I often get pulled in to do a Fear Ward in rotation with the other priests on Auriaya. Because there’s no way I’m going to click on the person’s name and then click Fear Ward in the middle of that fight, I’ve macroed it. However, tonight I had some inspiration concerning the macro that I’d like to share with you.

At the moment, I’m using the following macro, call it FW v1:

#showtooltip
/tar ath
/cast fear ward

Ath is short for the person I’m supposed to be casting the buff on, by the way - I wrote the macro really, really quickly.

Basically, this is a rather clunky macro… and it annoys me that I have to manually retarget the boss after. Of course there are ways to solve it - but it’s still not elegant.

I happened to be talking with a hunter a few weeks back about macros and I mentioned that I used a misdirect macro on mine. Basically, if you have a focus, Misdirection is cast on that. If you don’t have a focus and your pet is up, the Misdirection is then cast on your pet. It means that you have one button for pretty much every Misdirection situation.

So why not apply this (though simplified) to Fear Wards?

And voilá, I give you FW v2!

#showtooltip
/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead][self] Fear Ward

If you have a focus, your Fear Ward will be cast on the focus. If you don’t have a focus, it’ll be cast on yourself. This is great because you can put whoever you’re going to need it cast on as the focus and then just forget about it.

Now, does anybody know how to stop the macro from casting Fear Ward if the buff is already active on the target?

One of the biggest problems with discipline priests is convincing the raid leader that they’re an extremely useful addition to the raid. Because they’re low on the healing meters, it’s assumed that they aren’t doing anything. Now, anyone who knows anything about how a discipline priest operates knows that the build works off of damage mitigation, which simply won’t be at all obvious on healing meters.

Lesson 1: (healing) meters aren’t gospel

Lesson 2: learn about the build and its capabilities before judging

Lesson 3: not all problems can be solved by brute force

Anyway, the whole point of this article is to point out that Matticus wrote another Spiritual Guidance article entitled Tools to evaluate a discipline priest. He takes a look at a number of different ways to get insight into how a discipline priest is doing - without using the heals per second statistic.

It’s an interesting read and well worth looking at if you’re a raid leader, a healing lead or just a discipline enthousiast.

OK, the dust has now settled around alternative specs. The speculation can now cease as we’ve gotten to see how things work in practice. I’ve been thinking about putting together a post on priests and their alternative specs for a while now and the time has come to actually put pen to paper.

Q. Should I have an alternative spec?

I know of a number of priests who flat out refuse to use their alternative specs. They’re so happy (and generally good at) being shadow or holy or whatever, they don’t want to use it. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s their game and they should play it how they want.

Then you’ve got people like me. I can play both holy and shadow decently now, but I wasn’t laying out 50g for every respec. One of the first things I did when 3.1 hit was go get my dual spec. As I’m officially caster dps within the guild, I took shadow as my primary spec and holy as my alternative spec - but those are simply details.

Think about if you even want an alternative spec, though. Some guilds will decide what alternative spec you need for the guild. The one I’m in appreciates that I’ve got a holy spec and puts it to good use - but it’s not a requirement. If I decided not to use it, they’d respect that. But do you want this hybrid character?

It’s your choice, just remember that it has consequences.

Q. What other spec should I choose?

And this is where it gets fun.

Seri wrote an excellent post last week entitled Seri sez: Gearing for Disc vs Holy (or: Why My Secondary Spec is Shadow). Don’t forget to go read it and give her cupcakes!

The entire post is good, but note this section particularly:

Discipline and Holy are two very different beasts with their own set of priorities for gear. One of the biggest mistakes that I see Priests making right now is thinking they can respec and do either one just as well without swapping any gear around.

This is very true! As Seri goes on to explain in more detail than I will do here, shadow and discipline have more to do with each other qua gear than holy does. Theoretically, you can keep the same gear for all three trees - but your performance will obviously suffer. Holy has very different gear requirements than discipline does.

