Why I don't like death knights

No, this is not about how overpowered, underpowered or whatever else death knights are. Nor is it about bad death knight players in pugs. This is about why I, personally, just can't seem to get into playing a death knight.

I did create one of course, some time after WOTLK release. After all the new class was supposed to be a big new feature of the expansion; got to at least try it out, right? I got through the starter zone relatively quickly and thought that it was a pretty enjoyable experience, but once I made it to Orgimmar and was accepted back into the Horde, I felt... lost. I went around exploring the world, picking flowers to level herbalism and inscription, and once both skills were high enough I went to Outland. I did a couple of quests in Hellfire and my boyfriend ran me through the low-level instances in the area, but the feeling just wasn't there.

And after thinking about it, I think that the problem lies in the fact that the class starts out at level 55. Yes, the very same feature that everyone else praises about it.

The thing is: I like levelling. I haven't done a whole lot of it lately as my high-level alts have kept me very busy, but when I do play lower-level alts I enjoy it. It's rare that I feel like I'm just grinding to get to the next level; I enjoy the journey.

As such I also like that my character is a complete nobody in ragged clothes and with dull weapons when I first see them at level one. Where they go from there is up to me. Of course many people will go down the same path, just following their starter quests, but there is choice. You can also run your new alt over to another race's starting zone and be a stranger in a strange land. Or try to level without killing things; the world is your oyster.

Compare that to the death knight starting area, which is heavily phased and scripted. Don't get me wrong, it's nice in its own way, but it's really more of an interactive movie. You can't run away and decide that you don't want to fight the scarlet guys. You've got to follow the premade plot. Said plot also provides you with both a predetermined past and a future: You were a hero of your faction - though nobody really tells you what you did that was so heroic - and in the future you will do everything to fight the Lich King! And then you suddenly find yourself in Orgrimmar, kitted out in awesome gear for your level, supposedly with a great backstory, but in reality no more developed than a freshly rolled level one. It just feels wrong, as if I suddenly ended up playing someone else's character. I don't want to play someone else's characters though, I want to level my own!

There is a practical aspect to it as well. I often see people who hate levelling make the argument that you should just be allowed to create new characters at the level cap. One argument that I've frequently seen brought up against this is that it would throw players into the game with no knowledge of their class and they'd be terrible at it. To which the no-levelling supporters say: "What? It's really easy to learn how to play any class really quickly, you're just stupid if you can't!" Well, maybe I'm stupid but I simply don't like being thrown into the game as a new class and start out with a full spell book. I don't like having to sit down to read and figure out twenty different spell descriptions when I only just rolled this character. I want to go out into the world and play. At level one that's easy, no matter the class, because you usually only have like three skills. You actually look forward to gaining new abilities one at a time and then testing them out in your environment as you level. It's a gradual process and it's learning by doing.

This applies to talents as well. I don't know how other people do it, but when I roll a new alt I don't usually have their spec all planned out. I may have a general idea, like "this will be my BM hunter", but I don't go around looking for optimised specs of any kind. I just look at my talent trees every time I gain a new talent point and then decide what looks the most interesting. Doing this one point at a time also allows you to really see the difference each point makes. Imagine my horror when I was assaulted by 46 death knight talent points that needed spending at once. I actually pictured how much more fun this would be for me if my little death knight was only level ten, having to decide whether to spend her first talent point in improved icy touch or butchery (as little sense as that makes lore-wise - nobody decides to be a death knight, they are made). But 46 points? God knows! I do like reading up on optimised specs and the like once I have figured out the basics myself, but I don't think I should need a manual for my new character the moment they leave the starter zone.

In summary, I don't like playing my death knight because she doesn't feel like "my" character, but like someone else's premade. And while I have no trouble running around and killing mobs, I still feel slightly lost in terms of which abilities I should use - and since I don't care about the character to begin with, I can't be arsed to do more research. A vicious circle.

I can't help feeling a certain admiration for people who have a death knight as their main. How did they ever manage to get into it? I have no idea. All I know is that I'm glad that for all the rumours about the new expansion that have been making the rounds lately, none of them have been talking about a new hero class. I really don't fancy any more premades.

I hate replenishment

In the past week I've been getting back into some ten-man fun: We killed the first two bosses in the new raid instance and finally downed Yogg-Saron in Ulduar. It was great fun all around, but it also served as a reminder of just how much I hate replenishment, or rather not having it when it's so badly needed.

