Decisions decisions decisions

Having had almost 5-6 months break from any real raiding, I feel ready to get back into the swing of heroic progression. I’ve missed the bulk of 5.2 Throne of Thunder heroics, but did manage to complete all the missing Mists opening heroic raid kills like Sha of Fear, Empress and Will of the Emperor. I did however manage to complete the missing parts of Glory of the Pandaria Hero and Pandaria Raider in the break. It’s amusing how slack I’ve actually been in Mists – I haven’t even completed the Pandaria Loremaster – having at most done 5 or so quests in Valley of the Four Winds. Still on the bright side, I’m pleased that I still have things to do in the game – that continues to allow me to pretend that Nat Pagle and his stupid reputation grind doesn’t exist.

My raid absence has mostly been coz I’ve been away a fair bit. I bought a house, refurbished my current residence, moved into a hotel for a few months and then moved into a new home. Since none of this happened overnight it took me a while to set up my computer and get a stable internet connection to play.

In my absence my perfect 25 man raiding guild has gone through some significant changes. For the vast majority of the heroic progression in Throne of Thunder, the guild has been raiding 10 man, simply as they just didn’t have enough people online to keep the 25 man going. There were quite a few who were not playing around the same time as I, for a varying degree of reasons. Officers and the Guild Master decided 10 man was the only way to keep raiding. However, I was surprised to hear that the guild has no intention now to return to its 25man roots, it’s quite happy with its new found 10man structure. This has already caused some issues for people deciding whether to stay or continue raiding/progressing elsewhere. As the GM plays a restro druid, our guild’s other restro druid felt she wasn’t likely to be selected often and was a fear highly likely to happen. She took the change to 10 man as a reason to move guilds – she wanted to raid and good on her she left to do so.

Now I’m by no means the best, or the worst shadow priest, and given my gear being almost half a tier behind, I can’t imagine I’m going to be the guild’s first choice when it comes to filling the raid. I know I have an awesome raid leader who does rotate people so despite this I will get the opportunity to raid, but the truth of the matter is do I want to occasionally raid or raid properly now? And the answer keeps coming back to properly.

So the only option is to leave. But I’ve once already left a guild that was ‘home’, to be blessed enough to find another, equally ‘homely’, is it really worth risking that again, just to raid? I doubt I’ll be leaving friends behind – I still have alts in the guild that I play and I have the many friends I speak to frequently on real ID so I’ll still keep in touch with them as well. So why is it so hard to walk away? Maybe I thought this would be my home for the rest of my play time, and my integration into the guild really made me feel that.

So now comes the decision – where to go?

Quel’Thalas has been my home for my entire WoW life – dare I even consider leaving the realm? I can’t stay behind if I want to raid 25 man. I’ve made 2 applications – one on Emerald Dream and one on The Sha’tar. One has invited me to trial, I’m waiting to hear back from the other. But for now I guess I need to think what I’m going to do and what my preferences are.

World of Busycraft

In the lull of the pre-expansion, I’ve been making the most of the quiet time in-game to spend time with friends and family. I’ve caught up over the past 2-3 months with most of the friends I’ve been neglecting to varying degrees over the course of 2012.

Patch 5.0.4 has arrived, and I must say I’m liking and disliking some of the changes to my beloved shadow priest. I absolutely hate the lack of control over devouring plague, but I absolutely love how super charged it is now. I’m also very fond of my new shadowy companions the psyfiend and the mindbender. The former, is absolutely mental in PVP, and the latter absolutely mental in PVE, although it’ll take me a while to remember that mindbender has a 1min cd and I actively need to watch for when it comes off cd. I miss the shadow nuke that the old tier bonus gave me when I popped shadowfiend, more so on Spine of Deathwing than on anything else if I’m being honest. I also very much miss the ability to have an instant cast of Mind Blast after two consecutive casts of Mind Spike. I still struggle to remember that that is no longer present, and as a result cringe every time I use Mind Blast and see a cast bar. I’m also struggling to cope with the inability to use Shadow Word: Death at any given time, although I shouldn’t complain as I know that is fixable with a glyph.

Managed to get Sinestra undying, so I am now the proud owner of the Feat of Strength ‘I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am,’ although watching the raid frames I could see how messy it was, and there were several moments where a few brushed with death.

