Aethelwulf

Well if you want to feel unsafe, truly the Alliance Warlock is without equal. The Undead race's Will of the Forsaken racial and Shaman class's Tremor Totem are the bane of the Warlocks. The Warlock also has the worst kiting abilities of all ranged classes. Druids have Entangle and shapeshifts. Shamans have Frost Shock and Earthbind Totem along with fast Ghost Wolf if they needed it. Mages have a ton of kiting options. Hunters have Freezing Trap, Concussive Shot, Wyvern Sting, Wing Clip, Black Arrow, etc. Warlocks have Fear, Succubus pet's Seduce, Death Coil, and Curse of Exhaustion. The first two are broken by WotF and Tremor Totems. Death Coil has a gcd and lasts 3 seconds. Technically there is also the Aftermath talent but no one ever takes it. For bonus poinst, the warlock is the only spellcaster (aside from the extremely rare balance druid) who has no talents to avoid casting loss from damage (unless we are counting Fel Concentration which applies to drain channels and intensity which applies to AoEs and Soul Fire). This is the reason why there are so few alliance warlocks on PvP servers. At least 70-80% of every Horde class that can be Undead is Undead, except for the Warrior. And the Warrior can Berserker Rage out of fears and obtain fear immunity (Fury Warriors can also Death Wish for more fear immunity). Rogues in particular are over 80% Undead iirc. If these people carry PvP trinkets they can even break two fears. On the upside, because Warlocks are typically the least popular class on the Alliance, at least you will have a great time obtaining raid loot now that there's half as many Warlocks or less in your raid compared to the Horde. (Also if you are rolling a Shaman, Taurens are the best race. War Stomp and +5% health are both excellent racials. The nature resist doesn't hurt either.)

Burst damage is also higher value than sustained damage. If your windfury hits someone for sub-2k damage he will probably pot, self-heal, or make some distance somehow, so that's a lot less useful than a windfury that hits for over 3k damage plus a shock destroying them before they ever realize what happened.

If he is expecting WF to proc off of any weapon proc that hits enemies, that would of course be wrong, but there are weapon procs that inflict hits which should be able to proc Windfury. The Nicker, Halberd of Smiting, Blackhand Doomsaw, The Needler, Diabolic Skiver, Grim Reaper, Brain Hacker, Pendulum of Doom, The Lobotomizer, etc. These weapons all proc physical hits on enemies and as such their procs should be capable of causing weapon procs. While windfury cannot proc off of windfury effects (ie. giant Ironfoe windfury chains) or spell procs, these procs are physical attacks that are not windfury effects, and thus they should be able proc off of each other just fine.

The thing you are missing is that Hunters and Warriors can force procs off of Wing Clip and Hamstring hits respectively. Hunters in particular can and should spam rank 1 Wing Clip on gcd endlessly, amounting to a 233.3333% increase in procs from Wing Clip hits. In addition, with a Windfury Totem (and Hand of Justice) their procrate will be even higher. A Shaman's Windfury is certainly powerful, but you have to account for the fact that any other Nightfall users should be receiving a Windfury Totem to improve their uptime as well. A Nightfall Hunter is easily worth more than a Nightfall Shaman in terms of uptime.

I stand corrected. Druids obtain Growl at level 10. As for the subject of Druid tanking, it is also worth noting that Druids can tank dungeons well, as can Shamans and Paladins. (Arguably, any class short of the Mage can dungeon tank with the right healers, gear, talents, and determination.) On the topic of Nightfall Prot vs Feral Druid though, a Nightfall easily wins. That debuff (+15% to raid magic damage) is far too potent to neglect, although you could just as well have a Nightfall Hunter spamming Wing Clip on cooldown to force large amounts of procs.

