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  • Spiritual Guidance: Patch 4.0.6 for discipline and holy priests

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    01.17.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow and attacks hunters. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. I could have sworn the expansion only just came out, but despite the newness of it all, there already appears to be a major patch on the way. Before you get excited, though, patch 4.0.6 won't be bringing anything too new -- it's a patch aimed at balancing a lot of little things about the game. Priests in particularly are getting a lot of tweaks, and with each passing day, the pile of changes we can look forward to in the next patch grows a little bigger. Before it becomes too much to keep up with, let's take a look at it all and examine what everything means for holy and discipline priests.

  • Spiritual Guidance: The shadow priest of 2010 ... and 2011

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    01.05.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. With the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen once again in control of Spiritual Guidance, it's time for some New Year's resolutions. That means three things: spending more time at the gym, eating only low-fat gnomes, and destroying his holy-specced nemesis Dawn Moore once and for all. Anyone who's read Spiritual Guidance knows I'm a sucker for nostalgia. And for someone who loves nostalgia, New Year's is the best time of the year. From Joel McHale to Joan Rivers, everyone gets a solid 30 minutes (21 minutes with commercials) to sum up an entire year in a series of tiny snippets. Why? Because it's a great way to recap a year. If you'll allow me a moment to reflect, here are a few of the things I learned in 2010: Running out of mana is not fun, no matter how much Blizzard tries to convince us otherwise. I talked about this a little around BlizzCon 2010, but it bears repeating: I have the most awesome fans. I'm talking about people like Leigh, who gave me a huge hug. And a T-shirt. And a subscription to her website. Blizzard developers don't really get shadow priests 100%, but that doesn't mean they don't love us. Don't believe that last point? Well then, today's column is for you. Shadow priests slowly evolved through 2010, transitioning from the proverbial red-headed step child of the Ulduar and ToTC days to something today that's -- dare I say -- pretty awesome. And there's some evidence that our best days aren't behind us. They're yet to come.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Holy Priest 101, part 1

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    01.03.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. This week, I'll be continuing our healing priest 101 guides with a version for holy priests. If you're a new or novice priest who wants to heal as a holy priest in dungeons or raids, this is the guide for you. In Cataclysm, holy is one of the most versatile healers a player can choose. Our core ability Chakra allows us to switch between strong, single-target healing and AoE healing. Holy is an ideal spec for players who want to be able to heal in all sorts of different situations.

  • Spiritual Guidance: The calculus of shadow priest hit in Cataclysm

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    12.29.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Every Wednesday, the shadow specced Fox Van Allen takes over Spiritual Guidance, doing all the hard work so you don't have to. So you can spend more time ... I dunno, trolling trade chat or something. NOTE (Feb. 8, 2011): With patch 4.0.6 now having gone live, I recommend all raiding shadow priests cap at 17% (1,742 points of hit). Every once in a while in my heroic PUGs, people get talkative. That can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. It depends entirely on the person talking. See, I've learned a lot of good information about bosses and strategy from complete strangers. I don't play a warrior, so it never occured to me that disarming Forgemaster Throngus would make the encounter so much easier on the healer. It was a pretty good day when an impatient healer showed me a shortcut around the Lockmaw trash in the Lost City. And it took me far longer than I'd like to admit to notice the slipstream teleporters in the Vortex Pinnacle. But for all the good advice, there's been just as much bad advice. The worst of it came from a healer who said, in a copy-and-paste that he likely shared with every random group he was thrown in, "Cataclysm heroics are hard. If you are not hit-capped, you do not belong here. Please drop group, re-gem, and re-enchant until you are at the cap and re-queue." That's bad advice for shadow priests on multiple levels. Managing hit caps in Wrath was easy -- get to 263 (or 289) points of hit and you were done. Cataclysm is a whole different animal, though. There are a number of important hit cap numbers to know. And getting to the ridiculously high new raiding hit cap doesn't improve your DPS. But you should probably cap out anyway. Unless you're running heroics. Shadow priest hit in Cataclysm is a complex beast. Let's ... discuss.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Pre-raid gear guide for holy and discipline priests

