Inertia

If it's possible to roleplay mental illness I'd say Merlot is bipolar. A month or two back, with a string of Kara kills and a trip to Zul'Aman under his belt, all was rosy. Now things are slacking off, guild events have dried up and everyone seems to be focusing more on their alts.

It would be tricky to put a finger on a single cause of the malaise, but a couple spring to mind. Our guild has been slow to react to a general sense of impatience among the better-geared players with a lack of progression. If you mix and match your dps for Kara runs, you'll inevitably find yourself treading water. And any attempts at progress generally take place at the weekend, which is reserved for my partner.

So what happens? People grow bored and switch their focus — perhaps they respec because they find themselves grinding or turning to pvp. Or perhaps they role an alt because it's more rewarding than standing around in Shattrath trying to pug a tank for a heroic.

The upcoming expansion also looms over us and contributes to a growing restlessness with the end game. On the one hand, I think people are excited and impatient for new talents, spells and content. On the other hand, the prospect of levelling multiple characters to 80 is pretty daunting — particularly if some of them aren't even in Outland yet. I've still not got all my alts to 70, and I think this alt anxiety is driving a frenzy of alt levelling on my server.

So Merlot is in a funk. Badge grinding has dried up and I've nothing to focus on that doesn't involve killing Prince or Nightbane. It's all very depressing. I've even respecced my very casual shaman to resto for a challenge. Can you imagine it, a shadow priest on a healer? It's anathema. I need a way to get back into the game and pronto. What's the roleplaying equivalent of a mood enhancer?

Should buffs scale?

At level 64, shaman get the delicious wrath of air totem. This stick of goodness increases spell damage and healing by 101. When my elemental shaman got this baby at 64, he had only a couple of hundred spell damage; this totem alone bumped it by a mega 50%. As I'm pushing 1000 spell damage at the moment wrath of air would give me a respectable 10% increase. Our raid healers would be lucky to get a 5 or 6% increase to healing.

At level 70, a talented prayer of fortitude will increase your stamina by 102, conferring 1020 hit points. To a mage with 7000 health, that's a very sweet improvement of nearly 15%; to a warrior with 13,000 health, it's less than 8%.
Do you see where I'm going with this? There are a plethora of buffs out there that just don't scale very well for end-game content. In general, the better your gear, the less useful the buff. Just ask a raiding druid what they think of mark of the wild...

This isn't the case with everything. A beastmaster hunter's ferocious inspiration, while only a temporary buff, increases all damage by 3% for its duration. Compare that to a marksman hunter's trueshot aura, which provides a flat increase to attack power alone.

I wonder if buffs should more consistently scale. What would be the harm of using percentages instead of flat numbers?

I suppose you could argue it doesn't make any difference. Blizzard has tuned instances to the capabilities of the classes as they are now. If buffs were to get more powerful over time, instead of less, they'd simply retune the content to arrive at the same balance.

But it does seem more in keeping with the idea of end-game progression that characters should get more powerful, not less, over time.

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?

Managing threat

To play a shadow priest is to walk a tightrope between life and death. Well, it's not always a tight rope. Sometimes it's a very loose rope, and sometimes it's only tied at one end. So it would be more like a rope ladder, and you'd be clinging to it rather than walking. At any rate, to play a shadow priest is to spend a rather lot of your time contemplating all things rope-like in an attempt to balance your threat with that of the tank. Threat is the price of our Faustian bargain with the shadow and it is our constant companion.

In full flow and under optimal conditions you are a threat battery. It's an unavoidable part of playing a shadow priest and one which you'll need to master if you are to avoid getting squashed twenty seconds into every encounter. Admittedly, it's something I'm still working on...

What is threat?
The first part to mastering our threat is to understand it. Basically, threat is a measure of an NPC's aggression towards player characters. Under normal circumstances, NPCs keep a 'hate list' of people with threat towards them and attack the one at the top of the list. But they don't switch targets the instant one player's threat tops another. There is a buffer, or more accurately, two buffers, depending on how close you are to the mob. In melee range, the mob will switch target when one player's threat exceeds 110% of the threat of its current target; at range, the mob will switch target at 130% of threat.

We build threat through the actions we take while in combat, and we can conveniently lump threat into two types, so I can use some bullet points and break up this big chunk of text:

• Damage threat — if you hit a mob, it will naturally be unhappy about it. One point of damage equals one point of threat. This threat applies only to the target of the attack. Just being in the vicinity of a mob does not cause threat — it simply places you on their threat table with a threat of zero.
• Beneficial threat — threat caused by beneficial things, which most commonly means healing and mana regeneration. This is calculated at a rate of .5 threat for every point or health or mana returned. This threat is divided equally among all of the mobs that are aware of you. So if you heal a tank that is being attacked by 5 mobs for 100, you will generate 50 threat or 10 threat per mob. It's this amorphous threat that usually causes stray mobs to peel off and hunt you down.

Of course, there are many things which can affect these basic figures — talents and spells that can both reduce and increase the amount of threat you generate, special moves and abilities with bonus threat values, and NPCs with special moves that either alter or ignore the order of threat against them. We'll come onto these later. This is just the basic mechanic of threat. It's also worth pointing out at this stage that you can never have negative threat on a mob.

