On pug etiquette

The debate around random groups seems to hinge on the quality of the players you get: either they are rubbish, or they are not rubbish. Observers can be found at both ends of the spectrum, strenuously arguing their corner.

Honestly, I don't care about the quality of players available, except in the extreme. You can succeed in most situations with bad dps, and even bad tanks or healers do not automatically mean failure if other players in the group are skilled enough to compensate. Only the perfect storm of five idiots is guaranteed to fail, but this is a very rare occurrence. (And no smart arse ask me when I've ever been in one, thank you very much...)

In my experience, pugs rise and fall not on the skills of the players but their emotional maturity, their manners, and consideration.

I do not vote to kick bad players. They are there to get better gear, and to learn to play more effectively. I am more patient of the bad player who says 'please bear with me as I'm new to this spec' than the tier 10 jerk who zones in and goes AFK so you can earn his badges while he watches TV. This has happened to me. Many times. I vote to kick for a 10-minute DC, for wiping the group unnecessarily, for harassment of other players, and for general asshattery.

And if I had the power to summon back every tank or healer that has quit for no reason and with no warning and vote to kick them myself, I would.

But if a player can barely muster 1k dps while we are otherwise making good progress, I don't care. Clearly the bar for acceptability lies a little higher for tanks and healers, but the principle is the same.

If I think my fellow players are basically all brain damaged, I will choose a break in combat to politely take my leave and suffer the consequences.

The upcoming changes to the 'vote to kick' feature are therefore a mixed blessing to me.

While they assume that frequent vote kickers are all elitist bullies out to destroy the confidence of new players, we have no evidence of this. What if they, like me, are on a mission to cleanse the game of twats?

On heroic difficulty

We are used to a linear end-game progression route that starts with heroics and steps through each raiding tier in turn. This is essentially what happened at the start of the expansion, although Naxx proved to be such a low starting point that many people skipped heroics and dove straight in to raiding.

Subsequent patches raised the level of badges dropped by heroic bosses and consequently the level of gear available through heroic grinding. In essence, heroics become a shortcut for bypassing the conventional route of progression and spring-boarding straight to the current tier of raid content.

There's a lot to commend about this design philosophy, which gives unlucky rollers an alternative to boss drops for gearing and ensures a manageable route into raiding at any time during the expansion — good for alts and good for late bloomers. But it also, unavoidably, devalues the heroic experience by encouraging higher and higher geared players to faceroll their way through content that mostly sits, in difficulty, somewhere below Naxxramas.

So here then is a basic flaw in the philosophy — the place of heroics in the progression path keeps getting higher, while the relative difficulty of them keeps getting lower. And what shocks even an unapologetic casual player like me is that they keep making them easier.

This doesn't make much sense to me. The longer an instance is open, the bigger the pool of people who are over-geared for it gets — and current end-game design ensures there will always be a plentiful supply of over-geared players willing to run the easy instances. If Blizzard is intent on replicating the current badge system in Cataclysm, I hope they recognise that, far from working hard to ensure they are easier over time, their biggest challenge will be in keeping the instances interesting and enjoyable to all players at all levels of raid content.

New five-man instances definitely help break up the monotony of grinding content you massively over-gear. The heroic versions of the ToC and Icecrown five-mans are very well-designed instances in their own right, and at their time of introduction gave many players access to improved rewards. But there were no new five-mans with tier 8 and only one with tier 9, so in Wrath there just haven't been enough new instances to balance out the originals.

Achievements are another way that heroics have retained some attraction beyond the basic challenge of the encounter and the gear they drop, and some of the most interesting fights were the ones that — for a time at least — challenged you above and beyond the standard encounter.

So I think Blizzard would do well to learn from its successes in Wrath and stop over-analyzing the accessibility of instances. More five-mans at each level of raid content would add a stronger feeling of progress and achievement in heroic grinding while a greater emphasis on soft-trigger hard modes would serve to extend the freshness of instances at each level.

Hard isn't always bad, difficult doesn't have to mean annoying — even to 'casual' players like me.

Addon crises and epic instances

I think the to-do list definitely helped because the addon crisis, when it arrived, wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared.

DoTimer was up to its usual patch-day hijinks, plastering every single timer in existence on the screen. But instead of ignoring the problems and praying for a speedy update as I normally do, I bit the bullet and went shopping for something new. And boy, am I glad I did.

Based on recommendations on shadowpriest.com and various blogs, I installed fortexorcist. The interface is a little scary, but I quickly discovered that the addon is very simple and intuitive to customise — at least, to my level of detail.

By default, it places two bars on your screen — one for timers, and another for cooldowns. So far so DoTimer. But to customise anything you see, you just have to right click on it to open the interface; it even knows which section to open at. The options, which are many, often have useful tooltips, which are a huge help, and give you a lot of power when it comes to setting up your display. What this means in practice is it's very easy to stand in front of a target dummy casting spells and setting it up on the fly.

But it's the cooldowns display that really impressed me about fortexorcist. Instead of a huge list of yet more timers, it gives you a single timeline. The icons of your spells move along the timeline until they drop off in a flourish, indicating that the spell is ready again. You can scale this bar, have it run horizontal or verticle, and have the timers run to the left or right. It's a brilliant piece of design.

I've got my cooldowns running perpendicular to my timers, so I can easily track both in the same space (they run up the side of my timers list). This is a huge improvement on my DoTimer setup where I had cooldowns in a different part of the screen to avoid visual conflict with the timers. As one of my biggest failings is not casting mind blast enough, it will be interesting to see if this setup has a positive impact on my dps. If you promise not to faint in shock, I'll try and remember to take some screenshots tonight for use as illustrations!