Also, ventured into Vortex Pinnacle, rather than trying to learn how to play shadow in a calm situation I threw myself into VP and tested myself there. You never really truly learn to play something than when you are doing everything in your power to a. DPS the hell out of everything, survive and mitigate the crap loads of damage incoming and use every tool in your spell-book to resist getting stomped on. The weirdest thing is how powerful Flash Heal seems to be at the moment in Shadow spec. I’ve been venturing into VP a fair amount recently, the draw of the instance was too much to resist once Baron’s mount dropped. And yes, that was my not so subtle way of saying Baron finally dropped his Deathcharger mount, I believe I was around 175 or so attempts. Anyways, on my first post-5.0.4 visit to VP, I was amazed to see Altairus dropped the Drake of the North Wind. So now I have all but the South Wind which drops off Al’Akir.

I’ve been fairly frequently flying around Uldum looking for the mysterious camel fragments but have failed to even find one that crumbles. Seen Vyragosa in Storm Peaks quite a few times but alas, no living Time Lost.

I cleared out all my tabards, and made a whole bag worth of space, for all the gorgeous gear I’ll come across in Mists. I’m actually finding the current lack of space quite frustrating, so I moved all the Halaa marks into my main bags and just bite the bullet and farmed incessantly (thank heavens for AOE looting), and turned 3 stacks of crap into the last shiny mount I can purchase (outside of the Argent Tournament) which reminds me I really need to start doing those again before Mists hits and better dailies come along. I had placed those to one side while I focused on TB dailies for the Fox Kit, which I picked up a few days ago. Anyways so I now have 150 unique mounts, for whenever Blizzard decide to create a 150 mount achievement.

Finally I received my copy of Jaina Proudmore: Tides of War about 2 days ago. I’m about half way already, which if I’m honest has been a struggle to find time to read. It’s been a challenge to not scream ‘GO AWAY’ at anyone who comes near me. I’ve only gotten so far by stealing every moment whenever I can, and yes that included while I was out bowling yesterday in-between my turns. Still on the bright side I have a 3 hour train journey tomorrow, so 6 good solid hours to read, assuming of course, I’m not swamped by people I know on the return leg of the journey after the meeting, but a good solid 2 hours should be enough to digest the rest of the book.

Sinestra

With the date for Mists announced, WoW seems to have had some life breathed back into it. It feels good.. WoW was starting to get boring. Diablo was a nice welcome break, but after a while that too lost interest for me. I didn’t get as far as inferno, but I did get to Act 4 in Nightmare, but despite the slight increase in difficulty Diablo on its hard mode really did little for me. Don’t get me wrong, it has a fabulous story, but can that same story keep me engaged 4 times, for me, erm the answer is no.

Anyways, getting back to WoW, I finally managed to kill Sinestra. Was 3rd attempt for me. First attempt was several months back with a group of guildies clearing Bastion of Twilight on heroic but since we took some time on Ascendant Council, we kinda ran out of time for Sinestra. Second time I joined a pug on Openraid, which was a fatal mistake as the Raid Leader didn’t really lead or know the capabilities of any class but his own, and set my Shadow Priest as chief dispeller, which as of 4.3 is something a SP can’t do. Oh well, and third time was back with the guild and a fairly straight-forward kill although we did wipe several times to not kill it so we could practise the fight. Why practise you might ask? Well the plan is to give the achievement ‘I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am’ a go. It’s going to be brutal as the achievement can only literally be attempted once a week and people still screw up the orbs. Still it will be interesting to see if we can get it before it becomes a Feat of Strength.

On other news, we finally have filled our ranks enough that we’re back to 25man raiding. Spine was hell but we managed to clear the entire raid out at least over two raid nights, compared to a single night last week. Quite excited to see the Mists raids haven’t been on the beta enough to see any of the fights yet but really looking forward to having 25 people and not 2 groups of 10.

On the beta front I have entered into the first dungeon but I think the night I choose it was buggy like hell and I finally gave up finishing it after the party disconnected 6 times in a row every time we engaged the first boss. I’ve levelled 3 pets to 5 as well, but other than that, I’ve not been on WoW or the beta much of late.. rather I’ve been in Sardinia, Rome, and on a cruise to Barcelona, Cannes, Valencia & Majorca. Oh and I have Prague arranged for a weeks’ time too.

