You can use your PW:Shield in Shadowform, so no worries there. You’ll to a lot more damage in shadowform also, and it just looks cooler.
I think in general you want to pull with Vampiric Touch then do Devouring Plague. For tough mobs add SW: Pain. Before the recent patch I was told to just use Mind Blast if you have at least one Shadow Orb up, otherwise use Mind Flay until you have one. Then use SW: Death when it will be the killing blow or if you are low on mana. If you can get the SWD glyph that’s good to have.
So my rotation looks something like VT->DP->(SWP)->MF until I have an Orb->MB
Then I use MB on coooldown as long as I have at least one orb, until it’s SW Death time.
Do you have Shadowfiend yet? That’s a nice mana boost too but I don’t remember what level you get that now.
Well, I found the Kals finally, and did one low level for 5 g’s and I forgot how much rep, but boy what a travel time and time consuming quests, huh?, In addition, I ran into some low-levels offered by some Alliance soldiers there, but figured that would give me Alliance rep, which I didn’t need so I didn’t do those.
A couple of quests I can’t solo in TB: Take back that Keep, and kill that Largo guy right behind the camp. Also lost 2 walk on water potions. They just wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do and I had to swim and got killed by the shark. Made a ticket on that one, but haven’t got my potions back yet. A QA person is supposedly checking that out.
My 2 new guildies who rolled alts due to the article never showed back up, but they haven’t quit either, so that’s ok. Didn’t have 'em before, so I don’t mind soloing.
I really like the music in SW. That oboe really gets to me. Don’t know what the guys are singing in that chorus, but I like that, too.
I get a lot of killed spiders to loot from other players which allows me to sell a lot of savage leather for at least 50 g’s and so I now have 25 k g’s and every now and then in the AH, I can find Wolkie some armor and a new weapon.
You absolutely can PW:S in shadowform, as it’s a discipline spell and not a holy spell. You can also cure disease in shadowform without losing it now, which is a great convenience. Casting MB while VT is on the target should trigger replenishment, which is a small mana return (I’m not sure if this has to be talented). Definitely glyph SWD and use it for killing blows. If you have dispersion or shadowfiend at your level, definitely use those a lot, as well. For solo questing, my shadow priest does VT, SW:P, MF until I have 3 orbs, then MB. Knowing how much your SWD does at your level certainly helps the timing, though a string of crits can leave you mana starved if you can’t get it off in time.
Water Walking expires as soon as you take damage. Were you in combat while you were trying to use it?
It takes a great act of will on my part to leave that area whenever I’m on my skinner and people are leaving corpses everywhere. I can easily spend all night skinning when the spiders are the daily (same thing happens to me at the Shadow Wardens spider area).
Great article, Quasi! Very admirable work you’re doing. Cheers.
Wow, a tauren shadow priest. First thing is you never, ever want to be casting Holy spells (Holy Fire and Smite) as a Shadow priest unless you’re forced to heal. You should be in Shadowform 99% of the time. It increases your damage by 15% meaning you need to cast less spells in order to kill mobs.
Secondly, PW:Shield is a huge mana hog. They increased the mana cost for this spell in order to nerf Discipline priests, and so using it before every mob you fight is going to burn through your mana very quickly. Devouring Plague is also a high mana cost spell, so using that spell is also going to burn through your mana. Self-healing through Vampiric Embrace should keep you up for a while, and then when you’re low on HP, you can shift out of Shadowform to heal yourself up and then get back to it.
Third, you have the talent Masochism and should use SW: Death in order to get your mana return from this talent if you’re running low on mana. Also, your Shadowfiend will help return mana, but if you’re going to use it on quest mobs, I would suggest pulling a few at once so that it always has something to hit.
Depends on what kind of stuff you’re doing. For quest mobs, one of the most fun I had leveling was to PW:Shield myself, and then use SW:Pain and/or Vampiric Touch on a whole bunch of mobs, run away, and if they got too close Psychic Scream and watch them fall over.
For boss mobs in a dungeon, Shadow priest spell priority is fairly complicated. But, in general, what you want to do is to get Empowered Shadows up as quickly as possible (I usually put up SW:Pain and then Mind Flay until I get a Shadow Orb), then put up your DOTs (Vampiric Touch, SW:Pain and Devouring Plague). Always keep your DOTs up, refreshing VT and DP when there are ~2 seconds (1 tick) left on them. Mind Blast on CD and then Mind Flay as filler. Shadowfiend is a good DPS boost as well, and once you get Sin and Punishment, you should be able to use multiple Shadowfiends in a fight.
