I’d Rather Be Wowing!

I know I know, I barely have time for Lem and F, my baby druid. But recently I’ve wanted to kick back from the routinity of raid and dailies, for some odd reason Lem and F just didn’t cut it. Lem is now 57, she almost can go to the outland. But the thought of having to quest for her epic ground mount kind of put me off from leveling her up. From everybody in the guild, only Val has the key to Scholo and Dire Maul, which automatically put her in every guild’s run whenever anybody wants to do their epic mount quest. Unfortunately, that means that I have to hunt for another person for keys for Lem. Totally not up for it. On the other hand, I am thinking of getting a pvp mount for Lem. It won’t be as prestigious as the warlock’s epic mount, but at least it will be different.

F on the other hand, is currently leveling as a feral, due to the recommendation from WowInsider’s own BBB. But I found myself gets really bored of melee. She is stuck in getting her water form quest done (see the pattern there?). Someday I will level her up though, I promise.

In the same spirit of wanting to raise a healer, what could be a better option than a resto shammy So I decided, yesterday, to get myself my very own baby shammy. In a day, she is now up to level 10 and gets a ton of cool new spells. She is going to level as an ele and will respec around lvl 60 to resto. We’ll see how far she’ll go.

As many avid shadow priesters have known, one of the challenge in our class is in the spell casting sequence, where we don’t have a rotation, only a priority. The basic ideas are simple: keep VT (and SW:P) at all time, cast MB and SW:D whenever they are up. Otherwise, cast MF. The application, however, is not as simple. There are certain nuances, such as, should we clip MF whenever MB is up? The general concensus here is that, it is okay to clip MF immediately after the 2nd tick. But how can we know when is the 2nd tick has occurred? Another problem is if your timer shows that MB will be in cooldown in less than 1 sec, should we wait or cast another spell?

So, when an addon like Face Melter (from Wow Curse) went into my radar, I was eager to see how my current spell priority hold up against, the supposedly, a better spell rotation. Face Melter is an addon that suggest what spell that you need to cast, taking into consideration all the best practices in shadow priesting spell rotation.

When the addon initially appear in your screen, it will be in the form of a grayish black rectangular (the size of the this rectangular can be somewhat adjusted). If it is not locked, you can move the rectangular around. When you have a hostile target, 3 squares of icons will appear in this rectangular. The left and the right icons will be grayed out. The left icon shows the spell that you just casted (it will be irrelevant when you first target a mob). The middle icon shows the spell that you should cast at this moment in time. The icon is castable (when it’s not in global cooldown, or for MB when MF is after its 2nd tick) when a green square surrounds the icom. The right icon shows the spell that you should cast next.

This may sound really simple at the get go, but not really. Notice the words that I emphasis in the previous paragraph? I found that using this add on is like testing your reflex in identifying what icon to press and pressing the spell associated to the icon as soon as possible.  The right icon, most of the time, will have nothing to do with what you will be casting next. Often times, additionally, what spell that shows up in the middle icon will change before the spell can be casted. For example, there’s a time where MB shows in the middle icon, but due to global cd, it may not be castable yet. As I was going to cast MB, it suddenly changed the icon to VT. I found myself feeling very frustrated when wanting to follow it spell by spell.

Customization wise, you can specify not using VE, or SW:D, or SW:D when your health is at a certain percentage. I think the latest one is a very useful function. Also, you can specify the priority of each of the spell.

My verdict so far is that this is not the silver bullet to our shadow priest’s challenge. To be fair, I think that no add-on should take away the thinking process. If it can precisely predict what spell to cast next, by taking into account all the other spells’ expiration and cooldown, it may be take away the fun of playing the game itself. My poor review may also be caused by the unfamiliarity with the add-on. People who have spent more time using the add-on, may be able to utilize it more effectively. One thing for sure though, I ended up paying attention to the add-on rather than the environment around, which may be too hazardous to use during raid. Again, it’s probably because I’m not used to it. What I also did, is try to utilize the aspect of the addon to tell me when it is good to cast MB, especially when I am currently cast MF. That also didn’t work out quite so well. It’s shame, really, I do really want to like this add-on.

If you have a better luck in using the add-on, or any advice on how to use it, feel free to chime in!