Despite of Blizzard's assurances that it's considered mandatory for all raiding and should be easy to come by now that five different classes can potentially provide it, I'm finding myself without it all too often. In fact I've done all the ten-mans mostly without it. So far I've managed, but it's been really painful in many respects.

The thing about replenishment is that it's not really a buff, it's a binary state of being: either you have it and it will be virtually impossible to deplete your mana bar, or you don't have it and will barely be able to make it to the end of a boss fight if you're sufficiently overgeared, pull every trick in the book to squeeze some extra mana out of various sources, and then hope that the raid gets lucky during the last thirty seconds of the boss fight as you stand in the back, completely out of mana and cooldowns, and just shoot at the big bad with your wand.

Unfortunately I can't find a quote on it right now, but I distinctly seem to remember that when the developers decided to get rid of Blessing of Salvation, a blue poster said something along the lines of not wanting any class or spec to be absolutely manadatory for raiding just because of some buff they have. This affected shadow priests too, and even though I was shadow myself at the time and enjoying it, I could still see the logic behind it. I mean, people were nearly getting into fights over who would get to be in a party with me. So normalising shadow's damage output while nerfing vampiric touch and its mana regeneration aspect seemed sensible.

I don't know when and how that turned into: "Actually, let's keep it, give a mass mana regen ability to five different classes and make it required for every raid." And I really wish it hadn't, because it's stupid.

I don't know the actual mp5 values for the old vampiric touch and replenishment as it is now, it might have been somewhat reduced in power actually, but in many respects it's only become more powerful than ever. At least in BC the buff was only party-wide, and depended on the shadow priest actually dps-ing and doing it well. If they got stunned, feared or otherwise incapacitated by a boss there was no mana regen, or very little if they played badly. Now a retribution paladin just has to auto-attack and judge whenever it's on cooldown, and ten people in the whole raid get fifteen seconds of guaranteed mana regen.

You'd think that with how many classes can now provide replenishment there really shouldn't be a problem getting it anyway, but that's not true either. Retri paladins are pretty much the only reliable replenishers I've seen. Shadow priests try it as well, but due to the effect only triggering from a vampiric touch and mind blast combo, there are situations where they simply won't get much of a chance to make it happen (think of things like Thorim's arena). I also thought that hunters could be relied on to provide replenishment since survival is everyone's favourite raiding spec at the moment, but only last night our hunter leader showed up to our raid as survival without replen, simply because he preferred to put those particular talent points into talents that boost his personal damage output. Warlocks come in all kinds of flavours so getting one that provides the buff is very hit-or-miss. And frost mages? Are you kidding me? That's no help at all, considering all raiding mages these days are fire or arcane.

When I complained about having to raid without replen yet again last night everybody just mocked me. "Oh look, Shintar's whining about mana regen again." They know that I'll keep them alive somehow. But I don't think any of them, even the dps warrior with the windfury addiction, appreciates just how extremely frustrating it is to rely so completely on another class's buffs to be able to do your job properly.

Now just to clarify, I don't actually want endless mana. I do think that having to watch cooldowns and conserving mana is part of a healer's job. But when I use my shadow fiend twice during a fight, pop inner focus and my regen trinket whenever they are on cooldown, use a mana potion, get innervated, and still people die at the end of the fight because I was out of mana, even though I'm fully kitted out with gear from one tier up on the raid ladder, and it's all because I'm missing a single buff, something is seriously wrong in my book.

In my ideal world the developers would just admit that replenishment was a bad idea, scrap it, and then buff everyone's mana regeneration ever so slightly to enable them to play without it again while not giving anyone endless mana pools. A woman can dream.

Instance Review: Trial of the Champion

To start off, let me say that I wasn't looking forward to the release of this instance at all. Some people were getting excited as if we were going to see a new Magister's Terrace, but I already knew that this wasn't going to be the case. From all the information we had been given it was clear from the start that it was basically going to be an instanced version of Ring of Blood. And the fun thing about Ring of Blood was always that it was fairly unique; you did it once while levelling to get some great rewards for your level and then moved on. You didn't repeat it three times a day.

