See those skeletons all over the ground? Yeah.

I just finished watching the latest episode of Big Crits. They’re so happy that they’re now 8/12 Heroic ICC.

Ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Well the first eight or nine Heroic modes in (25 man) Icecrown Citadel go down pretty easy. I’m sure the Big Crits guild will get Lady Deathwhisper next without too much trouble. But then they’re probably going to hit their heads against the wall also known as: Heroic Professor Putricide.

Having suffered about 2-3 months of wiping on Heroic Putricide we earned our first Heroic kill just this week. Compare that to the time it took us to get the nine heroic modes before that: less than 1 month. The ICC buff was at 15% when we killed Lady Deathwhisper and it was 25% on our first Heroic Professor Putricide kill.

I’m not sure that I’m qualified to offer tips and tricks for other Shadow Priests out there attempting this fight. But surely I’ve devoted such a large amount of game time to dying on this fight and I can share some hard-earned wisdom. 

Stuff for Shadow Priests

Dispersion and Unbound Plague

Unlike the regular version of the Professor Putricide encounter, in which you should use the Tear Gas mass stun as a chance to Disperse and regain your mana during the phase transition, in Heroic mode you should save Dispersion for:

(a) an opportunity when you can’t really DPS anyway but need mana. This includes when you are the target of the red Gas Cloud (when you are the target of Gaseous Bloat) and will be running/kiting the cloud around the room, or, if you get hit and smacked with the Malleable Goo debuff.

But ideally you should use Dispersion for:

(b) extending the time you can hold Unbound Plague. Everyone in your raid should download and run the mod called Plagued. It does a simple little announce countdown that helps you monitor when the ticks of Unbound Plague are going to get too painful and you need to pass it off. Most guides/guilds recommend that you hold it for 10 seconds, 10 ticks. The Plagued mod counts down from 10 to 1 to notify the players around you. When the timer reaches 2 or 1 seconds to go, use Dispersion. Dispersion will numb the pain for the next 6 seconds. Just make sure you pass it off to someone else before Dispersion wears off because that 16th tick really, really hurts.

Your Shadowfiend and the Green Ooze

Talented, your Shadowfiend will be down on a 3 minute cooldown. And you should summon him twice – during the Phase 1->2 transition and the Phase 2->3 transition. Get him to attack the Green Ooze and he will help absorb the knockback damage. I like to wait until the first knockback before summoning my fiend, it’s usually players running to the second or third knockback point that having an extra friendly around to spread the damage really makes a difference.

Just be careful of this one little thing: if you’re currently using a macro (it’s often tied to Mind Flay) to get your fiend to use its Shadowcrawl ability, and you have the Gas Variable (thus, are attacking the Gas Cloud and not the Green Ooze) you need to make sure you don’t accidentally command your fiend to switch and appear right on the Gas Variable. Might be worth ditching the macro for this fight – after all, it’s not so much about the damage your pet deals, it’s about the damage it can absorb.

Professor Putricide: he’s right behind you!

Just because there’s a Gas Cloud or Green Ooze hanging around it doesn’t mean that you should let Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain drop off Professor Putricide. On a good attempt I can keep my DoT uptime fairly high, but on an unlucky attempt Professor Putricide will often be out of my range, or my Variable target will need all the DPS we can get (when you have a bunch of healers and tanks all with the Gas Variable you’re going to really need to focus fire if you’re one of the few DPS with the Gas Variable).

In Heroic mode Professor Putricide tends to spend a lot of his time hanging around his table – and he always heads there while you’re busy with the transition phases. Now, it could be different depending on what positioning strategy you’re using, but for me Professor Putricide was inevitably behind me when it was time to refresh my DoTs. This is quite annoying because I tend to rely on enemy nameplates to keep my targets in view/range and tab targetting to select them. And there are many occasions during the fight in which I can’t see the Professor’s nameplate.

Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague can all be cast with your back to Professor Putricide. Rely on a Focus frame or your DoT monitoring addon of choice instead of nameplates. And you can go a step further and create a macro for targetting Professor Putricide when he’s behind you:

/tar Professor Putricide

Simple! Actually because I’m so hesitant to spin my view around between my Variable target and the Professor I tend to let Shadow Word: Pain expire and just reapply it when it suits me (usually when I’m flying through the air from a knockback!) instead of trying to face the Professor to refresh SW:P with Mind Flay. This isn’t great for mana conservation, or for extending a boosted Shadow Word: Pain indefinitely, but it’s better than nothing.

