a Darkened Soul

Patch 3.2.2 is being released today and they are a couple of lovely shadow priest buffs in there including added benefit to spell power from spirit, spirit tap proccing from Mind Flay crits, and Glyph of Mind Flay no longer reduces the speed debuff.

Here is a link to the patch in case you are having trouble downloading it from Blizzard Patch 3.2.2 Read the rest of this entry »

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As many of you have probably noticed by now, I am taking a short summer break from WoW. I still log on occasional to say hi and check the AH and such, but after raiding so hardcore for months trying to get hard modes down before 3.2 came out, I got a little burned out.

As to be expected when you have kids and other responsibilities outside of the game, I need to take a little time off to finish some things I have procrastinated on and spend some quality time with the fam. I still check the site daily and answer and questions asked of me so feel feel to email, comment, or Twitter me if you have any topics that you have questions or just want to discuss.

Just because I’m taking a break doesn’t mean I am not keeping up with everything or that I am not interested in WoW anymore.

Thanks for being understanding and I am sure I will be back posting in not too long.

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Customizing your UI FTW!!!!

Sometimes even the best gaming companies do not have the time to make every feature kick ass. The developers at Blizzard deliberately designed World of Warcraft to be almost infinitely customizable through modding, so that they would not have to try to make each player happy with a single way of doing things. Read the rest of this entry »

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As many of you have learned, we will be reducing the duration of flask effects so that they only last one hour. However, all recipes that create flasks will create two instead of one for the same material cost. Additionally, we will be increasing stack size from 5 to 20 as we anticipate players will need to carry more flasks at a given time. Vendor value for flasks has also been reduced to keep the auction house deposit low.

Our goal with the change was to allow players greater flexibility when determining how long they plan to raid, as currently we were seeing many players balance time spent raiding around flask duration. We also anticipate that this change will make using flasks in dungeons and battlegrounds a more reasonable decision for players. Though this change will not occur until patch 3.1.0, we wanted to give as much advance notice as possible in case some of you who are stockpiling flasks would prefer to wait to do so until the change is implemented.

We realize players who currently have stockpiled a lot of flasks may feel like they will lose money with this change, since their current flasks will only last for half as long once 3.1.0 goes live. To partially remedy this, we are going to allow players to exchange any current Northrend flasks (Flask of the Frost Wyrm, Flask of Stoneblood, Flask of Endless Rage and Flask of Pure Mojo) for two flasks with the shorter duration. Flasks from older content will not be grandfathered in, and going forward, it will only be possible to make the flasks with a one hour duration.

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Chef Chuck is back and on the menu today is Snapper Extreme. This tasty treat is great for getting you to hit cap when you are just a bit low. Currently the highest level gear for shadow priests is lacking a lot of hit so I personally have been sitting about 32 short of my 288.5 and using this food to make up for the difference. In addition you get the always present stamina buff and restoration of BOTH health and mana. Which is nice is you are running something without a friendly neighborhood vending machine around (mage).

This food is made using 3x Bonescale Snapper and 1x Northern Spices. Bake at 350 degrees for 45minutes.

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These days not many priests PvP as shadow due to lack of survivability and useful weapons. Why choose shadow when disc is so powerful and fun at the same time? Well there are some amazing new talents and abilities coming to shadow in 3.1 that should spice things up. Read the rest of this entry »

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Well its been over six months since I last posted which means I’ve probably lost most if not all of my reader base. But I’m back and better than ever. My daughter was born last year and I have adapted her into my WoW schedule finally. Chuckenorris is now an extremely geared out level 80 raiding shadow priest. I have also leveled my warrior Struggler to 80 and I’m currently working on getting him defense capped so he cant tank in raids. Now that the reintroduction is over, I can get back to bringing you the most up-to-date info and news for shadow priests on the interwebs. So stay tuned and dont touch that dial.

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Long before there was beta, when alpha still reigned supreme, there was a foretelling of great magnitude that shook the foundations of everything we hold true. It was written that in WotLK, Vampiric Touch would be nerfed to 2.5% of damage done converts to mana for party members, down from 5% in TBC. For the longest time I wondered why? Was it something I did to upset the shadow gods? But just as I had given up all hope for retaining my raid spot over mages and warlocks, we find out that Blizzard’s testing shows that the increased damage output along with abilities to conserve and restore your own mana, gives more overall mana to party members. Could this be true? Possibly, but we have been lied to before. The only thing that could redeem Blizzard in the eyes of the people would be some kind of miracle. And behold, from behind the third wall comes a glimmer of hope. A recent blue post states the very real possibility of raid wide mana regen! While this has not been implemented in the beta as of yet, it does conform to many of Blizzards major class overhauls already in the beta: raid wide pally auras, raid wide hunter aspects, and many more. Blizzard goes on to say that they want to make it so different specs of the same class are not required for a raid, i.e.- CoH Priest and Shadow Priest or Resto Druid and Feral Tank.

So as a breakdown from what we know so far about Spriests in Wrath-

-We now have AoE, although it is way overpriced in mana

-Our dps is supposed to be increased to compete with mage and warlock classes through talents like Pain and Suffering and Twisted Faith

-Our ability to regen mana for ourselves is no longer reliant on VT. Instead we have Improve Spirit Tap and the ability to convert Spirit to spellpower, making stacking Spirit applicable again.

-VT was nerfed to 2.5% from 5% but could be adapted to be a raid wide buff before Wrath is released.

-We were given some great PvP abilities like Dispersion, Imp Shadow Form, and Psychic Horror.

Let’s not forget we have months of the beta still to come for things to change for better or worse. The important thing is that I believe Blizzard is moving in the right direction with our class and spec, although they don’t have it all down yet.

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I know its a little late for theorycrafting with a new expansion coming out that will change everything, but for those maybe leveling a new spriest during this down time, here is a list of some of the bests threads ever posted about shadow priest theorycrafting.

Best Raiding Gear- Shadowpriest.com

DPS Spreadsheet- Shadowpriest.com

Haste for Dummies- Shadowpriest.com

Shadow Basics- Dwarfpriest.com

Tips and Tricks- Dwarfpriest.com

More to add later, this is a good start though. Happy reading.

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A little behind on this one but some big news.

Priest (Skills List / Talent Calc. (8770))
Raid-Wide Vampiric Touch
We’re still in talks about how to consolidate buffs/debuffs between classes. Making VT raidwide is a possibility, but yes it would mean the value of multiple Shadow Priests in a raid is somewhat diminished. In a lot of ways we’re okay with that (you shouldn’t *have* to have multiple specs of one class in a raid), but there are a lot of other side effects we’re not sure about right now. (Source)

Vampiric Touch nerf to 2.5%
To be honest, 2.5% still might be too high. In our tests, Shadow Priests were still providing around the same amount of mana to their party (if not more) than before because of their increased damage output. Not to mention the Priest wasn’t going out of mana at all because of Spirit/Improved Spirit Tap. (Source)

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