Lathere and I face down Akil'zon with the help of our guild

If you follow Lathere and I on Twitter you probably read our despondent tweets a few nights back where we lamented the general sea of impatient and unkind players found via the Dungeon Finder.

After being carried through Throne of the Four Winds Lathere was wearing purple coloured glasses (if you can imagine such a thing). And the best place for us to get gear right now? The Heroic Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub dungeons. And before we can qualify for the Z Heroics we need a bit more gear from normal Heroics.

Isn’t it odd how even between dungeons, normal or heroic, there are still different shades of difficulty?

And fresh from a 6-9 month gap, we had forgotten how unfriendly and punishing other players can be.

We queued for a Random Cataclysm Heroic and landed in Blackrock Caverns.

Step 1
Blackrock Caverns: Heroic but easy

We made a big mistake: we behaved like ourselves. This means that I, mistakenly, took time to say hello to people in our groups. Lathere almost immediately announced:

“This is the first time I’ve done this Heroic”

Or words to that effect. I chimed in:

“Me too. So any tips or reminders would be great.”

What I really wanted to say was: I will probably remember most of the boss tactics – from normal mode that is – after we’ve pulled each boss but having a quick little reminder before we pull will help me recall and perhaps do a better job. And I’d like to be told what is different on normal mode.

Our tank’s response was simple:

“Then we’re fucked.”

I thought that was a little extreme. Perhaps we should be grateful that he didn’t just leave the party immediately? No, wait, I think I would have preferred that.

Lath was quick to defend us “We’ll be fine. We’re not idiots!”

He went on to say something like “if DPS don’t know how to handle the beams on the second boss there’s no point”.

I was on Vent with the third member of our party, a Mage from our guild, so asked him what the tank was talking about. I did actually remember that boss – Corla, Herald of Twilight – quite well from normal mode when I was leveling:

In normal mode she she has two Zealots – one on each side of her – and when the fight starts they get struck by a steady, continuous beam (the purpose and origin of which escape me). The beam can be intercepted by a player simply by standing between the source of the beam and the NPC.

If the beam is not intercepted properly the Zealots turns into a giant ugly Patchwerk looking thing and promptly eats your healer – face first – and then the rest of the party.

I remembered this fight well and also remembered intercepting the beam back at level 80/81. Two players are required to intercept two beams.

In Heroic mode it’s three Zealots and three beams. Ideally you would have two ranged DPS intercept the two outermost beams and someone in melee intercept the middle one. If you only had one ranged DPS – or a more capable healer than melee DPS – you could ask your healer to take a beam, too.

I asked my friend, our Mage, over Vent:

Don’t you just have to watch stacks of something? Like you can’t take 100 or something?

I should point out here that our friendly Mage was on an alt and usually plays DPS as a Warrior. His advice was something vague about “get out before 80″.

This seemed straight forward enough and I was optimistic as I volunteered to take the far right beam on as my responsibility. The tank took the center one and my friend, our Mage, took the leftmost beam. I played cautiously and – since those stacks of the debuff ticked up so fast – strafed out just after 60. Taking in lag meant that my stacks were close to 80 before the beam broke from me.

Soon as it wore off I was back in there. And out before 80 again. That’s when things went wrong: my Zealot morphed into something big and scary. I knew something had gone wrong. And that it was my fault. But I was perplexed: exactly what should I do differently next time?

We wiped. I tried to explain what I had done over vent – hoping for someone to quickly grasp my mistake and fill me in – while we ran back.

Too late. Our tank left the party but not before leaving with a word of advice parting shot:

I suggest you learn how to do this before doing it on heroic.

How maddening! We replaced him and tried again with a new tank. This time around I had a chance to read the tooltip of the debuff and adjusted accordingly. The limit was 100, not 80 and getting out at 80 (not before) was a breeze.

Solved! Much easier than juggling Netherspite’s 3 beams, that’s for sure!

Am I behind the learning curve? Am I to be expected to get it first time? Am I expected to read up and study for each Heroic before I queue?

Maybe. That’s a shame. Learning first hand is so much more memorable. I don’t think I would even remember if I just read about it.

Starting the Heroic like that wasn’t enjoyable. I don’t think I relaxed completely until it was finished.

Afterward I found myself staring at my list of dated, but otherwise hard won titles from the last two expansions. Just to remind myself that I am a good player even if I am a little rusty and inexperienced with the ways of Cataclysm.

Step 2
Grim Batol: Normal but as difficult as normal gets

For the next few days we scaled back to queuing for the Random Cataclysm dungeon (non heroic that is). At level 85 “Random Cataclysm dungeon” means apparently means “Grim Batol“.

Lathere and I are overgeared for it and there’s not one upgrade for us there. But I diligently tried to pay attention to each boss ability, storing it away as practice for Heroic Grim Batol (which Ive actually done already a few times right after hitting 85).

These were straightforward runs. I rejoiced in the no-pressure but party-friendly use of Psychic Scream and Psychic Horror. Lath stopped paying attention to her mana: she had more than enough to play comfortably.

Step 3
ZulAman: Heroic and difficult

When we approached Heroics again Lathere chose the dungeon for gear (Zul Aman and Zul Gurub) on the proviso that our group and our tank were from our guild.

With a small amount of nagging and peer pressure we were able to talk some “old school” guildies into a ZA run (I say old school because these are the tiny percentage of players that were in the guild when Lath and I raided).

Oh my what fun!

I was mad keen to see what had happened to ZA: had they mangled it? Split it into pieces?

There’s no easy answer except to say: it’s so much like before. I actually know that instance better than I know any of the Cataclysm content. Which is saying something: I was no expert at ZA the raid and I’ve forgotten a lot in the last 3 years.

Most of the boss abilities seem to be similar although there is some rather major differences between old Nalorakk and new Nalorakk. I guess that makes sense: that fight was very much about two tanks working in tandem and juggling their threat at key points. Now players juggle their distance from Nalorakk to juggle occasional charge/swipe attacks from him.

Akil’zon doesn’t just force you to react to a Thunderstorm anymore – now his swooping birds actually try and pick players up. I’m pretty sure they didn’t do that before.

I teased Lathere something fierce as we approached the gauntlet to the Jan’alai boss. In the Burning Crusade we called on Lath to trap approaching Scouts before they could run to their drums and summon extra groups. Her timing was always so poor (like casting it after multiple, alarmed requests from us over Vent, usually by then they had already reached the drums!) we eventually took the responsibility away from her. Crowd Control is probably not her strongest point.

In saying that, I nearly wiped us on the Jan’alai boss simply because I didn’t realise the Hatchers would die with so little damage. I one shot on the Hatchers while our Shaman was killing the other and then saw our tank running towards my side to tank the hatched birds. Well the birds that would have been hatched if I hadn’t accidentally killed the Hatcher so fast!

Hex Lord Malacrass was a breeze and those Spirit Bolts made me itch for Circle of Healing.

Zul’jin has been replaced by a new last boss Daakara. The concept was much the same however in that the final boss channels the ability of each of the four animal avatars – bosses – already defeated.

Anyway, to make a long story short (too late!) ZA was so much fun. And I felt so comfortable there. In my element. I felt powerful too, although I’m sure that’s because my teammates were doing most of the damage, but that’s a topic for another post.

Oh yeah, and Lath healed just fine!

Step 4:
Zul’Gurub – Heroic and damn difficult

The following night, fresh from our success in Zul’Aman, Lathere and I queued for a Random Z. I’m going to call it the Random Z queue from here on out since both of the instances start with that letter and I can’t remember exactly how they are grouped.

While Lathere and I had some experience with Zul’Gurub (we used to run it with guildies before they were ready for Karahan just to get the raiding hook in) we didn’t run it at level 60.