Unsurprisingly I felt quite unsatisfied when I finished Trial of the Champion for the first time. This was it? This was Blizzard's excuse for an instance these days? However, I have to admit that the more often I've run it since then, the more I've come to appreciate its good points. Only today I joined a pug for the heroic version with my hunter, and while we managed to wipe at least once on every boss, we still had fun. I think the key here is to be open to experiences different from what we're used to.

Let's go into greater detail:

1. Accessability

This an area where the new instance shines. The Argent Tournament grounds are only a two-minute flight away from Dalaran, if you've never been there before a friendly NPC will send you off for free so you don't even have to search for the local flight path, and if you're already a veteran crusader you can even teleport straight to the tournament. There's also a summoning stone. The only way to make it more convenient for people to get there would be to place an NPC in the Dalaran inn that teleports you straight into the instance. Seriously.

As far as I'm aware there are also no prerequisites for being allowed to enter. For a while I thought that being champion of at least one faction would be a requirement, what with the name of the instance and all, but as it turned out that's not the case. Trial of any old guy who just happens to come by, anyone?

2. Atmosphere

I said in my previous post that I like dungeons to live up to their name by being... dungeon-like. Dark caves, abandoned ruins, lairs of evil masterminds, that kind of thing. Trial of the Crusader on the other hand throws you into an arena where you're actually pitted against (mostly) friendly opponents by the "good" guys. That could hardly be any more different from my usual expectations, but let's run with it.

To be fair, Blizzard did make an effort to evoke some tournament atmosphere in the instance, but I find it a bit lackluster. I have some friends who never seem to get tired of Jaeren Sunsworn's speeches about their greatness, but personally I find the whole introduction too long and tedious. Other instances, like Culling of Stratholme, have long intros too, but at least something's actually happening there. In the Trial you just wait for lots of red text to scroll past, which is really not that interesting. Blizzard can do better than that.

3. Story & Quests

There are no quests connected to this instance. Woe. Story-wise... well. There is a story to the Argent Tournament as a whole, namely that the Argent Crusade is trying to select the most capable fighters for their final assault on Icecrown, to ensure that said fighters don't die too easily and end up returning as ghouls that are fighting for the enemy. The basic idea makes sense, but the logic of the actual implementation is debatable. 2fps summed it up much better than I ever could. Personally I cringe every time the Black Knight shows up to force-choke poor Jaeren Sunsworn, and all those important leader figures just stand there and do nothing.

4. Length

Trial of the Champion is hands down the shortest instance Blizzard has made to date. In a way that's both a blessing and a curse. As I said, initially it felt like quite a letdown, like the instance didn't provide me with enough sense of adventure. But once you get past that stage of wanting to explore and mostly come back to farm for certain drops it becomes a blessing. When your main concern is to find out whether boss X will refuse to drop that one item you want yet again, not having to fight your way through endless tunnels and tons of trash packs is something to be grateful for. It's a lot less immersive than it could be, but also more practical.

5. Layout

I'd like to see anyone get lost in this instance. It's a single, circular room! Unfortunately that also means that you're literally not going anywhere. The first couple of times I ran the instance, I had the instinctive urge to run onwards towards the next boss... except there was nowhere to go.

6. Trash

There is little trash in this instance: nine weakling opponents during the mass jousting event at the start and three packs of three before the second boss. I've said before that ideally the amount of trash in an instance should be a happy medium, not too much but not too little either. Considering that, I guess I should be glad that there are any trash mobs at all, yet at the same time... they make no sense. It makes sense for underground caverns to contain miscellaneous wildlife, it makes sense for the lair of some kind of big bad guy to contain some lackeys, but it does not make sense that if we're meant to face off against some powerful but benevolent boss to test our skills, we first have to beat up a couple of his assistants who don't even stand a chance. They are supposed to be our friends as well! And yet they don't get to walk out after being defeated like the bosses, we clearly kill them and then take their stuff. How wrong is that?

It very much feels like these mobs were inserted as an afterthought so people would get a bit more rep from the instance and actually have a chance at some green drops as well.