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    12.26.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for disc and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. So you've gotten your priest to level 85 and now you want to get geared up to heal raids, huh? Not sure what dungeons to run or what tabards to wear? Not sure where to start or too lazy to go to Wowhead and find out the information yourself? Spiritual Guidance is here for you! This week I'll be listing off all the gear you can get your mitts on before you can get into raids. Before we get started, you should know that when you first hit 85, you'll only want to run a handful of normal dungeons to get your average item level high enough to queue for heroic dungeons. Those normal dungeons are Grim Batol, Halls of Origination, and Lost City of Tol'vir. The other normal 5-man dungeons only drop 308 and 316 item level gear. Once you can queue for heroic dungeons, you'll see level 346 gear in all the dungeons. Normal mode raid gear is 359, but you can get a handful of 359 gear without raiding, either through crafting, reputation, or drops. Got that? Okay, let's get to the priest-specific stuff now.

  • Spiritual Guidance: A shadow priest's guide to Cataclysm's heroic nightmares

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    12.22.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Bear is for tank! Spriest is for fite! It's time for a heartfelt confession. I think I'm done with Cataclysm heroics for a while. Don't get me wrong, they can be fun, but as of late, they've become miserable endeavors. If you're not running heroics yet, you may not know what I'm talking about. If you are running heroics (through PUGs), you know exactly what I'm talking about. An awful lot of tanks, healers, and DPSers think Cataclysm heroics are the same kind of faceroll instances that Wrath heroics were. Nothing could be further from the case. And as more and more "casual" players reach level 85, a greater percentage of players are just so terribly lost that they don't know what to do. Wipes on the first pull. Frustrating attempts on bosses with "teammates" who just don't listen. People who AoE when they should nuke. People who use AoE and ... no, no, wait! Don't attack that, it's CCed, and ... well, crud. Now we've got merchants throwing fruit at us now, don't we? Simply put, most people are just not prepared. It's forgivable, of course -- new, more difficult instances mean a new, gigantic learning curve. Even the best Wrath shadow priest can muck things up in a Cataclysm heroic. But that doesn't need to be the case! The shadow priest spec is an incredibly powerful one. Not only do we do get to churn out the DPS, but we have an incredible number of tools at our disposal to make up for the problems that PUG groups routinely face. From crowd control (yes, tanks, we can CC) to mana regen, there's an awful lot we can do to make heroics run smoother. Even if you're saddled with a group of four 12-year-olds from <Mommy's Little Accidents> trying to make the run as difficult as possible.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Gearing a shadow priest for Cataclysm heroics

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    12.15.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Your host for the Wednesday edition, Fox Van Allen, always brings you the latest in shadow priest news, the latest in shadow priest controversy, and the latest shadow priest tactics -- all with the level of maturity of an episode of Maury. After the break: a paternity test, a lie detector test, and you won't believe who we're sending to boot camp! Eight months ago, I wrote one of my most viewed and read articles here at WoW Insider. It was about GearScore and item levels. Most of us know, of course, that each weapon or piece of armor we equip has a numerical value behind it that approximates how powerful it is. Back then, far too many people were using item levels and GearScore as the sole arbiter of who could and couldn't team up with them in pickup raid groups. Sorry, you seem like a lovely person and all, but I've determined your entire worth as a raider boils down to a four-digit number. Unfortunately, the four-digit number assigned to your worth is slightly lower than the four-digit number I arbitrarily came up with as the requirement to participate in the outdated raid content I wish to be carried through. In the piece, I explained that item levels and GearScore provide you with a general idea about whether or not a piece of gear is good, but in the end, having the right stats matters more than item levels. That still holds true in Cataclysm -- stats matter. An item level 333 blue can be better than an item level 346 blue. Despite that, though, measures of your "gear score" matter more than they ever have before. Cataclysm instances and heroics are gated behind strict minimum average item level requirements. Blizzard has become that guy. We won't spend our time today discussing whether that's right or wrong; instead, we'll be productive gamers and figure out how and where to get gear to clear that item level requirement, get yourself into heroics, and eventually, get yourself ready to raid.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Early Cataclysm for shadow priests