Do you have days, where it just seems like all you did was dying?

Gruul’s Run - E, I think, broke the record of dying 5 times in an hour! 1st time: we had a bad pull, and as E run out when the RL called it a wipe, she got hit and died.  2nd time: MT drops within 10 sec of pull, again BE Seers make a quick work of E as she runs out. 3rd time: Better pull this time, into the fight, Seers was down but some tanks were downed, as the dps focusing on warlock, tank also try to gain some aggro, but E went down due to the warlock were still out of control. 4th time: In one of the trash pull, I have to admit E wasn’t paying attention because of this new add on (post follows), and she must have stood in front of Brute or something. Splat! 5th time: Druing Gruul, E made a miscalculation to do SW:D when not many healers around. Suffice to say, she was pretty low on health when Cave In caught her off guard. That’s one stupid move.

But oh no, the misery didn’t exacty end here. She went on to heroic MgT, had a couple bad MC breaks, and repetitive wipe on Dalrissa. Ouch!

Well, E finally have enough burning blossoms to get Captured Flame. Double cheers! Unfortunately, I doubt that she ever gonna get the dancing draenei

I was thinking of expanding my post of the encounter with Ahune. Keep in mind, however, that this is going to be mostly in the perspective of pally tanking and shadow priest. Both of the characters have successfully done the fight several times in regular mode and once in heroic mode (still no Scorched Stone though).

First thing first. Fact: The loot table between heroic and non-heroic is not the same! I have someone I grouped yesterday that insisted they are the same, regardless to what I said. I’m going to refer you to this post by WowInsider for the loot table distribution.

Summoning Ahune
In the regular mode, you would need to complete the chain quest that is started from any capital city. It is really easy to do, and completing it, not only you will get a tabard at the end of the quest line (after killing Ahune), but you will also unlock another daily that is also very easy to do.

1. From any capital cities, talk to the Earthen Ring representative to pick up Unusual Activity quest. He/she will send you to Zoram Strand in Ashenvale.
2. Port/fly there and make your way to the ZS, which is on the northwest area of the map. Kill the twilights people until it drops the quest item Twilight Correspondence. Click on the totem provided to you by the Earthen Ring guy to summon Earthen Ring Guide. You have to be in ZS to summon it.
3. The next quest will ask you to travel further northwest. If you look at your bag, you will see Orb of Crawler. Clicking it will turn you into a crawler At the northwest end of the map, you’ll notice area with ice stones and Heretic Emmissary nagas. As a crawler, hang around there (you should be able to see their conversation) until you get the mission completed message. Again, summon the Earthen Ring Guide, which will send you to any of the capital cities. Note that you don’t have to go back to the place where you pick up the quest, any of the Earthen Ring guy in capital cities will suffice.
4. At this step, the Striking Back daily quest will open up. Also, he/she will send you to talk to an npc in Slave Pen.
5. Travel to Slave Pen. Keep in mind that you will only be able to continue the quest line in regular mode. Talk to the npc right as soon as you enter Slave Pen. He will send you to another npc further in the inside.
6. Once you clear, oh I think 5 packs of mobs, you will see the next NPC. Feel free to talk to her to complete the quest. Now, I am not sure if you have to at least reach this step before you can summon Ahune in heroic. For both of my characters, I only did heroic after finishing up the quest line in regular. If you finished up the quest until this step, every day you can talk to her to get the daily quest to summon Ahune. It will net you 11g, which is pretty sweet
7. Clear up the mobs surrounding the area before you click on the stone to start the event. The pats behind the area where Ahune will appear can also be cleared, but it is really optional. From all the time I’ve been there, we’ve only aggroed it once.

Fighting Ahune
The perfect group make up for this fight is a druid tank, a good mix of melee and caster/range, and healers with hot or group healing. But this doesn’t mean that the other tanks and pally healer are not viable. It’s just a bit disadvantaged, in my opinion. The same phases and strategy apply to heroic, with exception that mob hits harder and have more HP. In heroic, it is even more important to protect your healer as the small elementals will make a quick work on him/her. If your group can kill Ahune within 2 rounds or a short bit into 3 rounds, they are most likely will breeze through the heroic as well.