Well, current responses are somewhat more encouraging than what I initially saw. It's worth noting that while passwords can indeed be pilfered from the forum database, the average GM should not have access to the DB proper (I should hope). Although given enough control over the forum layout, it might be possible to embed a keylogging script to steal account names and passwords. If the OP is around it'd be curious to know what kind of Elysium (or Nostalrius, if he kept the same password there) affiliated services he used, if any. Unlike WoW proper, I would think that even if he had malware on his own computer they would not be interested in private server login data, but that cannot be strictly ruled out, given the presence of goldfarmers and the tendency of malware groups to pursue any data that can result in financial gain. The most likely scenario in my mind however remains that his account data was pilfered through some Elysium-related service, so the forum really cannot be ruled out as the largest and most convenient vector, particularly given Elysium's prior lapses in vetting staff members. If he used a power-leveling service however, that would also make sense. Temper, lad. Two-factor authentication is not some magic spell either. It's an encouraging security measure (albeit somewhat of a nuisance), but it doesn't absolve an organization of the need to keep its users' data safe. The question of how this happened remains a pertinent one. And at the very least it would be worthwhile for Elysium to look through the login history on his compromised account and see if the IPs match against any users of the game or forum, as well as noting where the items disappeared to, if possible. Identifying the culprit is still very much a worthwhile pursuit as opposed to making excuses or giving apathetic responses.

Sadly this lines up with the shadier rumors (some of which seemed more or less confirmed) I've heard about the Elysium staff. Coupled with our GM's thoroughly uncaring response, it's safe to say Elysium just doesn't give a shit about these problems. Makes me glad about the steps I take to disassociate my forum account from my actual game account, but it saddens me with regards to Elysium's irresponsibility. I suppose I may as well abandon ship too then.

You only need 1 rank of Shadow Weaving with 5/5 Darkness to have a higher spelldamage coefficient per second than Starshards. With 5/5 Darkness, 1 stack of shadow weaving (applied by Mind Flay itself), and no Shadowform, the spell damage on Mind Flay already provides a higher return on DPS than Starshards. The crux of damage multipliers is that they also multiply the damage you receive from spell damage gear; that is how they improve your spelldmg coefficients. We're concerned with the total benefit of spell damage here. Not some theoretical baseline which is not used in practice. In reality, any shadow priest will have a higher coefficient on their Mind Flay alone than you would obtain from Starshards. Even with PI and your starshards doing 21% of spelldmg per sec, it would only take a Shadow Priest 4 stacks of Shadow Weaving in Shadowform to have a higher DPS coefficient with Mind Flay than you would obtain on Starshards with PI active. Starshards may be mana efficient for grinding (which is a good catch by the way), but in terms of DPS it sadly offers nothing until Burning Crusade unless you're locked out of Shadow school as a Shadow Priest maybe. I've fiddled for a while with how to make Night Elf Priests viable myself and the ultimate conclusion is that their racials are sadly rather worthless, except when using Elune's Grace against Rogues, Hunters, and the odd Enhancement Shaman in PvP maybe. With regards to a Warlock's Affliction grinding there is nothing much to say. Numi has already listed a solid grinding build using 2/2 Improved Drain Soul to mitigate downtime even further, and we already know SM/DS tops for general grinding and DoT damage among other things. Dark Pact just gives you another mana battery if you ever wanted it, but Warlocks being what they are tend not to be too concerned on this point. I suppose it's worth noting that SM/DS has some use as alliance PvP, since there are fewer defensive dispels on the Horde to guard against your DoTs and if you have a voidwalker sacrificed for the regen a Rogue is going to have a harder time ganking you since you should never be low and if he tries stunlocking you to death in world PvP, your constant health regen (and the fact that he cannot sap you, kill your pet, and get back to offing you like he would if you are Soul Link) coupled with your higher stamina pool, Siphon Life, and larger healthstones will increase your odds of surviving through his stunlock routine. Plus a Succubus isn't as viable for world PvP as an Alliance Warlock anyway. The main downside to this is that you will have a bad time against horde priests who can dispel all your DoTs other than (Amplified) Curse of Agony, and your burst damage is pretty lousy. If you can't DoT your main damage nuke in solo PvP as SM/DS is probably going to be Searing Pain for the fast cast times. Honestly against Horde Priests you should consider tossing a Death Coil and using Fel Domination to pull out a Felhunter quick if you can. It might also help to equip a Spellstone strictly to remove the Silence condition from yourself. You similarly lack a Felhunter to interrupt and Spell Lock mages and shamans but you can drop an Infernal on their heads if you want to frustrate their spellcasts and you can equip a spellstone for the magic shield and dispel against mages.