The only downside I've noticed so far is a slight lag between casting a dot and seeing it on the timer list; DoTimer is completely instant.

After I'd sorted out my addons, I signed up for the new 5-mans as scheduled and trotted off to look for the entrance. I didn't know about the teleport thing. How cool is that? All that time and gold I've wasted flying to Nexus! Sadly I ended up healing, so can't tell you what's happened to my dps, but in the process of running them I managed to collect several items that pushed my haste up to around 600 with only a minimal loss of spellpower and crit. Must get to a dummy tonight to test it out.

I was a bit too focused on Grid to fully explore the new instances, but I was generally very impressed with the designs, the way they were held together by a fantastic storyline, and the way they climax in a truly epic final encounter. I never fully appreciated how intense Sylvanas was before last night. You couldn't go out with her, could you? It'd be exhausting.

But the highlight of the night? The funky porno-style music during the Bronjahm fight. Seriously, so good I nearly died humming along to it.

And I am loving the new daily dungeon quest — 10 badges for spanking Patch on 10 man? Yes please! Even better, according to today's hotfix, you can now upgrade emblems of triumph for emblems of frost. I'm not sure this is the right thing for the game, but it's certainly the right thing for me. Bring it on!

My next job is to replace ag_unitframes, a prospect that fills me with dread every time I consider it. I've heard good things about shadow unit frames but I don't think it's on Curse (I couldn't live without the Curse client). If you are all selfishly keeping the world's best unit frame addon to yourself, now is the time to take pity on me and break silence.

LF tank, last spot

The perennial tank shortage has struck Darkspear again. Pugging heroics is torture, even for the daily. And what fills me with dread is the thought of competing not only with my server for a suitable meat shield, but the entire battlegroup.

Because that's the worrying prospect facing us in the next patch when Blizzard introduces the new grouping tool. It sounds fantastic on paper, and wow.com has certainly spared no expense in singing its praises. Group with anyone, get transported automatically to the instance, and pick up a bunch of special rewards in the process. But look at the facts: take one server with a tank shortage, lump it with half a dozen similarly tank-deprived servers, and the problem grows exponentially. Has anyone done the maths on this?

The picture for healers — once in the same endangered boat as tanks — is very different. Not only do we see plenty of main-spec healers, but a decent proportion of main-spec dps have healing off-specs. On my resto shaman, I even find myself in the ludicrous position of going off-spec dps because of a healer surplus.

The duel spec facility saved healing, so why then are we still scrambling around for tanks? The same number of classes can tank as heal, and while I don't have the numbers on server populations, there must surely be a roughly even split between the two groups. There ought to be more tanks flying around than there are, even if most of them were off-spec.

What I think is that tanking is harder than healing or dps — not that all dps and healers faceroll, but the baseline for skill strikes me as much higher for tanking. And the entry bar for gear is a little higher too, so that potential tanks have to spend a little time collecting gear before they can throw themselves into heroics — moreso than healers and unlike dps who are good-to-go on the ding. And there's nowhere you can train yourself to tank, you've just got to bite the bullet and jump into an instance.

I don't know if tanking should be easier or the rewards greater. Or maybe, for the people who do tank, it should actually be harder: more challenging, not less. Either way, I don't think the problem is going to go away. I think when the new patch lands we'll see a momentary glut of tanks trying out the new instances and farming the next tier of badge gear. But if the underlying problems (whatever they are) aren't fixed, we'll be back in this position in a couple of months, but with an even greater surplus of frustrated dps.

Win

Thank you very much for your advice and encouragement. Maybe I'm not such a priestard after all :)

Owning my mistakes

Time for some naval gazing after a disastrous attempt on the Instructor. This fight is much more appealing in theory than it is in practice. Lovely idea to give priests a novel role in a raid fight but if they wanted to tank, wouldn't they have rolled a mage? Hmm?

Razuvious should be easy.

Step 1. Mind control mob.
Step 2. Cast bone shield and taunt.
Step 3. Repeat step 2 every 40 seconds.

That looks easy, doesn't it? So what's my problem?

Mistake number 1 — not watching the channel time
This is my biggest problem. A minute feels like a lot, a minute is enough to lull me into a false sense of security. A minute is longer than my short-term memory. With the taunt switching every 20 seconds, even in ideal circumstances that means the cast will expire towards the end of only your second time tanking. And circumstances are never ideal. Damage from the knife will push back the channel, the spell will break early.

Solution: drop and recast after every switch. Even if this is overly cautious, it will minimise the risk of mind control breaking during my tank time, and that's a Good Thing.

Mistake number 2 — mistiming bone shields and taunts
Something else that should be much simpler than it is. Neither priest has voice, so we couldn't should out to each other. Trying to track cooldowns while watching the channel time and picking up dropped mind controls is easier said than done. The result? Razuvious either flattens a tank without his bone shield or runs after the dps when both taunts are on cooldown. I'm sure it's easy enough to do this without voice if you're practiced and have modest situational awareness, but I fail on both counts.

Solution: get voice. Strong preference for voice-enabled priests to tank.

Mistake number 3 — terrible positioning
Ok, the big guy is running amok and flattening the dps. Clearly something has gone wrong. He's bouncing around so fast I can't even catch up to him. And there are so many damn melee I can't even see him. But I'm going to fix this, I just have to get close enough to taunt and then... and then I run out of range and mind control breaks and it's all over.

Solution: assign positions for everything. All ranged here, all melee here. If he runs at you, suck it up. If he moves, stand still.

I have to say, this boss would be much easier if the taunt worked at range. You'd be able to position the tanks a couple of feet apart and it would be much easier to see when the switch occurs. Don't player class taunts work like that now?