1. Ahune’s fight is a repetition of 2 phases. On the first step, he will appear but he will be invulnerable (-75% of damage). Don’t bother attacking him. He will spawn one big elemental guy (hailstone) and many waves of smaller elemental guy. The first occurrence of 1st phase, only water elementals will appear. One the subsequent occurences of 1st phase, air elemental guys will appear. There will also be more elementals (the 3rd time in 1st phase will have more elementals than the 2nd time, and so on). Because of that, it is pertinent to finish the fight in 2 or at most 3 rounds, otherwise your healer may potentially be out of mana.
2. First phase:
   • When the big guy is still up
     • Tank: You will mainly concern with tanking Hailstone. Having frost resistance aura up helps tremendously in this fight. Another word of caution, pally tank can easily get multiple little guys on them with consecrate. This may not be very desirable because it will force your melee to fight near the big guy (see next bullet) and the damage from all (especially the magic dmg) can easily eat your health bar. Judge for yourself whether you have enough health and leet enough of a healer to survive. On the upside, warlocks, mages, and boomkins will love you :0. All the elementals are tauntable.
     • DPS: If you are range, focus on the big guy first. If you are melee, don’t worry about the big guy (unless you only have melee dps, which in this case, assign one or two for the big guy). Having melee on the big guy will be very taxing on the healers because of the stacking aoe debuff that will incur 300 dmg every 3 sec up to 10 stacks. Not something to take lightly.
     • Shadow Priest: Don’t forget your VE in here, which is going to help your healers a alot. Because of the mana intensive nature of the fight, focus on the big guy at entire time before moving to smaller guys.
   • If you see blue swirly appear at your feet, move away. You don’t usually have to move away right away, but don’t stay there too long. The swirly will turn into an ice spike that will throw you up in the air and damage you for almost 1000 dmg + falling dmg.
   • When only waves of small guys left:
     • Tank: These guys usually have initial aggro on the healers. Regardless, you can focus on the person who has the most aggro and drop cons in front of them. You can downrank it so that you are mana conservative but enough threat to gather the little guys on you. The nice thing about doing this is that, you can intercept for your party members and collect them together, which will make your melee dps-ers (trust me they hate running around chasing those elementals) and your aoe-ers really happy. If you have a lot of casters in your group, putting up cons aura may help with the push back. One druid tank that I partied with shifted into cat and make a quick work on the small elemental guys.
     • DPS: Nothing more to add here. Keep your cooldown for the burst damage until the 2nd phase though. Just keep killing the elementals and do your best protecting your healer and keep yourself alive.
     • Shadow Priest: Usually 1 MF (+ SWD) or 2 MF will be enough to kill this guys. The problem is protecting yourself from the push back when you get aggro. As you might have known, it really sucks to MF if that happens. If you have spirit tap, remember to try to get the killing blows from thse elementals. Doing this frequently will make a difference in your mana bar. If you have a lot of high dps-ers, don’t worry about dotting them, as you will only waste your mana.
3. Second phase: An emote will appear telling you that Ahune has retract back, or something along the line. You will only have 30 sec in this phase, so hopefully you don’t start this phase when there’s still a lot of little elementals left. The core itself doesn’t have an aggro table and it doesn’t do any damage, so dps your heart out without worrying about aggro and healers can get their 5sec rule here.
   • Tank: Pally tank and prot warrior is more disadvantaged than their druid counterpart because druid can shift into cat form and provide a good addition to dps during this phase. What I did as pally tank is as follows: If you still have little elementals left, tell all dps to just focus on the core while you tank all the remains. Otherwise, put blessing on wisdom on the core so your casters can replenish their mana. If you don’t starve on mana, I guess you can put a bit of dps. Just make sure that you will have enough for the next 1st phase. This phase is really boring for pally tank, to be honest
   • DPS: Blow all your cooldown trinket, heroism, etc. The good target to aim is around 50% for regular and around 40% in heroic.
   • Shadow priest: If there’s leftover little elementals, dot them on your way to the core stone. Nothing really to add other than to remembet to sick in your pet in if your mana bar is less than 50%. Feel free to use SW:D cause your healer won’t have anything to do anyway
4. Rinse and repeat until Ahune is dead. Loot the Ice Chest :0 If this is your first time killing Ahune, don’t forget to loot the shards of Ahune from the chest, right click on it to start up a quest, and return it Luma (the npc near Ahune summoning stone). This will give you a tabard and 20 burning blossoms.