The short of it on Priests is as follows: You're mistaking vanilla to have burning crusade spelldamage coefficients. All coefficients are capped at 100% pre-multiplier. The damage is furthermore split across each tick of the channel. Normally it would require 3.5 seconds (or more) of cast time to do 100% of spell damage. Starshards is a 6 second duration channel, and will have 100% of spell damage distributed across 6 ticks. This means that it does roughly 16.7% of spell damage as DPS whereas any normal spell will do 28.57% (like a smite). Mind Flay is a special case where it has a terrible custom coefficient (45% iirc) split across 3 ticks (15% per second), but with 4 ranks of Shadow Weaving or 1 rank plus 5/5 darkness or Shadowform multiplying the damage, it will exceed Starshards in DPS coefficient out of the box also. The only single-target channels I can think of with worse damage coefficients are Drain Soul (15 seconds of duration ruins the coefficient) and Drain Life (because drains receive half of the normal damage coefficient because they also heal for their damage, so it only does 10% pre-multiplier). In Burning Crusade the coefficients formulas were altered and no longer be capped at 100%, improving the damage of channels considerably.

I see we have someone joining a blizzlike server only to whine that he doesn't want to play blizzlike and telling others to change the server to suit his taste. You might think you have a great idea going but that's not what we're here for and if Elysium did this you can expect the population to collapse overnight. Here is a better idea for saving Elysium: Release AQ40.

It was nerfed in 1.3.0 because the Green Lens of Stamina could give you +35 stamina on a single headpiece. That was considered overpowered by Blizzard and was thus removed from possible Green Lens rolls.

Hm, point. If you use PW:S beforehand, that would work. I thought Renew was more popular for Priest grinding, but PW:S is indeed an option. Spirit is useful for leveling up and grinding, particular for Mages and Priests. There is nothing special about gearing Spirit heavily. Only Warlocks, Shamans, and Paladins avoid gearing spirit, although if Shamans and Paladins really wanted to, they could gear 3/3 Green Dragon Mail and Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon to suddenly make spirit a viable gearing option (if you want to go the extra mile, you could use the Burst of Knowledge trinket with under-ranked spells - R1 LHW for Shamans - to cast them for free and trigger the 5 second rule on demand too), and even Warlocks can use Spirit if they run 2/2 Improved Drain Soul like the build Numi detailed above, although most of them are fine with life tapping and bandaging or draining. Of all things, there is really nothing special about a Priest that gears Spirit. Given 5/5 Spirit Tap and 3/3 Meditation, gearing Spirit is extremely normal for Priests. As for spell damage, in terms of DPS Starshards has the worst spelldmg coefficient of all Priest spells. Even Mind Flay out-scales it once you get Shadow Weaving stacks. I will grant that it is mana-efficient provided you get full duration via Power Word: Shield or engineering dummies. But once you factor in Dark Pact, that could still become a net negative overall. It depends on your mana consumption really. Yep. It has its uses though, since Soul Link cannot be purged off of a Phase Shifted Imp, nor can a Rogue sap you, kill your pet, and get back to offing you, and you still have Blood Pact and Fire Shield. But you would at least want a Fortitude buff on your Imp from a nearby Priest (and maybe Druid too) and probably a Robe of the Void if you can. Shouldn't be hard, especially if you offer Healthstones. That said, no one really does SL+Imp since you have other solutions to Rogues and Priests.

Thank you for the peanut gallery remarks. I'd like to remind you that the Horde uses Tremor Totems from Shamans to deal with Fear. It also has all those Undead players who picked UD precisely for Will of the Forsaken to break Fear on their own (aside from the Warrior, every class that can be Undead is over 70%-80% UD because of this one racial). That is why the Horde manages without Fear Ward. The Alliance on the other hand leans heavily on Fear Ward to handle boss fears. As for Desperate Prayer, it is a self-heal and not particularly raid relevant unless your Priest is in danger of dying.