Also, I hate being in melee. How do you see what you're doing? How do tanks cope when mobs break loose? Do people volunteer for this job?

On a personal note, it feels very, very shit to know your raid is wiping because you — and only you — can't get the hang of something. Tanks have a huge responsibility, and while some players respond well to the pressure, and have the reactions and the sharp mind to deal with changing circumstances, these aren't qualities that you nurture in the dps. My admiration and respect go to the players who choose this path.

I can't wait to get back to ranged.

Blizzard: never ever do this to me again.

Note to self: get better

I hate Malygos. Or rather, I hate the minds that contrived to assemble so many irritating mechanics in one encounter. Just because everyone else can defeat him with no problems does not mean it is good design. So there.

Right from the start, the damn platform gives me motion sickness. It can't just be me. But I grit my teeth and prepare for phase one. It 'should' be easy, I know what needs to be done. But the sparks spawn well out of range, are hard to see, and impossible to manouver without a death knight. With all the time wasted running around trying to target the damn things, never stacking the buff, my dps is way too low. I vaguely think I need an 'Illhoof'-style spammable macro but one that checks for range too. Is that even possible?

Phase two feels a little gimmickey, but it's not so bad. I have just enough time to ramp up some damage in-between bubble hops. I even get to ride the disc things occasionally. I feel a bit like the green goblin.

Phase three is the paradigm of gimmicks, it makes other gimmicks look conventional. I can spam the fire spells, I even have an addon to track my combo points and dot stacks, but it's hard to move at the same time and even harder to keep enough focus in reserve for the shield. I fail, I die.

So I need to get better at two things:

• Dealing efficiently with sparks with minimum interruption to my Malygos dps
• Staying alive during phase three

Any advice?

Construct: the alternative bosses

Blob
Blob is the gelatinous guardian of the construct wing. The jelly of doom lurks beneath a grate in the second chamber where it ambushes unsuspecting solo adventurers as they skip back from a wipe or a failed Pipe attempt (see third boss).

Hit points: couple of thousand

Special moves:

• Wobble. Stackable debuff that causes deep despair in the affected raider. Each stack increases the likelihood of tears. Persists through death.
• Tunnel vision: aura that prevents raiders from realising they should all wait at the beginning and run back together.

Strategy: because of the effect of tunnel vision, Blob is incredibly difficult to fight. You will keep running and dying, picking up additional stacks of wobble, and may develop the urge to quit the raid. Don't give up. If you ignore him and don't react, Blob will eventually bore of you and leave you alone. This usually happens somewhere between the fourth and seventh ambush. Wobble wears off once you pass the grate safely. It's ok to cry.

Slimes
Slimes are the obsessive-compulsive spawn of Blob, driven by their neuroses to move endlessly in parallel lines across your only path to Pipe. This is a deceptively simply fight. Slimes are not capable of deviating from their tormented ritual, all you have to do is avoid them.

Hit points: n/a

Special moves:

• Lag aura. Random instant cast aura of infinite range that freezes all internet traffic long enough to lure hapless raiders to certain doom.
• Moron: curse of complacency that reduces intelligence by 110% and causes affected targets to bounce into the path of an oncoming slime.

Strategy: for this fight you need a paladin. They should bubble and run through all three lines of slime as quickly as possible. The raid should follow only when the paladin has cleared the third line, so she can resurrect everyone at the far side.

NB: Lag aura and moron may render this strategy ineffective.

Pipe
Pipe lies in wait at the top of the ramp from Grobbulus. The most fiendish of all bosses, Pipe can lay waste even to skilled groups without leaving his inanimate form. This is an environmental fight — Pipe himself, along with the platform approaching him, contains at least 17 violations of the health and safety code, including missing railings and floor markings. These won't in themselves kill you, but any one of them can send you plummeting into Blob's lair below, forcing you to repeat the first two bosses. If you can traverse this gauntlet of dangers, you will prevail.

Hit points: n/a

Special moves:

• Liquid hazard. Places random pools of slippery liquid on the ground without one of those yellow warning signs. Causes players to slip off Pipe into Blob's lair.
• Freeze frame: reduces frame rate of affected raiders to 1 and increases the spill rate of liquid hazards.

Strategy: there are two ways to approach this fight. If your guild includes an engineer, you can construct a rudimentary hand rail and mark our liquid hazards with flares. But for many guilds, this method is too slow. The alternative is to set your movement speed to walk, turn off all distractions — Vent chatter is especially dangerous — and creep forward, one tiny step at a time, making lots of painful adjustments to your trajectory to compensate for freeze frame. If you have a warlock, make sure they drop a wardrobe of summoning on the platform before they start, so you can summon people back to avoid a second Slimes run.

Coming soon: the Thaddius mini-boss, Jump.

Fast targetting on Illhoof

OK, so tell me if I'm preeching to the choir here, but I had a revalation on Illhoof this week: a targetting macro.

You know the fight? At any one time, the dps needs to focus on three different targets. Firstly, Illhoof's pet Kil'rek. Once he's dead, you can focus fire on Illhoof himself. Kil'rek respawns repeatedly so you have to switch back and forth. Every so often, one of the party is shackled by demon chains and you have to drop everything to burn these down quick. Unless it's a mage that can ice block out of it. (Can rogues use cloak of shadows?)

Switching targets quickly is critical in this fight. But this is one time your trusty tab button just isn't going to cut it, because throughout the fight Illhoof summons imps. Dozens of imps. You'll probably have one dps on them full time, but even then they will spawn en mass until it's hard to even see Illhoof, let alone taget him. You need a macro.