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    12.08.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. The cataclysm is now, and Fox Van Allen demands you take sides! Do you stand with Team Fox in rejecting gnome shadow priest alts for now and all eternity, or do you, like, have a stupid little tea party with gnomes, sparkles, and fairies vomiting rainbows all over the damn place? Cataclysm is here! Cataclysm is here! That's not exactly anything new, though -- it's been here for at least 36 hours now. Which means, of course, that I've been awake for well over 36 hours, playing World of Warcraft the whole time. Here are some fun facts about my current state that I've been able to glean from the internet: After 17 hours without sleep, people behave similarly on tests as those with blood alcohol levels of 0.05. After 21 hours, people test similarly to those with blood alcohol levels of 0.08. Minor halluncinations typically begin after 36 hours, with visual hallucinations appearing at around hour 60. But hey, I know you're not here to listen to me babble about what appliances in my house keep talking to me and what they keep saying. You're here because you're doing the same thing I am -- feverishly leveling that shadow priest of yours from 80 to 85, and quite possibly, starting a new goblin or worgen. And you want information. How exactly do these shadow priests work in Cataclysm? That's what this column is all about: all the basic information you'll want to know for that epic grind to level 85.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Building your shadow priest alt, point by point

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    12.01.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. The Shattering is now, and Fox Van Allen demands you take sides! Do you stand with Team Fox in rejecting gnome shadow priest alts for now and all eternity, or do you, like, have a stupid little tea party with gnomes, sparkles, and fairies vomiting rainbows all over the damn place? As you'd expect from a class that (now) stacks intelligence, we shadow priests are a classy sort. To prove this to my oft-skeptical bosses here at WoW Insider, I thought we'd start today's Spiritual Guidance with a little bit of class and culture. As such, I present to you, while sipping on a martini with pinky out-turned, a poem courtesy of our old friend Dark Cleric Duesten: A Forsaken priest is a curious beast, her path an unusual course. Her shadowy rites cannot come from the Light, so she seeks a more sinister source.That's about as poetic as I'm willing to allow Spiritual Guidance to get -- we don't want this column turning into Frasier. I did have a reason behind today's poetic opener, though: The quote is just the tiniest sampling of the thousands of new quests that were put into the game last week. Cataclysm is still a week away, but if you're just twiddling your thumbs waiting, you're missing out on some of the best parts of the new expansion. These two weeks between "The Shattering" and the release of Cataclysm are prime alt-leveling time. Sure, you can't be a goblin priest yet, but you can be a tauren or (ugh) gnome priest now. You can even reroll a race you've already played to enjoy a whole new experience. I spent the last few days leveling a Forsaken shadow priest from scratch, and it's just so much fun (once you get past that bugged first quest). There's much more flavor to be had on this go around -- it's just an incredibly enjoyable experience. I primarily play Alliance, but there's still no denying that there's something bizarrely satisfying about killing an already dead Marshal Redpath and then eating his corpse. Whether you're taking on the roleplaying challenge of a tauren shadow priest or crawling your way out of Deathknell as an undead seeker of the ... sinister source, you'll need to know where to put all those valuable talent points on your way to level 85.

  • Spiritual Guidance: New priest races and racial traits in 4.0.3 and Cataclysm

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    11.29.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests. She enjoys grating carrots. So 4.0.3 is out now, and all the little Holycows are running about Mulgore, grazing on the succulent young grasses. Pocketheals the gnome priest is strafing across Dun Morogh, avoiding those who would punt her. If you haven't heard, 4.0.3 has made it so that tauren and gnomes can become priests now. In another week, we'll also be able to play worgen and goblin priests too! That means every race in the game but orcs (poor orcs) can now be a priest. That makes it a good time to talk about racial traits for priests then, doesn't it? So if you want some extra insight on making that new priest you've always wanted, hit the jump. And if you don't want a priest, maybe you should reconsider that, huh?

  • Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest addons for a post-Cataclysm world

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    11.24.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. In the spirit of the Thanksgiving Pilgrim's Bounty holiday, the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen has been pondering that which he is thankful for: a broken (but new!) world, a constant supply of minds to flay, and his Joan Rivers-esque good looks. When I heard for sure that patch 4.0.3a would be hitting yesterday, I immediately thought to myself, "What kind of information about the post-Shattering world will shadow priests need to know?" The idea was to create a great big article all about those changes so that everyone would be prepared. But here's the thing -- all the major Cataclysm changes happened to shadow priests in patch 4.0.1. Patch 4.0.3a is almost all about changing the world around us (and also about nerfing warlocks). There are a few spriest-specific changes worth noting, but they're largely passive: Vampiric Embrace has been nerfed, as discussed a few weeks ago. We now only get 6 percent of the damage we deal back as self-healing, down from 12. Ouch. Our mastery has been reworked. Casting Mind Blast (with a Shadow Orb active) now procs a non-stackable, 15-second buff, Empowered Shadow. It increases the damage of shadow DoT spells by 10 percent (base), plus 1.25 percent per point of mastery. You should be experiencing close to 100 percent uptime with that buff. Our talent tree has been reset, mostly due to tinkering in the non-shadow trees. This is my preferred, crowd-control-free talent tree for your last few days at level 80. If you found yourself unsatisfied with the damage you were doing in 4.0.1, these few changes are probably going to leave you wanting. You'll need to find some other way to boost your damage or manage your spec, and there's really only one foolproof way of doing that (aside from practice, of course): addons.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Priest PvP concerns in Cataclysm

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    11.21.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests ... at least, when she's not AFK. A couple of weeks ago, I promised that I'd return to priest PvP once the PvP-related problems on the Cataclysm beta were resolved. Things still aren't perfect either for balance or testing, but I have more information now than I did two weeks ago, so I'm willing to take a stab at it ... /bleed. Or take a stab in the kidney or something. Overall, I'm going to say things aren't looking too great. I don't think you should panic, granted, but things are pretty rough for priests right now. Mana is a nightmare, options for spell selection suffer due to mana restraint, dispels are essential but you can't afford to cast them, and interrupts and crowd control run rampant. I'll elaborate on all of these in a bit, but before I get started, I want to take you guys back to December 2008. Wrath had just come out, and the start of Season 5 was on everyone's minds. When at last it came, there was a deafening thunder as tens of thousands of priest bodies crashed lifelessly to the ground. Playing a priest was like not playing at all because of how fragile we were (unless you were one of those cheap holy priests who exploited the Glyph of Spirit of Redemption for a short while.) The outcry from the community was one of the more unified responses to priest class balance I have ever seen, as both novice and gladiator turned to Blizzard and screamed a resounding, "WTF?!"

  • Spiritual Guidance: Cataclysm heroics vs. Wrath heroics

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    11.17.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Fox Van Allen, your shadow specced host for the Wednesday version of SG, once again finds himself suffering from an IRL version of Devouring Plague. This means three things: 1.) This version of SG was written under the influence of cough syrup; 2.) this version of SG is likely to be a disjointed mess; and 3.) Fox fell asleep on the keyboard three or four times in the middle of writing it. This past weekend, I've been playing around a little bit with my druid. It's the first I've really played it since patch 4.0.1 went live, and it's really amazing how much has changed. I'm casting Wrath to buff Starfire, and then I'm casting Starfire to buff Wrath. There are a couple new "faux power auras" to learn, too. I kind of like the new mechanic, but the feel of it is just so different than what I was used to back in the days of yore. (For those keeping track, "yore" means, like, September.) Shadow priests are somewhat fortunate in that our spec worked well enough in the world of patch 3.3.5 that it didn't need some kind of Lunar Eclipse/Solar Eclipse gimmick. Cataclysm plays a lot like patch 4.0.1, which plays a lot like patch 3.3.5. That doesn't mean there aren't notable differences in the way the game plays, though, especially when it comes to something so seemingly familiar as your daily heroic.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Levels 80 to 85 as a priest, plus recent beta changes