Horde or bust. You don't want to go up against things like Tremor Totem or Will of the Forsaken which break your fear and seduce. Warlocks are heavily dependent on their Fear and Succubus to clinch fights. Warriors in particular can Berserker Rage out of fears, making them a pain in the ass unless you have a Succubus in which case you can usually Seduce + Soul Fire them into the ground or you're Soul Link spec. A timely Death Coil is usually clutch in those fights. If their intercept is on cooldown you might be able to kite them to death with DoTs from a distance. But Warlocks typically need some heavy damage and stamina to be properly dangerous. Undead Rogues (which is like 80% of Horde Rogues) in particular are a Warlock's bane, whereas Orc Warlocks have a solid chance of defeating an Alliance Rogue's stunlock, especially if they have a Succubus pet out. Undead Warriors are a Warlock's bane too, but the Warrior is the one Undead class that isn't like 80% Undead, because Warriors already have built-in fear immunities. Maybe a Mage can kite a Rogue well, but Mages are the masters of kiting and depending on the Rogue, two shotting a Mage should be very doable for them. The mobility issues tend not to matter when Rogues can apply Crippling Poison and will always start a fight ambushing you from behind. If you can get the drop on a Rogue it's a different story but given their stealth, that's not likely to ever happen. You're neglecting the fact that Warriors can't just take enemies out of the fight like Rogues can, which is extremely destructive to PvP matchups. A sapped enemy might as well be dead for all the good he does in a group fight. The problem most Rogues face in battlegrounds is that they are still trying to solo gank people in mass PvP, with predictable results. Instead they should just cripple enemies in fights, assist their teammates, and ambush people who are in a bad spot. But rogues still have very high burst damage with the right spec and gear.

It's as people say. 3 piece T2 plus high +healing gear make Chain Heal much more potent later on, viable in both raids and battlegrounds.

I suppose Starshards might have its perks for mana efficient PvE grinding, although I'm not sure how you prevent pushback. Once you're geared though Starshards is worthless. Shadowguard on the other hand divides 100% of spelldmg across 3 hits, and every hit applies Shadow Weaving and can proc Blackout. For a Shadow Priest with 5/5 Shadow Weaving up, Shadowguard does 145.475% of spell damage, or about 48.49167% of shadow damage on every hit. Given 402 spell damage, your Shadowguard would hit 3 times for 363.6875 damage. I suppose it depends on how much you dark pact, but it may be better to turn off both. Lash of Pain not only consumes mana but also disables mana regeneration for 5 seconds, and the Succubus isn't quite the mana battery than an imp is. That said, a lot of Warlocks aren't really concerned with ways to get unending mana off of dark pact since they can just Life Tap and bandage or drain/siphon it back. And strictly speaking a phase-shifted imp can still take damage from Soul Link, but usually Soul Link Warlocks tend not to go with the Imp as their pet of choice (unless they're equipping Robe of the Void and/or putting fortitude buffs on the imp maybe). I would typically favor this for a SM/DS build but it's true that for strict PvE drain-tanking it's worse. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#IA0bVRbkAZfxhzT0o In that case you can drop Curse of Exhaustion and a rank of Suppression for 5/5 Improved Drain Life if you prefer. I wouldn't drop Amplify Curse because a 50% stronger Curse of Agony is still potent. Improved Succubus is fairly worthless overall unless you have 2/2 improved Lash of Pain at the least. That's just a SM/DS build designed for leveling from 1-60.

Tauren, period. Anything else is just a handicapped Shaman. Shamans have no stuns or CCs out of the box and Stompcasts are incredibly potent since they can interrupt spellcasts and guarantee 2 seconds of casting time for yourself (Lesser Healing Wave if Enhance, also Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning if Elemental) and having +5% max health is great against everything in PvP too. Taurens are hands down the best PvP race, even if you are playing Enhance spec. Elemental Shamans do have the benefit of stomping into a trinket Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning for large amounts of damage which they can immediately follow up with a NS Lightning Bolt, but a well-timed War Stomp into a Lesser Healing Wave can also turn around fights you were otherwise losing. Beyond that, interrupting someone out of a spellcast at the right moment can also decide fights, and War Stomp can also buy time for your auto-attack to come off cooldown or for your Fire Nova totem to explode. In BGs and the like it also lets you aoe stun people whenever it gets crowded. As for Orcs and their Hardiness, if you are worried about stuns, just carry a PvP trinket, and if you really hate getting stunned, make it a macro to use your PvP trinket and instantly follow it with a Free Action Potion (30 seconds of stun and movement impairing effect immunity). Now you're immune to stuns (and slows) and you can compensate for the loss of a health potion with a Stomp Lesser Healing Wave. This is much more reliable than counting on a random 25% chance of resisting stuns to save you. Shamans simply don't need Hardiness, and the Blood Fury racial with its 50% penalty to heals is just suicide on a self-healing class. As for Trolls, they are awful. They are the worst Shaman racial pick by far. If your health is low enough to obtain +20% from Berserking, you would need 10 seconds of unimpeded spellcasting (in which case you should have already won) to obtain 2 extra seconds worth of spellcasting. Whereas War Stomp (which does not GCD) delivers 2 seconds of stunned time on demand to interrupt enemies and cast as you please. Even in PvE, no one cares about Berserking. It's 10 second duration on a 3 minute cooldown for 10-20% increased cast speed. The benefits are far too marginal for anyone to really care. As for their Regeneration racial, Shamans do not gear Spirit and even if they did it would still be utter trash. Not even Priests care about Regeneration (but they would care about the Troll's racial spells) and they stack the most spirit out of anyone.

