Icecrown Unlocked

At Nibuca's whim, I updated Raider101's Shadow Priest Guide. It was pretty outdated before, having not been updated since August, so I brought it up to how it is currently. I am never confident in the stuff I write - otherwise I would be a teacher - but it gives people the general idea of how to begin and if you want to be up to date, then follow the EJ Shadowpriest discussion.

With the Icecrown Citadel fully unlocked, you can now gain 83 Badges of Frost a week. That's around 3.6 Primordial Saronite, so the price may go down with supply increasing. Heres the breakdown:

ICC10 (2/Boss) + Sister Svala: 25
ICC25 (2/Boss) + Sister Svala: 25
ICC10 Weekly Quest: 5
ICC25 Weekly Quest: 5
Weekly Raid: 5
7x Daily Random Heroic: 14
VoA10: 2
VoA25: 2

I watched some Lich King streams on MMOChampion last night, and that fight looks tough! Seems very difficult for a 10man guild like ours to do, but we'll try and give it our best shot, tonight!

Edit: Messed up maths, will edit later !!

Raiding Shadowpriest 3.3 Guide: Part 2

Raiding Shadowpriest DPS utilises roughly five core spells for DPS. In order of uptime priority, they are:

Vampiric Touch
Devouring Plague
Shadow Word: Pain
Mind Blast
Mind Flay

My personal opener, since it requires on equip effect procs (Black Magic): MF VT MB DP SW:P

Try to make sure VT is up before MB for Replenishment uptime. Start casting VT when there is about 1.5s left (adjusting for haste).

Some people use Shadow Word: Death in their rotation; I prefer to save mine for movement situations.

MF is a filler spell that has damage ticks at about 50%, 75% and 100% during the channelling. So always make sure you have casted halfway before clipping the spell if you need to. MF also provides a stack of Shadow Weaving every tick. This also applies to the Muradin's Spyglass trinket (unfortunately only provides a single stack per cast for Illustration of the Dragon Soul and Eye of the Broodmother).

DP's instant cast component is very powerful, especially with heroism where you can almost keep casting it, waiting for the first tick and casting it again. This is probably only something you can do with T8 2set bonus though.

Hard refreshing SW:P through recasting it (as opposed to MF's soft refreshing it) can be useful when:
- You possess a crit buff through Potion of Wild Magic and/or Nevermelting Ice Crystal.
- You have a Rune of Power/Malygos Spark damage buff.
- Your current SW:P wasn't casted with 5 stack Shadow Weaving.

Hard refreshing SW:P doesn't have any affect on:
- You gain spellpower buffs. It adjusts automatically.
- Any boss weakened/debuff states.

During Heroism: Leave out MB from rotation, be sure to cast VT/DP as soon as it starts and just before it ends to get full benefit from the haste. Otherwise make use of any potions and MF the day away.

Raiding Shadowpriest 3.3 Guide: Part 1

This guide is something I've been writing for past few days, and is intended to give you a rough overview of raiding as a shadowpriest. I'm pretty casual as far as raiding goes, but nonetheless I hope this guide proves to be useful no matter if you are a healer looking for an offspec or an up and coming shadowpriest.

Why be a shadowpriest?

What I love most about being a shadowpriest is Vampiric Embrace, the ability to steadily heal my group in the raid through damage. It allows me to take a lot more risks and be a rebel, standing in fire, whirlwind, fire, orbs and fire. If we underestimate the damage then we have Dispersion to fall back on. It's pretty stupid to like a class for the ability to play bad, but it's funny on fights like Twin Val'kyr to see everyone manically running around trying to dodge orbs, sometimes dying, while I am able to more damage through not having to move and healing myself for more at the same time. We're not immortal, but we're not pushovers.

Unfortunately we will always have some deficit to our class, known as the 'Hybrid Tax', that makes us inferior to pure damage dealing classes. We put in more effort than others only to get less in return. But if you are looking for a class that can stand on it's own two feet in raids, Shadowpriests are it.

Key points about shadowpriest.

- Provides Replenishment through Vampiric Touch and Mind Blast. Same as Retribution Paladins, Frost Mage, Survival Hunter and Destruction Warlock.
- With 3/3 Misery, a deep shadow talent, gives entire raid an extra 3% spell hit. Same as Balance Druids.
- Constantly heals yourself for 25% of your damage done, 5% to party members, through Vampiric Embrace. A Paladin's Judgement of Light is similar on a smaller scale, but benefits the whole raid.
- Shadowform provides 15% less damage. Also, the talented cooldown ability Dispersion temporarily reduces damage by 90%.