What I do remember of the instance seems to have been changed completely anyway. You could argue that there are still Trolls in ZG but I think that’s where the similarity ends. Fortunately we dragged a third guildy, Velidra, along with us and asked him explain the important stuff over Vent. I think he may have regretted his decision by the end of the night and I do feel quite bad about that.

I can only think about how much worse it would have been without him!

Lathere confessed that we were new to the instance. We followed along closely and I stuck to my Dungeon 101 basics: kill what the tank is killing. I also clicked all those cauldrons. Because it seemed to be the Thing To Do.

The bosses all blur together in my memory now but I’m quite confident that we avoided the common mistakes/pitfalls. Sure, if I was more familiar with the instance I could have played better. I probably avoided stuff that wasn’t that harmful and took spell casting gaps where I need not.

Our tank left group without a word after the first boss. Coincidence? I hope so. Our replacement tank left after the second boss. As did a Damage Dealer. Coincidence? I doubt it. But he didn’t say anything either so I don’t know if it was something we did wrong (or something we weren’t doing… like high enough DPS?! I’m getting anxious thinking about it).

Our third and final tank decided to stick it out. We also picked up an Enhance Shaman to finish the run.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle before the Zanzil when I raced right past a group of enemy Trolls and pulled them without seeing them and realising it. I take the blame for that: it was absolutely my fault and hopefully one I won’t make again. This caused us to wipe entirely – Lathere and her heals were miles behind and our tank was quite far ahead of me.

We wiped on a trash pull soon afterwards again. And we really, really struggled to get the last boss Jin’do the Godbreaker.

I understood the concept: Chains that need killing, but first you have to lure the ugly giant to jump on you (while standing near the chains) before you can harm the chains. I didn’t quickly grasp the danger of what I think of as Shadow Crash (but everyone in the party described them as fire which confused Lathere and I just a bit) and also didn’t immediately understand that standing on a Chain inside it’s immunity bubble makes it impossible to see that you’re being pelted by Shadow Crash.

Lathere was even more in the dark and on each attempt just got wiped out by incoming damage and adds (spirits/ghosts) half way through.

After our second wipe the tank typed:

Do you know how to do this fight heals?

Lathere was pretty frustrated and I was pretty upset (I find referring to someone by their class or role is incredibly lazy and rude – they are real people after all). We explained that we were new to the dungeon and having it explained on Vent.

I think his reply was:

 zzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzz

And we got it on the next go.

From the Achievement spam it turned out that our Enhance Shaman, myself and Lathere were all new to the dungeon.

Step 5?

I thought we did pretty damn good. But even Velidra seemed a bit frustrated by the run “that took a lot longer than it should have”.

I am sincerely grateful for the help from guild members. I am sincerely grateful for the patience of other players who we encounter in the Dungeon Finder. I am even somewhat grateful to the impatient and rude players we encounter in the Dungeon Finder.

But I’m really, really tired of feeling this way in my groups.

I’m tired of feeling like I’m not good enough, or somehow am the weakest part of the team, somehow dragging down the run into something slow or hopeless or pathetic. I hate feeling as though I need to be carried. Feeling as though I am being carried.

I want to feel as though I contribute my fair share towards our success.

I need the gear from these Heroics. I’m using the Dungeon Finder to get that gear. I’m open to suggestions and encouragement and instructions ”priest, you take the right beam and get out before 100 stacks” but there seems to be precious little of that going around.

Nobody wants to tell me what to do. They just want me to give up and get out of their way so they can be finished – and rewarded – faster.

The shoe is on the other foot

Part of the agony of being in this weak, pathetic, pleading position is that I’m just not used to it. For years I’ve landed in dungeons as the most geared, experienced, knowledgeable player.

But I can promise you I never, ever, treated my fellow team players with disrespect or impatience. No matter how green they were (like being asked where my Tier 8 came from from a fresh 80 when Ulduar was the new big thing!). I knew that the dungeons I was in were designed for new level 70s/80s (as the case may be) and not for raiders. I was trespassing on their territory and not vice versa.

I like playing with new players. They bring enthusiasm to the game. It’s easy to get jaded when you’ve seen the inside of the dungeon a million times. A new player brings a fresh look and often gets you to see something odd that you never noticed before.

Playing with a new player is a chance to pass on your own tips and shortcuts.

Am I in the minority? Has it all been spoilt by raiders who are forced to run these dungeons because of the (presumably still relevant to raiders) rewards?

I refuse to believe that. Raiding doesn’t turn you from a patient person to an impatient person. Raiding doesn’t make you rude to strangers. If anything it should make you value teamwork over all else, it should make you better at networking and social situations. It should make you patient.

I don’t know what to do anymore. I can feel myself becoming more and more isolated and unwilling to play with strangers.

I was anticipating the launch of the Raid Finder but, honestly, I don’t think my ego could cope with it right now.

Deva steps in to handle the encroaching gnolls

It’s worth spending time on interests that you can share with your loved ones. Something you can bond over. Lathere had been asking me (nagging me gently) for some time to play with her and I always seemed to have something else to do. We haven’t quite nutted out which night works best for us both. And we have no ambitions or significant goals to achieve.

But spending a few hours together sharing a fun experience can’t be bad. Otherwise we might just end up having nothing to talk about except Lathere’s little girl, Caitlin!

Of course, once I’d agreed to return to Azeroth together for a once-a-week play session our levels of interest and commitment in the game changed completely. By the end of an evening I’d out-leveled Lathere’s baby Paladin by 5 levels. And it was very hard to stop.

I logged in first. I had a young, confused Paladin going by the unfortunate name Dêva waiting for me on my loading screen. Yes, that’s Dêva with a funky character “e”. I’m not even sure how you type that onto your screen. I know, on my Mac, that I can recreate the name by typing “d” “e” “alt+i” (that’s the bit that throws up a special character on the previous letter) and then “v” “a”. I had to figure that out straight up in order to send, by mail, a Bind to Account cloak to her from the Stormwind Visitor Center courtesy of my bank manager.

What a mistake. I’m so embarrassed walking around under such a silly bunch of characters. I might as well have called myself “Xxxlegolaosxxx”. /shudder. (Where’s that point scoring system that uncovers noobs simply based on name and hairstyle?)

I may have related the circumstances behind the name in a previous post. I’m pretty sure I talked up my baby Paladin quite a bit when I created her. That is, when I birthed her, virtually, full grown and empty headed into an Abbey just north west of Goldshire. Poor race choice you say? I really like being a Human in RL and in game. Sorry.

At the time of her creation a long time WoW player and guild mate, Ultraviolet, persuaded me to believe that if you do a WoW Armory search for a character name that you like, and it cannot present any characters of that name on your server, you can raise a ticket and petition Blizzard to release the name from some strange person’s inactive account and they will… well… just give it to you.

I believed this. And Ultraviolet had just created an alt going by the name “Dan” to prove his point. Unbelievable! A three letter name, a common place, recognizable and easily pronounced name on one of the older Oceanic realms!

I also knew, and this might still be correct, that nonsense characters do not belong in World of Warcraft character names and naming your character with one goes against the Terms of Service. Or something like that.

Thinking to kill two birds with one stone and to strengthen my case to Blizzard, I discovered the name I wanted for my Paladin, checked to see if I could find a character on Barthilas going by that same name, and then created an illegally named character from which to launch my ticket.

As you might have guessed Blizzard were not in the least bit interested in freeing up the name “Deva” and the ticket was closed and I was stuck with my stupid version of the name. At level 10 I was too stubborn to re-roll, or pay, for a name change. It’s my mistake and I’ll live with it.

The loading screen ran for a very long time. A disturbingly long time. I had to force quit the game and try again – this time with all Add Ons disabled – to see Westfall, and Deva, again.