Assuming that all your party members has done the quest chain up to the slave pen npc, each of you can summon Ahune again. Remember that if you touch the stone to initiate the summon, and if you don’t get him down, you will lose that summoning chance (but you still complete the daily for 11g, so no biggies really). In heroic, I think you can summon him as many times as you’d like until you beat him. But you can only kill him once a day in heroic.

The first time I did this, I don’t have to reset the instance to resummon Ahune. But yesterday, for some reason, we do have to reset the instance to make the summoning stone respawn. I am not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with whether or not the ice chest despawning. The best chance is to make sure everybody looted the chest.

This may not be the appropriate title. I wasn’t going to write about this until it almost happened again yesterday.

Last weekend, we are setting up group for regular MgT. By “we”, I mean G and E. Among the group was a resto shammy and an enh shammy. After a while, we got a mage as our last member. It took us a long time before we actually started due to the resto shammy’s needs to replace the battery on his mouse (which took longer than I imagine). As soon he got summoned, he asked to be summoned back because he was going to port and get him self some spells. A red alert appeared and upon asking, he mentioned that he is going to respec to resto and…he just ding like 10 min ago (the actual time is unknown, but it’s probably an exaggeration). But we didn’t think about it too much since he claims that he has about 1k +healing. After he is finally ready, we did one pull, and G suddenly asked whether that’s his healing gear. True enough, his gears were all greens, and not all of them were healing gear. They are a mix between healing and damage. There’s no way that amounts to 1k healing. Enh shammy suddenly said, “how come you only have 28 tp allocated”?. His excuse was that he was just setting up. At the end, he got kicked out from the group, which  I think mostly due to him lying to us and wasted our time for waiting on him.

/rant Why the heck do you think you can heal MgT with such a meager gears? With no experience of healing whatsoever.

I can devise so many theories to why he wants to come, but I do have to admit that he may just not know that MgT is harder than the other 70 instances, and he just want to see the content. The lying part is the one that gets me the most.

Yesterday, we were looking for an off-tank for ZA. Two warrior were on the LFG. G asked us to check them on armory. One of them turns out to be full fury (completely full, as no points are allocated anywhere else). That should have been our red alert, but I think G still inquire him anyway. It turns out that he just turned 70 and he doesn’t have a good gear. Well, at least he is honest. So now the question is, what is he doing in LFG for ZA? Did he expect that this run would automatically gear him up? Did he just completely unaware that ZA is hard (well maybe not if he’s going along with an overgeared group, which is not us)? Did he aware that him going there would mean him being a dead weight?

I guess in my opinion is that, if you are deliberately putting yourself into an LFG for a specific instance, you attest that you are qualified for that run. Unfortunately, I am jaded.

It’s here! The chance to get your very own Captured Flame or Brazier of Dancing Flames, among other cool things. It’s also a great time to earn some additional easy moolah, as each activity can reward you 5-10 g. Here are some activities that I’ve done so far.

1. Torch tossing. The first activity available by the Fire Eaters at every major cities (Shatt is not included). Given a short period of time, you need to toss the torch to some brazier for X number amount of time. After you have done Torch catching quest, the “daily” version of this activity becomes available. It is not much harder, in my opinion, than the original quest. Hint: Put the torch in a keybind. Zoom out or stand further out so you can see all the braziers. Click on your keybind and target the brazier that has a hunter mark on it. If you missed out on the brazier, don’t blindly try target the next brazier, cause you will miss that one too. Instead, wait a bit until it changes its target again before targetting it.