If you’re already shadow or discipline and want to make an eas(ier) switch, then you can choose to go for discipline or shadow. Note that you will eventually end up with close to two sets of gear - you won’t be wearing hit gear as discipline, for example. My holy and shadow sets, now that they’re pretty much complete, no longer share any gear at all. You can do some overlap while you’re moving over, but in the end, you’ll end up with different sets.

Note also that holy and discipline have completely different play styles. One of the reasons that Av has holy/shadow specs is because I personally prefer to play holy above discipline. The fact that I have a full set of holy gear at T7.5 level helps, too, but I honestly prefer holy to play. This is something you might want to keep in mind, as you’ll want to play what you enjoy.

Furthermore, you might want to check with the healing lead within your guild if you’re planning on speccing to heal. They may be interested in having you as a backup healer for whatever reason and may prefer that you choose a certain spec. It can’t hurt to ask.

Q. Is healing/dpsing hard?

Yes, if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Don’t assume you can simply switch specs and suddenly be an imba healer or dps’er simply because you’re a priest. Admittedly - priests are imba healers and dps’ers but you need to learn to play your class (spec). It probably took you months to get good at whatever your main role is now, expect the same for another role.

As most of you know, I switched from holy to shadow around patch 3.0.8. Admittedly, I was in a world of hurt - I’d gone from healing which I’m pretty good at to shadow. And I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. There were so many things I didn’t know about, from spell rotation, different addons, tab targeting, learning to actually remember which target to take, hit, gear balance… argh. Oh. And I was trying to compare myself to dps who’d marched through SSC, TK and Black Temple and who knew their stuff. What a way to take myself down a few pegs.

I personally think a lot of the actual gaming comes down to habit and muscle memory. You need to know exactly which spells to use when and only practice is going to get you there. Research - there are tons of good resources available. Practice. Do heroics. Beat on target dummies. Go play in battlegrounds. Watch yourself on Recount to get an idea of how you’re improving. But keep practicing.

Remember, you have the priestly reputation to uphold!

Q. Got any other tips for me?

Yeah, Talented is your friend. Unless you actually like speccing by hand, especially if Blizzard is planning another talent reset.

Get Outfitter as well, or something similar. I have it set to switch my gear when I switch my talents, which makes my life so much easier. If you don’t want Outfitter for whatever reason, WowInsider has a post about gear changers for dual spec.

Decide if you want an alternative spec, then decide which one you want. You can always change your mind later, but getting the gear sorted yet again is a pain. And don’t underestimate the challenge of getting good at a new spec.

OK, you may well have figured out that I’m a big fan of gear lists. I like that the priority of things have already been worked out in numbers that can be trusted and I like having something to base my own loot list off of.

Say what you will - maybe I can’t actually write my own content, but I do try and keep track of what’s going on and collect it for you!

Discipline

Best in slot disc gear v2 @ The Munch Land

Note that the weight scale for this was taken from the TheDoctor’s Disc Healing Compendium at Elitist Jerks.

Holy

Best in slot holy hear @ The Munch Land

Note that the weight scale for this has been calculated by BobTurkey. He’s got a full post explaining the reasoning behind it, plus links to LootRank with the weight scale already added and the Pawn weights. Yes, this is copy/paste from above - he did both weight scales.

Shadow

Best in slot shadow gear @ Shadowpriest.com

I’ve mentioned this one before, but it really is one of my most used bookmarks. It’s more than just a loot list but a good go-to thread for the weight list, gear, gems, etc.

Seri commented on my post about Wowhead and weight scales that she’d like to know more about how the weight scales work and I guess how they’re calculated. What I”m going to try and do here is give a high level explanation to give you an idea of how they work and how you can tweak them. What I’m not going to do is go into discussions about how to decide which stat needs to have which weight - because I’m not that good of a theorycrafter.

What is a weight scale?