I woke up in a graveyard. I’m not sure what it says about my experiences as a World of Warcraft player that loading in at a graveyard immediately makes me think that in the previous play session I was corpse camped until I gave up and logged out. I started running towards Sentinel Hill, mentally debating if it is even possible to be corpse camped in Westfall (I’m fairly sure it isn’t). and accidentally stepped between a ramshackle army and some ugly gnolls fighting it out on the outskirts of the hill.

In true Paladin style I charged in swung my mace about. Or my sword. I’m pretty sure I had a mace equipped at the time.

After all I may be a driving a lowly level 16 Paladin around Westfall but my brain is full of adventures in the most dangerous dungeons in Outlands and Northrend. Surely these footmen – these Westfall hicks – needed my help! After smacking a few gnolls into the ground I eventually realised that those hicks were coping well enough with the attacking gnolls. You might even say that they had been designed for that purpose. Indeed just as one gnoll hit the ground a new one would run in and attack.

The battle could go on forever, seeming to favour the Alliance but actually completely unchanged. World of Warcraft programming at its best?

It was about that time that I realised that I was in Sentinel Hill. This was Westfall. And I hadn’t loaded in at the graveyard because I’d been corpse camped or run down by one murloc too many. I had loaded in at the graveyard because while Cassandri was spending her last days before the Cataclysm drinking champagne in The Park, Deva had missed it altogether. Slept through it entirely.

And Sentinel Hill isn’t the same place I remember.

For one thing, there’s a Paladin Trainer living in the Inn. I found out about Sister Darnhald the hard way, or the “old school” way. I just typed in [General] chat “Is there a Paladin trainer in Westfall?” and got a fast reply back “Inn”. Whoops. She’s not even tucked away in a cellar. She’s right there next to the Inn Keeper.

Westfall isn’t the same either. And once I learned some talents and some skills with Sister Darnhald’s help I ventured out and discovered just how much it’s changed…

But more on that another day!

One of my favourite Mount Hyjal quests. I don't think I'll ever get tired of Just How Stupid Are Ogres quests.

I am one of those people who reads quest text from beginning to end before I hit the Accept button. I don’t know when I became one of those people. I know I didn’t start out like that.

I’ve also noticed a disturbing new habit that I’ve developed since the release of Cataclysm: I talk back to NPCs. (The quest givers seem so surprised when you are able to complete a quest it’s insulting!)

I wanted to savor the new parts to the story as I leveled from 80 to 85. And I also really like to run dungeons – almost as a mental brake from reading questing – which probably explains how I can be level 83 and only now just completing the first questing zone: Mount Hyjal.

My gear hasn’t changed. The mobs haven’t gained more health or learned how to hit back harder. The only thing that has changed as been that number: my “level”.

With each level up I drop about 1500 dps. Instead of picking up a couple of mobs and using Psychic Scream to hold them for a few seconds until death (don’t worry, it’s glyphed) I now need to throw out a steady stream of Mind Flays to finish off an enemy.

Vampiric Embrace isn’t enough to keep me healthy. I need to use Power Word: Shield, or ditch Shadowform momentarily to heal myself before I can go on. Even at level 82, before I was popping extra heals, I was starting to run short on mana: cycling Dispersion and Shadowfiend as soon as they came off cooldown.

At level 83 I picked up my wings. I always thought Archangel was designed to give us a much needed, on demand, burst ability. But right now I’m popping my wings as soon as they’re available – even if I’ve just left combat and my party is running to the next group of enemies – just to recoup some mana.

I have to eat and drink whenever I can find a safe spot to stop. I have to drink before a boss pull in a dungeon. I’ve been shying away from Mind Sear and Mind Spike simply because they cost so damn much to cast.

I ran out of mana killing the final boss in Stonecore the other day: barely scraping together 7000dps and unable to AoE the last packs of Devout Followers while I waited for Shadowfiend, Dispersion or Archangel to come off cooldown.

I know this is the game readjusting me to what I’ll be able to do at level 85: with each level you need a ton more stats to get the same output. But it’s certainly no fun becoming weaker with each level “up”. And it’s particularly biting that the new UI tells you “You have become more powerful” when, in fact, the opposite is true. And it’s only going to get worse.

There’s something absolutely un-fun about it.

But it’s not all bad news. Around the time that most of my guildmates (and perhaps the battlegroup?) were reaching level 85 I was still queuing for Blackrock Chasm. I healed a few runs early on. The queues for DPS were 40-50 minutes long. And there were quite a few occasions when I would get through that 40 minute queue only to be dropped into a near complete dungeon: when other DPS had dropped out post-wipe. I’ve come into Vortex Pinnacle to wipes right before the final triangular-lightning-grounding-totem mobs and wipes in Stonecore before the last boss.

5 minutes of XP gains for a 50 minute queue? No thank you.

In an act of desperation I logged onto my Mage to see what the Random Wrath Dungeon queues were like for Damage Dealers. I thought they’d be horrible. Surely everyone would be too busy leveling their mains in the new Cataclysm zones and dungeons to muck around with alts and Wrath of the Lich King content?

Well, I’m happy to say that I was wrong! Hello 10 minute queues. I ran dungeons back to back and went from 78 to 80 in record breaking speed (well for me anyway).

The funny thing is, at level 79, I went to the Auction House and bought up a set of uncommon Cataclysm cloth armor. For a couple hundred gold I think I tripled my stats and damage output.

Now that was a level up that didn’t lie: You have become more powerful. Yes, indeed.

Cataclysm Quests

For all this complaining, I am liking the quests in Cataclysm. But I don’t like how linear the quest progression path is becoming: it seems very anti-MMO to me.

When I started playing World of Warcraft just finding the good quests was part of the fun/difficulty/intrigue. I liked that you could run into the backwoods of Eastern Plaguelands and find some farmer standing there with a pitchfork and a shiny exclamation mark above his head.

Perhaps it’s because they’ve used more phasing, I don’t know, but there seems to be a set order in which you can complete quests in Mount Hyjal. And it seems the most glaring when you make a mistake and – god forbid – don’t realise that you’re carrying around a core pup that you need to “activate” (I mean, really, how is it possible to carry a giant dog in your bag and not know about it) it and feed it the meat also in your backpack – and suddenly your Twilight Hammer Trainer won’t talk to you anymore. I was left foundering for several seconds trying to work out why, after handing in a quest, my Trainer didn’t want to give me a new chore and, in fact, none of the NPCs in the area had anything to give me.

Of course by then I was jolted out of the story long enough to discover that I had done the hard part of a silly, mostly unrelated quest, but not technically satisfied the criteria and hadnt actually handed it in at all. Apparently not feeding meat to a corehound is enough to halt the recapture of Mount Hyjal.

When I first read Save the Wee Animals I immediately turned to my roommate, lover of Hello Kitty and all things cute, and said “you have to do this quest in Mount Hyjal”.  She was part way through her first quest zone, Vashj’ir, and asked me:

Can I just come and do that one quest? Or do I have to do other stuff first?

Honestly, I didn’t have an answer. Even though this quest has so little relevance to the overall story of reclaiming Mount Hyjal from Twilight’s Hammer and Ragnaros and Deathwing something tells me you can’t just fly in and pick up where to start.

Most Memorable Quests

Look! I'm right in the cinematic!

The entry into Mount Hyjal is breathtaking: you start with a quest that flies you over the entire zone to survey the damage. I snapped up a beautiful screenshot of Ragnaros and Deathwing chasing after me as we flew away from Sulfuron Spire.

I felt like I had been dropped straight into the cinematic!

There are so many run of the mill quests in Mount Hyjal that I just loved for the tiniest little reason. Sometimes it was just a quest name that made me smile (Fighting Fire with… Anything, In the Rear With the Gear) or when the quest givers disagreed with each other (Ysera’s response once you’ve spent a fair bit of time hiding a Night Elf gone bad by taking him into The Emerald Dream “Alysra’s decision might not have been the wisest, Cassandri“).