Gearing a shadowpriest.

It used to be simple, reach spellhit and stack spell power. Shadowpriests get a decent amount of hit through talents Shadow Reach and Misery, requiring 289 hit with both talents to hit the cap, 263 if you're a cute draenei to boot (<3 racechange). You still want to keep gearing for more spellpower, but that comes with a penalty in terms of gear itemisation - you gain more from multiple stats rather than one stat.

Thankfully haste is thrown into the fray due to patch 3.3, and is weighed up very close to spellpower, with Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague ticking faster with more haste. Affliction Warlocks, our closest cousins to the DOT-oriented playstyle, have the same buff with Corruption. Haste is beautiful, but it changes things around a bit. With the Black Magic enchant on a one handed weapon you have to keep an eye on your Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch when it procs. If you don't refresh them while it has procced, then you lose the real benefit of the haste.

Spirit is calculated into spellpower through Twisted Faith (increases spellpower by 20% of total spirit) and Improved Spirit Tap (increases Spirit by 10%) talents and Glyph of Shadow (increases spellpower by 30% of spirit when critting with non DOTs). Thats 50% of our spirit, which also gets an extra 10% increase. Moonkins and Warlocks also get 30% as spellpower while Mages get 55% as crit rating. When both proc on my self-buffed priest I gain around 220 spellpower. There is no spirit on any of the T10 pieces, nor do the set bonuses provide crit buffs to spells which proc Shadowy Insight like T9 gave 5% crit to Mind Flay. As far as 3.3 looks, we will be spending 5 talent points and a glyph for an increasingly diminutive gain in spell power. That 220 bonus spellpower will end up at 140 spellpower with full T10 and a couple of spirit pieces.

Ultimately, priority for gearing is, with values from shadowpriest.com:

Hit = 1.88 (0 after cap)
SP = 1.00
Haste = 0.98
Crit = 0.76
Spi = 0.59
Int = 0.22

If you're switching from holy or levelling pieces with shadow, a good mix of crit and spirit will give you uptime on Glyph of Shadow and some decent spellpower to compensate. But ultimately go for spellpower and haste pieces for good, consistant damage. You can afford to go for gem bonuses with red/yellow requirements thanks to Reckless Ametrine, which is rated close to Runed Cardinal Ruby. Note that you should spend Heroism badges on the Ametrine and Honor on Cardinal Rubies, as the rubies are more expensive with badges.

Shadowpriest Glyph and Talents

My Talents and Glyphs

Damage (which includes Hit) are top priority talents for shadow, and we get a lot of them. Along the way we will get some utility talents, some more useful than others but all ultimately situational. There isn't really a right or wrong, the Shadow tree is pretty good as talent trees go. But within that tree there are many mana conservation and regeneration talents, which can be sacrificed for less interruptions or constant self healing.

Glyph-wise it's the same principle; Damage before Utility. Patch 3.3 turned Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain into one of less importance, making Glyph of Shadow and Mind Flay the chief damage dealing glyphs. Glyph of Shadow Word: Death is also a damage dealing glyph but it's situational requirement of 35% or less health for 10% damage buff means it is useless for the first 65%. It is a prime choice for the mana regen utility of either Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain or Glyph of Dispersion. The latter comes with a shield wall like ability and is my chosen third glyph.

3.3 Shadow Priest Glyphs

Amongst many other delightful shadow priest changes coming with 3.3, we now have a slightly more varied glyph selection to choose from. Here are the 3.3 changes concerning shadow priest glyphs:

Glyph of Mind Flay
Old Effect: Increases the range of your Mind Flay spell by 10 yards.
New Effect: Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.

Glyph of Shadow
Old Effect: While in Shadowform, your non-periodic spell critical strikes increase your spell power by 10% of your Spirit for 10 sec.
New Effect: While in Shadowform, your non-periodic spell critical strikes increase your spell power by 30% of your Spirit for 10 sec.

Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain
Old Effect: Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.
New Effect: The periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell restore 1% of your base mana.