2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace and Divine Hymn

I love Vampiric Embrace so I always talent into 2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace. The first time we got the Professor into the final phase I was the last to die – a steady stream of damage will keep you alive long after the damage aura has killed your teammates.

As we started refining our Phase 3 approach I got put on a Divine Hymn rotation (the other Shadow Priest in the guild would chant her hymn around the 12-15% mark and then I would follow her, and then our healing Priests would follow me). I really disliked this approach – reciting my Divine Hymn was usually the closest I came to death. In our kill neither of us Shadow Priests used Divine Hymn, although I think maybe one of our Holy Priests may have used hers.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be the last DPS standing, too!

Improving your DPS

Absolutely the most effective way I was able to improve my DPS during this encounter was to keep all my DoTs running on both the Professor and whatever Gas Cloud/Green Ooze was up (or my Variable target during transition).

From there it’s a case of minimizing your movement. You need to be very careful not to get caught out by Malleable Goo and I would recommend being overly cautious while you’re wiping/practicing – move even when you’re fairly sure that you’re in the clear. You cannot afford to be hit. However, once you’re fairly confident that you aren’t being hit, try not to move unless you actually need to.

Unfortunately the stuff that will mess up your damage are all pretty important:

• being a good, thoughtful, Unbound Plague carrier
• intentionally stacking to absorb Green Ooze damage
• kiting the Gas Cloud if you are targetted
• moving away from the Gas Cloud before it retargets
• moving away from path of Malleable Goo

I would also argue that, as ranged DPS, getting the Gas Cloud variable is a pretty big DPS loss. In our strategy we had our ranged DPS continue to stack and absorb the Green Ooze damage even when they couldn’t DPS the Green Ooze themselves because they were debuffed with the Gas Variable. This mean that, if the Gas Cloud was kited out of our range, we couldn’t really DPS the Gas Cloud. As a Shadow Priest, you can still contribute by keeping your DoTs on the Professor.

By the way, a more experienced player told me that you should be aiming for 9k DPS from each of your raiders. On a lucky attempt (Green Ooze Variable, not targetted personally by the Gas Cloud, only carried the Plague once or twice) I could reach over 10k DPS. I saw a bit of a DPS drop once we hit Phase 3. On your average attempt I was still hovering around 9k DPS. If I got hit by Malleable Goo? 8k.

And every single attempt I had my ass kicked by our Hunters.

General Stuff for Ranged DPS and Healers

Zoom In

I think a lot of players, especially us ranged DPS, like to zoom their camera out to maximum distance so that we can see everything. In Professor Putricide having your camera a maximum distance can make it harder, not easier.

Ideally, you want your camera zoomed in close enough so that you can read the character names of the players standing nearby, but far enough away that you can judge which three directions Professor Putricide has thrown his three Malleable Goo.

I can’t stress how important it is to be able to see who’s standing nearby. We have 3 – yes, three! – Moonkin in our raids at the moment and 2 Hunters with that trinket that turns them into an ugly looking Gnoll. Our 2 Mages are fairly easy to identify because one is a Human and one is a Gnome. I’m also not the only Shadow Priest in the group.

We used vent to coordinate the spread of Unbound Plague. And the responsibility lay with the person currently handing Plague: when they were ready, they would run to pass it to the next carrier. But within the first few seconds of catching the Plague they had to call out on Vent who they intended to pass it to. And if your name was called, you would do your best to make catching the Plague safe – moving away from the rest of the raid (if you were a bit close to others) and then staying completely still while you identified who was trying to pass it to you.

Communication: Be Clear

When I would hear:”I’m passing the Plague to Cass”, my thought process immediately switched from juggling cast bars, DoTs and targets to:

Who said that? then Where are they standing?

Where am I standing? Do I still have an infected debuff from the last time I took the Plague? If so, can I afford to take it again? Are there people standing too close to me? Am I in the green ooze knockback area? Am I close to the Gas Cloud spawn point?

Professor Putricide casts Malleable Goo!

Oh crap. Is there a goo coming towards me? Of course there is. How can I avoid it and still be close to the plague carrier? Should I take the plague early?

It’s pretty easy to see how dealing with the Plague can take your mind off dealing damage. Now imagine that the person called out “I’m passing the plague to Cass” and I get half way through that distracting thought process only to realise that they’re actually standing 20 yards away and the other Shadow Priest in the guild is right next to them… they just got the name/person wrong.