Rogues are the best for world PvP, which is why rogues are incredibly popular on PvP server and why the game has been called World of Roguecraft. The ability to sneak up on people undetected and ambush them off-guard as well as their absurdly lengthy stunlock routines are extremely powerful. Not to mention Rogues typically have the luxury of avoiding PvP encounters they don't want thanks to stealth. Druids are also capable of stealthing and ganking people using their cat form (and Druids do make very good PvPers if you truly master how to shapeshift around in PvP and use all the abilities of a Druid), but they don't have stunlocks and their damage is usually a bit lower so they lean more on raw damage and need to powershift and the like to sustain their output or heal themselves as needed. As for Shamans, they're quite strong if they are 30/0/21 elemental PvP spec (especially if they are Tauren for the War Stomp + Lightning Bolt combo). But if you are talking about Enhancement Shamans destroying people with big 2handers and Windfury, that's just perception bias. Enhancement Shamans are generally terrible at closing distance and staying there, whereas Windfury only has a 20% chance of proccing (so an 80% chance of not proccing). With Stormstrike your odds of a WF increase a bit (36% chance over 2 hits) but the odds are still well against you successfully unloading a WF on someone, and Enhancement Shamans are highly vulnerable to kiting. It's usually an agonizing game of trying to get close and hoping that the RNG gives you windfury and maybe some crits. Other than auto-attack and Stormstrike's high cooldown, there's nothing Shamans actually do in melee. Enhance has been likened to a slot machine and with good reason. They only do good damage when they get crits and windfury. Elemental Shamans on the other hand don't have to worry about being kited, since they can just comfortably unload lightning bolts and chain lightning from a distance, and their lightning does extremely high DPS.

Horde Priests have it much better than the Alliance in this regard. Undead Priests have Touch of Weakness and Devouring Plague (which has a high mana cost and cooldown) whereas Troll Priests have the extremely well-scaling Shadowguard which has no cooldown and is worth reapplying constantly. Troll Shadow Priests have been rather underrated ever since their racial spells got buffed. Yes but if you DoT and run you can easily grind down 10+ mobs at the same time by running around and instant DoTting everything in sight. It doesn't matter how much damage they do if they never get close enough to do it. You will also heal a lot from Siphon Life and proc a lot of instant shadowbolts. If you're DS specced you would have no pet otherwise (unless you are using Gnomish Mind Control Cap or Gnomish Universal Remote) so it's a lot more worthwhile to enslave demons than usual. It is also worth noting that as DS you can still instantly summon a pet or do a dungeon run with an improved imp active. Agreed. There was a lot of dubiousness to vanilla balance and talent trees and the developers and CMs had a generally half-assed "we know better than you" attitude to it all. It's also worth noting that the 2nd rank of Improved Firebolt does nothing for imps because they still GCD at 1.5 seconds anyway. In Burning Crusade they addressed this longstanding complaint in the most assholish way imaginable, by making Improved Firebolt remove 0.25 seconds of casting time instead of 0.5. Now both ranks are useful, but only because it takes 2 ranks to do what the 1st rank did before. I think it's better to use Dark Pact with a Succubus with autocasts disabled than an imp, when it comes to inflicting damage at least. The imp does provide bonus health and a rather negligible fire shield though. Incidentally, Dark Pact has a fun PvP use with the Gnomish Mind Control Cap since you can Dark Pact them out of all their mana while they are mind controlled. You used to be able to use the Mind Control Cap with Soul Link as well but Blizzard then performed one of their ill-conceived nerfs and changed Soul Link so it only works with summoned demons (ruining the intended Enslave Demon + Soul Link combinations, which is why Demonic Sacrifice is a prereq to the Soul Link). Ill-conceived class changes are also partly the result of the original Blizzard WoW development staff by and large leaving WoW in the wake of Vivendi's acquisition of the company shortly before the official release. This resulted in a slew of abnormal rebalances (including the gutting of the Paladin class), since their balance motivations were rather petty overall (before Tigole ran WoW class balance, he infamously staged server crash protests in Everquest because a Paladin could out-tank him and he felt his class should be the only tank class in the game or something). It's the best spec if you like DoTting enemies.

