5081

They’re CCable and its a channel.

The adds die extremely fast as well if you AoE them.

Only thing I can say is that you need to enchant your gear and go with blue quality gems, but the enchants are probably a bigger deal. Theres no good excuse for not everything enchanted going into a heroic especially as a tank. All your gear is iLvl 333 or better so its not like you’ll easily replace things other than possibly the relic.

5082

Understand what you’re saying about enchants, and thanks, but blue quality gems?

5083

Purple and orange gems, respectively. You want Purified and Reckless.

5084

I wouldn’t worry about blue-quality gems unless you’re in 346+ gear and you plan on wearing it to raids. The benefit isn’t nearly worth the cost if you’re still replacing gear in heroics, though. Well, unless you have easy access to a jewelcrafter/miner. Even then you’re probably better off selling the gems.

5085

Aaaand Bane of the Fallen King. Sure, I was carried (lowest dps), but I didn’t stand in defiles, so there’s that.

5086

Starting out in heroics you need every edge you can get. Blue gems add up, but like I said the enchants are the far bigger deal. And he does have some 346/359s from rep and the like iirc and those had green gems in them.

Depends on the price of gems on your server as well of course. I rarely spend more than 100g on a gem and its not like thats even a noticable amount of money these days.

5087

Well, that’s why I included the “unless you’re in 346+” part. ;)

5088

I have the feeling stuff on my server is scarce, as while it’s a medium pop, the horde outnumbers us 3:1. I just went to check for moar expensive gems on the AH and, uh, there weren’t any. At least not agi upgrades.

That reminds me, there’s an adorably inept horde guild on our server (Horde Strike Force). They raid Stormwind daily. Those raids invariably have one of two outcomes: they attempt to fight in the open, which case they’re slaughtered, or all forty (or whatever) of them camp the same room in an inn and stay there for a few hours until they get bored and leave. Oh, and when they leave, they don’t all get the memo, so a dozen or two of them die after their buddies leave. It’s…amusing.

On a different note, I sort of missed being able to run BRC and TotT in normal, and vaguely wondered why that was. Well, now I know why. A buddy queued as a healer on his 80 alt and the “tank” did the “I brought my buddy to the front of the queue now I’m leaving” thing, so my friend brought me in. We had one boss down in 24 seconds and at no point was I the least bit concerned that I might die. Now I understand why I can’t queue for those normally.

5089

I’m surviving heroics without having done that (and with comparable/worse quality ilvl) as a feral bear. It’s not about enchants. What it is about to a larger degree than folks seem to admit is how good your support is. And I’m not talking healers. DPS who interrupt and who do good DPS really reduce the damage you take. And of course some of it is learning the fight mechanics (for example, the most important thing you can do in grim batol trash is make sure you’re killing the right trash mobs in the right order: Fire casters/elementals first in the caster/elemental packs, azure dragonkin to avoid the AE elemental summons. Also make sure you pull crap out of the light pools which ups their damage by 50%…)

One thing that will give a nice boost is buying the Therazane rep rings. Both the Agi and Str ring are solid upgrades to ilvl333 rings until heroic drops can replace the Str ring.

5090

So I’ve actually started my Priest again since my WoW friends won’t shut up about how they need a frigging healer every time they do a random heroic, and I think I might understand some of these people who are wandering into heroics geared wrong. I decided to start out in the ocean. I am now halfway to maximum level and I am STILL IN THE OCEAN. I fully expect to ding 85 without ever so much as setting foot in a dungeon, just because I want to see the new zones. The gear that I’m getting is just now starting to clearly and uncontestably surpass my old raid gear, but I’m presently grabbing a lot of DPS caster gear and I barely understand which stats I should be focusing on for that. Given that I’m probably going to level-and-quest-gear my way into heroics without healing one dungeon, I fully expect to have no clue what stats are best to gem and enchant for (specifically, I have no clue how much bang mastery will give me versus all the other stats, and I haven’t had time to read the volumes of prose on the subject that the internet will turn up), and I’m going to be walking into my first dungeon trying to figure out what order to push the buttons in after all the changes for the Cataclysm patch. As much as I like gaining levels and all, I have to think that maybe I should at least be forced to do all of the dungeons once on Normal before advancing to hard, because I sure as hell wouldn’t want to PUG with me at this point.

Just please tell me that I don’t level out of the ability to specifically select the individual normal dungeons by the time I hit 85, because if I have to run to each one of these damn things I may just give up now.

5091

Right now, Blackrock Caverns and Throne of Tides disappear from the dungeon finder list when you hit 85, but in 4.0.6 they’ll be adding them back to the list.

5092

You can also run them at 85 by physically going to the entrance.

I don’t really understand your complaint, Brian. It sounds like you realize that you need to play the dungeons on Normal in order to get gear for Heroics, but you don’t want to do that … why? Is it that you refuse to run a dungeon unless it’s presented to you as part of a quest line? Is that like a rule you’ve set for yourself while levelling?