I also loved Salome’s greeting when you first meet her to hand in Fact-Finding Mission:

What, Omnuron calls this a ‘fact-finding mission?’ Bah! Facts are best found on corpses. Let’s do some damage.

Salome understands us gamers, that’s for sure! Unfortunately I found the Sethria’s Roost quests near impossible to complete. There were about 10 Horde and I squished into a little 30×30 yard area waiting for mobs and armor scraps to spawn.

As usual, I love any quest in which I get to go out into the field and save fallen heroes (or Trapped Mammoth Calf as the case was in Borean Tundra). And, as usual, it was a little bit painful to then head right back out to pick up arrows and simply step over any near-death Wardens that happened to get in your way (nobody is that heartless!).

Absolutely the worst quests by far were the ridiculous flying+jousting quests in the second Flamegate. I suck at anything that requires that much three dimensional coordination. Spamming a button to simulate beating your wings might be an accurate interpretation of what it’s like to fly as a bird but it really just felt like I was trying to space jump with too much gravity pulling me down.

Seriously, whoever came up with that quest chain sucks. Might have sounded good in theory but it’s really not fun at all. No wonder they give you a pet and an achievement to compensate you for your troubles at the end.

I was quite surprised when you were asked to make a moral choice in A Bird in Hand: to kill the misguided leader of the harpies or let her go free. The cynical part of me was convinced that, whatever I chose to do, the game response to either choice would be identical. I still dithered over my choice for a good few seconds anyway. I’ll let you guess what my decision was

I thought A Prayer and a Wing was one of the most ridiculous quests I’ve ever been asked to complete: let’s try and bring our All Things Flying Goddess back to life and then get her to fight for our cause. And the best way to do that is to summon and kill the guy she’s been with for the last 10 000 years! (Of course it’s all okay because he’s gone “mad”).

A few quests tripped me up.

The most embarrassing one was failing – and dying in the middle of a no danger zone – the Twilight Hammer IQ test. I never noticed that my action keys had been replaced so I could use 1 for a “yes” response and 2 for a “no” response. Instead I fumbled around for a bit and typed out “/say yes?”. I died pretty quickly. The punishment for not hitting the right 1 or 2 key is pretty severe.

When I came back for a repeat I was really getting into the swing of it. My question set went something like this:

1. Is fire hot?
2. Do rocks float in water?
3. Is fire hot?
4. Do dogs bark?
5. Is fire hot?
6. Do liars speak the truth?
7. Is fire hot?
8. Is fire hot?

… and by this point I was seriously hoping that they were trying to recondition my brain to think that fire was, in fact, not hot and give me a follow up quest to /hug the fire elemental that I had run away from in my earlier training sessions.

Alas the correct answer to the question “Is fire hot?” remained “yes”.

I also fumbled my way through my Graduation Speech and to this day I have no idea how you’re meant to know what to say. I think I leaned heavily on “Incite”. I did love how Cassandri(damus) was able to spout absolute nonsense for a good 5 minutes and nobody seemed to notice. I also really loved the tooltip on “Pander”:

These people are insane. You need to play along with it.

The blissful moment right before I charged in...

I failed spectacularly in the epic fight (Cassandri, Cenarius, Malfurion the Good Brother and that Shaman guy) against Ragnaros. You see, I stood side by side with Cenarius as Ragnaros started mouthing off and Cenarius never told me he was tanking. Yep, a second later and Ragnoros becomes attackable and I’ve proximity pulled him.

Ragnaros lifts his mace thingy. Cassandri has died.

I never even saw it coming.

Since it looked like the quest was going to fail only after a good long while I abandoned it, recovered my body, flew back to pick it up again, and then reentered the gate into the Sulfuron Spire. Except when I re-entered Cenarius and Rag were going at it and Cenarius was already on half health. I stepped up, hoping that I could get the quest completed anyway.

I dodged the lava waves, I killed the adds attacking my teammates when the UI warnings came up and told me to do so. I hesitantly dropped Shadowform and threw some Greater Heals on Cenarius when the warning came up to heal Cenarius (what, they’re customising quests so hybrids have to heal now?). Anyway, between the DPSing and healing and form switching and lava dodging it wasn’t long before I was out of mana and out of options. I was a bit peeved, a bit confused and very surprised when I successfully completed the quest anyway.

I’m still not sure if I was meant to heal Cenarius or not. Can’t the game detect that I’m a Shadow Priest?

__________

ps. Perhaps juggling your mana is fun for healers. But it really isn’t fun as a Damage Dealer. It really isn’t. Using spells as though they are Shadow Priest mana pots instead of potential damage boosts sucks. That is also not fun.

Afraid to leave Nordrassil?

It appears everyone around me has been mad keen for the Cataclysm release. Guildies are trying to level to 85 as quickly as possible, workmates took time off for the launch, my other half was determined to get realm first herbalist (which he did by the way) and my brother is aiming to make as much cash as he possibly could off the auction house.

And then there is Cass and I. Cass didn’t even bother to get a copy of Cataclysm on launch day and I only got it because my other half picked it up and installed it for me on his lunch break.

When Wrath of the Lich King was launched we did things very differently. We lined up at the midnight launch at EB Games, installed the game and started questing that very night. We took time off work, had our talent trees worked out; gear sorted and a loose plan of how we were handling the leveling process. When we woke up after a couple of hours sleep the next morning we were already past the main leveling pack (after a dangerous trek north of Howling Fjord, cutting across Grizzly Hills and into Dragonblight) and a group of us were both questing and dungeon-ing the entire way to 80.

Even if I had planned things in a similar fashion for Cataclysm I think I would have been thwarted for a number of reasons. First off, this expansion was released at 6pm AEST right when workers were coming home and peak playtime for Oceanic servers. Secondly, the expansion came out a little later in the calendar year meaning the teenagers were running amok – damn those school holidays – with literally nothing better to do than fill up the servers and cause havoc.

When WoTLK was released if you weren’t at work you could easily get on with perhaps a 2 minute wait time during the day. The real queues started approximately 3:30pm when the school kids were arriving home. Cataclysm is released and when I get home at 6:30pm, I’m in for a good 2 hour wait for server access. Apparently the queues are no better during the day this time round with at least a queue of 2000 waiting to get in.

Since I know that I won’t be able to raid, at least until I’ve settled into a routine with bub, I was very keen to level at my own pace and relax. I have been in a questing mood and was looking forward to doing all the quests in the new areas, actually taking the time to read the quest information and seeing exactly Blizzard had designed for us. This didn’t really go to plan when I quickly realised after arriving at Mt Hyjal that for every 1 Alliance player questing, there were 100 Horde. Quests that took me 5 minutes on the Beta… I couldn’t even find a spawned mob for to kill! I gave up and walked away to make some dinner hoping it would quiet down after an hour break.

I came back and while still busy I could go through the quests with less hassles. I did occasional get ganked for absolutely no reason other than I happened to be on my own: a poor lonely Alliance player in the middle of a Horde playground. The biggest problem being: if one Horde decided to go you, another 10 within the vicinity would decide to lend a helping hand as well. 277 gear and healing spec still just doesn’t cut it against that many opposing players.

All in all things was going well until it was time for me to go Into the Maw. There were no more than 10 alliance players in here and the second last quest objective, Cindermaul, was being camped out by at least 200 Horde players. I tried being patient. The Alliance tried sticking together but it was all for naught. At a 2 minute res timer I gave up and hearthed to Nordrassil ready to call it quits for the night. I was only about 60% into level 80 and my mood was not improved when I turned around and found out that my other half was only just trailing behind me in XP from doing Archaeology and hadn’t experienced a single run in with my mortal enemy: the Horde teenager.

Things got better at Nordrassil where I picked up a quest that took me straight to the final leveling hub for the Hyjal area. While there were still quite a few players around, I had made it past the main leveling pack and did this zone without any problems at all. I even ended the night on a high note by getting a neat little vanity pet from the flying jousting quests. I will happily admit I really sucked at flying and jousting all in one!