Or, when you get the Plague and are unable to easily see if the Moonkin standing next to you is actually Player A, B or C. If you call out “I’m passing the Plague to… er that Moonkin nearby… wait! don’t move away” you distract three of your damage dealers all at the same time.

Pivoting for Malleable Goo

One of our newer healers was really struggling to avoid Malleable Goo and he was very upfront about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the timers or wasn’t trying to look and move out of the direction of the goo. He was. He was just having problems accurately determining the path of the goo flying through the air.

After a couple hours he pinpointed the problem: his camera was zoomed out so far that the ceilings and walls of the laboratory kept interfering, forcing him to pivot his camera view (when Malleable Goo was cast) to strange angles to see the room.

Try it – zoom in for Professor Putricide!

Yep, your raid is going to take a beating. This is before the Twins are even in position.

Update: Here’s the video of our last Twin Val’kyr kill using this strategy.

Remember those two lovely angels, the Twin Val’kyr? Remember running around to power up and smartly swapping essences to avoid AOE damage and increase your damage on the correct – opposingly coloured – twin at the right time? Forget all that.

This is how we defeated Twin Val’kyr on 25 man Trial of the Grand Crusader. We didn’t have amazing DPS. We didn’t stack the raid with Arcane Mages (although, that might be a viable strategy all on its own – I’m looking forward to that YouTube video). We didn’t need fantastic latency.

We used the “door strategy” which kind of ignores the main fight mechanics to the point where you feel like you might be cheating just a little bit. I know there are some players out there that do consider this method cheating, and therefore, inferior. If you’re one of those people please just stop reading now.

The biggest difference between Heroic and Normal difficulty is those flying dark and light orbs. A bad orb (opposite colour to your essence) will hit you for about 18k damage. 2 in a row? You’re gone. And they fly around pretty damn fast.

The Door Strategy in Concept

Just about everyone will need to take Dark Essence. Stand clustered right up against the entrance gate/portal (no light orbs can spawn here). Never change your essence. Use survivability cooldowns to survive AOE special abilities. Pray.

This strategy removes the need for every raid member to have excellent situational awareness. Usually you would:

• Dodge one orb type while collecting another based on your own essence
• DPS the correct target based on your own essence
• Switch essences to burn down a Twin’s Pact shield
• Switch essences to avoid AOE damage
• Switch essences to remove Touch of Light or Touch of Darkness (a new nasty for Heroic mode)

Oh yeah, while maintaining a high DPS output in order to beat the enrage timer.

The Door Strategy is completely different to how you’d go about it on normal mode and we thought that it was worthy of further explanation.

The Door Strategy in Practice

Step 1. Turn off Deadly Boss Mods. You’re not going to do anything it tells you to do.

Cass says: I cannot recommend this strongly enough. DBM will tell you to change essences over and over again – which, of course, you’re not going to be doing.

Lath says: I kept Deadly Boss Mods on but changed the standard settings. I unticked the “Show Warning for Touch of Light/Darkness” because it gives the same emote/warning as one of the special abilities (Lightbane’s Vortex, explained below) – the critical healing point where I need to use Tranquility. While learning this fight I ended up using my Tranquility waaaay too early and ended up needing it when it was on cooldown.

Step 2. Assign some “soakers”. These people are going to protect your raid from incoming light orbs. Choose DPSers who have a good combination of survivability and can move a lot while still maintaining decent damage. Make sure these are smart players.

Cass says: We had 2 Warlocks as our primary soakers. I think they spec’ed specially for this fight (to include Soul Link, Molten Skin and Nether Protection) to increase their survivability. Your soakers need to have good situational awareness and will often be doing something contrary to what your Raid Leader is telling people to do. Get some people who can think for themselves and move.

We also ended up with a couple extra plate wearing DPS (1 Ret Paladin and 1 Death Knight) assigned to Light Essence. We found that having a couple extra DPS doing additional damage to Darkbane helped us out considerably when we needed to burn down Darkbane’s shield. These DPS were not running around soaking up orbs though – that was just the Warlocks.

Lath says: These Warlocks take extra damage so make sure you have at least one raid healer keeping an eye on your soakers. We assigned a healer to each raid group but the 2 Resto Druids were also keeping full HoTs on the Warlocks to ensure they lived. We also found it was easier to heal plate-wearing DPS (with Light Essence) if you need that little bit extra DPS for Darkbane’s shield.