Each class has key stats or attributes. For priests, that’s spirit, mp5, intellect and spellpower. Stamina is also a stat that a priest can consider paying attention to - but it’s generally less important than spirit or spellpower.

Have you ever faced a big decision and created a list of pros and cons? Then, once you had the list of pros and cons, you realized that it wasn’t simply a question of which list was longer but that some reasons were more important than others? So what you probably did was assigned a priority to each thing in your list, for example 1 being least important, 10 being most important. Once you had those numbers, you could add them up and then get a better idea of if the pros or cons are more likely to win. This is a way of quantifying things, making it easier for you to get a grip on what they actually mean for you.

A weight scale works similarly to your weighted pros and cons list. Instead of assigning priority to a pro or a con, you assign a priority to each attribute. Once you’ve applied a priority to your attribute, you can do calculations off of it.

How does it work?

As an example, I’ll be using Dwarf Priest’s holy priest weight scale from the beginning of December 2008. This means that at this point, it may already be outdated - but the principles still hold true.

0.74 Intellect
0.54 Spirit
0.35 Haste
0.15 Crit
1.00 MP5
0.60 Spellpower

In a weight scale, you can pretty much always assume that the higher the number, the higher the priority. So in this example, Dwarf Priest has said that she finds MP5 the most important attribute for a priest. Next in importance is intellect, followed by spellpower, then spirit, then haste and finally crit. You can see this because crit is worth the least at 0.15.

OK, now you’ve got your weight scale. Instead of calculating the number of points in the pro and con column, we can calculate how much each attribute is worth. Say you have Mace A that has 12 crit on it, and Mace B that has 15 haste on it. How do you know which one is better? Simple - you do the math.

Mace A
12 (crit) x 0.15 = 1.8

Mace B
10 (haste) x 0.35 = 3.5

All I did was multiply the attribute (haste or crit) by the corresponding weight in the weight scale. In this case, we can conclude that Mace B is betteraccording to this weight scale - because we value haste more, even though there is less haste on the item, it still gets a higher score.

Of course, real item comparisons are more complicated, as there are many more attributes to be calculated - but I didn’t want to do my own head in.

Using this method, you can decide how important an attribute is for you and calculate which item is going to be better.

How do I choose a weight scale?

At the end of the day, a weight scale is only a way of giving an attribute a certain priority. What I’ve explained here isn’t only applicable to priests, though I’ve only been using priest attributes. There are lots of ways of getting weight scales.

I personally tend to look at the one on Wowhead for the type of priest I’m working with and tweak it accordingly. Just because Wowhead put it together, doesn’t mean I have to agree with it, after all. And the Wowhead weightscales happen to be based on 100, not 1 - but the principle is the same.

Wowhead’s holy priest weight scale
Spellpower - 100
Mana regeneration - 93
Intellect - 88
Spirit - 85
Critical strike rating - 63
Haste rating - 51

However, like I said, I might not agree with all of this stuff. But I can decide to change it if I want. I could decide to put in Dwarf Priest’s values, instead. Or I could just decide that I think haste rating is the bee’s knees and give it a weight of 90.

In conclusion, you can find weight scales all over the place, like on PlusHeal, Elitist Jerks - or you can make it up yourself. I tend to steal someone else’s and just tweak it as I please.

How do I put this into practice?

Right, calculators at the ready!

I’m joking. Honestly. I’d drive myself nuts if I tried to calculate this stuff. As it is, I already very much appreciate those very nice people who do the calculations for the best in slot loot lists. There are plenty of ways to automate these calculations.

1. Wowhead’s loot ranking system (I wrote a post about it)
2. Lootrank.com (pure win for generating whole lists, link to Dwarf Priest’s weight scale)
3. Pawn (addon for adding weight scale info to tooltips in game to easily compare)

These are great ways to compare items using a weight scale, both in and out of game.

Don’t forget the salt!

