016: I'll keep you my dirty little secret

On a different server somewhere out there, a belf gayadin and a gay belf rogue found a private corner to unwind at the end of a long day leveling. They, in turn, where created after a long day spent leveling the resto-shammy and doing whatever Tieryn was doing that day. We were bored. We needed something new. And that male belf dance is so much fun.

This post was heavily fueled by Chidori and the Flaming Rubies.

015: ARGH. AAAAAARGH.

All I want is my Spellstrike Hood crafted. Had a guy lined up to do it via a friend, he said no problem, whenever I was ready with the mats just whisper. Friend even said he'd log onto that guys account and run a heroic to get the nether himself if it came to it. I was a happy Mana Battery. I was purring.

Crafter quit playing wow.

Right, well, gotta troll /trade to find a new guy then. Not so hard, yeah? Spend 3-4 days periodically calling for a crafter with no results. See other people doing the same thing. Finally one day I come back from afk'ing to see that somebody has infact advertised that they can craft Spellstrike Hood in the trade channel and they also have a Nether available. Great! Whisper! 0 players found! Whatever, he logged off, it happens, I'll add him to friends and he'll be back eventually.

He does come back, but I'm the polite kind and do not whisper people while they're in a raid. I wait and wait and wait and two more days pass and finally I catch him idling in Shattrah. Whisper. No reply. Wait, wait, wait, oh look he's gone afk. Fantastic.

Player comes back from afk, I whisper again. He has no Nether. No, he says, he doesn't really run heroics often either.

I JUST WANT MY HOOD PEOPLE. It took me weeks of grinding to gather all the mats now GIMME MY HOOD :[

The Raiding Shadow Priest Part I: +spell hit

Disclaimer: I only raid 10man, things might be different in 25man raids. Also, I don't know everything.

In almost every post in this blog I've been going on about my +spell hit rating. So what's the big deal really? Why is it so important? What does it do for a shadow priest?

First of all, let's look at the concept of spell hit. Wowwiki says: "The more spell hit gear a caster has, the lesser the chance an enemy will resist his spells." As the game is set up there will always be 1% chance to miss, no matter what we do. It's the remaining percentage that we're concerned about.

If you throw a spell at a mob that's 3 levels below you, your hit chance is 99%. If you throw a spell at a mob that's the same level as you, it's 96%. When you get into Karazhan and throw a spell at a mob that's 3 levels above you (or any boss), your chance to hit is 83%. That's getting a little low. Since it's obviously necessary to down mobs and especially bosses as fast as possible, it's vital that almost 2 out of every 10 spells you cast are not resisted. Any spell that is resisted is a waste of casting time and mana.

Enter +spell hit.

PvE raiding mobs marked with a skull are considered as level 73 and thus you have 83% chance to hit them. At level 70, you gain 1% hit for every 12.6 spell hit points you've gathered from gear. The theorycrafters have done the math for us and tells us that 202 spell hit rating converts to aprocimately 16% and 83 + 16 = 99. In summary: to not resist more than the unavoidable 1%, a shadow priest needs +202 spell hit. That's a lot.

Enter Shadow Focus.

Shadow Focus is a tier 2 talent in the shadow tree and has a maximum of 5 points. For each point in this talent, you gain 2% spell hit for all shadow spells. Since pretty much everything we do is shadow magic, that's one hell of a useful talent! In fact, it's imperative for a raiding shadow priest to max out this talent until they get their +spell hit going.

(The talent Focused Power also helps the +spell hit for Smite, Mind Blast and Mass Dispel, but being in tier 6 of the Discipline tree it's really not worth it IMO)

So let's say you're level 70 and have no +spell hit but you just specced 5/5 in Shadow Focus. You now have an extra 10% chance to hit with all your shadow spells, landing you at a comfortable 93%. You will need 76 hit rating in order to cover the remaining 6%, which is a much more reasonable number. Once you reach 101 hit rating, you've covered 8% and can downspec to 4/5 Shadow Focus and spend that point on something else. The full list has been posted before but I'll throw it in again:

76 hit is the cap with 5/5 Shadow Focus
101 hit before you can go to 4/5 Shadow Focus
126 hit before you can go to 3/5 Shadow Focus
152 hit before you can go to 2/5 Shadow Focus
177 hit before you can go to 1/5 Shadow Focus
202 hit before you can go to 0/5 Shadow Focus

All numbers rounded up to the next whole number.

When I digned 70 I had a puny amount of +spell hit because I didn't know what on earth it was. Once I figured it out with a little help from my guildies I set about gathering any +spell hit piece that was available to me. For example the day I realised that 2 pieces of the Mana-Etched set gave +35 spell hit was a glorious day and it got a big ol' post on this blog. (I'm still using those.) It's not easy accumulating all that hit but it's not easy to down bosses without it either, and most high-end guilds will require you to have 202 spell hit as one of your most prioritized goals. I won't say the most prioritized because guilds differ, obviously.