2. Torch catching. You need to stand on the bonfire, click on the quest item (wood), and catch the torch for X amount of time. Warning: failure to catch the torch caused the torch to “explode” within a short range and put a fire damage dot on you that ticks for about 400-500 damage. You won’t die from one explosion, but it does take quite a chunk of your life. I imagine how this must be terrible for non-healing class. I personally hate this quest. While I was able the original quest twice, I am only able to finish the daily version of it once. Hint: You don’t have to be so close to the bonfire to start the quest. I noticed that, regardless which direction you faced when you light up the torch, it tends to bounce on the same direction. The important thing to do is follow the shadow that the torch casted. When you caught the torch, get ready to turn and change direction. A decent amount of fast reaction is needed. I imagine it is easier for mouse-turning people than keyboard-turning people. I really suggest to do this quest while not many people around are doing the same quest. It can get really confusing to know which shadow belongs to you.

3. Striking back. This daily quest becomes available once you finish a short quest chain. This is the same quest chain with the summoning Ahune quest. I picked up the start of this quest in Shatt, but I am guessing that any other locations in major cities would work as well. The quest chain will send you to Ashenvale, near BFD. They are really easy, just involving a few traveling. Now it seems like the daily quest differs depending what level you are. But they are kinda similar in what you need to do. For us, level 67 and higher, the daily quest will send you to the Dark Portal. Click on one of the 4 ice stones, located in the vicinity around the Pit lord, and a elemental looking guy will spawn. Just kill it and you are done.

4. Honoring and Desecrating the flames. Each area will have a festival fire that we can honor (the same faction) or desecrate (the opposite faction). Each fire that we honor will net you 5 Burning Blossoms (currency to buy the event items) plus 5 g (if you are 70). Each fire that we desecrate will net you 10 burning blossoms and around 10g worth of g. Although you can only honor/desecrate the fire once per event (per year), it could easily net you up to 300g. These fire always located outside the city itself, so if you are in PvE server, desecrating the fire is really easy to do. The npc surrounding the fire itself won’t aggro you. However, once you completed the quest, you will be flagged. Remember that you can get rid of the flag by hoppint on a flying path. You can also steal the fire in the capital city that will net you 25 burning blossoms (I don’t know how many g since I haven’t done it myself), but they are much and much more trickier.

5. Summoning Ahune. The quest chain which started by the Earthen Ring representation in any capital cities (incl Shatt) will lead you to slave pen. Now, I heard that you can only complete the chain in the normal mode, but you can still summon Ahune in the heroic mode. When we did this in normal mode, each of us in the party can summon the frost lord once. You don’t have to “reset” the instance to summon or to be able to loot the ice chest that spawned once you down him. Just to try it next, we did this in heroic mode, right after we summon him 5 times in normal mode. Since you don’t require any totem, you can just click on the ice stone to summon him. Now I’m not sure if you can repeatedly summon him without reseting in the heroic mode. I imagine that you would have to since Ahune drops a heroic badge - forcing it to be summonable only once per day in heroic.

Now, there are some confusion about the loot table in normal or heroic. For the 5 times we did it in normal mode, we get the epic cloaks to drop (healing, defense, and dps caster). And on the heroic mode, we get the melee dps trinket and Deathfrost recipe. But people say that the loot table is completely the same, with exception of the badge. (Not true, heroic and regular have different loot table. Recipe seems to drop more frequently in heroic. So far is 2 out of 2)

The fight itself is not so much difference between normal and heroic. It just seems that he has more hp in heroic. (Upon the 2nd tries in Heroic, it seems like there are more small guys spawned during the first phase in heroic). Having a melee dps is totally helpful. We had a fury warrior and hunter in the group, and they totally own the multiple of waves of adds. On the first phase, I, myself, concentrate on the Hailstone elemental guy, until it died before helping killing the little adds. The melee dps are on the little guys because the big guy will give you a stacking debuff. I found myself blowing a lot of mana since the melee/range dps-ers can kill the little adds really fast. So all I did was MF-ing. Also on the first phase, there will be spikes coming out from the ground that will throw you out on the air. If you see a swirly blue thingy on where you stand, move away. The funny thing was, it happened once that I got thrown to the water. I can hear myself saying “oh no”, not knowing how I can get back to the fight. But next thing I know, I am back to the land, where we are fighting. So don’t worry about the water

On the second phase, we attack the “core”. There doesn’t seem to be anything special on this. Just burn it as soon and as fast as you can. There’s no aggro table for this guy. The first and 2nd phase will then repeat. We got him, in all occasions, after 2 repeats. On heroic, we just barely made it.