Your gearing seems fine to me, though at that level your gearing rule is basically the more Intellect on an item the better. Things get more complicated once you hit 85, but we can get into that later.
Your talents seem fine for the most part. The only change I would suggest is taking a point out of Improved Psychic Scream and maxing out Mind Melt instead.
If you’re not comfortable in groups, I highly suggest you stay Shadow at least until you get more accustomed to group dynamics and dungeon layouts/bosses. There’s much less pressure on a DPS than on a healer in a 5-man group, and if you don’t have much experience as a healer, then it can be a difficult role to pick up. Also, Shadow shares a lot of gear with Holy/Discipline, and you can pick up healer gear as you do dungeons (as long as the healer doesn’t need it). Two birds, one stone. Hope this helped. Let me know if you have any other questions, and I will try to answer as best I can.
I’m not sure which one you’re talking about with ‘Take back that Keep’ - there’s Taking the Overlook Back which is where you need to kill Largo, and Claiming The Keep where you need to kill Farson. Farson is a bitch, because there are so many other people around him to kill. I think with that one it’s a just a long, slow journey of killing everything going up to him. I don’t know how to play your class (warrior, right?) so I don’t know if you have any special abilities to get enemies to leave you alone. If you do, use that, and the moment you can mount up on your horse run like mad!
With Largo, is the problem with him as an individual, or are you having trouble with all the ghosts attacking you on the way to him?
Yeah, those are the correct names for the quests. I try to get as close as possible to the correct ones, but sometimes I don’t make it.
Largo - yeah the ghosts and then those guys around the campfire. I just turn them both down, because dying and rezzing with 10% damage just isn’t worth it. By the way, when you fight with that 10% and get killed again and rezzed, is that added to 20%?
Nevermind, I was just over there trying to do some fishing and my Water Walking was randomly dropping me under the water, too, so it’s probably just a glitch.
It seems like everyone here universally hates the Druids of the Talon dailies.
I just want to say that i kind of like them, and they seem easy enough and i get them done pretty quickly. Guess i just don’t understand all the hate lol.
Granted, i haven’t seen the other factions dailies yet, i should unlock them on Friday.
The Shadow Warden quests are more straight forward. Only the “Enduring the Heat” quest requires using the thermal jet “super jump” mechanic, none of that lame ass hopping from platform to platform crap.
I finished my dailies today with 149 Marks of the World Tree. :eek:
But tomorrow I’ll move on to the next step.
I found this guide pretty helpful in figuring out how to run them:
I would suggest a couple of steps to change role to heals at 85:
[ol]
[li]Run the dungeons first as DPS to get to know them.[/li][li]Practice Healing in Battlegrounds - less of a worry if you get it wrong and you should get a feel for what heal to use and when[/li][/ol]
So a guildemate and I have been doing arenas this season. We are doing 2’s (me a feral druid, and him a frost DK). I have to say i’m actually enjoying it and am actually looking forward to it each week now. For those of you that don’t know, right now, it takes 8 (2v2) wins to cap conquest points for the week so we generally queue for matches until we get 8 wins. Here’s how it’s gone:
Week 1: 8 wins, (something like) 30 losses. We started out pretty bad losing like our first 8 matches at least. I had not done arenas in a long time and him never at all so really just getting a feel for things. eventually our matchmaking rating got low enough that we were playing some pretty bad teams.
Week 2: 8 wins, 8 losses. Obviously a huge improvement, still lost some matches that we should’ve won. Actually used vent this week. We both picked up some more/better pvp gear. felt pretty good about the .500 win %
Week 3: 8 wins, 5 losses. Wow! Super excited! both picked up still better pvp gear. did some reading about proper pvp, our strategies as a team comming together a little better. Didn’t really lose any matches that we “should have won”, except maybe one.
I’m actually looking forward to farming some honor to pick up another pvp trinket and a little better pvp armor to see what we can do next week and beyond. It would be awesome to get that rating up to 1500 and get the achievment.