Step 3. Hot key your Shield Wall (er, that is, whatever temporary survivability ability you have).

Cass says: For me, that’s Dispersion. Warriors get their Shield Wall, Paladins have their bubble, healing Priests can use Guardian Spirit or Pain Suppression, Death Knights have their Anti-Magic thingy, Rogues can Cloak of Shadows and Mages can Ice Block and Shamans have … well… don’t be a Shaman.

Lath says: Barkskin is your friend here however it isn’t strong enough to survive without additional healing. I have my Barkskin and Tranquility macroed so I can cast them quickly in succession.

Step 4. Put your Resto Druids and Shamans in a group. They’re going to need a lot of help.

Lath says: I’m not sure why but the shammies seem to always go down first. As the majority of the raid have “oh shit” abilities that let them live through the opposing colour vortex, we place both Restoration Druids, Enhance Shaman, Elemental Shaman and Discipline Priest in 1 group together. Both Druids popped Tranquility which keeps the entire group topped up, however in future attempts I think we’ll stagger this in case we have to survive a second Light Vortex.

Cass says: While I’m taking a break during Dispersion, I like to watch those health bars. They go down so fast!

Step 5. Get into position. The raid will stack right up against the gate. The soakers and tanks will form a small, protective ring around them about 5-10 yards out from the raid.

Cass says: Don’t stand close to the sides of the door. That’s enough to pick up a stray light orb as they spawn. Really stack dead in the middle with your back to the gate. If you’d like a better view of the action swivel your camera view around to the front with your left mouse button.

Lath says: If you stand out and get hit by a stray orb don’t expect to live and don’t blame the healers for your death! Love your fellow raiders and say goodbye to personal space.

Step 6. Pull the Twins into the raid.

Cass says: DPS your opposite Twin. For most of the raid (with Dark Essence) they’ll be attacking Fjola Lightbane. The soakers will DPS Eydis Darkbane when they can, but it’s more important for them to make sure not one light orb gets past them and into the raid.

Be careful not to call your targets “Light” or “Dark” unless you want to cause mass confusion (ok, you probably already figured that out on normal mode). And, even better, make sure your raid understands that when you say “Switch” you mean “Switch Targets” not “Switch Essences”. Try and get people to start loading up debuffs on Darkbane a few seconds before the Special Ability phase begins just in case they need to burn down her shield. That head start can make a big difference.

Lath says: The raid healing is crazy. We got our first kill using 6 healers: 1 Holy Paladin and 1 Disc Priest for tank healing and 2 x Resto Druids and 2 x Holy Priests for raid healing. Before the tanks go in and pull make sure you give them some HoTs as they go out of range for a little while and the tank healers can’t leave the doorway. Raid damage is continual and as a Resto Druid you are primarily responsible for blanketing the raid with Rejuvenations and using Wild Growth every time it is off cool down.

Step 7. Special Ability time! Ok, there are four special abilities and you’ll get all four, but the order is a bit random.

After the first special ability the rest are somewhat predictable. You’ll get all four special abilities without doubling up on any one. Once you’ve experienced all four of the special abilities the order will change up again for the second set of four.

7a. Lightbane puts up her shield

What to do (Cass): Nothing special. DPS her like you were doing anyway. Most of your raid will be doing a nice amount of damage to her (since they have Dark Essence) and you should eat through her shield in time.

What to do (Lath): Nothing special here for healers, keep the raid alive and keep an eye on your mana!

7b. Darkbane puts up her shield

Note: If this is the first Special Ability of the fight ignore it and let the Twins heal back to 100%.

What to do (Cass): This is your moment! Everyone much switch DPS targets in advance, debuff Darkbane to hell and back, use Heroism, blow your DPS cooldowns and hope to hell you can somehow DPS through her shield and that your soakers with Light Essence can somehow pick up the slack. Pray. Yeah, we never killed it in time. Add 30% health back onto their bars and keep going.

What to do (Lath): Again, nothing special here for healers, just try to keep the raid alive!

7c. Lightbane does crazy “Light” Fire AOE damage

What to do (Cass): Translate your Raid Leader’s screams of “Shield Wall!” over Vent into “get ready to hit Dispersion/Iceblock/Cloak of Shadows/etc” when Fjola Lightbane has finished casting. The raid need to survive this. Hope that your vulnerable Shaman and Resto Druid party survived. Your soakers should be fine – they’ll absorb this one.