Weight scales are very cool. However, they are not the ultimate decision.

Your weight scale needs to reflect what your character needs - these needs may differ from other characters of the same class/spec.

Sometimes weight scales can be very unuseful, too - if the stats are incredibly imbalanced (e.g. 500 haste and 10 spellpower on a weapon), these would give a very high number as a result. That still doesn’t mean it’s good for you!

Do use your head when choosing your gear. Weight scales are simply a way to help you decide what’s going to be best for you.

I’ve discovered some more really useful macros that I never bothered with as a holy priest. After all, the last time I was asked to actually shackle something was Moroes back in Karazhan. But I found some stuff that I personally found very helpful, so I’ll write it down - so I don’t forget and in case someone else can use it.

Note that I didn’t necessarily come up with the concept for most of these by myself, I found them all over the place over months and potentially years. I did tweak quite a few of them, though.

Shackle Undead

This one is used to shackle some undead thingies. I haven’t seen a use for this in raiding content in Wrath yet, but it can definitely be useful for when you’re on your own. Basically I just have it ready because I’m sure someone will ask for it at some point.

#showtooltip Shackle Undead
/clearfocus [modifier:alt][target=focus,dead][target=focus,help][target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus]Shackle Undead

Basically, it focuses your target if your current focus isn’t an undead that’s still alive (I know, that sounds weird). Then it casts Shackle Undead on your focus. The next time you hit it, if your focus is still alive, it’ll shackle again. Easy!

Mind control

I don’t actually use a macro for straight up mind controlling, as you never need to switch targets, etc. I usually do have it on a hotkey, though, so I can easily renew the spell when necessary.

Mind control ft. Razuvious

I had the most horrible time with the mind control on the Razuvious fight before I got this macro.

/cast [target=focus] Mind Control
/tar Instructor

Before using this macro, make the student that you will be mind controlling your focus. Then, everytime you hit this macro, the focus will be mind controlled and you will automatically target Instructor Razuvious so you can bash him some more.

Tip #1: When mind controlling on this fight, stand at the bottom of the steps. If you stand too far up, you’ll more easily break the mind control because you go out of range.

Tip #2: If you’re doing this as a holy priest, have at least a little bit of hit. It will stop your mind control from breaking quite as quickly.

Mind Flay and Mind Sear

In other words, I want to mention the [nochanneling] argument in macros.

Both Mind Flay and Mind Sear are channeled spells. However, damage is not happening 100% of the channeling time - it’s happening in ticks. If you cancel the spell early, you lose x amount of ticks. And if you cancel the spell with 0.2 seconds left on the channeling time, you’ve lost your last tick and therefore damage! That means less damage, less efficient mana, you could have been casting something else, etc.

Seeing as you want to get as many spells off in the least amount of time possible, the [nochanneling] arguments helps by not allowing you to cast that spell when you’re already channeling something. If you’re still channeling Mind Flay and want to start the next one, this argument won’t let you because you’re channeling. Capiche?

So I have these two macros in my key bindings for these two spells.

/cast [nochanneling] Mind Sear

/cast [nochanneling] Mind Flay

I still have to watch out as I haven’t linked the argument into things like my Mind Blast or other DoTs, but it helps when you’re spamming one or the other.

Buffing macros

I actually used these as a holy priest and still use them as a shadow priest. After all, you never know when you’ll need to do group buffs.

This example is for the fortitude buff:

#showtooltip [modifier] Prayer of Fortitude; [nomodifier] Power Word: Fortitude
/cast [modifier] Prayer of Fortitude; [nomodifier] Power Word: Fortitude

Basically, if you just click the macro, it’ll cast Power Word: Fortitude on your target. If you use any modifier (shift, alt, control), then it’ll cast Prayer of Fortitude. The tooltip changes with the modifier, so I find myself hitting shift just to find out how many Devout Candles I still have left over.

I use variants on this for the shadow and spirit buffs.