Just wanted to share this story, and emphasize that while you might be TERRIBLE at pvp at first, don’t get discouraged and it can actually be fun (but i would mention that if you try to do arenas without any pvp gear you’ll probably get blowed up so fast that heads will spin… or roll i suppose)
Yah, a couple friends expressed interest in doing some 3s with my disc priest, so I’ve gone and crafted the starter blues and started doing BGs. Once I have a +res piece in every slot, we’ll probably start and see how bad we are Gonna be mage, lock, priest comp – should be pretty fun. I don’t expect us to see much success at first, but we do have vent so that will help. Lots of control, but not much burst, so we’re going to have to be super tactical and coordinated.
None of us have ever done arenas before so any advice is welcome!
I didn’t see any mention of this but might have overlooked it - Quasi’s story got extra publicity by being featured on episode #236 (“When Thrall Leaves His Tiny Tower”) of the WOW podcast The Instance. Scott Johnson mentioned the article as being interesting and inspiring, and they spent a few minutes talking about it! It starts around the 1:31:30ish mark in the show. He also mentioned that his wife’s family has had a number of people who have suffered from Alzheimer’s, and wishes Quasi well.
The only advice I have is pretty general/common sense stuff. But (for me anyway) its suprising how fast common sense can go out the window in the chaos of pvp.
Defensive cooldowns… USE THEM!!
Offensive cooldowns… USE THEM!! well, this one is more of a “don’t wait for the perfect opportunity to use them”. Blow em early and hope to get some of the other team real good and dead.
Dust off the old spell book. Use all the tricks at your disposal. Remember that spell you haven’t cast since the day you learned it and decided it was worthless for PVE, maybe it could help save your butt now.
**Daed **already hit on all of the important stuff, but I just wanted to emphasize that Shadowform is pretty much a non-negotiable part of being a Shadow Priest. Not using it would be like a Protection Warrior trying to fight with a 2H weapon instead of a 1H and a Shield. Certainly, it’s do-able, but it’s going to horribly gimp your damage, because it’s ignoring a central mechanic that you’re intended to use.
Yup, especially if you’re traveling between the Kalu’ak villages. At least Silka is nice and fast!
My guess is they won’t be on all the time but will stop in now and again to play a bit. That’s how it works for me on most of my alts–I have so many that the only way I could play them all would be to quit my job.
**Daed **and I just rolled some alts together, and mine was originally Herbalism/Skinning (now Tailoring/Enchanting). You should have seen all the crap he was giving me for insisting on skinning every single damn thing.
1.) Rez sickness isn’t a 10% damage reduction–it makes you only do 10% of your normal damage. It’s a 90% reduction.
2.) Rez sickness also lowers all of your stats by a huge amount (I think the same 90%?).
3.) Accordingly, if you have rez sickness, you shouldn’t ever try to fight anything until it wears off, or you will just die again right away, because you’re very weak while you’re recovering.
Yup, that seems to be how it’s shaking out–I’m at the same threshold (didn’t have time to do my dailies yesterday and unlock the next step, unfortunately).
BGs are a great way to get used to anything new (abilities, specs, addons), because you’re not causing repair bills for everyone else if you mess up. There are things about being a healer that you can learn even at low levels (line of sight/range; situational awareness; being able to keep an eye on multiple people’s health bars at once; coordinating among HOTs, heals, and shields) that BGs can be great for teaching. Plus, everyone loves a healer in PvP. (Including the opposite faction, who will probably give you great big hugs… full of knives.)
That’s awesome! I hope I can remember to check it out when I get home.
I’ve noticed this with all the water-walking mechanics (as opposed to priests’ Levitation, which makes you float above the surface of the water and isn’t as susceptible to this “falling through the water” effect").
I think it’s related to the intentional ability to push your movement direction (point of view) downward towards the water and move forward, which allows you to break the surface and swim without dispelling water walk. For some reason, the game confuses other movement with the intentional “I want to dive in” movement and you fall into the water.T
The best counter I’ve seen to this is to keep your camera angle as close to dead level or slightly upward as you can. I’m sure that if you look more downward than forward, the moment you start any movement (or other action… casting with a fishing rod, for instance) with the camera angle set that way, the game may decide you really mean to dive into the water.
Object lesson: water walking is like walking on the surface tension of water and is easy to break (temporarily) if the game thinks you’re applying downward pressure.
(but i would mention that if you try to do arenas without any pvp gear you’ll probably get blowed up so fast that heads will spin… or roll i suppose)