What to do (Lath): This is the part that makes this strat exhausting for the healers. The raid wide damage caused during Light Vortex is huge. Use your big AOE healing spells and personal damage reduction spells. For trees this means popping Barkskin and using Tranquility. Holy Priests must use Guardian Spirit themselves, not on the tanks, and use Prayer of Healing to cover their party. Discipline Priests might need to Pain Suppression themselves. Paladins can use their bubble (combine it with Divine Sacrifice to help reduce the amount of healing required raid wide).

7d. Darkbane does crazy “Dark” Shadow AOE damage

What to do (Cass): Enjoy the power ups as you soak up all the Shadow damage. Keep killing Lightbane.

What to do (Lath): Remind your soakers to use their survivability moves, or, if they don’t have anything, they can run over and change to Dark Essence temporarily then change back to Light Essence. But you probably won’t need to remind them much because you picked smart players to be soakers, am I right? The raid will continue to take some damage, but it won’t spike like it does when Lightbane casts her Light AOE vortex.

Step 8. Win! Whatever you do, don’t give up until you hit the enrage timer.

Holding Snowfall Graveyard is important, especially at the beginning of the game.

I’m no expert at Alterac Valley (AV) strategy. But I think it’s time I shared some small, but critical, slivers of  knowledge that I’ve learned over time. These are the things I wish someone else had told me when I first queued Alterac Valley as a total noob.

Master these concepts and you’ll no longer be confused by the strange, and often contradictory, advice provided by the “helpful” people in your battlegroup raid.

Oh yeah, this is for the Alliance. I don’t know much about how to AV as Horde, I only know how they beat us.

1. Don’t Leave Until the Tower Goes Up In Flames

Trust me: this type of fire is good!

If you, and 5 others, run into a tower (say Iceblood Tower, which starts out under Horde control) and it has a Horde looking flag you can click on that flag to “cap” it for the Alliance. Doing so turns it into a contested state. It’ll go half-blue on your map.

If you run away with those 5 players, a sole Horde player can sneak up behind you and click the same flag to win it back immediately. You’ve just completely wasted your time as have the 5 others with you. And backtracking isn’t fun at all, is it?

You need to hold the contested tower for a couple minutes. It will burn all around you when you’re successful. Only then is it yours (well, technically it’s neutralised, but the Horde still lost it). And it’ll stay that way for the duration of the game. The fire doesn’t hurt. So stick around.

2. Drek’thar isn’t just an Elite. He’s an Elite with Friends.

Those 2 medium sized dudes on his left and right are *optional*

He’s a big, ugly green Orc wearing a blindfold. He’s an Elite. He has wolves and he has generals. He probably kisses Thrall’s toes when he goes on annual leave.

If you pull Drek’thar (accidentally or on purpose) while he has his mates with him usually one of two things happen:

1. Some plate wearer does their best to tank all the Elites and doesn’t survive the first whirlwind (thank you for trying, though)
2. Nobody tanks Drek’s friends and they happily eat your healers’ faces (the people trying to help you)

See how neither option kills Drek’thar?

Those Elite generals will simply disappear if your team successfully captures and burns down the East and West Frostwolf Towers thus removing them from Horde control. Personally, I think the Elite Generals should bloody well stand in their respective towers (I would have made the connection about a year ago: Tower = Elite General) but whatever.

3. Zerging Drek’thar Works. If the Horde let you.

I.e. hardly ever.

Zerging means your entire team just rides, hellbent for leather, all the way south to the stone cave where Drek’thar lives. Sure an Alliance player might click a flag here and there, but nobody will actually stick around and try and defend the towers.

A typical zerg group only stops to capture:

1. the East and West Frostwolf Towers and waiting until they have been won
2. the Frostwolf Relief Hut graveyard (just in case the first attack on Drek fails, thus significantly shortening the run back for the next attempt)

Waiting til you win the East and West Frostwolf Towers removes some of Drek’s Elite friends (see item #2), thus significantly increasing your chances of success.

Usually this strategy doesn’t work because a small group of Horde players can pick off a significant portion of your raid group while you ride south, take back all their towers, leave you with no graveyards, and send most of your offensive back to the starting point where the Horde offensive can farm Alliance honor kills endlessly.

Don’t even think about zerging when it’s the holiday weekend.