7. Bosses

As far as the boss encounters themselves go, I have little to complain about. They strike me as pretty well-tuned, easy if you overgear the place, but challenging if you don't. They are also reasonably unique: Whether you like jousting or not, it's not something that you get to do in any other dungeon. The Argent Confessor has a wide variety of memories to summon. Eadric the Pure is a bit of a pushover, but he introduces a mechanic that was only used during the Yogg-Saron encounter before (having to look away from the boss at certain times) into a five-man and the gimmick with the hammer sounds like fun, though I have yet to see it in action. The Black Knight has a whole story of his own as well as providing an interesting multi-phase fight. About the worst I can say about the bosses is that they all seem to challenge the healer more than anyone else, the tank has some things to watch out for, but if you're dps all you do is stand in one place and nuke a single target all the time. But that's really only a very minor complaint.

8. Loot

Ah loot, the Trial's big selling point. Finally the term "epic quality" has lost even the last of its splendour. In this instance every single boss drops nothing but epics, and the saying that "if everyone is special, no one is" applies to loot as well. The more loot with purple letters we get, the less people care about it. I've been in pugs without disenchanters where people simply left any items that nobody could use to rot, as they couldn't even be bothered to pick them up for vendoring. Epics, the new Shiny Fish Scales? I can't help being a bit saddened by that development.

Sad philosophical ponderings about loot colours aside, Trial of the Champion is simply the place to be these days if you're not a raider that's already kitted out in full best-in-slot gear. Normal and heroic mode combined drop a plethora of amazing items for pretty much any class and spec. If you care about making your character better at all, this is an opportunity you shouldn't miss out on.

In summary, Trial of the Champion is very different from the instances we're used to. It has very little going for it in terms of story and immersion, instead it's all about being able to farm for epic loot all day long. I say, enjoy it while it lasts. Loot aside, you can still go in there with some friends or even a good pug and have a blast. Do it while you can, because once everyone got all the drops they want, the instance's popularity will decrease drastically, and after the next gear reset I can't really see anyone going back to it, ever, simply because it's got little else going for it. I sure hope that's not the direction Blizzard intends to take with all or even most future instances, but for now I'm willing to look on the bright side and make the most of it.

What makes an instance good?

I have quite a few thoughts on the new five-man instance, but I figured that before I start rambling about what I do and don't like about it and why, it might be useful to create a point of reference for what I consider positive and negative qualities in an instance. So, without further ado, eight factors that play a role in whether I like or dislike a dungeon:

1. Accessability

Accessability means something different for levelling and for endgame instances. For a levelling instance it basically means "how hard is it to get there at the appropriate level". For example Ragefire Chasm is very accessible to Horde characters (in the middle of a capital city where even lowbies will usually spend a lot of time) and virtually inaccessible to Alliance - can you imagine a group of players between level 10 and 15 even trying to get to the heart of an enemy city?

A less extreme example of an instance with low accessability is Maraudon. It's located in a zone that's pretty unpopular and annoying to get to initially, as it's far away from any major settlements. If you actually do end up questing in the area at the right levels (that is to say in your thirties), you'll still be too low to run Maraudon since it's tuned for characters in their high forties. Thus running it would require you to go back to Desolace long after you've outlevelled the rest of the zone and are glad to be gone. This is very counter-intuitive and definitely adds to Maraudon's unpopularity.

At level cap the question of travel times and the like becomes a lot less important, as nearly all the endgame content is limited to one continent these days, and within that area people are used to travelling a lot anyway (plus they have access to flying). What matters more is whether the instance requires a key and/or some kind of attunement. Obviously dungeons that don't are going to be much more popular since anybody can enter at any time, but since I'm quite fond of attunements personally, I definitely wouldn't consider some kind of requirement for entering a negative point.

2. Atmosphere

Whether you think that an instance has a good atmosphere or not is obviously something very subjective, but for me personally it could probably be summed up like this: Is this the kind of place you could see Indiana Harrison Jones exploring? There's a reason we also refer to them as dungeons - there's a certain expectation for the place to be dark, somewhat hidden away perhaps, and officially abandoned except for a big baddie and his lackeys.

Many low-level instances have a great atmosphere: Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep, Blackfathom Depths, Zul'Farrak... to name just a few. On the other hand I always felt that the Tempest Keep instances for example were a bit lacking in that regard - they definitely have a personality of their own, but something feels off about wandering over transparent floors and past walls that glow pink.