I’ve decided based on my experiences that doing leveling the casual way is just like raiding the casual way – horribly inefficient and for the main part much more frustrating. I’m starting to think that if raiding is going to be out of the question for me in this expansion, that a move to a PVE server is looking more and more likely. Or alternatively I might just give in and go Horde and join the teenage crowd. You all know the saying, if you can’t beat em, join em!

3 DoTs. Couldn't be easier, right?

Dusknoir, who has been playing his Shadow Priest to level 85, has given me lots of food for thought in his latest post. Frankly, since the game was patched with our Cataclysm talent trees and mastery I’ve been trying to play my Shadow Priest at level 80 the way that I’ve played her during Wrath of the Lich King.

Well it’s time to come to grips with the Cataclysm Shadow Priest play style. And we have nearly all the tools and time at our disposal to perfect our spell casting while we level up.

In Part 2 I’m going to help you (and me) come to grips with our Mastery: Shadow Orbs and Mind Blast. In this post I’m going to try and break you of six years of conditioning and teach you to recast your damage over time spells early.

If, like me, you’re a NW (Non Warlock) I strongly suggest that you head over to Cynwise’s blog and read his post about Warlock DoTs in Cataclysm. There are lots of diagrams, I promise. I’m going to just look at how the new Damage over Time approach applies to our Shadow Priest spells: Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague.

I’m going to try and give you diagrams too.

Breaking the Habit

Prior to the release of Cataclysm Shadow Priests strived for 100% DoT uptime. That hasn’t changed. We want our DoTs to be up on the target all the time, reapplying our DoT the moment it runs out.

Old model: Reapply too early and you will overwrite and “clip” your previous application of the DoT, wasting a damage tick and wasting your casting time (when you could have been casting something else) and wasting your mana. Inevitably there would be tiny gaps of time in between applications. Frankly, I was usually pretty happy to get to about a 95% DoT uptime.

New model: Blizzard have been kind to DoT casters and Shadow Priests. Now, in the same manner that you can queue up your next spell while still casting your current spell, you can queue up your next application of a DoT.

If, for example, your Devouring Plague spell has just 1 more tick of damage to dole out before expiring, a new application of Devouring Plague will allow the first application and its last tick to play through before starting in on the new duration. It won’t clip your last tick.

Recasting a little bit early will give you 100% DoT Uptime

Theoretically this allows for 100% DoT uptime. And, as aspiring master Shadow Priests, we should work very, very hard to play just that precisely.

Aim: Cast after the 2nd last tick but before the last tick and before your DoT expires.

Recast too early – before the 2nd last tick – and you will clip off the end of your first DoT application. Recast too late – after the last tick – and you will delay the first tick of your second application and lose DPS.

So the next question you should probably ask is, if the last tick occurs right as my DoT expires with 0 seconds remaining, when does my 2nd last tick occur? How do I know when I have entered the ideal recast window of opportunity?

Ticks, Haste and the Countdown

If you love ForteXorcist as much as I do, you can easily configure your Spell Timer to display the tick intervals on your DoTs. In fact, the diagram above was retooled from a screen capture taken with ForteXorcist monitoring my Devouring Plague applications.

At level 85 Haste will not effect the duration of our DoT spells. They will remain constant regardless of the amount of Haste Rating you equip on your gear. Instead Haste Rating will increase the number of times damage is dealt during your DoT, and, in the case of Vampiric Touch, Haste Rating should decrease the time it takes to cast the spell.

Devouring Plague ticks at different Haste amounts

If we take the example above, let’s look at it again with 5% Haste (any high level Shadow Priest in Shadowform would benefit from their own Mind Quickening buff), and with a significant amount of Haste Rating from gear (in my Tier 10 gear set).

You can see that with more Haste the recast window of time shrinks as damage is inflicted more frequently in the same period (24 seconds for Devouring Plague). This is the challenge of the well geared Shadow Priest: adapting and becoming more precise.

Devouring Plague

In the example above Devouring Plague deals damage 9 times over the course of 24 seconds. There is a 3 second gap between each tick (8 intervals between 9 ticks). In the Hasted example above Devouring Plague deals damage 12 times over the course of 24 seconds. There is a 2.18 second gap between each tick (11 intervals between 12 ticks).

When to recast Devouring Plague

I use ForteXorcist’s countdown timer on my Spell Timer bars. This means that I can see the time (in seconds and tenths of a second) still remaining on my Devouring Plague. So the number to keep in my mind when wearing my current gear is 2.1 seconds. If I see my Devouring Plague with less than 2 seconds remaining I should recast Devouring Plague on that target.

What makes Devouring Plague unusual is the restriction that dictates only one target can be afflicted by your Devouring Plague disease at a time.

If you cast Devouring Plague on one target, and then only a few seconds later cast Devouring Plague on a second target the first DoT immediately drops off. That said, I think it wise to only recast Devouring Plague early (just before that last tick) if you intend to remain on the same target. If you wish to dot up a different target with Devouring Plague I think it best to let your current Devouring Plague run its full duration and expire entirely before you recast.

Shadow Word: Pain

Shadow Word: Pain lasts 18 seconds. With no additional Haste from gear it deals damage 6 times over the course of 18 seconds. There is a 3.6 second gap between each tick (5 intervals between 6 ticks). With 39% Haste Shadow Word: Pain deals damage 9 times over the course of 18 seconds. There is a 2.25 second gap between each tick (8 intervals between 9 ticks).

Unlike Devouring Plague we don’t (or shouldn’t) need to recast Shadow Word: Pain to keep it active on our target. Instead we cast Mind Flay on our Shadow Word: Pain afflicted enemies to reset Shadow Word: Pain.

Talented we have only a 60% chance to refresh Shadow Word: Pain with 1 Mind Flay. If you’re DPSing on just one target this is fine: you’ll Mind Flay your target many, many times within 18 seconds. If you’re focusing on another target and only swapping back to a mob in order to refresh SW:P that 60% chance makes things much harder to predict. I know that in the last few weeks I’ve had many a SW:P DoT expire because Pain and Suffering hasn’t worked.

I think a more sensible approach would be to anticipate that you will need to cast two Mind Flays in succession to guarantee (or near abouts) a refresh of Shadow Word: Pain.

When to refresh Shadow Word: Pain with Mind Flay

Theoretically it is possible to start up two Mind Flays inside that optimum window before the second last tick. Honestly, I don’t think this is going to work well in the actual game – especially once you take lag into consideration! Clipping a tick or two of Shadow Word: Pain isn’t a huge DPS loss or waste of resources: after all, casting Mind Flay is a nice chunk of our damage on its own.

I think I will be target switching back to my Shadow Word: Pain targets once SW:P has about 4 seconds remaining and lining up two Mind Flays in quick succession. Only once I’m sure that Shadow Word: Pain has been refreshed will I switch back off.

Vampiric Touch

Vampiric Touch is our only DoT that has a cast time to reapply. We need to take that into consideration and start casting just that bit earlier again. Naked with 5% Haste, Vampiric Touch deals damage 5 times over the course of 15 seconds. There is a 3.75 second gap between each tick (4 intervals between 5 ticks). In the 39% Haste example above VT deals damage 7 times over the course of 15 seconds. There is a 2.5 second gap between each tick (6 intervals between 7 ticks).

When to recast Vampiric Touch

If we factor in the time it takes to cast Vampiric Touch (1.39 seconds at 5% Haste, 1.04 seconds at 39% Haste) the point at which we can recast Vampiric Touch is actually quite early. With 3.5 seconds still remaining on my first Vampiric Touch in my current gear I can start casting the second one safely.

A Discovery: The start of your DoT is padded

ForteXorcist tends to morph the positioning of ticks on its Spell Timer bar in the second or two after you apply a DoT. I assume that it calculates the positioning of each tick given your current amount of Haste immediately after you cast.