I had a nice one that used modifiers, so you could hit it with shift to target Illhoof, ctrl for Kil'rek etc. I was pleased as punch and I published it in this entry. Then Larry Shatzer, Jr. posted an alternative in a comment, which you can read below, and I had to come back and update it. The following macro puts mine to shame and makes me wish I did more research for my posts. But aren't blogs fabulous? I now have the number one chariot of targeting macros, and here it is:

/cleartarget
/target Demon Chains
/stopmacro [nodead, harm]
/target Kil'rek
/stopmacro [nodead, harm]
/target Terestian Illhoof

What this does is target what you need to kill. Every time. Mash it for the whole fight and you will always have the right target. I'm still in awe. Thank you Larry.

One other word of advice for shadow priests out there — bring lots of pots and use them liberally. With the constant change of focus and the need for burst damage, this is a very mana intensive fight. It's tricky knowing when to use your shadowfiend but on balance I'd say you won't have time to use it twice, so my advice is to pot early, pot often and save the fiend until Illhoof is at about 30%. I'll be writing more on the shadowfiend later, when I get my thoughts in order.

Skullcrackers to Akil'Zon: ya got nuttin bruddah

The second boss of Zul'Aman, eagle lord Akil'Zon, fell to the unstoppable force of Skullcrackers last night — after a bit of a slow start...

It was our fourth or fifth attempt of the night. Most of us were new to the boss and getting used to the mechanics, so I think we're excused.

This is a fight in which the raid takes a lot of damage and the healers can be stretched very thin. Static charges, gusts of wind and swooping birds wreak havoc at random while electrical storms every minute can quickly kill anyone slow to react. Vampiric embrace can help — the bird attacks shouldn't be an issue for a shadow priest's group — but the damage is hard enough and constant enough to require some pretty nifty healing. Nobody can be allowed to fall below 50% health. I am constantly impressed by our healers.

We collapsed on the tank to get through the electrical storms, ensuring that we were all conveniently centred when the storms struck. It's a good method as it enables you to continue dps without threat issues. If there's a risk it's that a badly times static charge before or after the storm could wipe your group, so you have to be in quick and out quick.

My own performance over the night was patchy. I finished number two on the damage metres but my dot uptime was terrible and I'm sure a better player in my gear could have squeezed an extra 50 dps out of it. On trash it's not so bad because they go down so fast. For the mobs up to Nalorakk I was even managing a sustained 700+ dps. But once a fight goes on longer than, say, 30 seconds, I can easily tie myself up in knots over spell rotations. I have to get much better at watching my timers and much faster at plotting out my priority spells. I ought to write about spell rotations; us shadow priests really have it tough compared to other casters.

Anyhoo, the beaky troll dropped a healing necklace instead of the damn mace so my search for a decent weapon continues. But I am two badges closer to the blade of focus.

Doing damage on the move

It's hard enough to stand still and dps as a shadow priest. Your dots have irregular durations, your nukes have irregular cooldowns, and your mind flay has a crappy range. Add the need to move constantly throughout an encounter and you can kiss goodbye to respectable damage. Fights like shadow labs' grandmaster vorpil and the mechanar's nethermancer sepethrea are a perennial headache.

The same thoughts keep crossing my mind while I'm running around in alarm and mashing my keyboard: I'm going to die; why does mind flay have such a crappy range; do other shadow priests struggle as much as me; I'm going to die; shit, I didn't mean to hit shadow word: death; I wish I'd rolled a lock; I'm going to die; shitshitshit.

If there's a secret to walking these encounters, I haven't found it. The best I can muster is a vague list of priorities to forget while spinning in panic.

First off, I know it's obvious but my number one priority is to stay alive. In a standard fight, that usually means managing agro while slapping the bad guy as hard as I can. I can rely on healers for the most part to take care of splash damage. Not so on mobility fights: they're not designed to be healed through; you have to move. So there's something else for me to think about besides what spell to cast next.

If I determine I am not in mortal peril, only then do I think about casting any spells. My spell rotation inevitably suffers. As a general rule of thumb I cast vampiric embrace and shadow word: pain while running, and slot in everything whenever I can. Vampiric touch is my first choice, then mind blast. Mind flay is often out of the question because of range. Only when I'm sure I'm safe and I have three seconds to spare do I even think about it.

Mana conservation goes out of the window. Even with vampiric touch up I'm not putting out a high enough dps for it to have much of an effect. On top of that, I shield, I fear, I heal, I bandage, I pot, I drop back into shadow, I spam mind blasts, I shield again, I overlap dots. Every other player is under the same pressure as me. While healers will do their best to keep me alive I can't rely on them. They may be under fire themselves, or else out of range or otherwise tied up.

Gear is a constant dilemma too: do I dress for survival or damage? I am a very fragile priestie in my standard raid gear and lack a pvp set like some. My fallback is resistance gear, as mobility fights generally involve a lot of magical damage. I've a few nice crafted fire and arcane resist items, but even stacking boe greens I can raise my stamina a few thousand and build up a hefty resistance to once school of magic at the expense of some damage. I've tried both ways but without much scientific method. My gut tells me to dress for survival if it's a new encounter or an inexperienced healer; go all out damage otherwise.

Is this a textbook strategy? I doubt it. When it comes to mobility fights, I get the feeling I'm missing an important piece of the jigsaw. They are things that deeply irritate me and I'm constantly looking for ways to get the better of them. If you have any ideas or strategies, please let me know.

The obligatory gloat post (and second thoughts)

It was to be my last jaded foray into the cavernous maw of heroic slave pens.