3. Story & Quests

I'm not really a lore nerd, but I do like the World in World of Warcraft, with all its little quests and stories. As such I really appreciate it when there are multiple quests related to an instance; it makes me feel like I'm going in there not just to get experience and better gear, but also to make a difference (even if I know that all the mobs will respawn afterwards). Fortunately most instances have quests associated to them. However, if there aren't any or they are at the end of long chains that are easy to miss, I always feel that something's lacking.

4. Length

I think it's quite obvious that an instance can be too long. Some people may praise Black Rock Depths for its great atmosphere and due to fond memories they have of it, but most likely not even they would like to run it on a daily or even weekly basis. Having to spend several hours in an instance to get from the beginning to the end is simply not practical.

From a purely practical point of view you'd think that the shorter the better, but personally I think that there's also something like "too short" for an instance. This wasn't an issue for me pre-Wrath, but in WOTLK both Azjol-Nerub and the new Trial of the Champion introduced me to the sensation of: "What, that's it already?" In part that may just be related to atmosphere (if the boss had so few obstacles to throw in our way he can't have been all that), in part I think it's related to practicality again. Sure, anyone can run an instance that only takes fifteen minutes, but if it also took you fifteen minutes to assemble the group it doesn't really feel like a good investment of your time in terms of effort and reward.

5. Layout

This one is relatively simple: Don't make it too bloody confusing! I still largely avoid Wailing Caverns purely because of it's confusing layout with all the criss-crossing tunnels that make it easy to run in circles. Even maps can be deceiving and set you on a wrong track since they are only two-dimensional. BRD is another prime offender in this category. I'll admit that I might feel less strongly about that point if they actually implemented in-game maps for those low-level dungeons, but as long as there aren't any it's way too easy to get lost.

Also, completely linear instances where you just run through a long, straight tunnel lose some points in the atmosphere department. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Shattered Halls.)

I thought Blackfathom Depths is an example of an instance that does it just about right in that regard, lots of winding tunnels to make it feel like a natural system of caves, some nooks and crannies with hidden bosses that make it more exciting to explore, but you'll never run in a circle so there's no way of getting backwards and forwards mixed up.

6. Trash

This is strongly related to the overall length of an instance. We can all agree that too much trash is boring, but if there's too little it feels lacking in a way.

There's also the question of what kind of trash it is. Instances can gain fun points for offering a wide variety of opponents with different abilities - beasts, humanoids, elementals - and lose some if you're just killing the same kind of mob from beginning to end.

Finally, it should also be balanced to not be too difficult - BC had some heroic trash pulls that were harder than any bosses, which seemed a bit wrong.

7. Bosses

Boss encounters should be memorable, preferably in a positive way. Obviously wiping a lot on a particular boss will also make him memorable, but it also makes it less likely that you'll want to run the instance again. It's quite possible for bosses to memorable in different ways, for example by having unique fight mechanics (like the stairs event in Zul'Farrak) or simply by including good dialogue and voice acting - who could forget the "demon couple" from Arcatraz?

8. Loot

As much as people like to claim that they don't play for the loot, in the end upgrading your gear is definitely a major part of developing your character - that's simply the nature of the game. People will most likely run any instance once or twice just to see it, but if it wasn't for the loot they wouldn't be coming back repeatedly. Thus, a good instance should offer good quality loot for a wide variety of classes and specs. At level cap it also needs to offer incentives to come back once you've progressed past the available loot, such as emblem drops or daily quests.

You might notice that I didn't list "difficulty" as a factor of it's own, but that's simply because it's more or less included in some of the points I already mentioned: an instance shouldn't be too long, trash shouldn't hit too hard, bosses shouldn't wipe you a gazillion times.

In summary, in my eyes a good instance should

• be easy to get to
• feel like a proper dungeon
• have a story and quests associated with it
• be neither too long nor too short
• be impossible to get utterly lost in but still be fun to discover
• have a reasonable amount of trash
• have memorable (if not necessarily hard) bosses
• contain good loot

We'll get to which ones live up to these requirements and which ones don't!

Three more reasons to like patch day

The first reason to like patch day should be obvious: new content! However, for me personally the real reasons for enjoying patch day don't actually lie in the new content itself, but in some of its side effects.

1. Dead places come back to life.

Now, calling my guild "dead" before the patch would be doing it a great injustice, but it's a simple truth that things quiet down as people have less and less reason to play, to explore new things and to achieve new goals. They log on to raid and do dailies, without talking much or doing a lot of other things in between. Some might not log on for whole weeks.