This led me to question how accurate the display was. I assumed that a DoT would tick immediately on application and then always tick as it expires. With this assumption my Spell Timer bar mislead me and I often counted 1 additional tick that, according to Recount, didn’t exist.

I went back to basics. I applied one DoT, just one spell, and actually counted the number of times WoW popped up a damage number. I soon realised that most DoTs, in fact, do not tick immediately after application. But they do always tick just as they expire. I believe this is the new way that Blizzard have approached their Haste calculations.

For example, at 5% Haste you get 5 ticks out of Vampiric Touch. Now imagine that at 6% Haste you tip over into the next bracket in which you get 1 more tick in the same duration.

Being just under a Haste tipping point (eg 5%) sucks

In the first example there’s a good second or two of wasted time before your spell even starts to do damage.

This leads me to believe that however Blizzard have spaced out ticks across the static time duration of a DoT, they’re doing some rounding to keep the intervals to say, half second possibilities instead of tenths or hundredths of a second. Perhaps it’s possible to have DoTs tick at:

5 seconds, 5.5 seconds, 6 seconds, 6.5 seconds = interval of half a second

but not possible to have them tick at:

5 seconds, 5.95 seconds, 6.9 seconds, 7.85 seconds = interval of .95 seconds

The Haste Sweet Spots

In this article I’ve compared Haste at 5% vs Haste at 39%. Is it likely that Shadow Priests will be raiding with a 39% Haste at level 85? Eventually, yes, I think so. I haven’t done any investigating of gear for max level Cataclysm Shadow Priests just yet but with each new maximum level cap the amount of Haste Rating needed to provide 1% of Haste increases quite a bit. This means that once I reach level 85 I might need double the Haste Rating that I have now to get even close to 39% Haste.

It looks like early calculations are saying that 128 Haste Rating at level 85 is an increase of 1% of Haste.

Extra Haste Rating might not result in a steady, gradual improvement to your DPS. If you knew that equipping just 1 more point of Haste Rating would give your DoTs and additional tick (instead of a bunch of padding/wasted time) – you would do it whatever it took to get that 1 point. Reforge, re-gem, whatever!

However I think it’s safe to say that each of our three DoTs (Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague) are likely to gain extra ticks at different Haste points. After all, each has a different duration.

Amounts of Haste that will give you an extra tick of damage

This means that even if one of your DoTs isn’t quite getting that extra free tick at your current Haste Rating, perhaps one of your other DoTs is. And the steps between Haste “sweet spots” probably isn’t as big as you’d expect.

The three DoTs gain additional ticks as you increase Haste

And if you’d still like to know precisely when Haste will give you an extra DoT tick here are the tables from Nysem posted on Elitist Jerks:

TLDR?

Worry about Haste, but don’t worry too much about it! Every point is likely to help one of your three DoTs… and if nothing else, your Mind Flays will be faster.

Turns out I'm not a very good headhunter. Should have rolled a Troll.

Xeppe (author of the excellent blog An Ordinary Priest) and I have a strange history.

I actually found Xeppe’s blog through a link via another link from someone else’s blog. I was amazed to discover that she was not just a fellow Priest, or a fellow Oceanic Priest, or even a fellow Barthilas player – Barthilian?, or even another girl WoW player. No. Xeppe was all those things, but even more interestingly, she was a brand new recruit in my guild’s shady splinter guild: DeZire.

Talk about good gossip!

You see, back around the time my guild was first struggling with the new Icecrown Citadel hard modes two distinct, but major events occurred within our ranks. Firstly, we recruited a third Mage to join our two existing Mages (the existing pair of boys happened to be very good friends and had gamed together for years and I think, perhaps, even knew each other well outside the game). The third Mage, I’m sorry to say, was a piece of work. She was one of those people who help perpetuate the girls-are-trouble-and-don’t-belong-in-serious-raid-teams stereotypes.

In those days we made a fundamental mistake. One that your guild is probably making right now:

We put our pure caster DPS in Group 3.

Do not do this. For the love of god, do not do this. It was pure happenstance that one week I also found myself in Group 3 (perhaps I had logged on extremely early and sniped one of the first slots). And by the time we had killed Heroic Blood Princes party chat had dissolved into a pretty serious argument between New Mage and I over the Shadow Silk Spindle. New Mage made a snarky comment when one of our Restoration Druids (not Lathere, by the way) outbid everyone else and won the Heroic Shadow Silk Spindle. It was the first one our raid had seen, and yes, coveted by all the casters.

New Mage felt that the item should be for DPS casters only. Because any serious raider would know that there is a Spirit offhand waiting to be had from Heroic Sindragosa, and that is better for Restoration Druids, and the Resto Druid that won the Shadow Silk Spindle was outting themselves for being unprepared and ignorant of their class.

I think she was surprised that I was so angry with her. I think she was really just directing her complaint towards the other two Mages in the party, and both agreed with her, and never intended for me to see the conversation. I’d certainly never seen her say anything like that in Guild or Raid chat before.

I have no patience for players who claim to know what other classes should or shouldn’t be equipping (especially when it’s to argue that someone doesn’t deserve the item you want – talk about biased!). And furthermore our loot system is set up to be as open as possible and we make no concessions for best in slot or class by class comparisons. It’s not a Loot Council. Far from it. You bid on what you want. And if you want it that bad be prepared to spend a lot.

We got into another argument about a week later, also in Party Chat, but I can’t remember what it was about. By then I had mentally labeled her as a Troublemaker with a capital T. Over the next few weeks our other two Mages became more and more discontent with our raiding and were quite vocal about it. They were fast to post DPS meters when one of the Mages had hit the #1 spot, and very defensive of each-other if anyone dared point out a mistake that one of them had made.

At the same time one of the core founding members of the guild, a Rogue, was also becoming unhappy with our raiding. He was angry when we struggled to get numbers, angry when he felt the officers weren’t recruiting properly. He was angry at our raid leading, angry at our mistakes. He eventually left to join a more progressed guild and I, like most of the guild, was both sad and relieved.

Anyway, to make a long story short, our unhappy Rogue decided to come back and give our guild, and his old friends still in the guild, another go. He chafed under the rules even more than before. Throw that into the mix with our 3 discontent Mages and it was a pretty miserable time to be raiding with Vitare. I blogged about it here.

To make a very long story short, during a tough night wiping on Professor Putricide, our Raid Leader decided to penalise one of our Mages (who had been topping the DPS meters) for doing something silly: getting hit by Malleable Goo or something. Within a few minutes all three Mages had left the raid and left the guild. While it was completely expected, and in fact the officers had over-recruited caster DPS just for that reason, it was still a pretty uncomfortable moment for the guild. Probably the most drama we’d seen in two or three years.

Not long after, perhaps a week or two later, our unhappy Rogue also called it quits. This time he decided to head up a brand new 25 man raiding guild on Barthilas, clearing the same content, with the same hours, same start time, same everything as our guild. DeZire started with 1 Rogue and 3 Mages. They took raiding applicants that we declined. They welcomed raiders who decided they didn’t like us enough to stay after their trial period (we can’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I suppose). And they built themselves up to a formidable and successful raiding guild, eventually surpassing us on the server progression tables if not by content cleared, but by the speed that they were able to clear it.

So imagine my surprise when I started reading An Ordinary Priest and all the drama of their new 25 man raiding guild is there to see written in between the lines of a young Discipline Priest second guessing herself during her raiding trial. It starts here, and gets better, and even better here and ends here.

Xeppe and I got to talking both on her blog and also in game – after all, we were on the same server raiding the same content at the same time. We had many online friends in common, and I had met a few of her raid team in real life so I had my own impressions and stories to tell.

