My recent treatise on How to Quit Your Guild seems to have gained some notice, and this morning was linked in a retort by Gevlon. He recommends that people in most situations refuse to go quietly, decline to talk to their officers, call specific people out, and basically try and cause as much unrest as possible. Perhaps it’s my Canadian politeness, but I just don’t see the point. If, as in his example, one feels that their guild is not strict or focused enough, why not just move to another guild that better suits the player? Doing that and having a hissy fit against the machine seems .. selfish, to be honest. Your old guild will, ideally, continue to be happy with their old ways, and you will be happy with the ways of your new guild. Everyone is happy, and basic social niceties still stand. Hooray!

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My fledgling shadow UI is atrocious. Witness the horror that is currently my playing area (cropped to show just the center):

Blargh! So first on the left and top right of my character I have ClassTimer. I added it on the right just so I could see when Shadow Weaving was fully stacked, and my Inner Fire timer and a few other things show up there. I’m starting to think that I should just move it back down to my user frame. I don’t need to check on Shadow Weaving THAT often, and running around out of combat with an Inner Fire timer floating in the middle of nowhere is making my OCD side crazy.

Since I was already using ClassTimer, and I’m used to how it looks, I’m still using it on the top right for debuff bars. I should, really, eventually switch this over to DoTimer, although it kind of intimidates me. (I unchecked the “Simple Mode” setup for DoTimer, and my jaw fell to the floor.) I DID manage to get it set up correctly as a cooldown timer, which you see on the lower right of my character. The biggest adjustment I made was having the “ghost bar”, like Mind Blast in this image, last 15 seconds so it will definitely catch my eye.

Right above my user frame is Quartz. Quartz is, as many people know, an awesome casting bar. The latency and GCD information is stuff I need to see — while I was quite good at anticipating the GCD on my healing spells, for some reason I am terrible at it with shadow. Quartz has little extras that pop up every so often during combat (debuffs? something..). Usually this happens in the middle of fighting a rather cross dragon, so I just shout rude things at my monitor and promise to look into it later.

Right now I’ve kept my old Pitbull user frames, complete with the totally unnecessary casting bar.

I played around a bit with IceHUD as a replacement for Pitbull, but I’m not sure my brain is ready for that big a switch. I also tried EventHorizon as a replacement for both ClassTimer and DoTimer, and while it’s a really neat way to view spell priority it just didn’t groove well with my playstyle. It’s worth a test for the unique “Guitar Hero”-like display if nothing else.

I am usually so careful about my UI, moving elements one pixel at a time until I am satisfied, and this is a dog’s breakfast. I’ve already noticed an overall improvment in DPS, though, so I suppose I’m just breaking a few eggs to, eventually, make a sleek face-melting omlet. Right?

On a seperate but also mod-related topic, I have never ever found an Auction House mod that I liked until No Stock UI recommended Auction Lite. It is quick, light, and adds some pretty awesome functionality to your buying and selling. It even inspired me to try my hand at “playing the AH”, and I’m pleased to say that thus far I’ve made 10g profit from buying low and selling high. I will try to not spend it all in one place.

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Guild Management, Shadow DPS, Technical Issues guildleading, mods

With all the current available 25-man content cleared and a surplus of very good healers, I seem to have switched almost completely to shadow in these hazy pre-Ulduar days. I’m finally hit-capped, I’ve got all the right glyphs, my keybindings are mostly set correctly, and more impressively my guildies have stopped giggling to themselves every time I go into shadow form. Really, though, I’m a 3-week old DPSer, so while I think I have a lot of the basics down now the experience and subtleties still elude me. Also, when flustered I have a tendency to stand there slack-jawed and mash on my Mind Blast — which is always on cooldown — until either it comes back up again or my brain kicks in and tells me what to do now.

Anyway, none of the below tips will help the experienced shadow priest, but if there are any other of my holy brethren exploring their dark sides some of this might be interesting:

1) Don’t rush the Shadow Word: Pain. It will stick on your target forever in most cases, assuming you’re using Mind Flay, so wait until you have a full five stacks of Shadow Weaving before unleashing the Pain. My usual single target boss opener is Vamp Touch – Devouring Plague – Shadow Word:Death – Mind Blast – Mind Flay – THEN SW:P.

2) Mind Searing herds of trash is almost illegally fun, but from my observations it only seems to be efficient with three or more mobs. When you’re dealing with two fairly resilient trash mobs, dot them both up and then do single target damage to the same one the rest of the raid is focused on. When pulling a pack of trash mobs with one big guy, throw VT on the big guy (why not, more mana and damage is good) and then Mind Sear to your heart’s content. I recommending giggling evilly to yourself at the same time.

3) This is going to sound stupid to any DPS person, but as a healer I didn’t know this: either use your tab key, or set up a tab macro. DPSers hit tab all the time to find their next target. I know, I was surprised too.

4) Shadow priests can dispel while in shadow form. This will most likely be taken care of by the healing priests and paladins on your run, but be prepared to help out when necessary. Resurrecting a player WILL knock you out of shadow form. Don’t be a Liore and end up DPSing two Naxx bosses in normal form. Also, you DO have healing spells, although god knows using one of the dirty things will seriously impact your spot on the charts, man. At least keep Flash Heal on your hotbar and be ready to use it if things get ugly or you’re about to die during a critical fight.