Not so on patch day! Suddenly everyone and their grandmother is back online and guild chat is overflowing with excited chatter about new patch features. For a social player like me that's great!

2. For a brief amount of time you get to feel like a newbie again.

I think most players still remember the first time they entered the WoW capital of their choice and went "whoa". I'll definitely never forget the first time I walked through the gates of Stormwind. It was an amazing experience, and I felt like I had a whole world laid out in front of me, just waiting for me to discover it. Which I did! The only sad thing about that kind of experience is that you can't really repeat it (not in the same game anyway) - once you know the game inside out, you can't just go and forget it all again.

The moment you log in on patch day however, you're flooded with so much new information it can be hard to keep track. Where's the entrance to that new raid? Cool pet, where did you get that? What's that new achievement that just popped up in guild chat? Personally I find that it's very much comparable to the newbie experience (So much cool new stuff, what the hell am I supposed to look at first?), even if it doesn't last for a very long time. As an added advantage everybody else is new to the content as well, so it's not at all embarrassing to to ask questions or, say, go into a new dungeon without having a clue about the boss encounters.

3. The little things.

New raids, new battlegrounds and new daily quests are very nice and all, but in all honesty I think that the many small, sometimes even undocumented, new features are usually the best ones. They likely cost relatively little effort but can still bring you quite a lot of joy.

For example I tried out the new raid on ten-man with a couple of guildies and we all sat down to eat a fish feast at the start. Lo and behold, the new cat form for druids actually has a proper eating animation! So we all just sat there and stared at our feral druid munching, it was quite mesmerising.

Or take the achievements for emblems: I remember reading multiple times that the old "get so-and-so-many emblems" achievements for heroism and valor would be converted to feats of strength and more or less be replaced by new achievements for conquest and triumph. As it turns out, Blizzard decided to merge them all into one big "dungeon emblems" achievement instead, which is great because it means no part of your old badge count is lost and all of it can count towards the new achievement. With the originally proposed setup, someone with, say, 900 emblems of heroism would have got the "500 emblems" feat of strength, but 400 more badges would have been lost in space, so to speak. As it is now, I'm almost at 1000 Dungeon & Raid Emblems on my main and pretty pleased with that. Small things...

I also squeed with delight when I opened the in-game mail from the orphan matron and it contained images. I really like the new music at the Argent Tournament. I giggled at the cute things the wolvar orphan said. And I could go on and on, even though I've only got a glimpse of all the new stuff so far!

I hope everybody else is having a good patch day as well and not being plagued by too much lag.

Looking at the priest Q&A

... I can't help feeling somewhat underwhelmed and definitely not enlightened. I know, I know, that's what people have been saying about all the previous Q&As too. I guess I was holding out an irrational hope that this one would be different somehow because it's about my class.

Nonetheless there are quite a few things I would like to comment on:

First off, I immediately have to disagree somewhat with Ghostcrawler's description of the "unmatched versatility" of the healing priest. I mean, have you looked at resto druids lately? A quick look at wowhead tells me that a fully talented resto druid has eight different healing spells at their disposal, with only one of them being of somewhat questionable usefulness (Healing Touch). A holy priest has ten different healing spells, two of which are utter rubbish for doing any actual healing (Holy Nova and Lightwell), leaving us at eight as well. That really doesn't strike me as having considerably more options. And the claim that priests have "strong heal-over-time spells" is simply untrue. Priest have one HoT, Renew, and it's only reasonably strong if you glyph for it and invest six talent points solely into making that one spell better.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying priests suck and nerf resto druids. I'm saying that with the way Blizzard has buffed the other healing classes since the end of BC, they are actually pretty on par with priests in what they can do, including the amount of spells they have. Priests have versatility in so far as they can choose to spec so they can either compete with paladins at single-target healing, or with druids and shamans at raid healing. But once you've picked your spec you're locked into a very specific role as well and don't really have considerably more ways to fulfill it than other classes.

Up next, shadow priests seem to get relatively little love from the developers. I can't really comment on everything in that section of the Q&A since I abandoned shadow for holy at the start of WOTLK because I didn't find being a "pure" dpser as fun as playing an utility role and thus didn't like the changes they made to Vampiric Touch and shadow priest damage.