After months of fruitless adventuring, I had resolved to make one last concerted lunge for quagmirran's eye. If, when, it failed to drop, I would give up and spend some badges on an icon of the silver crescent. You will no doubt recognise this latter trinket as the better option anyway, which is true. But I'm saving my badges for the dagger and this would have put me back weeks.

So we rolled up to the bog lord, whipped his grassy arse, and guess what sprung up on my screen? Yes indeedy, his bulging, bloody eye! Hooraah for me! Even better, there wasn't even a mage or lock in the group to roll against me. That trinket was mine!

The first thing I did was swap out that offensively green ancient crystal talisman and skip off to grind and test the proc.

As the tooltip says, the trinket provides 37 spell damage, a nice boost of 11 from the talisman. It also has a chance of increasing spell haste by 320 for 6 seconds.

I observed it triggering once or twice a minute, which fits nicely with the 10% proc rate listed on wowwiki. And while I have absolutely no idea how spell haste works in theory, in practice it chopped .3 of a second off a 1.5-second mind blast - according to Quartz. A back-of-a-fag-packet calculation using wowwiki's equations showed the cast time to be more like 1.25, so I'm assuming Quartz rounds off to one decimal place.

Spell haste is a completely new concept to me, but it appears to provide a percentage benefit based on the original cast time — so a 3-second mind flay benefits more from the trinket proc than a 1.5-second mind blast (by approximately .5 of second if my calculation is correct). As of patch 2.4, spell haste also affects the global cooldown, but I'm not sure by how much.

So the theory is this: the proc from quagmirran's eye reduces cast time and time between casts, enabling you to cast more spells in the same time than you would without the benefit of the haste boost. But while I ran around Nagrand skinning clefthoofs for the daily, I began to wonder if my lowly talisman, a mere quest reward from hellfire peninsula, might in fact be the better trinket. Oh god, had I really wasted months of my life grinding the same, gloomy instance for no reason?

Even with the combined might of wowwiki and my maths GCSE, I'm not at all certain. Shadowpriest.com says the eye is a decent investment for my level of progression and rates it above the eye (thank you Aaron M). But it's going to take some getting used to. I don't know whether to watch for the proc and adjust my spell rotations to take advantage of it, or just ignore it and let the haste do its work without a thought. If you have any experience of haste, please enlighten me.

At least I don't have to step foot in slave pens again, although now I see how close I am to exalted I'm tempted to keep grinding away. 6000 rep equals what, another three runs? Maybe just for the dailies...

Merlot's instance etiquette

PUG is a dirty word in my guild, which has its pros and cons. With such a stigma on going out of guild, you can't always get a group when you want one. But when you do, it's marvellous. We know each other's strengths and weaknesses, we have a laugh, we are patient of real-life interruptions and forgiving of mistakes. And on those rare occasions when you pluck up the courage to break the PUG taboo, you suddenly realise how lucky you are to have such a great bunch of mates.

Of course, there's nothing inherrently wrong with random groups, especially if it's the only way you'll get to run that instance. But the bad reputation stems from the fact that a lot of people really don't know how to behave properly. The phrase 'does not play nicely with others' comes to mind.

So this is my guide to playing nicely. And I'm going to ignore the fact that people who read blogs are probably not the target audience for such advice. I need a post and this is it, so there.

Be prepared. If you come to an instance without food and water I will quit. Even if you're expecting a mage. Even if it's only pet food. Don't forget your regents. That means you too shaman. Remember those ankh things? If your armor goes red after the first wipe, I won't be hanging around for you to repair and return. If you whisper that other hunter in the group and ask for ammo, don't be surprised if they kick you. Be prepared. It only takes five minutes, it makes you look professional, and it shows your respect for the other players who have all taken the time and money to prepare too.

Know your class. And know everyone else's. Every class has a bunch of abilities that they just don't need for levelling. But when you walk into an instance they suddently become rather handy. Dropping the right totem or popping the right aura will mark you out to the rest of your group as someone who knows what they're doing. Not everyone will be familiar with your enounter though, so it's useful to know what other parties can bring to the table. Could we have aspect of the wild please mister hunter? Would you mind using curse of recklessness here please missues warlock?

Be polite. Say please and thank you. This may not be the real world but these are still real people who deserve respect. You'll be amazed how a few nice words can change the mood of a party and even improve performance. And if things go wrong don't shout and swear and stamp your feet and blame other people - even if it is their fault. What you should do is 'fess up when you cock up. Everyone makes mistakes and it's no crime to admit to them. Just say you're sorry and move on.

And be considerate. This means waiting for your mage to drink, letting your tank set up the pull (unless you've agreed an alternative strategy), asking before skinning, herbing, minig, and waiting patiently if a player has to go afk a sec.

Play for the group, not for yourself. This one is more for dps than tanks or healers. Make sure your objective is to beat the encounter, not just top the damage meters. Don't push your tank's threat, and don't waste mana on inefficient actions (warlock curses, for example: agony does damage but elements may be more beneficial with a mage in your group).

Be fair with loot. Yes, I know, this is probably the only reason you're in the group in the first place. But if you're an elemental shaman don't roll need on some hunter mail cos you'll just get a bad rep and nobody will ever play with you again. It's fair to ask if you can roll for off-spec gear if nobody else wants it. Chances are there will already be unwritten loot rules on your server but if in doubt ask the rest of the group before rolling.

Don't post damage stats. Ever. Anyone who cares about damage enough to want a printout will have their own meter. They are only useful for measuring personal performance anyway. And the total quantity of damage done rarely reflects a player's contribution to a group. Plus, only wankers post damage stats.