Baby Spice

Ok, this isn’t priest related, but I do enjoy the macro. What’s the point of using Baby Spice on someone if they don’t even realize who did it?

/me thinks %T is getting too big for their boots. A little Baby Spice should sort that problem!
/cast Baby Spice

And no, I was not the one who Baby Spice‘d Malygos, honestly!*

I have a similar macro for Old Spice.

*Seriously, I didn’t, but I found this macro in my UI and thought it would be cool to share.

Av sat tucked away in a corner table upstairs at the Hero’s Welcome, his eyes glowing slightly more golden than could be explained by reflection of firelight. His fingers traced aimless patterns in the condensation circles on the table, sketching first the tail of a night saber, then a pinnacle of one of Dalaran’s towers. His cider sat next to him, forgotten as usual, while he listened to the conversations around him.

“I gots one! I gots one!” cried the red haired dwarven woman at one of the tables to her companion, showing him the branch that she’d found in her brightly colored egg. He smiled and offered her another piece of chocolate - the tabletop was already strewn with the paper that it had come in.

Avonar could not help smiling at the atmosphere in the inn - spring was here, or as much as it would arrive in Northrend. He suspected that the northern half of the continent would remain snowy, while the southern half would melt a bit. However, people were obviously happy and the eggs were a good diversions in this trying time.

He himself remembered looking for eggs in Dolanaar as a small night elf, his ankles sticking out of his breeches as he’d been growing fast again. There had been a night elf girl with beautiful, long purple hair with bells attached to the tips of her ears that complimented her laughter - Avonar remembered shyly presenting her with a bunch of morning glories, just to hear her laugh and hear the bells ring. What was her name again? He couldn’t remember, it seemed like such a different age.

“Mister night elf?” Avonar turned at a tug on his sleeve. It was a little draenei girl, her hair in pigtails and her hooves obviously recently shined. When he turned to look at her, she shrank back a little bit, sticking her thumb into her mouth - but to her credit, she kept his gaze.

“What is it, small one?” the night elf asked in his low voice, gravely from disuse.

Without answering, she reached into one of her apron pockets and pulled out an egg which was all decorated in yellows and blues. She handed it to him, gave a small curtsy and turned away. Avonar could only stare at the end in his hand, stunned. When he recovered, he called after her, “Thank you!” at which the little girl bobbed again but continued on her way.

Bemused, he placed the egg on the table, staring at it for a moment. Then, he deftly twisted it open and out fell a piece of chocolate in festive wrapping paper. The priest unwrapped the choclate and took a small bite, savoring the silky taste of it.

He put the egg back together and slipped it into his pocket. It would be there to remind him of the sweet little draenei girl who had given it to him… and the night elf girl with the morning glories. He patted the egg in his pocket, making sure it was safely settled. It was proof that the world was worth saving - something he needed to be reminded of from time to time.

One of the priests on our server asked me to write something about discipline. Now, I barely feel qualified to write about holy (hardly at all, anymore) and I feel like I’m jumping the gun when I go too deeply into shadow. I barely know how discipline works. But I said I’d try and put something together, since I do read blogs that have to do with discipline priests and see the stuff from Plusheal come flying past in my feed reader. Once again - this is meant to be a summary and a place to start off, not a comprehensive guide to discipline priests.

I tried discpline, in an attempt to be a balanced priest. While there are some seriously awesome spells (Penance, you make the world a better place!), the play style just never clicked with me. However, I do very much understand the point of discipline priests - they’re useful to have around and just as good as holy priests in the right situation. Just as discipline priests are more useful in some situations than holy priests. Point: discipline is good, I just personally don’t play it.

First off - discipline is no longer simply a pvp tree for priests. While it’s wonderful in pvp, it’s a viable raid spec as far as I’m concerned. While patch 3.1 allowed all priests to buff people with spirit (it’s now a baseline spell) and Divine Spirit has disappeared entirely, there are plenty of reasons to bring a discipline priest or even allow one to heal your heroic.

