running heroics most of the time has been a great boon for getting groups and mostly for the ease of completing them.  Prior to heroics dropping Emblems of Conquest heroics were largely the domain of Naxx geared (T7) and pre-Naxx geared players.  These players had the most to gain from completing heroics, which dropped a single item level 200 epic from the final boss and dropped Emblems of Heroism.  As at patch 3.2 heroics are quite different.

The introduction of a daily heroic dropping Emblems of Triumph (soon to be Emblems of Frost in 3.3) and a general upgrade of emblem drops from Emblems of Heroism to Emblems of Conquest has resulted in at least half of the players running heroics being geared at levels significantly higher than T7.  Where previously 1.5-2k DPS was a fairly standard amount per player 6k+ is becoming increasing common.  This makes heroics incredibly fast but it introduces a few issues for the less geared players, especially tanks.

When running heroics with a well geared tank it is not uncommon for them to be able to generate 15k+ threat to all targets (AoE threat) by about the 3rd or 4th global cooldown of the pull.  Their focused target will usually be 30k+ threat by this time.  Compare this with my newbie protection warrior tank.  Moowall produces about 12-21k threat on his main target (depending on my need to also generate AoE threat) and about 5-7k AoE threat.  This can be a problem if your DPS are well geared and used to using AoE damage from the second (or worse, first) cast of every pull.

So this is all very nice, but what can be done about it?

Communicate with your team from the start.  Don’t let them discover you are not T9.5 geared at the first pull.  I like to say something like, “My AoE threat isn’t awesome.  Can you please follow the kill order and single target DPS only?”  Players are usually happy to comply and I’ve never had anyone complain yet.  I have however had issues with near wipes where some awesome DPS was pulling 15k+ AoE DPS and continually died because, unsurprisingly, I couldn’t hold agro on all those targets.  Don’t let this become and issue, proactively manage it before the first pull.  It can prevent players thinking “failtank” and instead develop a “pretty smooth run” perception.

I make this easier I have the raid icons keybound to ctrl-w (skull), ctrl-a (X), ctrl-s (moon), ctrl-d (nipple – or whatever its supposed to be).  Ctrl-z clears the mark.  This means I can mark a pull in about 2 seconds.  It also means for a noob melee player like me, that I can figure out who the hell I should be targeting.  This makes tab targeting, especially when hitting the tab key doesn’t always move to the next target, much easier as I can tell the difference between the mobs.

Even with 6k+ DPS I can usually generate enough single threat (Glyph of Devastate FTW) to hold the target and still generate enough AoE threat so the others don’t start eyeing off the healer.  Single target DPS is slightly slower, but if you apply even one well geared DPS to a target they go down like a sack of the proverbial potatoes.

This situation is even worse when you first start tanking heroics as you have usually sacrificed everything to just limp over the 535 defence cap for heroics.  At this point your threat is even weaker than the numbers I suggested above.

So the take home message for new tanks is communicate with your party so they are aware you are not a bored raid-geared tank slumming it, but rather an up-and-coming tank who wants to mark and single target DPS to make the run smoother.

Good luck.

Posted in Warrior

v3.2

I get asked questions about shadow priesting from time to time on this blog and frankly i’m no expert at face melting.  My answer is go to www.shadowpriest.com and read up.  I imagine Elitest Jerks has similar information somewhere.

In the last month or so I have been DPSing a bit more as shadow spec and I seem to be doing ok, so here is my notes from my shadow cheat sheet.

Keybinds and macros

Keybinds and such like are personal preference but here is what i’m using:

Vampiric Embrace (bound to number 1 key), Vampiric Touch (2), Devouring Plague (3), SW: Pain (4)

I have other stuff bound to the other number keys like Shadowfiend and Dispersion, but exactly what they are bound to isn’t too important as I click them with the mouse if needed.  Actually i’m still probably using the mouse to renew DoTs too much ATM.

I have the following macros bound to my mouse wheel.  They are used for both healing and shadow, so only use the first line if you only need the shadow part.

Mouse wheel up
/cast [stance:1,harm] Mind Blast
/stopmacro [stance:1]
/cast [target=mouseover,help] [help] [target=targettarget,help] [ ] Prayer of Mending

What does this do?  In shadowform cast Mind Blast (on current target), otherwise cast PoM on mouse-over target > target > targettarget > self.

Mouse wheel down
/cast [stance:1,harm,nochanneling] Mind Flay
/stopmacro [stance:1]
/cast [target=mouseover,help] [help] [target=targettarget,help] [ ] Power Word: Shield

What does this do?  In shadowform, if not channeling, cast MindFlay (on current target), otherwise cast PW:S on mouse over target > target > targettarget > Self.  You may notice that it will not cast Mind Flay if I am already channelling (Mind Flay).  Generally I don’t clip Mind Flay ticks, although sometimes I get excited and clip them to cast Mind Blast.  Just imagine the crazed, part-time DPS madly scrolling his mouse wheel alternately up and down in between renewing DoTs

Spell priority

Boss casts: Vamp Embrace, Vampiric Touch, Mind Blast, Devouring Plague, Mind Flay, SW: Pain

Generally maintain DP and VT.  Don’t renew DoTs until they have done their final tick.  Priority is MB then DoTs then MF as filler.  I’m currently using Power Auras to track the remaining duration of my DoTs and this works well.

Vampiric Embrace

On 4000 DPS VE returns 1000 HPS to me and 200 HPS to each party member.  I like VE and use it on all the bosses. It heals me quite well and party members a little.  I’m currently spec’ed to Improved Vampiric Embrace, but see spec below for more comments.

Stats and stat weights

Target 289.55 hit rating (11%).  Gear for hit then spell power.  Chaotic Skyflare Diamond for meta.

These are the stat weights i’m currently using. I’ve added a ‘Shadow hit’ and ‘Shadow’ scales to Pawn to help evaluate gear.  The plain Shadow scale has hit = 0.  These are from www.shadowpriest.com.

• Meta gem = 70 (Chaotic Skyflare Diamond)
• Red gem = 23 (Runed Cardinal Ruby)
• Yellow gem = 19.2 (Potent Flawless Ametrine)
• Blue gem = 14.5 (Purified Dreadstone)
• 1 SP = 1
• 1 Crit = 0.72
• 1 Haste = 0.68
• 1 Spi = 0.25
• 1 Int = 0.22
• 1 Hit = 1.53

Spec

This is my current spec with Improved Vampiric Embrace.  This isn’t the max DPS build for shadow, but it is close enough.

With the recent buff to Improved Shadow Tap i’ll probably spec to this next time I respec.  Much as I love the idea of Vampiric Embrace its not overly awesome.  It really could do with a buff to either make it raid wide or preferably double the party heal component (or both).

Major Glyphs

Glyph of Shadow – While in Shadowform, your non-periodic spell critical strikes increase your spell power by 10% of your Spirit for 10 sec.

Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain  – Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.

Glyph of Mind Sear – Increases the radius of effect on Mind Sear by 5 yards.

Mind Sear is not the recommended third choice, Mind Flay is.  I find the increased radius on Mind Sear generally more useful for DPSing groups of adds and the like, which is something shadow priests do very well.  I also find it very useful soloing for killing more things faster.  I don’t find the reduced range of Mind Flay a huge issue and I like the reduced movement sped when soloing and in 5 mans.

Thats it!  The rest is mostly not dying, not wasting global cool downs and killing what ever you are told to. 

Good luck!

Posted in Priest