I'm feeling quite smug at this stage as I've just realised these are all the things that my guild do anyway. Do you think it's asking too much to expect this behaviour in a pick-up-group?

Zul'Aman mon!

I finally made it to Zul'Aman last night. All in all, it's a beautiful instance and a surprising relief to be in the open air after all those gloomy corridors in Karazhan. The bird song and frog chorus are a particularly nice touch. You know, the sounds in WoW don't usually make headlines but I'm often moved by some music or environmental effects as I potter around. There's a post in there somewhere. But I digress.

So we headed straight to the first boss, Nalorakk. The trash were enduring enough to give me a good run at them, and my dps was much better thank Kara. There's nothing worse than a mob that drops before you've even dotted it properly. I'm pushing about 600 dps at the moment, with just over 1000 spell damage. That's another tangent. I'm really unfocused today.

The last wave of trash before the boss was tough. It consists of two mounted bears and two shaman types. The bears both need tanking separately and hit hard enough to require dedicated healing. The dps were assigned to burn the shaman down first. Even with three superb healers in decent gear, the bears got lucky twice and downed a tank. We got them on the third attempt.

After that the boss himself seemed tame. It requires skill from the two tanks, who need to stay top of the threat table and juggle him as he switches forms, and it needs some good healers to keep the tanks alive. It's the ideal fight for a shadow priest, who can just stand there and mash buttons. That's just as well, because it's a reasonably long fight and mana-intensive for the healers. I blew my shadowfiend and two pots and still went out of mana at 1%. But he went down first time, much to the surprise of everyone I think. That's a first for our guild.

We called it a day after that, with homework to read up on the second boss. It's a mobility fight so not one I'm looking forward to, but it does dangle the delicious amani punisher as a possible reward.

Anatomy of a Prince

Prince Malchezaar is the big demon thing stomping up and down the ramparts at the top of Karazhan. I met him for the first time last night. It was hate at first sight.

I'm not exactly breaking new ground here so you probably know the fight. If not, go and read about it here and come back.

This is not a friendly fight for shadow priests and it took me a few goes to get to grips with the mechanics. To get close enough to mind flay you have to stand in range of the shadow nova — not normally a big issue but it's enough to kill you if you have been enfeebled. So I had to run in and out of range fairly frequently, which completely threw off my rhythm. I should be grateful I'm not a rogue, but I couldn't help feeling envious of the other casters who just stood by the door happily nuking away.

I killed myself early on in the first two attempts by running into the aoe when enfeebled. Meanwhile everyone else in the group — world-weary old hands of this fight — were proffering useless advice in raid chat, like 'avoid the shadow novas when enfeebled'. Really? That hadn't occurred to me, thank you.

The problem here, as in most situations, is not knowing what to do — it's applying it to your actions. With ambiguous BigWigs alerts going off all over the place and all the elements of the fight completely new to you it can be fairly overwhelming to a first-timer.

Misinformation doesn't help either. There was some debate about the radius of the shadow nova — opinions ranged from 30-40 yards. Now I know it's 24 (thank you wowwiki) I can use the range on my mind flay as a fairly accurate gauge and only move a few paces either way. The timing of the shadow nova was in some doubt too. To be safe, I ran out of range before enfeeble struck, and only moved back into range when it expired but if it only goes off four seconds after enfeeble I can stay in casting range and only move if I get the debuff.

All this adds up to the fact that I was off my game last night, which is never a good feeling. And some nasty business over loot left a bitter taste in my mouth. Against all expectations, the Nathrezim Mindblade dropped. I clapped my hands in glee and whooped and prayed to the gods of entitlement to nudge it in my direction. But a lock rolled higher and whipped it away. Nothing wrong with that you might think, except he already had a gladiator's spellblade. A bit of crit and +4 damage? Meh. Compare that to my current weapon and you can see while I feel more than a little aggrieved. Is luck the best way to decide these things, or should need be the primary factor? You can guess what I think. I'm down 82 spell damage and you can guarantee it will never drop for me again. Tell me I'm wrong...

Out of my comfort zone in magister's terrace

Down and out in magister's terrace

So I'd seen the reports and heard a few rumours from friends - magister's terrace, the new 5-man instance on the Isle of Quel'Danas, required a lot of strong cc. Meh, I thought, we were all in raid gear and it was a normal mode run. How hard could it be? To borrow a phrase, we were not prepared.

I went in with a warrior tank, a fury warrior, an affliction lock and a holy priest. All excellent players. We were short of cc so I ended up using mind control a fair bit. On the most part, it worked well. With maximum spell hit, and by keeping the mind controlled mob close to my body, I managed to maintain control for the spell's full duration a lot of the time. Where it started to go wrong was on later pulls with aoe mobs. The damage would break mind control and I went down like a sack of spuds.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I wasn't using mind control, I was fearing. Before the first boss, there are two groups of five that you can pull out and fear away. That all went nicely and the first boss was a push over.

Echoes of murmor
Things got tricky ahead of the second boss. There is a large hall full of mana worms. To start with, you have to pull them back into a very tight corridor. They are non-elite but hit hard and come in packs of 8-10. It took us a while to figure out a strategy - basically, I stopped hitting things and started tossing heals into the group. It was slow but it worked.

Vexallus is an arcane void wraith who does pure arcane damage (even melee). He just stands there, like Murmor, so the tank can run in to start with and you can get on with burning him down. But he occasionally spawns energy adds that do hideous damage if not killed. They have very low hit points, but once you do kill them, you get a stackable dot and a 50% damage increase buff. So the trick here is to spread the adds out among the group so the dot doesn't get unmanageable. Close to death, Vexallus starts nasty arcane blasting that will kill you rapidly if you don't burn him down quick. We wiped once on this guy, and lost both warriors on the second successful attempt.

