ToGC. Healers: Tuonie, Chayah ... Sinespe?

You better believe it. I shelled out sixty emblems to pick up the Tier 9 healing Shoulders and Gloves, because I've had no luck getting the gloves from VoA, and I helped heal the first four bosses of Trial of the Grand Crusader, in my mix of off-spec-rolled healing pieces and just-happens-to-work-for-Disc-too DPS items. Ironically, I got no upgrades for my DPS set tonight, but I got three items (Belt, boots and ring) from ToC10N and Onyxia10 for my healing set. Know what I was doing in ToC10N and Onyxia10? DPSing.

Additionally, there's nothing quite like clearing ToC10N in 26 minutes and 30 seconds, including breaks.

Still wouldn't want to heal as a main, but it's nice to know I'm keeping myself fully up-to-date and competitive even in my offspec.

Cataclysm: potential issues.

Obviously, posts like this aren't immensely useful, because their content speculates over the mechanics of things that may change as the new expansion approaches. To avoid such a problem, issues and potential side-steps have to be thought about, fully, before one can gauge one's opinions accurately and "conclude" things.

There isn't a huge amount of Shadow Priest-specific stuff so far on the Cataclysm preview front. The one major thing we've been told is that we will "probably get a nuke without cooldown".

Now, this is a problem, really. My initial reaction to hearing this news was: we already have a nuke without cooldown -- it's called Mind Flay. My reaction was met with a certain deal of hostility from people claiming that Mind Flay doesn't "Count as a real nuke" because it's channeled. This argument, I suspect, comes from a PvP perspective. I don't see how it really matters whether a spell is channeled or cast in PvE -- you're standing still and nuking ... Indeed, a channeled spell has some advantages in this respect since, if you have to move, you can clip it short and yet still have dealt some damage to your target.

However, the reason I say we "Already have a nuke without cooldown" is this: we already have something that we spam between our cooldowns. Mind Flay is a powerful spell, and we use it whenever we don't need to do anything else. So where on earth do we fit in another "Nuke without cooldown" into our rotation? The only room it has is in the same places as Mind Flay: we can only cast it between Mind Blasts and refreshing DoTs.

This, naturally, means that there is going to be a preferred spell to cast: either Mind Flay or Spell X (Shorthand for "Nuke without cooldown") will provide us with more DPS. If it is Mind Flay, then Spell X isn't going to be used at all. If Spell X results in higher DPS than Mind Flay, though, then Mind Flay will fall by the wayside: just as Shadow Word: Death was the casualty of TBC --> Wrath, Mind Flay will be the casualty of Wrath --> Cataclysm. It will become a spell that we only cast when we want to keep SW: P refreshed.

I was talking to Koren about this, and she thought that Spell X might act like a "Reverse Arcane Blast": her thought was something like "it gets weaker with each consecutive spellcast." I can't see this being particularly appealing, though ... and even if it were a non-reverse Arcane Blast, I'm not entirely sure I'd feel comfortable about becoming an Arcane Mage.

Shadow Priests are in a good place right now in terms of their complexity. We don't need another spell coming in and screwing with things. Besides which, I don't have a keybinding spare for it.

Never start with a quote.

[14:12] [Primar|Home] I think everyone and their mum uses a variation on that theme
[14:12] [Primar|Home] cos it's the only one that isn't retarded

So that's my excuse.

For the past few days I have wanted to stick stuff on the Wowhead forums, but have felt that it wouldn't really garner much in the way of people responding to it. So, for future such instances, I will just dump stuff here. This will probably be stuff related to being a Shadow Priest, though it may also expand into my forays into the world of Discipline as well as my guild's various antics.

So: Hi, I'm Chris. I take the form of Valandilv on the Wowhead forums and Sinespe on my Draenei Shadow Priest. I wrote the Anathema Guide on the Wowhead forums, and have also levelled a Horde priest to 80, though she is now in semi-permanent retirement.

As Sinespe, I raid in the relatively private guild Fancy Hat Club, a strict 10-man guild by GuildOx's standards, and we're doing pretty well, I feel. Some of the blog entries here may take the form of killshots (We're expecting Algalon very soon, and then Herald of the Titans soon after that).

As Chris, I'm a recent graduate who now has to look for a job, being pushed and pulled by various conflicting advice on the issue in the current economic climate. The "be direct" approach will probably win out, but we'll see. I'm looking to get into a proofreading/copy-editing role at a publishing company; if there is one thing I am good at, it is spotting grammatical errors.