No luck on Baron’s deathcharger, but I was lucky enough to log in to find Time Lost Protodrake’s corpse 😦 yes that is a sad panda face. But I did get the Twilight Drake from OS 25 today which brings my mount total to 144 now

Mounty mount mounts

So much has happened since my last post here.

Firstly two words… Diablo 3 landed. That was a serious time sink. I created a witch doctor, which is just past level 40, and have completed the first 3 acts on nightmare. Haven’t completed any of Act 4 for three reasons, one being burnout, another being boredom and the final reason being I died twice at Iskatu and then I couldn’t be bothered to try again.

Also, I’ve found myself missing WoW since playing Diablo again. So I have a resurged drive to keep playing. And with that resurged drive, I’ve had to find things to do to keep myself busy. So I’ve been actively pursuing my mount obsession.

Mounts I’ve managed to acquire:
– Stonecore one that drops of Slabhide
– The rare one that drops of Aeonaxx
– Deathwing heroic one
– Cataclysm Raider Achieve one
– Dragon Soul Raider Achieve one
– Nagrand Halaa 1 of 2 (I now have all the Battle Tokens I need, just missing 13 of the grindy marks)

Mounts I’ve failed to acquire:
– The rare one that drops off the Time-lost proto-drake
– Baron’s Death-charger from Stratholme (although I’ve seen the Runeblade 3 times now)
– Any of the 4 Argent Tournament ones I still need (this is down to focus on the above two)

Mounts I’ve not yet tried to acquire:
– The camel from Dormus, the Camel Hoarder
– North Wind Vortex Pinnacle one that drops off Altairus

So that’s been my WoW of late. Mounts, mounts, and more mounts.

Bye Bye Warlord

OK we didn’t take just an hour on Warlord Z, but yeah we got him, and then subsequently cleared the rest of the raid. We had a 0.1% (250k HP) wipe, at one point, which was so painful it’s unreal. We had 3 DPS dead from the half way point and I almost cried when the last standing warlock died and Warlord Z reset.

Anyway our kill was pretty awesome; we ended the 3rd black phase with the entire raid alive, and other than the few we lost to the berserk timer, it was a really clean kill and well deserved.

On other news my druid very deservingly won the 390 polearm from Deathwing. I say deservingly as I was 10th on the DPS (which I’m going to be honest is pretty damn awesome for how poorly geared she is). I’m still wearing a blue 333 shoulder item, 2 blue 346 items and a blue LW PvP helm, and whilst I’m gemmed I’m wearing no red gems, and the bulk of my gear is unenchanted. This is down to the fact that I have no essence at the moment.

Warlord Zee

So the first nerf has hit DS and lo and behold the world hasn’t ended as the heralds were proclaiming. My guild & I have already cleared 3/8 heroic before it hit and so the only place I’ve yet to actually see it is on Warlord Z, which we’ve been focused on this week. Morchok and Yor Sahj like always since the first kills have been fairly easy, so other than the Thursday which had us in Firelands it’s all been about Warlord Z.

We’ve had some phenomenal attempts. We had a 3.4% wipe, which was just painful as heroism wasn’t used until 25 seconds before the berserk timer, and knowing that it would have been a kill if heroism was used in time just makes it that much harder to digest.

Our strategy essentially splits our raid into five groups, four of which focus on the adds in their corners of the room, and the fifth consists of the tanks and designed healers. For the most part we easily succeed until the 3rd black phase; it’s just sometimes the RNG element just overwhelms us. Like one group getting the bulk of the disrupting shadow debuffs, and with a single healer in each group, that’s just too much for a healer to handle.

We let Warlord Z absorb the ball at stacks 9-7-7, and then let then ball hit the wall, which the entire raid can survive even on heroic mode if we use slow fall damage reduction techniques. This leaves us with the ability to full-out nuke the boss after the 3rd black phase until the berserk timer. The first time we hit berserk timer Warlord Z was on 40%, and the latest attempt had him at the painful 3.4%, with the whole raid alive on the burn stage at the end, so we’re definitely making progress. The plan is usually to progress until Monday, and then on Tuesday being the clear-everything-else day. However, we refused to let another week slip by without defeating Warlord Z so we persuaded the raid leader to give us 1 hour on Tuesday to keep at Warlord Z, and with only a little resistance agreed. I’m really hoping that everyone brings their A game tonight and so we can finally move from 3/8 to 4/8.

On other news I’ve finally decided that I can’t VP cap on so many alts, so as of this week and onwards I will not be capping on the paladin anymore.