There are some more nasty groups or four or five mobs on the path to the third boss. Some can be skipped, but some are unavoidable. At this stage, you start to see ethereals - the aoe mobs I spoke about earlier. They teleport all over the place and generally wreak havoc. At the same time, you have a succubus to deal with, seducing everything that moves, a magister dealing hideous frost and arcane damage, and numerous other mobs with knockbacks, stuns, interupts, spell locks, you name it. If you can pull them far enough back you can keep them feared. Otherwise, it's a race against time to get them down before they kill your healer.

Arena match
But we made it through with some difficulty and came face to face with the third boss, Priestess Delrissa. This is the encounter everyone is talking about, and one of the most innovative things Blizzard has done in a while. Essentially, it is a 5v5 arena match. Like Moroes in Karazhan, Delrissa will spawn with four friends chosen at random from a pool of 8. But unlike Moroes, there is no threat table. Tanking is irrelevant and, frankly, impossible. To win this fight you have to use every crowd control, spell and dirty trick in your arsenal.

To a group of dedicated pve players, this is anaethema. Every rule and tactic we knew from our pve experience went out the window. Just how do you face a group of five players who don't respond to threat? Who have more crowd control than you are used to? A team of arena players would have had no problems, I'm sure. But we wiped twice in a row because we had no strategy for even attempting the fight. In the end, we spammed fear and lucked out in the way the mobs targetted us. We banished a demon, stuck a felhound on a mage, feared and focused fire in a loose kill order - the priestess first (she heals), an arms warrior second (he hits hard), then it was free-for-all on the remaining mobs.

If you get past Delrissa, you are only one pull away from the final boss, Kael'thas himself. You walk into a corridor, turn a corner, and climb some steps you can even see him. There is just the matter of a six mob pull between you. There is a healer, two mobs with aoe, a magister, a mage guard and a succubus. Just how hard could it be in normal mode? Well, we were about to find out.

End game
Without reliable cc, there is no good way to approach this fight. Our mistake was to try and use any crowd control at all. We must have wiped ten times switching our kill order around but every way we cut it the healer pulled agro and went down hard. Mind control was a liability, as the aoe damage would break it wherever I stood. If it didn't, I couldn't drop it to backup heal. The difficulty of close-quarter fighting only added to our misery. After the second repair run of the night we almost didn't go back in but we gave it one more shot. And this time I healed. That's how we got through it - we banished the succubus, spam feared and had two healers.

This is in no way a reflection on our healer, who is outstanding. But I was one less person for him to worry about. And instead of having to heal himself, I could do it. With a few prayers of mending flying about and the odd lesser heal, we cracked it.

After that, Kael'thas was a bit of an anti-climax. The fight is a lot of fun, but it no longer seemed like a challenge. Basically, there are two phases to the fight. At first, it's a straight-forward tank and spank. During this phase, he summons a phoenix that does aoe damage and must be burnt down quickly. He turns into an egg when he dies, and the egg must be killed too or else he will respawn. The phoenix is on a timer - if you are quick, like we were, you will only get one; other groups may get two before the second phase. At this point, he channels gravity well and we all start flying through the chamber. You can still do ranged damage, but the priority is to stay away from the obs that chase you. They do nasty damage if they catch up. There is a short time where he drops gravity well and is exhausted. He does no damage during this period, and you do what you can to burn him down. You might get another gravity well. We had a second one before we killed him. Both the lock and myself died in the process. The shot above is post res :)

Conclusions
It was a relief to walk away from this one with all bosses down, but not a pleasure. For most of the run I was well out of my comfort zone, either channelling mind control or struggling to maintain some semblence of threat management on large pulls. I've run instanced with little cc before, but never one quite so unforgiving as magister's terrace. I am deeply uncomfortable with the way Blizzard clearly designed this instance to be dependent on the primary dps classes with their reliable methods of CC. There should be a sign outside saying hybrids like shammies, druids and shadow priests are not welcome. And even if there isn't as cc issue, I really don't think end bosses should be easier to kill than their trash. That's just not in the spirit of instances. Still, I am proud to say I was able to run it and clear it, despite the many wipes, and pleased to walk away with a runed crimson spinel as a reward for killing Kael'thas. I also received 'heroic countenance', which enables me to enter magister's terrace in heroic. Not that I will be rushing back any time soon.

Kara progress

Look, that's me, all shimmery and hauty...

finally, some proper Kara action. Ok, so I know going four bosses in Kara is not exactly hard-core raiding, but it's modest progress for me.

Attumen went down like a priest's nickers first time and obligingly coughed up the handwraps of flowing thought, a small but reliable upgrade to my tempest's touch. Notice the extra spell hit? I now have spell hit coming out of my ears and need to consider dropping one or two points from shadow focus. More on that another time.

We moved on to Moroes, who proved easier than I was expecting. And can you believe he dropped another nice cloth piece? This time is was a belt, the nethershard girdle. Again, it was a nice upgrade for me, but not as good as the belts I am saving up for. So I passed.

On to Maiden. Some of our group had been there before, but for others (like me) this was a new experience. It took us a long time to figure out the fight, even with the more experienced players explaining things. After four wipes, we were nearly ready to give up, but luckily we went in that fifth time and cracked it. Amazingly, she dropped the bands of nefarious deeds.

By this point I am feeling a bit giddy. Three bosses, three cloth drops, no dps competition for the gear. That never happens. I could have taken the bracers, but like the belt, I have my eye on better stuff and didn't want to ruin my loot karma.