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    11.14.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests and makes the occasional StarCraft 2 reference. If you ask her, she'll tell you disc priests are like sentries and holy priests are medevacs. There is a lot to cover in Spiritual Guidance this week, so I'll be diving right in to the content. I was going to outsource my creative introduction to Mr. Fox Van Allen, but he wanted to be paid entirely in red M&Ms, so we'll just have to do without. We'll be covering two topics today. The first will be to cover the latest build released on the Cataclysm beta earlier this week. There were some large changes made to AoE healing that affect both holy and discipline priests in different ways. Second, I've written up my advice on leveling from 80 to 85 as a healing priest.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Does Cataclysm spell the end for Vampiric Embrace?

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    11.10.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Your host for the Wednesday version is, as always, the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen, who has recently leveled his blogging skill to 525. Rejoice, readers, for this means Fox has finally gained access to that most elusive of blogging tools: Formula: Oxford Comma! Mea culpa! Last week, during a Spiritual Guidance mailbag session, I talked about some of the more recent changes to shadow priests in the Cataclysm beta. I was all like, "Blah, blah, blah, Mind Spike; blah, blah, blah, Inner Fire." I was feeling pretty damn proud of myself for summing everything up into a mere couple of hundred words until someone asked, "Uh, what about the Vampiric Embrace nerf?" It's a damn good point -- I was running down my list of the most recent changes, and I totally skipped over the nerf to VE. I shouldn't have, though. It's a huge change. A change massive enough to deserve its own column.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Healing heroic Cataclysm dungeons as a priest

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    11.07.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for disc and holy priests, and also likes to knit gloves as presents. Can Fox Van Allen make you a pair of gloves? I intended to write about holy and discipline priest PvP in beta this week, but after spending a few days trying to test out battlegrounds, I think I'd do well to give Blizzard more time to fix things. Between the 100,000-damage rocket blasts in Strand of the Ancients one-shotting players, and randomly getting ported to The Barrens when you're dead wrapped in plastic in Twin Peaks, it all just seems too buggy to fairly assess right now. While we wait for the developers to finish tidying up the battlegrounds and PvP, I figured we could tackle something in the beta that has stabilized for priests: heroic dungeons! Pretty exciting, huh? Yeah, that's what I thought. Word on the street is that heroic dungeons in the Cataclysm beta are way overtuned and bordering on the difficulty of pre-nerf heroic dungeons in The Burning Crusade. While I can't personally deny or confirm the latter statement (I was slow in leveling), I can tell you that heroic dungeons in Cataclysm aren't that bad.

  • Spiritual Guidance: Beta patch 13221 and holy priests

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    10.31.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for disc and holy priests, and makes a delicious Thai curry, which she used to defeat her morally bankrupt, shadow priest rival, Fox Van Allen, at the WoW Insider Thorium Chef cook-off. Granted, Fox was disqualified for the illegal use of ground gnome in his lasagna. BlizzCon 2010 is over, and that means it's time to get back to work. I'll let you guys know, though, that I definitely did a lot of healing priest advocacy while at the convention. I even met a Blizzard developer who works on trash and critter spawning. So if we're lucky, we'll see a fox spawn nerf, and skunk spawning will get its long-needed buff. Anyway, the Cataclysm expansion is just a little over a month away and testing on the beta has gotten pretty serious with all the new raid content available. There's also a new patch being tested on the beta that should interest holy priests. Join me after the jump, and I'll fill you in on the details.