The bit about Dispersion made me raise my eyebrow though, because the most common complaint I hear about it is that it simply doesn't work in PvE when it would be the most useful, that is to say in situations where a boss suddenly decides to target you with an extra damage ability like Ignis' slag pot. This wasn't even brought up.

And the argument that Dispersion must be good because "nearly all shadow priests take it" is simply rubbish. The reason nearly all shadow priests take it is that there aren't any other options. You could take every single talent in the shadow tree, even the ones you'll never get any use out of, and you'll still have talent points left over at 80. Then you look at the other two talent trees and they are all about healing and thus don't improve your damage either (with the exception of a couple of talents in the first two tiers of discipline). So what else should you do with those points? Dispersion is not a bad talent, it's just very lackluster for a 51-pointer considering that most other classes get something in that spot that's worth casting every time its cooldown is up.

Regarding Vampiric Embrace, I have to admit the notion that it creates too much threat these days is new to me as well. Just thinking about that spell is kind of weird now though, I remember how many times they nerfed it because its group healing was perceived as too powerful... and yet these days we have ret pallies healing the whole raid with judgement of light. Go figure.

I'm not sure I like the idea of priests getting a frost spell; it just seems to... un-priesty. I think allowing easier shifting to holy spells if necessary might be the way to go there, it's not as if that will suddenly turn shadow priests into amazing healers or anything.

Shifting gear to talk about the healing side of priest-dom, Ghostcrawler goes on to talk about how Greater Heal doesn't get a lot of use these days. And then... it just gets confusing. He basically says that Greater Heal is a bit rubbish and they know it because it's too slow and too big, but they want us to use it more, so they are considering giving us another small heal. Eh, what? I hope I'm not the only one who was wondering what he was actually trying to say there. That said, I'd definitely like them to make Greater Heal more viable again. I miss it and I still use Flash Heal a lot less than my fellow raiding priests. Old habits die hard.

The question about Divine Hymn was actually my favourite because it was the one thing that made me a little happy. I agree that it's a great spell and probably shouldn't be available more than once per encounter, but it can easily happen that you wipe and then can't use it on the next attempt simply because your raid is reasonably fast at regrouping for the next try. So preventing it from being recast only because of a debuff à la "sated" (which you lose if you die) would be great.

Every mention of Lightwell just makes me sigh. I can't believe how stubbornly the developers are clinging to the idea, no matter how many times people repeat that it's not working. Yes, there's always the odd one out who goes "Oh yes, I use Lightwell all the time in raids and it's great because our dpsers are smart", but in most cases it will simply go unused. Dps characters will focus on their dps more than their survival, and I think to a certain extent that's actually quite okay. That's why we have healers in groups. If everybody was expected to run to the back and grab a Lightwell charge, you might as well not bring a healer and just tell everybody to bandage. Just let it go already and replace that talent with something that actually affects the way I heal instead of expecting people to create wannabe soulwells.

The section that annoyed me the most was the one about combining Dispel Magic and Dispel Disease into one spell. To be honest this wasn't even something that ever occurred to me, so it's not like Ghostcrawler just rejected my favourite idea ever, but the way in which he did it was just... baffling. "We think that pushes dispels too far into easy mode." You realise that both paladins and resto shamans already have spells to dispel not two, but three debuffs at once? Are those classes easy mode then? And why is it okay for them but not for priests? That's just no logical argument.

Finally, the argument about Inner Fire was one I could actually understand somewhat, though the charges are still hugely annoying in PvP or any other kind of situation where you are on the receiving end of a lot of small hits in rapid succession. I'd actually really like the idea of providing priests with alternate armour buffs if that made them get rid of the charges, but unfortunately I don't think he was quite serious about that suggestion. Oh well.

This might have come off as a bit ranty, but for the record I'd like to state that I actually think that priests are in a pretty good place right now. There are always minor things that could be improved, but overall we are fine - all three of our specs are viable. It's just that when you read something that goes into that much detail about your class, you'd hope they'd be able to avoid silly mistakes like claiming that priests have strong HoTs.

Link to the Q&A itself on the European website

Insanity!

Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom is one of the less popular WOTLK heroics as far as I can tell. I'm not entirely sure why that is. Do people consider it too long? Is it because of the spell flingers and their shadow blasts of doom? Personally I'm quite fond of it for various reasons; about the biggest gripe I have with the instance is its name. An'kahet? Ank'ahet? I always have to double-check the spelling.