Unfortunately Xeppe didn’t have a very good time of it in her Barthilas guild. I started thinking of ways to get her into Vitare. I knew she would fit right in, and while her guild and mine were identical in raid times, gear and progression, the personalities and attitudes which drive both guilds are as different as night and day.

As much as I would have liked to sponsor an application to my guild from Xeppe the timing was all wrong. We had a full roster of Priests and our Raid Leader leader is a Discipline Priest. And she was of the opinion that Discipline Priests don’t stack well.  Tack on our two excellent and long term Holy Priests and there was just no reason, other than pure favoritism, to welcome another healing Priest to the team.

I was dismayed to hear that Xeppe had burned out and left Barthilas, forever associating hardcore raiding, 25 mans, and progression raiding with that bad experience in DeZire.

If you haven’t been reading An Ordinary Priest you might not know it but Xeppe has turned from a white bar into a dark blue one: these days she’s playing a Restoration Shaman. And it just so happens that my guild, Vitare, is being very open-minded about our roster for Cataclysm. And there’s definitely room for a Restoration Shaman.

There’s room for Xeppe. If only I could convince her!

Natassia, a Rogue in my guild, played with Xeppe when they were both in DeZire, Xeppe’s old Barthilas guild. She chimed in on Xeppe’s blog to add support to my Must Recruit Xeppe Plan of Attack. Our Raid Leader has been reading An Ordinary Priest on and off for almost a year. Our Recruitment Officer is keen for Xeppe to join too.

And if you need further proof of how much we want you to join, Xeppe, here it is!

Plan: How to Recruit Xeppe

My hopes for Vitare in Cataclysm are thus: to hash over our experiences in game online here at HoTs & DoTs (written by yours truly and if you’re lucky you might get some mad ramblings from Lathere), our guild’s anti-gnomes Warlock over at Emberstorm (written by Velidra) and our future guild’s Absolutely Unique Shaman (that would be Xeppe)!

ps. These days it is a firm rule in Vitare that Mages are never placed in the same party within a raid and are, instead, almost always separated among Groups 2-4.

A gathering to welcome the end of the world

We live in tumultuous times. War, invasion, and famine have swept the world, but the real trial is yet to come: the end of Azeroth itself. How will you cope with the loss and destruction of everything you hold dear? The answer is that you don’t have to. Bring your friends and family to one of our gatherings and learn how you can survive the apocalypse together, with us. – Finding Secruity and Comfort in a Doomed World

Even though I’ve got access to the Cataclysm Beta I’ve really only spent a few minutes online before missing my friends and logging off to find them on the live servers instead. But in that very short time I did a quick fly over Stormwind.

And the most noticeable change? The Park district is/has been destroyed.

So just hours before tonight’s extended maintenance AKA The Shattering kicked in someone decided to throw a party in The Park. A party to welcome the Shattering. A party to greet the End of the World.

(Sorry. I think those Doomsayers may have persuaded me to their way of thinking.)

We carved out a spot in The Park and held back the Furious Wind and Water Elementals that tried to gatecrash. There were feasts. There were romantic picnic baskets and umbrellas. I think a few battle standards went up. Mojo and Perky and a variety of other pets played in the grass.

We ignored the (perpetually) rainy skies of Stormwind. We /danced.

Where did you spend your last night on Azeroth B.C. (Before Cataclysm)?

PS

So why, exactly, are we getting attacked by all these elementals? Who is Cho’gall? Is this about Deathwing? From what I can gather here is the gist of the story:

The Twilight Cultists – presumably the same dudes that stir shit up in Silithus – who may or may not be in league with Deathwing, are now answering to their new boss: this evil, corrupted Warlock Ogre going by the name of Cho’gall.

See we all thought Cho’gall was dead and buried – just like C’Thun, which explains why nobody bothers with Silithus and either of the Ahn’Qiraj raids anymore (lets forget for a second that we’re just motivated by GearScore and item level loot rewards). But like Anub’arak, Kelethas Sunstrider and well heaps of baddies he’s alive and kicking once again.

Cho’gall is a Warlock. And if that’s not enough reason to hate/fear him, he’s one of the first “turned” Ogres into Warlocks and I think he’s pretty high up in the Burning Legion chain of command. Or he was. Frankly every single Ogre I’ve met in World of Warcraft makes me laugh – they’re so silly! – so right now it’s pretty hard to think of Cho’gall as a threat.

Anyway the Twilight Cultists are good at summoning elementals. Thus, Stormwind and Ironforge are frequently besieged by their “minions”: angry elementals.

Now I have absolutely no idea how any of that explains four new “bosses” showing up in existing dungeons. If it makes sense to you please fill me in.

Vampiric Embrace might not be visible to you, but it's as defining as Shadowform to us

I often feel that of all our Shadow Priest spells, Vampiric Embrace is the spell that is really only understood by those who have played a Shadow Priest.

Most people know that a Shadow Priest gets back a bit of passive healing while they deal damage. But Vampiric Embrace hasn’t been a hot topic during Wrath of the Lich King. We’ve talked about Dispersion and Mind Sear a lot. And so we should: they were new and interesting.

We’ve always taken Vampiric Embrace for granted. It’s one of our defining abilities, as important as Shadowform to my way of thinking.

The last time I remember really thinking about Vampiric Embrace was right before Wrath of the Lich King was released back at the end of the Burning Crusade. Up until then I think (from memory) Vampiric Embrace was a spell that we would cast on our target, it cost mana, only lasted for about a minute and any damage that we did to that target would heal back both the Shadow Priest and their four party members for 10% of the damage dealt. You could spend talents and I think you could boost that amount to almost 20%. So much has changed.

Mostly Vampiric Embrace was a bit of an annoyance. One that lazy Shadow Priests forgot about and one that smart Shadow Priests could use with a bit of planning to benefit their party and help keep themselves healthy during raid encounters.

And boy did we need it. Back then Shadow Word: Death, our instant spell with a very nasty 100% backlash, was part of our regular casting rotation.

In fact when I was first learning how to Shadow Priest I was given the advice to try and follow up a Shadow Word: Death cast with a Mind Blast. This way we would drop to a third health (from SW:D) and then prop ourselves back up to say half health with the Vampiric Embrace heal (from Mind Blast damage).

Still a distracted Shadow Priest could easily kill themselves by following their “rotation” and not paying attention to incoming environmental damage. And on a fight were the raid’s DPS was artificially boosted? We would often slip up and kill ourselves.

But I’m getting off track. Someone changed the numbers in the lead up to Wrath and for a very short time the amount that Vampiric Embrace healed was boosted to 25% of damage to the target… baseline. I think they may have increased it to a raid wide effect too briefly. Remember this was in the days when they were trying to simplify raid composition and buffs.

The TLDR version is that for about a week or two during the lead up to Wrath even Shadow Priests would admit “Vampiric Embrace is OP”. The nerfs were fast and furious. Shadow Priest DPS was increasing and nobody wanted to make healers obsolete.

Numbers were changed. But the most important change to the spell split the healing returns: the Shadow Priest would receive a much bigger heal from Vampiric Embrace, and the rest of their party would get a little bit. Vampiric Embrace existed to help keep Shadow Priests alive all on our own. It helped keep us independent.

I loved this change. I wanted to feel the effect of my own Vampiric Embrace spell, and I wanted some control over my own health bar. Just as Warlocks have both Life Tap and Drain Life, I wanted to know that I could choose to hurt myself with Shadow Word: Death, but that I could also heal myself in part with Vampiric Embrace – and, as the encounter demanded drop one or both from my spell casting altogether.

I loved all the changes made to Vampiric Embrace to make it more useful – to more than just long boss encounters that is – during Wrath of the Lich King. First Blizzard dropped the mana cost and then extended its duration to 5 minutes. Then it became the self buff, an aura, that we have now. No longer did we have to focus fire one target to receive the benefits. It became great for instances and 3-4 mob pulls.