In case you haven’t heard this before, the emphasis with discipline priests is on prevention while holy priests are there to pump out huge amounts of healing. A discipline priest will be low on the healing meters because they’re not pumping out all of that healing, they’re making sure that their target needs less healing. They are hands down excellent single-target healers. Disc priests have spells and talents such as:

• Divine Aegis: your heal crits on a target and they get an extra shield which absorbs 30% of the amount you just healed for - automatically. Gorgeous.
• Borrowed Time: 25% extra haste and increases the amount absorbed by the your shield by 40% of your spellpower? Wow!
• Power Infusion: great for use on themselves or a dps at the right time
• Pain Suppression: does some cool stuff, but reducing all damage taken by 40% for 8 seconds could be game changing on the right target at the right time.
• Penance: a huge amount of healing in a short time to one target.
• Grace: 100% chance of creating a stackable buff (up to 3 times), increasing the healing done by the priest who cast it by 3% - 9% extra healing on a tank, anybody?

Basically, a good way to remember a discipline priest’s most useful features is to remember the four P’s: Penance, Pain Suppression, Power Infusion, Power Word: Shield.

If you want to play discipline, your very best resource is probably going to be the Elitist Jerks Discipline Healing Compendium. While it may be a little heavy for everyone’s stomaches, the information is there. Just make sure to take it slow. It answers questions on specs, healer interaction, gemming, glyphs, etc - pretty much all your need to know, in the typical, concise EJ format.

I also stumbled across this totally awesome Discipline Gear Guide on The Munch Land, a blog that I obviously should have put into my blog reader a long time ago. That mistake has now been rectified. Anyway, this is a gear list for discipline priests, much as the one Dwarf Priest used to make - and it’s up to date for Ulduar. The weight scale from the previously mentioned Elitist Jerks post has been used, so basically this just saves you a lot of time and effort. I have to say, I adore these kinds of gear lists.

One of the reasons that discipline priests aren’t totally accepted is the fact that it looks like they aren’t doing anything. They’re at the bottom of the healing meters, they have very low hps (healing per second) numbers. Why bother bringing them? There’s a modification you can do to Recount, described fully here, which will show shield absorption as healing done. Furthermore, you can take a look at WWS and check things like how many shields they cast, etc. This will give you some more insight. The best way, though, is simply to take one along and see how they do.

I think that each raid should have a discipline priest, just as you should have an even spread of healers. A raid healed by only discipline priests is going to be in a world of hurt, especially with all the aoe damage going around. However, a discipline priest, properly geared (please do not just respec from holy to disc and think you can keep the same gear!) can be a very useful addition to the raid and the roster of tank healers.

A few months ago, I got asked to respec to shadow for a heroic Naxx farm run. We had a lot of healers and not a lot of dps, so I said sure, as I had at least the basics for a dps set. I scrambled through speccing (didn’t have Talented installed yet), trying to figure out which buttons, etc. One of the shadow priests in the guild was telling me which spell to use before trash/each boss. It was chaos.

After the run, I talked with the guild master and it was agreed I’d switch Av’s main spec from holy to dps. And that was when the work started - getting gear sorted, regemming, reglyphing, learning the spells, rotations…. who knew it would be so much work?

Probably a bit more than two months later, I can say I’m a capable shadow priest though I’m nothing special. But what I can do is share the sources of information I used. Especially with these dual specs, knowing a bit more about shadow (if you choose to use it) can be really useful.

Most of this assumes that you don’t have a friendly neighborhood shadow priest around to give you a hand. Even if you do - you are perfectly capable of reading, as you’re reading this blog. If you have questions after reading or just want to have your gear double checked, talk to them. Spare them the 20 2000 questions spiel.