5093

Doing the dungeons requires either a group or me to go healing, which I currently have no understanding of (and speaking with my elite raider friend has only confused me more, because apparently Discipline is now one of the best raid healers), so any PUG that I graft myself onto is probably not going to have a very fun time. I would run dungeons if any of my usual WoW crew were of the level to do it (I’m going to have to wipe up all the damn quests anyway to get into the good graces of all the factions), but most of them are split between their already-endgame-leveled mains and their developmental characters that are too far back to run with. I’m also pretty sure that I’m doing everything wrong in Shadow because I keep burning through my mana (I suspect that this is because all of the DPS caster gear that I see lacks Spirit, which my raid gear had a lot of).

Basically, I’m unwilling to ruin anybody else’s night so that I can find out that I suck, and I’m gaining levels faster at this point than I did in Lich King, and I came into Lich King halfway through. At the rate I’m going, just trying to gather herbs, level archaeology, and get friendly enough with all the factions to buy their shirts I’ll accidentally level my way out of the regular dungeons if my whole The Little Mermaid experience is any indication (though I’m assuming that every other new zone is much, much shorter and I just made a horrible choice starting out in the water).

5094

Hmm. Well, I think that the only way to truly know how to play your class is by practicing. So you’ll have to jump into dungeons at some point (assuming you like doing dungeons!) - the only question is whether it’s with normals or heroics. Personally, I think people will be more forgiving in Normals. By the time you get to Heroics, I think it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.

But you probably aren’t as bad as you think. The mere fact that you care about getting better tells me that you probably aren’t that bad.

This is an interesting question though. What is the experience for a person with a high-level character who hasn’t been playing for a year or more? By the time they come back into the game it has changed so much that you have to re-learn everything, but you’re already high-level and people expect you to know what you’re doing.

I was in basically the same boat when I resubbed in November. I hadn’t played for about a year and a half, and had done almost none of Northrend. I levelled to get to 80, but I also did Battlegrounds. This helped me configure my healing addon exactly how I wanted it without the pressure of people depending on me. By the time I jumped into an instance, I was relatively capable.

5095

I stopped playing before Burning Crusade came out. I had a single level 60 shadow priest at that time I had dabbled with other characters, but didn’t get any much beyond level 25-30.

I picked up BC and Lich King and started playing shortly before Cataclysm came out.

I really didn’t feel like much had changed. For the normal instances, for example, as a priest you basically just have to try not to be stupid. Most wipes are still caused by idiot DPS who can’t stop taking aggro (and thus diverting my attention with that irritating “Do I let them die or not” decision) or tanks who can’t hold aggro.

Perhaps mana is a bit more difficult to manage.

The above isn’t to sound arrogant. My fat fingers and poor reflexes (and occasional poor decision making) have certainly caused wipes. But for ordinary dungeons, healing still seems to consist of “Watch green bars. When they go down, heal. When all start going down, group heal. When one goes down really far, throw on shield then heal.”

Oh yeah, and to be fair there is a lot more “Don’t stand in the fire” than there was in vanilla WoW. Though again, that’s not exactly a rocket science concept to learn, just a matter of getting used to having to look at something other than your heal bars every once in awhile and then move.

That’s actually a good thing; probably my biggest flaw as a group healer in the past was paying too much attention to the heal bars and not the game. Most wipes, to the extent I caused them, were caused by me dying first from not noticing monsters were suddenly beating on me. I’ve gotten better at that as a byproduct of having to watch more of the game.

5096

Shadow on trash, quest mobs is easy. Mind sear till you get an instance mind blast then mind sear again till below 24% then shadow word death. Have SWD gyphed so you get a second one if the first doesn’t kill and for lifetap on a SWD kill you’ll need to eat more than drink.

5097

Damm I’m dumb. Then I say Mind shear I mean Mind Spike. And the glyph for mana return is glyph of Spirit tap.

5098

Burning through mana at about 83-84 is pretty natural, spell costs go through the roof then.

W Wiley’s suggestion for Mind Spiking is a good one, I’d add that you should intersperse that with Mind Blast after every third Mind Spike, it’ll be instant cast and almost sure to crit. Shadow Word: Deathing things under 25% health will do a lot for your mana, each one that doesn’t kill will give you 10% mana back, and each one that does will give you 16%.

Dots suck up mana now, and applying them to every trash mob will drain you quickly.

Also, spirit no longer gives combat regen for shadow priests, it converts to hit.

5099

So i decided (flipped a coin) to start my Cata questing by going through Vashj’ir. Damn, that area is about 80 quests too long.

EDIT: thinking back, i actually liked the area by itself. It’s just the quest pacing that was pretty bad.

5100

I swear the little bastards broke the “don’t show the splash screen” option in the last update.