That's true, but only insofar as we are discussing mana recovery. The health recovery perk of Voidwalker DS also ensures that you do not spend any downtime standing still and bandaging/etc. post-fight. It's particularly valuable on PvP servers where it reduces the window of opportunity for you to get ganked and allows you to recover health throughout a Rogue's stunlock combo. SM/DS plays heavily to a DoT heavy playstyle which also plays to a PvP kiting strategy since you do not need to stand still for your spells. That said you can always sacrifice the Succubus for much more powerful DoTs if you prefer. It's also true that a Dark Pact build can put a few points into Demonology to become more resilient. SL or DS is preferred for drain-tanking, but for solo play it's frequently better to run around enemies while DoTTing them all to death with your instant casts than to stand still and tank them. Especially given the fact that drain-tanking is not conducive to grinding multiple mobs (although presumably your pet is tanking 1 or 2 mobs as well). This is even more true since you intend on playing on a PvE server where you won't need to worry about getting ganked while you are training mobs. Don't knock the DS Warlock's ability to enslave demons, especially if you decide to kill mobs with Curse of Doom or if you feel like summoning an Infernal in a pinch. And as your gear improves, the damage contribution from your pets becomes increasingly marginal. And on that note of pet damage, your calculations of Succubus DPS are a bit off since percentage bonuses typically stack multiplicatively, thus they would have a 47.29% bonus to damage, 54.6545% if you are an Orc (Command gives pets +5% damage). It's better to have 2/2 Improved Lash of Pain in that case, and possibly get a Mark of the Wild buff from a friendly druid on your pet. That's correct. Unless you intend on tanking for some reason, Demonology does very little to help you in PvE conditions that are not prone to world PvP. There was a time when Demonology was incredibly powerful if you sacrificed your pet and either had it rez'd or used a paladin's blessing of sacrifice to make them survive the 100% life loss DS was supposed to inflict, thus giving you the Demonic Sacrifice buff on top of the pet and its Master Demonologist bonus, but it got patched out. Demonology is supposed to offer some pet DPS, but it's not until Burning Crusade that pets properly scale with your gear, so pet damage is rather negligible, unless you are using the Black Book with a demonology Succubus or machine gun imp. There's some truth to that, but Demonology's benefits to survival do make the tree worthwhile. If you want a high damage Succubus however, it would probably be better to get 2/2 Improved Lash of Pain from the Destruction tree as well for 6 second cooldowns. A Black Book trinket (drops from Razorgore) would also be a lot of fun (30 seconds of giving your Imp/Voidwalker/Succubus/Felhunter +100% damage and armor on a 5 minute cooldown). Strictly speaking you can max out casting pushback avoidance if you have a Paladin giving Concentration Aura but if you are grouped with a Paladin it's probably better to have him Consecrate and heal while you Hellfire with 2/2 Intensity. It's also possible to reach 80% casting pushback avoidance if you have 4/8 Ironweave (the cloth tanking set), but that's 1.10 patch content so we will probably never see it and it's fairly undesirable overall given its total lack of spell damage or crit or hit, not to mention the effort involved in collecting set pieces. Plus a lot of PvP gear (defiler's set, outrider leggings, PvP set) have high armor as well without sacrificing spell damage.