That said, it's not only gear that can help you hoard spell hit. Xornot's Gem Finder, which is linked to the right, lists all relevant gems at the click of a button. Any enchanter that's revered with Cenarion Expedition will be able to put +15 spell hit on your gloves. (Consider getting that instead of the +20 spell damage enchant until you've reached your cap.) There might be other ways too, but none that I'm aware of.

014: Tipping the Scales

Yesterday we headed into Karazhan again, even though we were missing some key players due to them moving IRL. We pretty much knew we couldn't take on Moroes with the setup we had, but we were hoping to farm Attumen and Maiden for loot. No reason not to, after all. We wiped though, and awesomely so. Quoth the offtank bear: "Well as long as it was spectacular, it's alright."

First time was a really bad pull of some sort and the holy priest died, can't really remember. Second time was due to the first wipe and too much time spent explaining things to those who were in kara for the first time. After a few seconds of bopping Attumen on the head, the respawn came crashing around the corner and ate our faces for dinner. Much fun! Apparantly they spawned 2 seconds before we pulled Midnight. Third wipe was cause by yours truly getting feared into some adds just as the patrol was close enough to be aggro'ed as well. Oh the timing. Fourth try - and by then we were laughing in /ra about how mebarassing this was getting - was when our borrowed off-tank went down way too fast, I think. At some point I was Divine Intervention'ed too, at an Attumen wipe, but I'll be buggered if I remember when and why. It gets hard separating the wipes after a while. At any rate, our own off-tank came on after having been stuck in traffic on his way home for half an hour, and we took down Attumen and Midnight finally.

There was no way in hell we were even going to try Moroes, and since it was getting late we decided to go for Maiden another day.

It was glorious and it was humbling. To be honest, we might have needed that. Being forced to give up on Curator last week because our DPS simply wasn't high enough was one thing - Curator is a bastard - but wiping on Attumen is a whole different ballgame. We were the guild that walked into Kara and took down boss after boss on the second or third attempt without really trying terribly hard. We had extraordinary players who all knew their classes like the inside of their gloves and who maximized their DPS as much as they could (and then there was me, tagging along as best as she could, ha). Now, we find ourselves being just like everyone else and having to really work for the kills. All of us have to polish our gear as much as we can and work hard on upping our DPS point after point. It's beginning to feel like raiding should feel like, in a sense. Or maybe I just need some fresh air and an Advil.

That aside, loot! The borrowed offtank got a nice mail helmet and I won the roll for the Handwraps of Flowing Thought. That's twice in a row it's dropped for us now:

I'm probably going to try for the +hit/mp5 gem that drops in Heroic Underbog to replace that green one, but for the time being this will do. I'm now at +116 spell hit (at the cost of losing 4 points in +spell damage), thus breaking the treshold I've been striving for. Respecced late last night and am now happily 4/5 Shadow Focus. Once I get the spellstrike set made (and gemmed) and level my enchanting one more point to get the +10 spell hit on gloves I'll be able to downspec another two points. I could not be happier with where I'm at, gear wise, right now. Yay!

013: Intermission

Blizzard is teasing me. Formula: Enchant Bracer - Fortitude dropped during a normal Steamvaults rep-run and there was much rejoycing. I danced all the way to the bank, learned the formula and cried a loud WTH when I realised that you need a Runed Adamantite Rod to actually chant it on something. Which I don't have yet and which costs a fortune to make. So dissappointed. That's yet another Primal Might I need to farm, in addition to all the shards.

Primal Mights you say? Yes, and many of them. I'm going for replacing my Mana-Etched pieces with the Spellstrike set (pants, hood). Together they give +38 spell hit, which is more than the set bonus of having two Mana-Ecthed pieces (+35), and needless to say they're infinitely better in all other aspects as well.

I'm getting ahead of myself though. First and foremost it needs to be said that, after much PUG suffering, I've dinged exalted with both Lower City and Cenarion Expedition. Picked up Gavel of Unearthed Secrets (finally!) and Ashyen's Gift respectively. Plus the tabards, of course. My damage has been considerably upped and will go up even further when I get around to enchanting the new mace. At the moment it's +759 I believe, but I can't tell without logging in as the European Armory has died a firey death and refuses to update half the toons - Tieryn being one of them. If I'm right, then the +40 spelldamage enchant will land me at +799. What an annoying number.

(Speaking of annoying numbers, my rep was at 20999 out of 21000 when we'd cleared SL and stood at Murmur's feet. Of course ol' Murmur provided the last point necessary, but geez.)