5) When examining the logs later (oh please, if you’ve read this far you know exactly what I’m talking about, you crazy min-maxer you) check and see how many times each of your three main dots ticked during a fight. They should be pretty similar numbers. If your SW:P is much higher than the other two, you need to watch your dot timer better.

6) Shadow priests are just going to kind of suck at some things, like the trash phase of Gothik. C’est la vie.

The thing I haven’t figured out yet: when is it optimal for me to stay on a target and not the add? Take Grobbulus — a lot of shadow priest damage takes a while to crank up, so when the blob add appears I am loathe to leave all my dots and cooldowns and switch to it, only to have to slowly build up damage on the add as well. Mind you, I know from running raids for years that getting DPS to stop casting/hitting the boss and focus on the add can be challenging, and I don’t want to be one of THOSE people. More research is needed!

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Shadow DPS priest, raiding

Last night was our first “alt-friendly” raid in Naxx, and it was a blast. We had holy paladins tanking bosses, new characters in greens walking out with half a dozen upgrades, and I switched roles with one of our shadow priests and went DPSy for the night.

I’ve never raided as Shadow. I did two heroics the night before as practice, but otherwise what little experience I’ve had has all been questing solo. I have always been a big advocate of reaching the hit cap for our DPS, and over the past couple of weeks I picked up a couple of good pieces in Naxx and enchanted, gemmed, and buffed for hit. I zoned in feeling pretty dang slick with my 160 hit until my shadow priest compatriot informed me that the new cap is 290. Oopsie. First noob moment.

For those who don’t know, shadow priest DPS seems to be more of a priority system than a strict rotation. Personally, I just made sure that all three of my DoTs were up and Shadow Word: Death and Mind Blast were on cooldown, and then Mind Flayed until something needed refreshing. There are probably more nuances to the shadow priest priority system, but that worked for my first raid. On trash, Mind Sear is brutally overpowered and I love it. I was #2 on damage during the pre-Heigan “not gauntlet”. Me. Number 2. It made me giggle.

My UI is all wrong for DPS. When you heal, a boss is almost incidental. It’s the source of damage, but really your whole UI is oriented around the status of the raid at any given time. For DPS, of course, the health and activity of the boss is paramount, so my user frames were sort of backwards. I had a DoT timer, but a more general cooldown timer mod would have also been useful. And without keybindings I ended up staring at my action bars all night, which means I was not only one of those dreaded clickers, but also, yes, that jerk who stands in Rain of Fire.

My output, while not awesome, was not the hideous embarrassment I anticipated. I enjoyed the DPS epeening of Patchwerk for once, and ended up in the top ten for that fight. (Yes, as long as I don’t have to move or talk or look at anything, I can do.. almost adequate damage.) I also managed to almost kill myself on Loatheb by merrily SW:Ding away — thanks to our healing crew for covering my butt — and I DID kill myself on Gluth by SW:D right after Decimate hit. It was not my finest moment. (”Oh RIGHT. That spell.”)

It’s back to Holy tomorrow for Sarth 3D and an Undying attempt, but this experience has definitely whet my appetite for dual specs. I think my guild hasn’t seen the last of Evil Raiding Liore.

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Raiding Ruminations, Shadow DPS priest, raiding

I leveled from 0-80 as healy. Sure, I’d tweak it into a leveling spec (SMITE!) while grinding XP, but I poo-pooed luxuries like mind flay. I’m not sure why. By now it’s just tradition, and I admit that it lends itself pleasingly to curmudgeonly grumblings. “Back in my day we had to walk uphill to Blackrock Mountain in the heat, we didn’t have guild vaults, we leveled with wand spec — and we liked it!” Anyway, a few noob observations:

* It turns out that Mind Sear and Mind Flay are two entirely different colored lines of death with two entirely different purposes! More than once I got flustered and mixed them up.

* Perhaps Dispersion has some important function. I don’t know. I had fun using it and shouting to anyone around, “Look! Look! I’m an evil cloud!”.

* Not being able to heal myself when I pleased without dropping Shadowform was odd at first, but with a little practice I got better at timing VE.

Respeccing for the weekend and piling through a bunch of quests was definitely worth it. I did three days of dailies for the Hodir, Oracles, and Tuskarr, as well as half of the Icecrown quest achievement. The DPS change definitely made a difference, although shadow priest damage takes a while to build up so it’s not particularly suited to mowing through quest mobs. More than anything I just enjoyed the novelty of new spells and skills after four years of healyosity.

I was back to my usual spec in time for Malygos-25 on Sunday evening (guild first kill, hooray!), but I think I might have the DPS bug now. By the end of the night I was talking about picking up some off-spec gear before Ulduar, and may or may not have jumped discs during Malygos wipes to go try and get the killing blow off on a Scion.

I have to admit, I feel a little guilty, like I’m cheating on holy spec. It’s okay to experiment with alternative specs on the weekend, right? It’s not like I’m going to start speccing Shadow during the week, or binge on DPS, waking up the next morning dazed and wearing hit gems. Right? Right?

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Healing, Shadow DPS priest