Tag Archives: wow gold

It’s a troubling yet underpublicized fact that four out of five shadow priests respecced shadow for the first time after experiencing a romantic break-up. Recent studies show that priests are 63% more likely to respec shadow within 72 hours of a break-up, while a separate poll found that 78% of healing priests had seriously considered respeccing to shadow after having an argument with their spouse or significant other. To the tenderhearted healing priest, shadow probably seems like a quick way to steel yourself and mend a broken heart; unfortunately, too few priests realize the two points they’re putting into Masochism ’til they’re staring down into an empty bottle of Volcanic Potion and wishing they could do the same DPS as a warlock.

The simple way to avoid all these drastic courses of action is, of course, to skip getting your heart broken in the first place. Easier said than done, you think? Perhaps, but knowing the battlefield of love will certainly help you avoid the more obvious pitfalls. Want to know what your best match is? What about your worst? This week, I’ve got the answers in a special guide to the classes.

Warriors: Rage or passion?

A warrior is without doubt a class that wears its heart on its sleeve. Once stricken with love, warriors will make their feelings obvious to you and everyone around them. Be wary, however; their propensity toward emotional display also comes at a cost — they do not hide their anger or jealously well. If you’re the type of priest who likes to flirt, a warrior probably isn’t for you.

Warrior tanks in particular can often be big control freaks. This might come off as overbearing to some priests, while others will find it complements their need for security and stability. Disc priests in particular may have trouble living up to the expectations of a warrior tank, since many prefer a more conventional type of healer and think absorption is extremely improper.

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

Unless you’ve been living in the little cave on Darkmoon Island for the past few months (and frankly, if you have, well done — that must be one awesome time machine!), you’ll have heard about the impending expansion. I previously posted a short plea for WoW Insider readers to head over to Blizzard MVP Eldacar’s thread asking for PvP feedback over on the official forums, and it got me thinking about what I would love to see from PvP in Mists of Pandaria.

Now, I’m excited about the upcoming changes that Blizzard is talking about; you’ve no doubt seen the information over on Battle.net. Resilience as a baseline stat sounds pretty great to me and will make PvP at lower-level brackets a bit more fun, but I’m curious to see how Blizzard’s going to scale it within those brackets. If it scales with level, then a level 64 is going to have an even easier time beating up a level 60 and basically being a one-toon killing machine. And this won’t serve to help PvP at lower levels at all, although it will make entry into max-level PvP a lot easier.

And the new Battlegrounds look interesting, the proposed Valley of Power BG especially, because the premise is pretty simple. I don’t think overcomplicated Battlegrounds that require complex player-environment interaction are the most fun. I prefer simple maps that place the emphasis on, you know, killing the opposite faction. There’s a term for that, I’m sure … Oh, yeah. PvP!

But I’m thinking big, ladies and gentlemen, really big — Azerothian-moon-on-a-stick big. Now, a brief disclaimer: This is fantasy from the deranged mind of an Englishwoman and certainly not a scoop of exciting early news. I’m just throwing this out there!

In Two Bosses Enter, WoW Insider’s series of fantasy death matches, bosses, leaders, and powerful figures of World of Warcraft face off in the squared circle. Your vote determines who wins and claims the season title.

As the poll closes for last week’s matchup. the Echo of Sylvanas from the End Time dungeon successfully trumped the second raid boss to be a part of Two Bosses Enter, Yor’sahj the Unsleeping. Looks like this unsleeper is being put down for the night, if you catch my drift. You don’t? Oh, Yor’sahj lost. By 800 votes. Another surprisingly close match, considering who Sylvanas is.

This week’s matchup proves to be another fun one, especially for the commenters, who are doing their best to reconcile raid mechanics and 5-man mechanics while remembering that this is about spirit and fun. The Echo of Tyrande, leader of the night elves and caretaker of Nordrassil and the druid barrows, will have to pull out every trick in the book as she goes up against Warlord Zon’ozz, one of the two generals at the helm of the assault on Wyrmrest Temple.

Now the fate of these two champions is in your hands. Who wins it, loyal readers and fans? Does the Echo of Tyrande have the strength of will to stand up against the madness of the Old Gods’ servant Warlord Zon’ozz?

Dungeons drop gear. For many players, that’s the whole point of going into an instance, whether it’s a 5-man dungeon or a huge raid instance. We’re locked in the ever-expanding search for better gear, and you have to kill bosses to get your sweet, sweet loot.

Most guilds use one or more various systems to make sure loot distribution is fair. Some employ a basic rule of civility; once you get gear in an a raid, it’s polite to defer further drops to other guildmates. Others use complicated but effective point systems, assigning dropped gear a point value that members can bid against. No matter what the general system for rolling on gear, the foundation of the system is based on all group members’ being part of a common team.