It's a question of what you want to do as a drain-tank. If you're looking to kill mobs fast as a draintank, then SM/DS 30/21 is your best option by far. It's the build that's known to be more Shadow Priest than the Shadow Priest. For SM/DS a Succubus Sacrifice does give a very nice bonus to damage, but a lot of people prefer to sacrifice the Voidwalker instead for the health regen to completely eradicate downtime issues. You will always be at full health and can freely Life Tap to generate mana. If you actually want to be durable and tank dungeons and the like, then Soul Link is your best bet, although SL tanking favors the use of Searing Pain to build up aggro. Builds that depend on pets for damage aren't really an option until Burning Crusade since vanilla pets do not scale. If you're curious about the PvP viability of Soul Link, it's mostly strong in 1v1 and if you have very high amounts of spell damage. However it's usually better to get Shadowburn and improved Shadowbolts than dig for Grim Reach, amplified Curse of Agony, and Nightfall procs. Soul Link PvP is very straightforward. You have fewer tricks, you do less damage, but you're much, much harder to kill. Not only do you have Soul Link, you also have bigger healthstones, +15% stamina from Demonic Embrace, and possibly bigger Spellstone shields as well. In addition you will have +60 all resists with the Felhunter out, making enemy Mages and Warlocks a complete joke. As SL, you mostly depend on high damage to make it work. The downsides of Soul Link are that enemy Warlocks might banish your pet (hard to stick on a Felhunter though - it still has 185 resists with Curse of Shadow and the auto should slow their casts, especially if you have Curse of Tongues on them), Shamans and Priests can dispel Soul Link from your pet (you can defend against this by putting worthless buffs like Unending Breath, Detect Invisibility, and low-ranking magic scrolls on your pets as dispel shields), and Rogues can sap you, kill your pet, and come back to dealing with you (assuming your pet is not an invisible Succubus and that you are not using the Catseye Goggles + Felhunter combo to spot rogues before they sap you). In addition you no longer have things like Ruin, Siphon Life, or Curse of Exhaustion and you will probably not have the extra spellcasting range talents. SM/DS similarly trades your summoned pet (you can still enslave demons however, including Infernals and Doomguards, or summon a pet in a pinch with Fel Domination) in exchange for a lot more survival (assuming you sacrificed the Voidwalker).

For good PvP and PvE invites, Dwarf is typically strongly preferred. Fear Ward is good in PvP and required in PvE. It is the number one reason why dwarf priests are scouted heavily while other races tend to get the boot. In PvP, Fear Ward is useful against both Warlocks (they have to cast Fear twice to overcome the Fear Ward) and Warriors (it wastes their intimidating shout). In mass PvP, it can also help against enemy priests if they're not dispelling/purging you. As for racials, Perception is worthless for preventing ganks by UD rogues. It gives you +50 stealth detection for 20 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown. That means the only time it does anything is if there was an invisible Rogue nearby you and you knew they were there but they hadn't attacked you yet. Also, it's worthless against a Rogue's Vanish super-stealth (vanish's stealth rating is too absurdly high for perception to do anything, no matter how many stealth bonuses you stack - you could stack all the stealth detection bonuses in the game and it still does nothing against vanish). By the way, if you really know there are invisible rogues near you, you could just drop a rank 1 holy nova or psychic scream to expose them. I guess you could try to make it a nervous habit to keep randomly hitting perception but I'm not sure how much that will help, given the 3 minute cooldown. In Battlegrounds, Perception is a bit more useful if you can predict enemy rogue movements and thus get the drop on them, but that's about it. Dwarves on the other hand have it much better against rogues than humans. That's because Stoneform gives them 8 seconds of poison (and bleed) immunity (along with +10% armor). The clincher on this is that Dwarves can actually stoneform to break out of a Rogue's blind along with temporarily making their poisons useless. It's basically an anti-rogue trinket with a few minor perks on top. Breaking out of Blind is much more valuable for when you get ganked by Rogues than Perception, so Dwarves are actually the better pick for PvP against rogues. Where this leaves the Human Priest is with Feedback. Feedback mana burns enemies for 108 every time they cast a spell on you, so it should be good against the spellcasting enemies. These would be enemy Mages, Warlocks, Priests, Shamans, and Druids. Out of these, Mages and Warlocks tend to have extremely high burst damage and mana pools, and you will generally be dead if they manage to repeatedly cast spells on you for any appreciable quantity of spellcasts, so Feedback is fairly useless. This is even more the case when people have powerful gear, because your feedback does not scale but their health and mana and damage will all be much higher. Where feedback should come in handy is in those slow attrition fights where you are trying to outlast the other's mana pool by using your own mana pool to heal off all damage until the enemy is oom. Unfortunately, when it comes to attrition fights with Horde healers, both Priests and Shamans can effortlessly dispel your Feedback, rendering it useless (warlocks can also devour it with their felhunter, by the way). And the Druid will use shapeshifting to damage you unless they are playing the rare oomkin spec (in which case you were probably going to outlast his mana pool even without feedback). That means Feedback will almost never hand you a win (unless both you and your enemies are stupid and badly geared, maybe). It's just an irrelevant extra. Feedback only comes in handy against 1 class, and that's the Paladin. But you will never PvP paladins outside of duels or Dire Maul or Gurubashi arenas since they are alliance-only. But even then you could just spam mana burn if you want to outlast their mana pools. So strictly speaking Human race offers next to no benefits for PvP or PvE. Oh yes, you will almost certainly suffer from discrimination. Night Elf Priests are the red-headed stepchildren of Priests. Their racials are only viable for PvP, and they make better Shadow Priests than the other alliance races since their racial spells Elune's Grace (which is bad against Warriors because they will just Overpower you if you manage to dodge) and Starfall (which is only useful against counterspells since being locked out of arcane school means nothing - the damage is worse than mind flay) can both be used in shadowform. The real perk of playing a nelf priest is the racial Shadowmeld I suppose, especially if you want to camp a ledge to mind control people over the edge. The main matchups that improve for nelf priests are hunters, rogues, enhancement shamans, and feral druids I guess, but dwarves get stoneform which is better against rogues (and also of use against hunters) and rogues can probably wait out the elune's grace buff if it matters. In battlegrounds Shadowmeld might actually be useful for camping and defending.