So I’m thinking for an alt Leosfury, my paladin is fairly well geared at 386.
As is Shawnah, my death knight, and Silentruby, my mage, both at 388

I’ll continue to run the first half of DS on raid finder when I have time, to see if missing tier items drop. This week when I ran the first half of raid finder my Paladin was one of three who could have needed the conqueror token and I still didn’t win the roll when it did. Oh well.

The death knight tier bonus is fairly rubbish so I’m not particularly chasing the tier items on it, which is just as well really as so far I’ve lost out on all but the shoulder item.

Leaving Shaynaa, my druid at 370, which will be my focus from now on until she’s a bit better geared.

Both my warrior and warlock are geared enough to do twilight heroics but I hardly play either of those so I’m not sure I’ll bother to take either of those for a run unless I’m severely bored, which with the amount of events and darkmoon faire, and levelling/gearing my goblin I just don’t see happening.

Wishing you many epics

Complaints

I don’t like being a complainer but right now as much as I love the raid finder I find it equally frustrating.

My main just can’t seem to shake off his 378 helm. The conqueror helm token hasn’t dropped since week 1 of our DS runs, even though we are now 2/8 heroic and working on Yor Sahj. And well I’ve lost the helm in RF to multiple individuals the most frustrating was a Paladin on the Sylvanas server who had the tier helm equipped. Yes I have and recall the name but I don’t see what naming and shaming will achieve so I won’t stoop to it. So much for Paladins being of the ‘light’!

Yesterday I was in RF with my holy paladin, and he has 3/5 tier so far, so I just need to replace the legs or hands, preferably the legs as I have 384 non-tier hands. And the most frustrating thing happened. I lost the roll (I was 2nd) another paladin (pah for the light), who had 397 tier legs equipped (he instantly used a macro to change his gear into 226 ilevel stuff so people couldn’t see what he had (I had looked at his gear previously and ofc stupidly been relieved that he had 397 tier legs). Great how he gets a roll bonus, when he sports a higher version of the same damn item! I hate how absolutely selfish people can be. That made me so mad. In the same group another paladin won 3 conqueror tier items, all of which upgraded his 378 items and whilst I was envious of him, I was totally fine that he won. It got me thinking that Blizzard really need a smarter roll system. And implement a bonus when you need it. Frankly if you possess a spec-specific tier item (and its quite simple for Blizzard to know which items you possess, as they are all individually coded) you don’t get a bonus for the same one. If you want an item for your off-spec, join as that spec. Simple.

Blizzard also need to partly address the RNG element of never getting loot. I’ve seen people decked out in 5/5 tier items, and whilst my main has 3/5, mage has 2/4 and my paladin has 3/5, my DK has 0/5. There needs to be something to help those who have sheer bad luck. Like my DK who has lost the roll on every single tier token so far and yes I’ve killed every boss in RF each week since 4.3. So if I lose a roll on say tier legs 5-10 times in a row, then I get an additional bonus roll or something. Or with the trolls rolling need on everything simply because they can, I’m afraid I’ll never get the items I want.

Anyways that’s me vented out on that subject. Well not really, but I’m forcing myself to be.

So my guild and I have succeeded in defeating Morchok and Hagara on the 25 man heroic setting. We’ve turned our focus on Yor Sahj as the previous weeks raid reset, and getting used to the multitude of combinations has been somewhat challenging for the healers. We’ve hit the berserk timer so it’s just a matter of pushing out every single ounce of dps we can. It’ll definitely be a kill next week.

Ironically during the guild alt run we successfully managed to kill Morchok on heroic 10man with 1 minute left on the berserk timer using 4 healers 2 tanks and 4 dps. It was almost laugh worthy, the difference in the difficulty between 10man and 25man when you look at it like that just seems insane. Our 25man group consisted of 72% dps, and the 10man group 40%, and we often hit the berserk timer and just Morchok as he runs around killing people one by one on 25man.

With Christmas and New Year over, most people are back into their normal raiding schedule. There was a day last week where we barely had enough to fill 20 spots, but since than we’ve successfully filled a 25man group with a good representation of healers and dps.

As for the meta, we’ve done the following achievements so far:
– Taste the rainbow
– Ping pong champion
– Maybe he’ll get dizzy..

OK well on that happy note I’ll say happy new year and hope you all had good celebrations over Christmas and an enjoyable New Year.