Most of these changes made Vampiric Embrace an easier spell to use, and like Shadowform and Inner Fire it became a pre-fight buff rather than a decision you would make mid-combat.

See a Shadow Priest? Well assume they have Vampiric Embrace active. You won’t get one without the other.

But while Vampiric Embrace was going through a series of minor usability improvements it didn’t get much press. When, during Wrath of the Lich King, did you read a raid strategy guide that even mentioned the words “Vampiric Embrace”. I can think of only one fight in which Vampiric Embrace was noticeably useful to the raid’s success: Heroic Anub’arak in Trial of the Crusader.

As a member of a moderately successful guild I can tell you that we spent about 4-6 weeks working on that encounter and it was a doozy. Heroic Anub’arak, Heroic Lich King and Heroic Halion are the only encounters that I haven’t completed this expansion and I can tell you that I’d much prefer to be wiping on Heroic LK or Halion instead of Anub’arak.

Need to keep a party at near death indefinitely with a tiny trickle of heals keeping them alive? Vampiric Embrace to the rescue!

Meanwhile Blizzard have struggled to move Shadow Word: Death into its “rightful” place as an execute: a spell with no place in our rotation until our target is under 25% health. Unfortunately they haven’t been very successful. We dropped Shadow Word: Death out of our rotation back when we lost our Tier 7 four piece set bonus and we haven’t been harming ourselves with it until very, very recently.

It’s no wonder that over the space of two years Shadow Priests have been some of the most reliable, resilient (no, not the PVP kind!) clothies standing at your back.

We don’t die. We haven’t been killing ourselves with the backlash from Shadow Word: Death since we dropped it  and we’ve been keeping ourselves alive with hymns, Dispersion and Vampiric Embrace.

Obviously we’re doing too good a job.

It surprised me when I read Natarumah’s Survivability and DPS at stake post in which he outlines the direction that Blizzard are taking with Shadow Priests, Mastery and Vampiric Embrace in Cataclysm.

Vampiric Embrace is taking a pretty significant numbers hit. In Cataclysm we can expect to receive only 6% of our damage done to return back to us as a heal. And only 3% to go to our party members. Even if you assume our damage output will increase, that’s a significant reduction.

Natarumah points out that this puts Vampiric Embrace in a very weak position when you compare our self heal to those given to other classes like Warlocks.

I was a bit put out when I first saw Ret Paladins get their passive self heal with Wrath of the Lich King. I was a bit put out when I discovered that Death Knights were prone to self heal through damage. And I’m certainly not welcoming the news that our once unique utility ability is now the weakest self heal of the lot.

I understood what the Shadow Priest was in Wrath of the Lich King. We were the steady, dependable and slightly evil caster at the back that never did the most damage, but somehow steps out of the shadows as the last one standing. We had close ties to our Holy and Discipline brothers and sisters and often recited our Hymns when they couldn’t.

I was less comfortable with the power of our new and somewhat awkward AoE, Mind Sear, and never really liked the idea of being the one everyone looked to during AoE phases. I’m not sad to see Mind Sear nerfed in the lead up to Cataclysm.

We weren’t bursty. Never have been. As Shadow Priests we planned out in advance, independently. Like any serious DoT class we’d spread our damage around, prepping for a target switch long before our raid leader called it.

Natarumah is worried about our DPS nerfs, and to a certain extent I share that concern. But I’m more disturbed by weakening of Vampiric Embrace.

What will this mean for leveling?

If our self healing becomes both totally passive and of no real significance (read: it won’t save our life) and we lose our Hymns (our ties to our better selves) I’m not sure if Cassandri will even feel like a Shadow Priest anymore.

I know she’ll look like one, but will she still feel that way?

I can’t help but ask myself: what are we without Vampiric Embrace?

Cassandri in disguise as a Female Human

Even though I don’t usually participate in the holiday achievements I decided to go for The Hallowed title this year. I always wanted that title and the Dungeon Finder makes it much, much less painful for Alliance.

In my quest for both a Sinister Squashling and a Hallowed Helm, neither of which would drop for me from the Headless Horseman daily kill, I got into the habit of Trick or Treat-ing Isirami, the A Hero’s Welcome Innkeeper in Dalaran, every hour.

At first I started throwing away the Flimsy Masks in my Treat Bag. Then I started to get into the spirit of the holiday. I’m particular fond of wearing the Flimsy Human Female mask. Yes, even though I play a Female Human. I’m still in disguise!

Well I think it’s funny. If I only had an Orb of the Sin’dorei. Then I could be a Human pretending to be a Blood Elf pretending to be a Human.

To make the most of my mask I’ve dyed my hair blonde (only in World of Warcraft can you go from Black to Blonde in one session at the hairdressers) and have taken to wandering Dalaran out of Shadowform. Wearing the title ‘The Hallowed” of course.

In the lead up to Cataclysm I’ve been rethinking the imagery on our guild website. For this expansion The Lich King and his evil eyes have greeted visitors and guild members when they come to our site. I like it – I think it’s inspiring to see your kill target right there when you log in to discuss strategy or post that you’re going to be away for a night or two. After all, the guild exists to take its members to the darkest dungeons and the evil bosses waiting for us there.

But now that we’ve well and truly killed of The Lich King I think it’s time to put a new goal up there on the banner. Deathwing? We all presume that he’ll be the last boss of the expansion, or at least, the major boss (kind of like Illidan was considered the major bad guy in The Burning Crusade, even though Sunwell was released afterwards and had more difficult encounters).

So I mocked up a banner featuring Deathwing, a big black dragon, perched on a mountain top. It’s an image that you’ve probably seen about a hundred times by now.

Deathwing from the Cataclysm Cinematic

I’m not sure I love it. The predominantly red colouring makes me think Horde and we are an Alliance guild. I started looking at other wallpapers and artwork for Cataclysm and came across this stunning piece of work, titled Deathwing Approaches:

Deathwing Approaches by darklogik

The artist (he goes by the name Darklogik) has imagined what Deathwing, leader of the Black Dragonflight, might look like when he takes human form.

I don’t know why but I hadn’t thought much about Deathwing taking on a human disguise during the Cataclysm expansion. I think I just pictured him as a Black dragony version of Sindragosa, or Malygos even, who would fly down from wherever to be killed when we were good and ready.

Korialstrasz, Alexstraeza’s consort, masquerades as an elf* and sits on the ruling council in Dalaran. Onyxia once took the form of a human, Lady Prestor, and became one of Stormwind’s councilors while the King was out of the picture *cough*. She wasn’t ousted from the throne room until quite recently in World of Warcraft when Wrath of the Lich King was released.

Deathwing has also been known to take human form. In Day of the Dragon (definitely worth reading in the lead up to Cataclysm if you haven’t already) he tried to take control of the human kingdoms under the guise of Daval Prestor.

Will we see Deathwing as a Human in Cataclysm? Perhaps. I hope so. I hope he doesn’t strut around like the Lich King did in WotLK – taunting us during the additional questing levels, but never actually killing us.

I hope Deathwing is a bit more devious than that. If he’s going to meddle and taunt us during questing, dungeons and early raids I hope he does so incognito. Then we can have the mysterious reveal right at the last moment when he takes dragon form!

Oh, that guy was Deathwing?

____

* I say “elf” because I can only guess that when Krasus snuck into Dalaran and worked up the ranks as a Mage he pretended to either be a night elf or a human. Since the city (part of the Alliance) had no idea Blood Elves existed at the time. And Night Elves were known, but a bit of a rarity I think. In Day of the Dragon nobody, not even Rhonin, seems to be able to see him clearly. So perhaps he always was tanned and blonde like the Blood Elves are now in-game and when he showed up in Dalaran everyone just thought he was a strange looking Night Elf. Or perhaps he can take on any form and now takes on the look of a Blood Elf by choice?

There is only one answer: Reforge!