So onwards and upwards. We hit the opera event and rolled Romulo and Julianne. I think we were lucky in this. From what I've read of the other fights, there's a little more to them than simple tank and spank. We burned these two down easy, and one of our hunters got a nice shoulder upgrade for his efforts.

And that, as they say, is that. It was late and I had an early start in the morning, so we called it quits. Next time, we'll be looking to curator and nightbane. Fingers crossed...

Death to Quagmirran and a nice offhand upgrade

I cleared Heroic Slave Pens last night in the hope of grabbing Quagmirran's Eye from the eponymous fungal giant. Sadly, it wasn't to be. My search for a decent trinket continues.

As a consolation, the five badges of justice I looted (including two as a reward for the daily quest) gave me enough for the orb of the soul eater, a nice upgrade from my saga of terokk. Once again, I find myself trading stats for damage. I can barely afford to loose that 23 intellect from the saga, but I am comforted by the fact that the orb is listed on shadowpriest.com as the best offhand in the game for shadow priests.

This takes me over 900 shadow damage, not bad for someone who has barely stepped foot in Karazhan. That's a sore point which I'll moan about another time.

Heroic or just plain stupid?

I ran heroic Botanica last night with a very good team of warrior tank, priest healer, mage and hunter.

It was the mage's first heroic. She had been put off attempting them before by some elitist jerk who told her 500 spell damage wasn't enough. Botanica is generally regarded as one of the easier heroics so I thought we'd be fine. And we were; more than fine. We cleared it with only one or two silly wipes on the trash and got all bosses down first time.

The hunter, in very good gear, topped the damage metre as you'd expect. But the mage, with about 300 less spell damage than me, came a clear second place, even while busy sheeping. And she is frost spec. It really did feel like I was a fifth wheel at times. So I wonder, is there really a place for shadow priests in heroics?

There's a chance it's just me, not all shadow priests, of course. I was a bit laggy last night and a bit sluggish to respond at times. And then there's a chance that Bot is simply not very shadow priest friendly: the fourth boss, Laj, actually resisted four consecutive attempts to land shadow word: pain, which seems a bit unlikely given that I am now spell capped.

But I doubt those things were a big factor here. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that shadow priests simply aren't designed for heroics. There are four things I think a group needs going in to a heroic:

1. a well-geared, skilled tank
2. a well-geared, superb healer
3. reliable crowd control
4. massive amounts of controlled, sustained damage

Now, with the exception of Sethekk Halls, we bring no reliable crowd control. So our role is clear — we are there to burn things down. And in heroics, where the mobs hit hard and the trash groups are big, you'd better do it quick. The problem is, more than any other class, our burst potential is poor. We rely on DOTs and a channelled spell to do the bulk of our damage. Affliction locks suffer from similar issues, but they have more nukes at their fingers and more cc functionality to balance it out. And they always have a nuke talent tree to turn to if they can't keep up. On trash, I don't always have time to build up steam. While my comrades are unloading at full throttle, I'm still applying spells.

It's a different story on boss fights, which usually last long enough to allow me to reach my full potential. But typically, the bigger challenges in heroics are the trash leading up to them. What do you think? Am I doing something wrong? Or should I accept the limitations of my class and move on? Is burst damage as important as I think it is, and what does that mean for the future of shadow priests if it is?

My place in the (5-man) world

I ran Sethekk Halls last night, giving me a rare chance to blow the dust off shackle.

Shackle undead is a priest's only means of crowd control, and it's a beauty. At max rank it will chain a mob to the spot and prevent them from causing any damage for 50 seconds. The only limitation is in the name — it only works on undead.

Most groups in Sethekk Halls contain at least one undead, so for the first time in Outland I found myself in need for more than just my face-melting abilities. And it made me realise how limited my normal contribution is to a 5-man group. Outland instances are very reliant on crowd control and so you would usually look first to rogues, mages and hunters to fill you dps spots.

Sure, I can buff. Nice to have. I can burn mobs down, but any class can do that. I can restore mana and health to the group, but in 5-mans where the mobs go down quickly, the benefits are marginal. I can even mind control, but the spell is so unreliable and is such a drain on 5-man dps that I don't really consider it viable cc. To be honest, right now my spot in a group could easily go to anyone else.

That's why I am so excited about Wrath of the Lich King expansion. A Scourge theme promises a lot more in the way of undead instances and with it a much-needed utility role for shadow priests in small groups.

And I've been thinking about ways the class could be developed to cement that spot in a group. My ideas so far:

• Shackle could be expanded to cover demons too. It certainly seems to fit with the lore. Why shouldn't masters of light have power over creatures of the underworld? This overlaps somewhat with the warlock banish ability, but I'm not sure that matters. After all, hunters can trap anything.
• Shadowform could include an aura. Don't get me wrong, shadowform is already very sweet, but I like the idea that a priest in shadow form would give off some kind of buff or debuff, perhaps a flat reduction in damage by mobs, or a small spell hit increase to party members.
• Make mind control more like enslave demon, so instead of effectively 'switching' to the mind-controlled character, it becomes a pet with an action bar and controls, leaving you free to continue to dps. The duration could be the same, or even reduced, but the reliability of the spell would have to be improved to make this a viable form of cc.
• Make divine spirit trainable. It's about time. Let all priests carry this fab little buff to the benefit of the whole group. Spec for improved divine spirit if you want.

I really don't think any of these ideas are particularly class-breaking. I want other things which probably would be — more direct-damage spells, an increase to crit bonuses and an aoe attack. I can live in hope. But I'd take any one of the things on the list above before them. What do you think? Overpowered? Underwhelming? What's on the top of your wish list for the expansion?