4.3 is here

Big news. I did a name change, Koryz is now called Soulseared. LoL not gonna bother with changing the name of the blog or anything. I did it when I was away with friends in Edinburgh. I had visions for it taking days so was pleasantly surprised when it was actioned within 20 mins. Well I was on holiday far from a PC so even had it taken long I wouldn’t have cared much. Although everyone I know (myself included) still keeps calling priest Koryz, stupidly every time I mail something to priest I type Koryz by default.

So 4.3 has finally landed and Azeroth will never be the same ever again. With exception of a few people that are completely not bothered about transmog virtually everyone is sporting a unique look. I love that. I personally have chosen to don the Absolution set from Hyjal, Black Temple & Sunwell. Does that make me a typical priest, yes it probably does but I really do love that set as it really is iconic for Shadow Priests. I really adored the shoulder that gave druids wings, but as a general rule I have never really liked most of the bulky gregarious shoulders in the game. I personally prefer subtle and strong items that speak for themselves. That’s probably why I really like the Amice of the Convoker since the first time I ever saw it. It’s simple with an epic look and feel to it. Coupled with Absolution helm, robe and hands it really looks perfect in shadow form and gives me a slightly different look from the rest of the Shadow Priests wearing the absolution set. The new shadow glyph even allows what I’m wearing to be seen. And for the first time since gaining shadow form I get to see my mount. Although at some point I really ought to stop using the PvP honour purchased Nightsaber. But it’s one of those rare mounts that were designed for a Night Elf and it just feels so natural for a Night Elf to ride it and the PvP one looks so awesome. Maybe listening to Anne Stickney talk about how much she loves role play is really starting to rub off on me.

Dragon Soul has been interesting. I’ve managed to kill 7/8 on 25 normal. I’ve also done all the bosses, but Ultraxion in raid finder so far. I never get a fresh run, even though I’ve used it quite a few times.

The guild has turned its attention to Morchok heroic. That went really well, we hit the berserk timer which was awesome. We tried reducing healers but that didn’t go so well so we’re all working hard to push out as much DPS as possible as we seem to be just a little short at the moment. Both of our tanks now have the 4-set bonus so that might enable us to go from 6 healers to 5. I actually can’t wait until Wednesday to give it another go.

I really love the Hour of Twilight heroics. I’ve even managed to VP cap on 3 alts so far, my Priest mostly through the guild Dragon Soul runs, and my DK and Mage via heroic and raid finder. At some point I probably should work on the DK’s off spec, and get some 378 tanking gear to replace the 346 blue stuff as that’s the one I tend to use in my non-main guild raids. I was lucky with a few drops so I did pick up plate tank shoulders that the druid tank couldn’t use, and tank shoes that the paladin tank already had. Normally though I do get to DPS but I have had to tank once or twice on it.

I should turn some attention to my Paladin healer, it has OK gear, was not too sure I would have been able to heal the new heroics yet, so I gave it a go and voila did a fantastic job. Which really surprised me as I had a 333 blue helm, shoulders and mastery trinket. The rest was an assortment of 378 bracers, and 359/365 epics. Personally I hated the trolls and unless I needed VP on my main, I never ran them. So I’d only healed the 2 or 3 4.1 heroics, none of the 4.2 heroics so most of my gear was normal blues. As virtually all my alts are decked out in Molten Front 365 gear, which goes to show how much pride I put into gearing up my alts (and how much I need to get a life)… but the trolls really were my limit. I couldn’t put all my alts through that. I refused. I think I ran a few on my DK, mage and warlock but I didn’t enjoy them, and when the game you play to relax and enjoy yourself starts to feel like a chore I guess you should avoid it. So I did. I got the mount on my main, and did them only to cap on the occasional week where I missed a Firelands boss kill.

But 4.3 has been everything a new patch should be. I did the DMF on priest. Everything but the PvP trinket and the A Treatise of Strategy. Hell I farmed that damn thing on 3 alts and it still didn’t drop more than once, which of course I rolled 6 on when it did /sigh. So much for hoping the name Soulseared would be luckier for me than Koryz was.

What are your thoughts on 4.3?

Good Wipes

I’ve been doing a lot of wiping of late. And I’ve found there is good wiping and bad wiping.