1. Spec and glyph

Speccing and glyphing, while useful, is something you’ll probably do once and then leave alone, especially when you’ve got all sorts of things going. Don’t forget to come back and review this stuff later as your understanding of the class/spec gets better as things will make far more sense. That counts for your gear and gem choices, too.

If you take a look at Talentchic, you can see that there’s one extremely popular talent build for shadow priests… with very few alternatives. That popular one is 13/0/58. The one I use and I’ve seen most other shadow priests use is 14/0/57 - the change is that I take Inner Focus and drop one point in Veiled Shadows as I like the extra free spell with the 100% crit chance.

Major glyphs for shadow priests are also pretty standardised: Glyph of Shadow, Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain and Glyph of Mindflay. Note that the Glyph of Mindflay is incredibly useful and saves a lot of swearing and readjusting, hence increasing your dps.

Minor glyphs are a question of choice. Av has the same as he had for holy: Glyph of Shadowfiend, Glyph of Fortitude and Glyph of Levitate.

2. Visit Shadowpriest.com

Shadowpriest.com is as to Plusheal.com as dark is to light. Well, that sounded better in my head. However, it is the main forum and source of information that I’ve found for shadow priests.

There’s one thread that I have bookmarked and refer to constantly. It goes into gearing choices, has a list of best gear (and updated for Ulduar!) and even explains which gems to put into said gear. It’s the list I used to build my gear list to figure out which upgrades I needed. Because I don’t make decisions like that well under pressure.

The other bit that I found incredibly interesting about the forum was the Newcomers Forum - basically, there were a lot of threads saying “my dps sucks, help!” While the qq got old after a while, I found a number of interesting tips here concerning spell rotation, gear, etc.

3. Learn Wowhead gear weighting

I’ve talked about Wowhead’s ability to help you rank gear and figure out which gear is best (subjectively) by using a weight scale. I even wrote about it here. If you don’t know how to do this, go read the post. Seriously. You will be upset that you didn’t know this incredibly useful skill.

When I needed to compare things, like my holy vs. dps gear, etc., I used this. I still use this to fill in potential blanks in the list from Shadowpriest.com.

4. Understand hit

As a healer, I never had to bother with hit before. I knew that shadow priests had a hit cap, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. Now that I’m a shadow priest, it’s suddenly become a lot more complicated.

To give you a basic idea - when a mob is your level, your spells have a 96% chance to hit… and therefore a 4% chance to miss. When a mob is three levels higher than you, as most progression bosses are, suddenly your spells will only hit the boss 83% of the time… you will miss 17% of the time. Ergo, you lose 17% of your dps to misses. And that’s solved by (spell) hit. To read the more extended explanation on Wowwiki, click here.

A shadow priest specced with a fairy standard 14/0/57 (as of 3.1) has two talents which help with hit, Shadow Focus (+2% hit) and Misery (+3% hit). This gives you an additional 5% hit chance, reducing the chance to miss to 12%. For priests, this means that the standard hitcap is 289. You have to have 289 hit on your gear, gems, enchants, etc., to ensure that you do not miss. And you don’t really want to be missing, that’s why hit is so important.

The hit cap (the number you need to be at to not miss) can further be lowered by eating food, having a draenei in your group, having a boomkin along, etc.

I found this to be a real struggle, constantly trying to balance upgrades and still make sure I was at (but not too far over!) the hitcap.

5. Renovate your interface

Get a dot timer. When you’re in a 25 man raid, you have no clue which of all those gazillion dots on the boss are yours… and how long until they run out. Plus, it helps you keep track of your cooldowns - I never had a problem with this as a healer, but it helped enormously as dps. I use Dotimer.

Set keybindings that make sense for you. I was trying to rebind the keys from the normal action bar and just getting confused as I couldn’t find any way of doing it. I needed key bindings because it was taking far too long to select a target and then move my mouse to the right spell, quickly. What I ended up doing was installing Clique and then using the same keybinds from Healbot (left mouse button + shift, for example) onto the enemy target button. This meant that the keybindings were familiar and made it easier to learn them.