Glyph of Mind Flay and Glyph of Shadow remain the mandatory glyphs for a raiding priest. Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain is optional now, and if you don't want to spend gold changing it around then there isn't a massive reason for doing so. Just remember that Haste not affecting Shadow Word: Pain means there is no scaling, just base mana over base tick. I will be swapping it for Glyph of Dispersion. The attractiveness of a 1 minute 15 second cooldown on greater mana regen and damage reduction appeals to me, despite the con of a 6 second silence. Just make sure you have this macro for the last one:

#showtooltip Dispersion
/cancelaura Dispersion
/cast Dispersion

So you can double tap Dispersion to control over how much mana you want to regen. or just to quickly get out of roots when you're too lazy to fade..

Lastly there is Glyph of Shadow Word: Death - Very situational, but it is the only other glyph option that directly boosts damage. I already seldom use SW:D as it is, so it wouldn't be worth my while glyphing this for now, but if the results are significant then I could see this moving up to a mandatory spot. But for now I'll worry about not being gibbed in Icecrown with my Dispersion glyph!

Multidotting

Lately I have been reading around about shadowpriests being far more effective at multidotting than single target damage. Multidotting being the art of throwing up your dots on multiple targets. I have never been a strong advocate of switching targets mid-fight, since priests were never known as a burst class, but a class with a slow buildup to a steady and stable damage. Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting around with multidotting with a mix of results with intent on a writeup. Keep in mind with the haste changes with our Shadow Word: Pain glyph in 3.3 we should see a bigger rise in damage with multidots compared to without.

Before you experiment with multidotting, you should set up your UI so that you can manage your focus target. This means setting up your binds so that you can set and target your focus easily, and also placing your focus window in a convenient place helps too. You can also setup a target last target macro for even easier juggling. And of course, having an awesome mod like ForteXorcist for dot tracking.


There are two ways in how you can multidot.

Method 1: Fire and Forget

This situation applies to adds which usually die fairly quickly, like Snobolds on Gormok the Impaler or the Light Sparks on XT-002 hard mode. After I start my initial rotation on the boss mob, I set the boss to focus and tab to the add and throw a Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain on it, and go back to the focus target.

Method 2: A Juggling Act

For adds that outlast the twelve or so seconds until VT expires, you can refresh the SW:P dot with Mind Flay. This is a bit more complex as you have to be aware of both targets, and constantly have to make decisions over what spell to cast. Therefore it's more likely you'll make more mistakes, and do less damage, which isn't what we want out of this scenario.

In either case, VT and Mind Blast remains top of the priority list. For adds such as the Nerubian Burrower on Anub'arak I occasionally refresh the SW:P with MF. Sometimes it warrants one if we're ahead of Anub's submerge, sometimes not. With multidotting you need to experiment around. For example, with the Twin Val'kyrs I found multidotting to be far less effective than to stay on single target. In that case it's obviously more preferable to do more damage on the target who is weak to your color,


My experiments with multidotting continues. I haven't made up my mind whether or not it is totally worth it yet, as some fights I see higher numbers and some lower. With the changes that come with the next patch however, it is a good time to be prepared for what is to come.

How To: Shadowpriest

So I made the video, around 1-2 hours of work. I wrote everything else beforehand and had to use the stop and record buttons of Sound Recorder a ton, but the amateurness still shows through. I hope it helps people though. Based on the responses from my brewfest how to ram ride video, people certainly like and appreciate the help, and I like to see that.

It's all too easy to say to a person doing 2k dps that he's a noob and tell him to read Elitist Jerks, but if you think back to when you started - or to any new game for that matter - to read a huge essay on the intricacies of coefficients and how to play, would you still be interested? I don't think I would be. Some people like to find things out for themselves. Some people like to read on how to improve. I think good how to videos are a good way to introduce a new level 80 on how to play end game. I'm not saying my video is the best; I'm saying it's a start.

For my UI, I never really commented on how it works since I doubt people really cared. Although I specifically crafted my UI for making videos, it still works the way I want to. The UI is like the mirrors of a car, they are there on the screen, functional and unobtrusive. You don't need to glance at the damage meters all the time, much like you dont stare at the side mirror when driving. The only UI you need close to the screen is party healthbars (as a healer) or the DoT timers. These are analogic to the speedometer, or the rear view mirror. Put them close, but not too close.

Since we're on the topic of videos, Xephos has released a new YoGScast. He's gone back the style similar to my videos, where we have a song and compress the action to scale to it. It's a pretty good video and I love the song.

The problem with humour in videos is that when you're editing the video, you already know the punchline. So when you finally see the finished product and you're not laughing at your own jokes.. well.. it's a horrible feeling.

UPDATE: Revised second edition of the video.