4. Snowfall Graveyard is Something You Want to Own

Snowfall Graveyard located west of the Field of Strife

Snowfall Graveyard lies mid-map on the west side of the battleground. Horde don’t path this way as they travel north. All the Alliance battleground action (capping Towers, mini-bosses and the like) is going to happen south of this graveyard.

If you don’t capture it as soon as possible anyone who dies on your team is going to be sent all the way back to the start of the map. Where the Horde will do their best to ensure they never rejoin the Alliance teammates until they cry and give up.

Ok, this bit is important. Pay attention! Defend Snowfall until you win it. Hold it until you hold a graveyard further south.

Just like you do with a Tower you need to click the flag at the graveyard to turn it into an Alliance-contested point. If nobody defends the graveyard flag for the next couple of minutes Horde can capture it.

And Horde usually do double back to capture it just before Alliance win it – with one or two players at most. Five minutes into the game and every single Alliance player who has died is stuck at the northern most spawn point.

Once you win this graveyard you get a group of NPCs who will help you defend it. This can deter Horde (sometimes) but if your Horde opposition seems to be playing dirty you might want to stick around and defend it until you have another graveyard right near Drek’thar.

5. Iceblood Graveyard is Not Something You Want to Own

Ok, this one is hard to put into words.

Iceblood Graveyard is the furthest graveyard away from where Horde want to be, but still allows them to resurrect and run due North without unduly blocking the way of the Alliance offensive as we capture Iceblood Tower and Tower Point (which we want).

Consider the situations below and how resurrecting members of either faction will try to rejoin their team:

3 Graveyard Senarios (click to expand)

If in doubt, don’t capture Iceblood Graveyard!

6. Spirit Running is Totally Pro

Run out of range quickly if you don't want to auto-ressurect

Ok, so you died. You’ll get ported to the closest graveyard and have a few seconds before auto-ressurection kicks in.

If you died somewhere on the southern half of the map, got ported way up north, and you know the Horde army is somewhere between you and your corpse, run out of range of the Spirit Healer ASAP. You have options:

1. Spirit Run all the way back to where you died. Only works if Horde haven’t taken your insignia (thus forcing you to resurrect at a graveyard).
2. Wait until your team captures another graveyard further south and spirit run to that graveyard and stand under a different Spirit Healer. You’ll join the auto-resurrection timer when you get in range. Works even if Horde have taken your insignia.

Option number 2 is the ideal method to rejoin your offensive team if you died early on when Snowfall Graveyard was contested, but not yet captured, by your team.

Congratulations you just successfully avoided facing the entire Horde army on your own.

Good Luck!

Unfortunately it takes 39 other people to win Alterac Valley. I hope that your next teammates are smart and have 1000 resilience each.

If nothing else, I hope that these tips will make you feel a little more in control of what’s happening in your next Alterac Valley game. And the Spirit Running tip is totally awesome. I’m sure it’ll save you a lot of angst. I just wish I knew about that one a year ago!

Rhonin was suitably grateful (thank you for the cloak, btw). We had a nice turnout at the Eventide, too.

Our 10 man group defeated Algalon the Observer on Sunday. If you’re following Lathere’s and my Achievements closely you probably already know that. It took us 3 weeks: 2 hours and 33 minutes all up to kill him. The learning curve for us went something like this:

Week 1: Our two tanks got their timing perfect
Week 2: Our star killer got his timing perfect
Week 3: We managed to stop accidentally phasing out

Thus… you may now address me as Starcaller Cassandri!

I’ve blogged about Algalon before, I think, and I have to put him up there are one of my all time favourite boss encounters. For Shadow Priests it’s actually really quite straight forward.

1. Equip your Glyph of Dispersion
2. DPS the dude
3. Don’t stand on a Collapsing Star when it’s low on health
4. Don’t stand within 10 yards of those nasty red void things
5. Hit Dispersion before he finishes his Big Bang cast

Video

[youtube eS4yQUs9GKs Vitare vs Algalon (10 man) - click to enlarge]

Enjoy the video! Make sure you have your sound on, I love both these songs and the Celestial Planetarium ambiance track.

Lathere had a much trickier assignment – gather up all the constellations with healing agro and maneuver them to close up the black holes without accidentally phasing herself – all while healing, of course!

And the best part about our victory was that we beat the other guild 10 man to it. And they got Firefighter almost 1 month before us (which they bragged about quite a bit!) Gotta love a bit of friendly competition, hey?