In this game if you don't raid you will suck. And R14 only matters for weapons. The set is completed at R13, which is a bit less excruciating. That said, just for kicks, here's a list of items you can grind out without hardcore raiding or hardcore grinding the Honor ranks: Mindfang, Therazane's Touch, R8 Satin Tunic, R7 Satin Handwraps, Rockfury Bracers, Flarecore Leggings, Defiler's full set, Frostwolf Advisor's Cloak, Spellweaver's Turban (or a headpiece with "of Holy Wrath" off of AH), Ritssyn's Wand of Bad Mojo or Bonecreeper Stylus (or a wand with "of Holy Wrath"), Eye of Orgrimmar, Maiden's Circle, Orb of the Darkmoon, and Briarwood Reed. Enchants: Spellpower weapon enchant, Zandalar Signet of Mojo (+18 spelldmg), ZG Prophetic Aura head and legs, +7 stamina boots enchant (minor speed enchant does not stack with defiler boots which gives same 8% speed), +9 stamina or +24 healing power bracer enchant, +100 health chest, +30 healing power gloves, There you go, a PvP capable set that should hit 432 spelldmg (and at least 78 more healing power), assuming you do not have Spiritual Guidance and are not using a spelldamage trinket or a Brilliant Wizard Oil (or a flask of supreme power), which persists through death. If we're competing for ZG loot, then Band of Servitude, Zanzil's Seal, The Hexxer's Cover, and Bag of Whammies are preferred. If you are Alliance and buddied with a Paladin who has Sanctity Aura and applies Judgment of the Crusader (especially if he has libram of fervor, pvp gauntlets, and/or improved seal of the crusader), your holy damage will be much, much higher. With a max crusader paladin, brilliant wizard oil, flask of supreme power, and ZHC you would break 1000 spelldamage (go PI yourself and enjoy outrageous holy damage). The basic problem Shadow faces is that once you hit high spell damage values it's much better to be shadow/holy or disc/holy than pure shadow, unless you're a Troll maybe.

You're reading into my posts too much. Stop being an idiot and learn to distinguish between what is in my text and what is in your head. I am under no burden to accommodate your fool notions. My statement was largely a comment on how with increasing yellow hits, glancing damage is less of a problem by highlighting the fact that yellow hits cannot be glancing blows. Coupled with edgemasters, this would allow you to reduce glancing blows to a very small amount. Huh. That's not blizzlike though. Also, that is somewhat inefficient code.

I never opined on how doable it is to somehow heroic strike for every hit in a dualwield fury setup. If you want to try it though, then I guess you should try to grab the slowest one-handers you can find and max your damage per swing somehow.