How do I generate threat?
So shadow priests face a triple whammy of threat from the damage, healing and mana regeneration we put out. Often, this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that over-healing generates no threat, nor does mana regeneration for non-mana users. Nonetheless, you will be generating considerably more threat per point of damage than any other class in your group — except, hopefully, the tank. This is especially true in fights with aoe damage, such as my nemesis Quagmirran in Slave Pens. In a worst-case scenario, with four other mana users in your party and all players taking splash damage, you will be generating threat before modifiers of:

damage done + (15% of damage done/2 x 5) + (5% of damage done/2 x 5) = 150% of damage done
(somebody please show me how to write that in a sensible equation)

On top of your standard dps spell rotation, also bear in mind the following things:

• Mind flay apparently carries a threat 'bonus' — probably because of the snare effect — although I have been unable to discover how much.
• Shadow word: death does no additional threat. However, in a threat-sensitive fight, if you heal the damage done by the spell's kickback through vampiric embrace it will clearly add to your agro. Similarly, the healing from prayer of healing, should you trigger it, counts towards your threat. It's sometimes better simply to remain at full health.
• Power word: shield generates about half the threat of healing per point absorbed. Not that this shitty little bubble is going to make a difference in heroics. But if you can spare the mana, it will help mitigate the damage of pulling threat by giving your healers a slightly bigger cushion and minimising the gap your tank has to make up.
• Power word: fortitude and prayer of fortitude will generate threat if cast in combat. I think it's roughly the equivalent of healing the amount of hit points the spells provide.
• Mind control has a bonus threat value. Don't ask me how much it is. It's big though. It's like you kicked them in the nuts and called their mother a ho.
• Spell resists don't apply threat, but they put you on the target's threat list. So if that mind soothe is resisted, your tank better be ready to jump into action.

Threat control
Threat management for all dps classes starts with the talent spec. Every raiding shadow priest should have three points in shadow affinity, reducing your threat by 25%. This isn't the best threat reduction talent in the game but it's better than nothing.

The next thing you should do is download a threat metre and keep it up to date. I recommend Omen (get the latest version from files.wowace.com). Threat metres give you a visual representation of threat in real-time and provide alerts when you reach preset thresholds. Preferably, all players in your group should be using the same metre; at the very least, you should ensure your tank is.

Know the encounter. Some fights are very threat-sensitive. Mobs may have abilities that wipe the threat table, deliberately target players who are second in threat, or not have threat tables at all. Get a more experienced player to explain the fight first or read up about it in advance on sites like wowwiki.

Play intelligently. First of all, give your tank a break and let them get a head start. Paladins are very good at top-loading threat so you shouldn't need to worry so much with them. Make sure you have an established kill order and follow it. Focusing fire on a single target helps the tank keep ahead of you on threat. If you go around dotting anything that moves you can't blame the tank if you wind up dead. Alter your spell rotation according to the encounter. Vampiric embrace is a spell you can often do without, and it will save you a considerable chunk of threat. Dropping mind blast and shadow word: death will reduce your spike damage and make your threat more predicable. And if aoe threat is an issue, dropping vampiric embrace will ensure that all your threat builds up on a single target, although you'll run out of mana pretty quickly if you go down this route.

You can also benefit from a couple of party buffs if grouped correctly. If you're lucky enough to group with a paladin, always ask for a blessing of salvation. This little gem reduces your threat by 30%. And a shaman can sometimes drop a tranquil air totem in threat-sensitive fights. This is a tricky one though because it affects the whole party in range, effectively cancelling out any threat-reduction gains if it falls on the tank too. In raids it's not so bad, because you probably won't be in the main tank group, but in 5-mans it's usually unworkable.

Finally, there's also a cloak enchant called subtlety which reduces your threat by 2%. The enchant is available from Thrallmar and Honour Hold and requires exalted reputation and the mats are not that bad. It's the only decent enchant for the slot anyway so you have no excuse not to get this.

If you do find yourself with too much agro, there's not an awful lot you can do about it. Clearly, the first thing to do is stop attacking, but with your dots still running this will be of limited value. Your main fallback is the rather controversial ability fade. The tooltip for this spell reads "discourages enemies from attacking you" which is misleading at best. What it actually does is reduce your threat on the tables of all mobs who are aware of you by a fixed amount; at rank 7 this means by up to 1500 (remembering you cannot have negative threat). This lasts a paltry ten seconds, after which time the 1500 threat is returned. To start with, there's no guarantee that fade will work — sometimes, you remain at the top of the threat list even after the reduction. And if you and your party don't deal with the situation within the time limit — either by killing the target or re-establishing proper threat — it could come straight back to you. The other problem with fade is what happens to the mob once you shake it off. It might turn back to the tank, but the healer could well be the next person on the threat list. That makes using it in tight spots a gamble that sometimes isn't worth taking. Either way, this is not a spell you should rely on for managing threat.

Certain items can also provide a temporary threat reduction, similar to fade. These are on-use effects and come with a cooldown of a few minutes each. The hypnotist's watch and spore-covered drape are two very easy items to get hold of, while the jewel of charismatic mystique drops from grandmaster vorpil in Shadow Labs. With no spell damage, they will gimp your dps but not by nearly as much as dying.

Finally, the shrouding potion will reduce your threat by about the same amount as fade, only permanantly. The potion is craftable by alchemists and the recipe is available from Sporeggar with exalted reputation. Unfortunately, it shares a cooldown with mana pots, making it less than desirable for the oft-thirsty shadow priest. (Thanks to Grayhammer for some of these tips.)

The last drastic recourse available to you for ditching threat is death. That's one sure way of wiping the threat table. Clearly, this is not a practical (or affordable) approach to maximising your contribution to the party on a regular basis. However, with the use of a soul stone or druid's combat res it is possible to deliberately go all out on damage knowing you will be given a clean slate after death.