Update: Went back again this week and video captured the fight and vent conversation for you. We organise CC and determine so much of the fight “strategy” during combat, it seems incomplete to watch it without Vent. The rest of this article describes our first kill (not video captured).

Last night we killed the Horde Faction Champions in Trial of the Crusader (third boss). I loved it. I loved it so much that not only did I forget to hit record, I completely forgot to take a screen capture.

The Faction Champions fight is chaos. It’s a simulated Arena/BG fight where you face off against 10 of the opposite faction (since I play Alliance I get to kill Tauren and Trolls and stuff). 25v10. In 10 man it’s 10v6.

Their Team

The enemy team of 10 is randomly selected from a pool of 15 champions and has a bit of everything and includes  healers (Resto Shaman, Disc Priest, Holy Pally and Resto Druid), armored melee-ers (DK and Ret Pally) and some extra casters and dps.

Strategy

The general strategy is to keep a couple of their healers under CC constantly, kill off at least 1 healer and then take out the most damaging/dangerous dudes. We found it necessary to kill 2 healers up front, CCing the last one for the rest of the fight. Our kill order was something like:

1. Resto Shaman
2. Discipline Priest (CCed)
3. Rogue
4. the rest of the damage dealers
5. Resto Druid (CCed)
6. Warrior (CCed by 1 DK with Chains of Ice)

Leaving the Discipline Priest or Resto Druid up and about will get you nowhere fast – these guys are a problem and will easily keep your kill target alive so keep them under control.

We didn’t wear Resilience gear or PVP gear and I’m not completely sure if those defensive stats do make a difference in this fight.

In general be aware of your class/spec abilities that you may not use in PVE all that much and be ready to adapt. Keep away from the Rogue/DK/Warrior as much as possible and use your Kick, Silence, Earth Shock, Hex, Polymorph, Cyclone, Fear etc all the time.

A Word of Caution

No strategy I read gave this piece of advice:

Before someone begins the fight (by talking to the NPC on the Arena floor), move your entire raid to stand underneath where your Faction Leaders are above you. So, if you to play Alliance, move and stand underneath Tirion and Jaina. When the fight begins your enemy jumps down from where they are on the bleachers and if a player is nearby they’re going to get slammed. We learnt this the hard way and I was the victim. If you’re on the other side of the room you have time to quickly mark up some targets.

Raid Symbols Please!

On our first attempt (described above) we had no targets raid marked with {skull} etc.  With the second attempt we marked up some on the fly which is better than nothing. With our third, and successful attempt, our Raid Leader had a macro that threw up our kill order and priority CC targets and this made a HUGE difference.

Our macro was something like:

/tar Thrakgar
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 8);
/tar Caiphus
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 7);
/tar Erin
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 4);
/tar Liandra
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 1);

This selects and marks the first two kill targets (Resto Shaman = skull and Disc Priest = cross) and the other two healers (Druid = triangle and Pally = star) to be permanently CCed. The rest were marked on the fly.

Why I Loved It So Much

It’s random, it’s about adaptability. But most importantly, the  reason I loved this fight is because it’s a bit like a crazy BG but it’s actually a team sport. I was playing with a team of people who are genuinely trying to keep the whole team alive, playing smartly, in order to succeed.

I also thought it was amusing that so many of the current class/spec strengths and weaknesses come across in this fight. At one point our GM was convinced we had to kill the Shadow Priest because a guide he read said to. Which made all us Shadow Priests pipe up and sarcastically reply “what’s he going to do? Mind Flay us? Fear us every 30 seconds?”. We had hunters yelling “kill the hunter’s pets!” with glee – for once exploiting their own class’s weaknesses.

Just like it often is in a battleground the Resto Druid is way too hard to kill, the Discipline Priest is hard to wear down and the Pally and DK are true forces to be reckoned with. The Shamans are easy kills (sorry guys but it’s true), as is the Shadow Priest, and the Warrior, once deadly, isn’t your biggest concern.

I played this fight in my Shadow PVE spec and it was really strange. I had no idea what to do! I tried to keep Mind Blast (now it has the reduced healing debuff) on cooldown and used Psychic Scream and Mass Dispel to help. I did try Mind Control on one of our targets at one point but it was immune. You can also Fade and some classes were taunting with some success so it’s not exactly like a BG.

I wonder if next time I can try it as Discipline? I think it’s a sign that the encounter really does feel like a PvP encounter because I was so uncomfortable as Shadow (I never PvP as Shadow spec) and kept hovering over my Raid Frames to start healing!