Our typical raid time is 19:45 to 23:00 server, and wiping from 19:45 right through to 23:00 easily turns good into bad, although there are days when actually I’m quite sad to see the end of the raid come, even if we have just spent over 3 hours dying to the fire lord Rag.

But this past month I’ve also been wiping to new things. Quite a few of us Dragons are on the public test realm, and so I’ve been wiping in 10-man Dragon Soul against some of the slightly harder bosses. We had to pug a tank last night and the mechanism to Warlord Zon seemed far too hard for him/her to grasp. Although with how smoothly the first boss and the blob boss went at least we have two farm bosses from the first week 4.3 releases. Although it’s the Warlord that drops some awesome haste spirit gear but with a Dragons tank I’m sure it’s a fairly simple boss and we’ll quickly add that one to the farm list.

I’ve also been wiping in 5-man heroics and the 25-man raid finder Dragon Soul. So far I’ve had a one almost blob boss kill (as you can see I’ve yet to memorise the names), no actual kills but I’ve got to be honest the raid finder has been pretty awesome at getting familiar with the fight mechanics and knowing what to expect and when and for that alone I’m glad. I’ve also completed End Time so far, none of the others. And seriously, what the hell is with Murozond? Blizzard seriously, why would you chose an anagram for his name! Was so obvious even before I set foot in there for the first time. Anyway I digress but before I move on, I hate that you can kill the Aspect of Time himself in a 5-man dungeon. How lame!

Oh and the other wiping I partook in was on Nefarian in BWD. My former guild has been struggling to get back to its former raiding in Wrath. A fair few of the former raiders have moved to raiding guilds, myself included, and therefore they have sometimes struggled to fill a 10-man, so on Saturday since I was free I helped them on my Death Knight, as they needed melee. Its gear sufficiently for BWD, but I’ve not really geared it recently – whilst it has does have 353 shoulders it is in 359 and 365 gear. We had a 8% wipe, when 3 of the ranged dps had died and we hit the berserk timer, other than that, we had a few good tries but for the most part a lot of players struggled with phase 3 and moving out of shadowblaze. Although with a little more time we could have killed it, but we were just too tired towards the midnight-1AM mark and focus had been lost. With raiding Sun-Thursday with Dragons I don’t often have time to raid with them which is a shame, as I really would love for them to be able to down Nefarian with a full guild run.

On other news, I’ve got 800-odd searing cinders now and am really looking forward to being able to use the haste-loaded 391 stage 2 legendary staff. We have the Rag kill tomorrow, and then 3 25-man heroic bosses on Wednesday should hopefully be enough to get 200. I’ll be really miffed if I need like 1 or 2 cinders and prevent the other shadow priest in our group from getting the 5th drop of cinders.

Empowered Shadow

I’m struggling with my dear shadow priest. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it dearly, there is never likely to be another class that will overcome my desire to play shadow as my main. But my complaint is just how unforgiving playing shadow can be. A tiny lapse of concentration, or a movement intense fight, or portion of a fight, can take me from being in the top end of the DPS chart to the bottom. Even after playing Shadow for years, this still frustrates me.

I’m not going to lie here 25-man heroic Ragnaros has pushed me to my very limits of playing shadow well. I know Shadow as well as anyone can reasonably expect and I’ve been forced in that fight to get better. I’ve had attempts on Ragnaros where I have quite literally been number one on recount, whilst on the other hand I’ve had other attempts where I have quite literally been the lowest of the damage dealers. I can’t put this down to just the randomness of shadow orbs, but I have noticed that on one specific try it took almost 60 seconds before I got my first shadow orb to enable me to get my empowered shadow active. The mad dash during world in flames and the need to run and damage the Molten Elementals just murder my damage dealt compared to other ranged classes like hunters and Boomkins. I barely get a fraction of their damage on those adds but I know my damage on Ragnaros more than makes up for that.

I was in Baradin Hold a few days ago, when a shadow priest (with relatively good gear) asked me how I topped recount by a fairly massive margin (I was at 11% and a hunter 2nd after me was at 6%, most were between 4-5%) when she could barely churn out the minimum requirement in a pug group without being thrown out of the group. I looked at her gear, talents and recount statistics and advised her. With Empowered Shadow up, and targeting a player with Mind Sear a second before the Eyes spawned, it wasn’t hard to push that margin but after talking to her for almost an hour it was clear that her lack of technical knowledge of her spells was the main reason her damage output was low.