Pickup groups and Raid Finder groups possess no such commonality. The teams comprise random folks thrown together by Blizzard’s behind-the-scenes group-building algorithms. Basic roles are filled, a few rules followed — but basically anyone can get thrown together into a group.

Random groups rarely agree on loot etiquette before getting started. We all say we should agree on loot rules beforehand, but that rarely actually happens. Instead, most folks charge ahead into the dungeon operating under only a few basic assumptions about how loot will be divided. With that in mind, let’s review the basic etiquette of rolling on gear in groups.

Blizzard’s Rolling Tool: Use it

Blizzard’s rolling tool has come a long, long way. At this point, the tool knows whether your class can use a piece of gear, and the tool allows you to roll need, greed, or disenchant. Just in case there’s some horrible error, you can even trade gear among members of the instance for some time after the roll, unless it’s been disenchanted, of course. (You only get the disenchant option if you have a disenchanter in the group.)

As a general rule, you should use the rolling tool exactly as it is. Don’t try and modify it with freaky rules and regulations. Just click need, greed, or disenchant, and move on with your life.

The tool does have a few challenges. We’ll discuss them in just a second, but I want to underline: Don’t do anything but use the tool as intended without discussing it with the group first. In the attempt to be a good person regarding gear, you could very easily just screw yourself out of loot. No sense in trying to alter the rules if the group doesn’t agree to it beforehand.

Consideration in low-level dungeons

One of the places the rolling tool falls a bit short is in lower-level dungeons. A few natural situation illustrate why. First, groups are comprised of people leveling up through the game, and most characters won’t yet be settled into their final role. Along the way, tanks and healers especially will be trying to maintain two sets of gear: one for DPS and leveling, one for completing dungeons. Second, some group members will be trying to switch roles, collecting DPS gear while still tanking the instance you’re currently in.

While that dynamic shouldn’t give a person priority in a need role, it’s fair to say that’s a good reason not to disenchant an item that would otherwise see use. Most players agree that disenchanting is cool, but it’s better for a piece of gear to actually get used. Breaking a useful drop into a shard is kind of a putz move.

For this reason, check in with the group members to see if anyone might otherwise use gear before you start rolling disenchant. This should only take a second or three and can save some heartache for someone who’s trying to leave DPS behind to get into the tanking game.

Windward Heart As far as healing throughput goes, this is currently the best trinket in the game. Many healers are reporting its doing up to 5% of their healing in a fight, and since the heal is a smart heal that will target the most injured member of your party, you know it’s never going to overheal anyone. The internal cooldown is 20 seconds, meaning you’ll see the proc going off constantly as long as you keep healing. There is some debate on whether holy or disc will benefit from this trinket more, since holy priests are typically healing more targets and thus more likely to get a critical heal, while disc priests are known to have more crit because of talents like Renewed Hope. First off, it doesn’t really matter who benefits from the trinket more, because it’s best in slot for both specs. Second, who it benefits more has to do with your raid role, not your spec. It’s true that a holy priest is more than likely going to be acting as a raid healer, but disc priests will occasionally fill that role too, just like holy priests may occasionally tank heal. Because raid roles change from fight to fight, I would encourage you to not be that jerk who tries to make a case for it by waving his spec around.
Heart of the Unliving This is the regen trinket every healer is going to want for the rest of the expansion. It’s the direct upgrade to Darkmoon Card: Tsunami, which you may have noticed most people were still wearing throughout tier 12. The trinket is most ideal for holy priests, who get 30% additional spirit regen from Holy Concentration, but that doesn’t mean disc priests need to back off. Disc priests are still able to utilize the spirit through Meditation (even if Rapture will only benefit from the intellect side of the trinket), which means this is the best regen trinket a disc priest can get. Both priests specs should keep in mind, however, that the healer who will benefit from this trinket the most is the one who has the most mana problems. If you raid with the same group of people week after week, you may want to distribute this particular trinket based on need.
Seal of the Seven Signs The problem with a random haste proc is that there is no real way of knowing whether or not you’ll be able to utilize it when it goes off. That’s the main problem with this trinket from a healer’s perspective. Healing is not a job that requires you to produce the most HPS possible at all times. It is a job that requires you to respond appropriately to the flow of damage in a fight. Damage is not always high, nor is it always continuous, so having a trinket that will randomly increase your HPS by increasing your casting speed is of debatable benefit. Using this trinket, there is even a risk that you might not be able to use the proc at times, since there are phases of fights that require little to no healing at all. I don’t want to make it sound like this trinket is bad however … It’s quite good, just not as good as it could be if it were say, an on use haste trinket. (I should also note for the sake of novelty, though, that the proc on this trinket can get you the mythical sixth Renew tick, provided you have enough static haste rating to begin with, about 1,800, but with the proc being random, there is really no way to make it effective.)