Learn to tab target. I had never learned this as a healer as I didn’t need to. It turned out to be a huge hole in my knowledge of dps. I rebound tab (switch to enemy target) to my delete key as I wasn’t using that for anything and it’s a huge key right near my hands. Practice, practice, practice, until you get good at it. Oh - and check which mob you have selected before you open fire. You make the mistake of checking exactly once.

I ended up disabling Healbot when I was shadow as I’d try and heal people out of pure habit. What I did was installed Grid as I’d lost my raid frames in the form of Healbot (thanks to this lovely video tutorial) and linked my Renew, Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield into it.

The upside of dps? You need far less info on your screen than you do as a healer.

6. Make new friends and practice

You’ve met the Practice Dummies in the major cities before, right? No? If you’re switching to shadow, I’d strongly suggest making their acquaintance. It’s going to take time to get used to having different dots up at all times and it’s that much easier to do it when you only have to focus on the dummy. Practice your spell rotation until you can easily talk on the phone and still keep it up. And then keep practicing. You need to get these spells into your muscle memory.

Did I mention you should keep practicing? Run heroics, even with pugs. The pugs are good as they’ll boost your ego (if you’re doing things right) and they’ll teach you how to fix mistakes in chaotic situations. Perfect guild groups are nice for gear but won’t teach you as much. Go into battlegrounds - the chaos will be good for you… even if you just run around tossing Shadow Word: Pain onto every target you can get.

Keep pushing yourself. I could barely make 2k dps on the target dummies at first. Now I can make 2.8k - but now I just have to set new goals. Keep going. Be the best you can be.

Some final tips

Here’s a list of some stuff that I kind of went /facepalm when I realized. Maybe by writing it here, you can avoid the feel of your palm against your face.

You can (and often should!) have Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch up at the same time.

Shadow Word: Death can kill you. Especially on a Sartharion +3 attempt. You do take durability damage. Plus, it’s embarassing.

Mind Sear causes a lot of aggro. Put up one DoT (e.g. Shadow Word: Pain) on one mob first to give the tank time to get aggro. Put up two (e.g. Devouring Plague) if you’re worried. Then Mind Sear to your heart’s content.

If you have a death knight in the raid and you’re doing packs of trash, put Devouring Plague on one target. Then ask him very nicely to use Pestilence - your Devouring Plague will be spread to all the mobs in the pack. And then be prepared to do something nice for the death knight in thanks. Note this was changed and no longer is applicable in 3.1 - thanks Lyssanne!

Learn not to “clip” your spells. This means stopping with Mind Flay before it’s done or renewing Vampiric Touch before the last tick has happened. This is down to pure practice and watching your mods.. but once you get it, your dps will go up.

Macros are good things and make your life easier. I strongly suggest having general macros for mind control and shackle ready, you never know when they’ll show up. Especially like when you’ve been asked to do the Instructor Razuvious mind control and you keep messing it up - macros can help save the day and make you look good.

Conclusions

I’ll try and keep shadow talk to a minimum in this blog, though I’m not quite sure what else to write about at the moment. Hopefully this post at least manages to help someone out a bit!

As I was asked for some new content (I can’t believe I actually have readers!), I figured I can at least share some of what I know. Even though Av is currently specced shadow, I still follow all of my normal blogs and PlusHeal.com. Hopefully the information that aggregates in my head will be useful for people.

Zusterke is pretty much a legend at PlusHeal - they write excellent theorycrafting posts on all sorts of things. One of the posts that I remember best is the one about priest mana regen for dummies. In other words, after reading this post, I actually understand mana regen.

In the article, attention is paid to things like spirit vs. intellect and how each effects the mana regeneration, but also a short bit about which stats to stack (a discussion, not an order!).

The post is here. Read it now, keep it in mind for potential reference material for later.