I can even cast my mind back to first playing Shadow and not knowing that I needed to use all my damage-over-time (DOTs) spells and in what order. Hell I remember being asked why the hell I didn’t even use them. And when I think and remember that I know that for every person who plays Shadow well, there are two who likely don’t play properly or well. This is for all those people.

I’m not going to just give what rotation to use. There is no such thing as a Shadow rotation. It’s simply a priority system. But I’m going to talk through what I do, and why and what this means.

There was a time I preferred having trinkets that automatically gave me its bonus, but since understanding how exactly my cool-downs and spell mechanics work I have found I prefer trinkets with either a stacking bonus or a bonus I have to use myself. This has made it easier for me to make sure I align as much of my cool-downs as possible. Knowing exactly when heroism or ancient power is to be used takes this one step further.

Take my opening for example, since my guild uses a DMB countdown, it’s relatively easy to use a volcanic potion just before the raid engages a fight. Instantly the potion means I’m up 1200 intellect on my base stats. After using that potion I almost immediately click and activate the 1149 intellect bonus on my Fiery Quintessence trinket. Therefore when the boss engages I have almost a 40% buff to my intellect. My opening spell is usually Vampiric Touch (VT) and Mind Blast (MB). I follow through with Shadow Word: Pain (SWP) and Devouring Plague (DP), and usually I have enough time for two Mind Flay (MF) before MB comes off its cool-down. By this time it’s very rare for Power Torrent and Lightweave Embroidery to not have activated. Power Torrent adds a further 500 intellect, whilst Lightweave adds 295 spell-power (which is kind of like 295 intellect). This means within a few seconds of my rotation I have over 9000 intellect. This translates to something like 14000 spell-power.

Whilst having 14000 spell-power is amazing for each MB you can cast off, there is something that a lot of people will overlook – the Shadowfiend (Fiend). As the damage the Fiend does is based on the spell-power at the time you activate it, this is an exceptionally good time to send the Fiend out. Whilst in the overall grand scheme of things the fact that Fiend only contributes to a small percent of the damage a shadow priest churns out during a fight, one should definitely not overlook maximising the amount of damage it can deal. Timing the Fiend well can in some cases double or triple the amount of damage it deals, if not more.

So to recap, I have used a pre-potion and activated my trinket, and opened with VT MB SWP DP MF (x2). The two MF ensure that Archangel activates and I consume the Evangelism effect so that it gives me Dark Evangelism, which actives on the MB cast, which in turn activates (note: almost always but not always) Empowered Shadow from the consumption of a Shadow Orb. With Empowered Shadow up now for the first time, I recast VT (which should be towards the tail-end of its duration anyway), and DP as well (despite the fact that it will not be close to its duration, but the Empowered Shadow means recasting it gives it the 10% extra damage bonus of Empowered Shadow). I also cast a single MF to ensure that SWP also updates to include the 10% Empowered shadow bonus. Around about now-ish some of the bonuses especially lightweave and Power Torrent are also coming to their duration limit timer, before anything ends Fiend is cast. With all the DOTs spells (VT SWP and DP) ticking away with the 10% bonus of Empowered Shadow, the prioritisation shifts to MF. Dark Evangelism gives a 4% damage bonus to each tick of MF damage as well as MB (a lot of people don’t realise that Dark Evangelism also benefits MF damage). Remember it’s important to recast MB on cool-down to keep Empowered Shadow active, as well as now to benefit from Dark Evangelism while its still active.
Around now the bonus of the volcanic potion and trinket should be near their duration timers, so I recast VT and DP to ensure that they retain a full duration worth of damage at their increased intellect figure.

After that the rotation shifts to its usual keeping all DOTs active and casting MB off cool-down, and MF the time nothing else needs attending to. If any bonus to spell-power or intellect activates it’s advisable to recast VT and DP, immediately after you see it activate and 2-3 seconds before it ends.

Another word of advice is get recount – not to be obsessed with figures but to assess your damage. It is useful in answering the following questions.
1. Is the damage you do comparable to others?
2. What is the uptime of your DOTs? Anything less than 95% needs attention!
3. What is your miss rate? If it’s more than 0% get hit capped.
4. How does your % damage by spells compare to other Shadow Priests (don’t obsess with figures, gear plays a part in the actual DPS) but focus on how does the % damage done by MF VT MB compare?

Do you have anything to share that might make someone play Shadow better?