I find myself inspecting other shadow priests in-game and on the armory, focusing on those whose guilds I know are progressed, to get tips on what items I should go for to up my +hit even more. I still have 5/5 in Shadow Focus because I haven't tipped the scale yet to downgrade it by one point (101 hit before you can go to 4/5), and it bugs me that my DPS could be a lot higher if I just had more hit rating. I only have 1 point in Improved Mind Blast with my build and I'm aching to move points around. Ego posted about wishlists the other day and that's exactly what I'm running around doing. Of course most of the items are out of my reach since my guild isn't big enough to tackle 25man content yet, and won't be for some time if ever, but there's the craftables. The spellstrike which I already linked are just two of many. What I wouldn't give for Belt of Blasting, for example!

It all comes down to gold in the end. Since I'm one of those to whom it would never occur to buy gold (in the sense that I still can't wrap my head around the idea of someone else playing the game for me - what's the point in that?), I'm stuck earning it on my own. I predict a lot of primals grinding in my future, and also many trips to Netherstorm to make spellcloth. It's going to take a long, long time, but it'll be worth it in the end. In the meantime, we got stuck on Curator last week - due to losing all our imba DPSers and the new ones having just dinged 70 - so there's plenty of heroics and rep-runs to occupy myself with. And of course, the boosting/helping/shoving upwards of the 64 healadin, the 65 warlock and the 48 resto shaman. All we need now is a couple more tanks and we're rockin'.

012: Abundance

Aaaaaaaan we're back! Pulled through Attumen, Moroes and Maiden last night and it felt so good. They didn't give us much trouble either, even with 4 of us being in Kara for the first time. There was one memorable occasion though when the tank pulled Moroes and I stood at the front line to shackle my target when, for whatever reason, Moroes and his compadres decided my proximity aggro was a lot more threatening than the tanks pullspell. Have any of you experienced having all of them on you at once? If not, I can reveal that you go down very fast. Very fast indeed.

Several weeks ago I posted my wishlist from Karazhan, and amusingly, the first three items all dropped:
Handwraps of Flowing Thought
Shadow-Cloak of Dalaran
Bands of Nefarious Deeds

Me and the mini-mage duked it out for the gloves and rolled the same number. In the climatic reroll, he got 6 and I got 3, haha. But I won the cloak (which he already had) and both of us bowed out on the band in favor of the first-timer Warlock. If you exclude all my healing items, this is the first drop I've gotten from Karazhan. It's the first time ever that it's been so benevolent with offensive caster drops, though. Now all we lack is some healing plate, which we have yet to see at all. Poor healadins.


Didn't get a picture before I'd disenchanted the old one, so I'm not sure exactly how much of an upgrade it was. Suffice to say it definitely was.

Immediatly after Kara we did a guild run of Shadow Labs for rep. (15200/21000 currently) The Tree claimed he could keep us alive naked and with rank 2 spells, so it ended up being a mad DPS race were we all took aggro regularly. I topped the charts but the elemental shaman and the rogue were neck and neck the whole time. Made it a bit of a challenge for everyone and made SL not quite so boring even if it was run #285 this week, or so it feels like.

Since the Warlock was online but not in group, everything that dropped were things he desperatly wanted. Oblivion pieces, wands, etc. It all dropped. Universal law, I tell you: Every time your guild goes to a place you'd like drops from but you're not in the party, all those things you crave will drop.

011: The waiting game

Still not back in Kara. On the bright side though, I'm honored with the Wintersaber Trainers, and this morning I found an Orb of Deception in one of the ever-spawning chests at Winterfall Village. Been running around as an orc all day - shame it doesn't stack with shadowform though.



I've also picked up the Orb of the Soul-Eater, but have yet to ding exalted with LC. Workin' on it though - boosting guildies in SL for the keybits is purposeful to me as well now so it's a nice thing we have all these new people! Last week our honorary Reavers member took the plunge and left his old guild, which we've been bugging him about since we began Kara. He brought three others with him, but unfortunatly they're all DPSers. It's lovely to have backups because lord knows not everyone can be on at the same time every raid, but we're still unable to go due to lack of tank and healers. Sexy Draenei Healadin's PC is still broken and the Shammy still hasn't received her new one. Damn this technology.

Speaking of though, I was asked the day before yesterday if I'd mind respeccing if it came to it. Now I know I stated in my first post that I'm allergic to healing - and I am! I'm never more nervous and paranoid than when I'm healing - but I'll happily do it as a temporary measure for the benifit of the guild. I don't know the first thing about holy talents though, so I've enlisted the assitance of the lovely Ego to help me make sense of things. The Bear stated he'd rather go be a Tree than for me to respec (since my mana battery is much more useful than yet another DPSer) so it might not come to it, but it's better to be prepared. I'd really rather avoid it coming to respeccing and us wiping at something ridiculously easy, like Attumen, just 'cause I have no clue how to heal effectively. Heh.

In further sucky news, the only other level 70 priest in the guild, my shadow mentor, has quit wow. He's promised to still hang out on our forums so I can harass him for advice when I need it, but eh. Sad panda. Add to it that I've been sick and seemingly 90% of Norwegians on my realm are having massive connection problems lately and you've got the past week in quick summary. Sad saaaaad panda.