I admit that I’ve always wanted to see the content of higher end instances and I know that our alliance guild would never reached that until months and months later. That’s why when the person that I pugged for Ahune (post incoming later) invited me for his semi-guild’s run for Mt. Hyjall, I couldn’t resist saying yes to it. Even if: (1) I know that my gears are not ready - especially I don’t have pvp trinket for Rage’s fight and (2) I don’t know anything about the fights - I tried to read as much as I can in 30 minutes and asked another shadow priest on the group about what do I need to be aware of.

Because of these two, I felt like I’m more of a burden instead of a help. I died in Rage’s fight because I have no way to escape the ice tomb. On the Anetheron’s fight, most of us managed to get healing debuffs from the Carrion swarm. It’s just too hard, for me especially, to keep alive. For the waves, I was never sure which one is the priority to be shackled. I just tried to shackle what I could, only to find 50% of the time, my shackle is broken repeatedly. I tried to MC the necromancer (was asked to help with the CC), and found that nobody is picking it up after my MC expired, forcing me to chain-MC him and pretty much keep myself out from the whole entire fight.

Well, although I had fun on the run since I don’t mind dying repeatedly myself, I regretted the fact that I couldn’t give a better impression to this guild that has been kind enough to invite me. To be fair though, the person who invited me knows that I’ve never been in Hyjall before. But, I can’t help thinking whether I should have just said no, knowing the extend of my knowledge and capability, therefore preserving whatever “reputation” that I had instead of shattering it for being such a “noob”.

This Guardian’s Pendant of Subjugationis going to be available when S4 starts (which is in June 24). It has no rating requirement (as oppose to the ring version) with 15.3k honor points and 10 EoTS mark. Shadowpriest.com rated this neckpiece (64.99) higher than Ritsyn lost pendant (51 pts) and Pendant of Acumen (will be 61.99 for Aldor with the upcoming patch). Keep in mind however, that 24 pts of the rating comes from haste, which if you are not yet reached 1400, it is not quite 24 pts. But if you are not yet exalted with Aldor, or if you are Scryer, or if you want some extra stam for your gear, this may be a good alternative to have. For my self, I prefer passive buff instead of proc, so I am definitely going to snag this little gem

Also, there’s a rumor (wowhead) that the epic gems available with 800 honor points will not going to be unique-equipped, although it is still bop. For us shadowpriests, this is great. With just 2 days of PVP (at least hitting AV in our server), you can potentially get one Runed ornate ruby (12 spell damage). The downside though, there is no spell haste gems nor tanking gems for Val.

MMO-champion posted things that you can buy from Haris Pilton, and one of them is: “Gigantique” Bag, 22-slot bag for the fetching price of 1.2k g. And as far as I know, it’s not unique. Now the 20-slot bag in our server is about 300g. Is it worth it to get 2 addition slot for 900g extra? Probably not. But I am hoping though that with this new bag, the price of the 20-slot bag will drop *crossing finger*.

Our alliance guild is going for SSC in another week. That means my shopping list is going to get bigger and bigger. That means that I really need to get my dailies done.

1. Gem upgrades for E. She finally gotten her self a nice belt of blasting. It comes with 2 slots, one yellow and one blue. Should I gem it with 2 Reckless Pyrestone or 2 Runed Crimson Spinel? Regardless, I need to buy 8 more epic gems. With them prices around 380g, I need at least 3k.

2. Consumables. Nobody in our guild can make Flask of Pure Death or the Flask of Supreme Power yet. I need at least 3 for each week. That would set me back to around 150g per week. Do you know of any cheap flasks that I can get for SSC, something like Gruul?

3. Epic mount for Val. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. But it seems like Val is going to have to herb more and more, especially since the price of herb going up the roof nowadays. Having epic flying mount would def help to cut short the herbing round. Well, that’s another 5.2k to go.

4. At least 2 20-slot bags for Val. She just have way too many gears that she needs to lug around and she’s always run out of space. With the current price, I need 600g.

From 2.4.3 patch note courtesy of MMO-Champion:

Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen: The triggered effect from this Item can now occur on periodic damage ticks.

Please