  • Spiritual Guidance: What few shadow priest highlights BlizzCon 2010 could scrape together

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    10.27.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Even weeks when your shadowy messiah, Fox Van Allen, is nursing one heck of a headache -- along with, presumably, everyone else who's still suffering from the non-stop party atmosphere of BlizzCon 2010. Let's start by saying that BlizzCon 2010 was an absolute blast. I met most of the WoW Insider crew, got to smell Mike Sacco's hair yet again, got some amazing swag and got to eat at Jack in the Box no less than five times. The best part, though, was probably meeting Orkchop (pictured above with WoW Insider's moonkin blogger Tyler Caraway, who can only aspire to be as amazing as Orkchop). The dude is an internet celebrity. For real. But enough about how awesome Orkchop is. Let's talk shadow priests, and how awesome they are. Now, I'm not good at sugar-coating things, so I'll just come out with it: BlizzCon 2010 was pretty disappointing in terms of World of Warcraft-related content. The biggest news out of the convention was the new loading screen for Cataclysm. Really. That was the big news. Seriously. And it's just a palette-shifted version of the Sindragosa loading screen. Despite the lack of earth-shattering news, I made sure to take note of all the shadow priest action. There wasn't a heck of a lot of it, but what little ground was covered was hugely important to the future of the spec. The good, the bad and the non-answers -- we'll go over it all after the break.

  • Spiritual Guidance: BlizzCon players tell about their first priests

    by 
    Dawn Moore
    Dawn Moore
    10.25.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for disc and holy priests. This week, Dawn and her shadow priest rival, Fox Van Allen, faced off at the WoW Insider reader meetup in a battle of quips, and it would seem that Dawn came away victorious. Originally this weekend, I had planned on writing a direct address to Blizzard concerning holy priest healing and mana in beta raids. The topic has been a large area of concern for priests on the forums lately, and I thought I should give the discussion a little boost by addressing it in my column. However, I am currently at BlizzCon 2010, and I happened to get the opportunity to talk to Ghostcrawler (lead systems design) in person for a few minutes. During that time, I relayed the general message of our problem (HPS is jank, mana needs work) and figured I'd give the Blizzard developers a week to attend to it before assailing them with complaints. Until then, I ask that my fellow priests not panic for a little while longer. In the words of Toby, who is pictured above, "Keep the faith!" By the way, I'm starting a donation fund for BlizzCon 2011 to buy Ghostcrawler a fedora. Ghostcrawler would look awesome in a fedora. Anyway, to tide you guys over until then, I figured this week I would attempt to entertain you all. At first, I thought I might try to be humorous, and then I remembered I'm not funny. (A priest walks into a bar and ... yeah, I got nothing.) So instead, I've decided to go with priest story time. Hit the jump to see what I mean.

  • Spiritual Guidance: The ups and downs of the 4.0.1 shadow priest

    by 
    Fox Van Allen
    Fox Van Allen
    10.20.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Your shadow-specced host Fox Van Allen encourages you to enjoy this, the Wednesday shadow version of Spiritual Guidance, for the world may end tomorrow night when he and Dawn Moore meet in person for the first time. Matter and anti-matter will collide, but with what result -- complete annihilation ... or karaoke? For a few brief hours on Oct. 12, when patch 4.0.1 first went live, shadow priests were gods. That's what it felt like, anyway. It was an interesting aligning of the planets: Shadow priests (and really, most spellcasting classes) were churning out impressive DPS numbers. Melee classes were lagging far behind, underpowered. Such imbalance was destined to be short lived, but it was damn nice while it lasted. Patch 4.0.1 was -- and still is -- an unpolished work in progress. There's still a lot of rebalancing going on, and that often means, unfortunately, getting hit with nerfs. We got hit with a couple of them, and they both concern Shadow Word: Death. We'll talk about that -- and about the reality of 4.0.1 mana regen -- just beneath the fold.