The same is true for the last boss. Harold Voljaz? Herold Volazj? Seriously, which randomiser produces spelling atrocities like that? However - odd consonant combinations aside, I freaking love this boss.

I'll never forget the first time I killed him. It was during the first weeks after WOTLK's release and my friends and I were levelling through Northrend at a comfortable pace, taking our time to look at all the dungeons together. Since everything was new to everyone anyway, we never bothered to check guides or anything of the like to learn about boss abilities, we'd just "wing it" as one of our raid leaders likes to say.

So we engage this squidiphant called (/check wowhead) Herald Volazj and at first it's pretty much just tank and spank. Then he casts something called "insanity" and suddenly all the other party members appear to turn hostile. "Aha!" I thought, feeling smart, "it's Blackheart the Inciter v.2, mind-controlling everyone!" Except... I was still in control of my character. What was going on with everyone else? People were shouting things over vent that made no sense to me. I healed myself, waiting for the perceived mind control to end, but it just kept going on and on! Eventually some of my friends managed to break their illusions and started killing mine, so now I suddenly saw double, friendly and hostile clones of the same characters! It was horribly, horribly confusing and utterly hilarious at the same time. We pretty much all agreed that it was a brilliant fight, intentionally designed to confuse everybody who had run Shadow Labyrinth one too many times back in BC.

When I came back to the boss on heroic mode, I soon came to another interesting realisation, namely that it's one of the rare bits of content where being a healer or a tank is much easier than being a damage dealer. I had more than one group where most or even all of the dps didn't even survive the first insanity phase and originally I had serious trouble understanding why.

As a healer, the insanity phase is ridiculously easy. Just heal yourself as needed and wait for someone else to break free and kill your adds, their damage output shouldn't be enough to put you in any serious danger. If you've got the mana pool for it you can also dps them down yourself, if somewhat slowly. On my priest I usually prefer to conserve my mana since the untalented dps spells are quite expensive, but on my paladin I'll gleefully consecrate and spam judgements and holy shocks on my foes. My damage output is still pitiful, but my health and mana never really go down.

Trying to survive the insanity in the role of a paladin tank I found things even easier. Just go for the healer first, whack them with a quick stun the moment they try to heal, use your aoe abilities and watch all the evil clones die within a couple of seconds without hurting you at all. Easy peasy!

Until... the fateful day I decided to run heroic Old Kingdom on my hunter. Oh my.

It was a very embarrassing experience. As soon as insanity hit, my first instinct was to go and kill the healer, except I quickly had to realise that as a survival-spec hunter without scatter shot I didn't actually have any ways of interrupting their spell-casting. No matter how much I shot, the heals just kept on coming and I couldn't get anything down. Eventually I just ended up running in circles like a headless chicken, unintentionally getting the Ultimate Triage achievement as I desperately clung to what was left of my life with a single bandage tick... and I survived, thanks to my guildies being much more competent than me, but I sure felt stupid.

I immediately consulted Google for help on how to survive this particular encounter as a hunter. Despite of all the hunter blogs out there I didn't really find a proper guide to the fight, but I did end up discovering a couple of helpful hints. The key to the fight, they said, was to crowd-control the healer and save them for last. You can trap things, remember? Even if you haven't had to do that since level 70...

Tonight I ended up braving Old Kingdom on my hunter again and I was excited. Would I manage to pull it off this time or get shamed again?

On the first insanity I managed to trap the healer and burn down two of the evil clones before they broke free again, but then I ended up breaking my second trap by accident and help arrived before I could get the situation back under control myself. Still, I didn't take a lot of damage.

On the second insanity I finally got back into the groove of trapping and managed to keep the healer under control until all the other adds were dead. Then I nuked the healer. They healed. I nuked. They healed. I nuked. The mage in the party went down, cursing resto druids. I was starting to feel an additional kind of insanity as I watched the evil tree without a mana bar keep itself topped up with nourish spam no matter what I did. Just as I was about to break into a mad cackle a lucky crit or something must have finished them off, because suddenly I could see the other survivors fighting their illusions. The spell was broken.

I can now happily return to mocking any dps that dies on this fight while I do the "easy" job of tanking or healing. And I still freaking love this boss.