Ursh

WTB Elder Stranglethorn Tigers :)

There are definitely people here who can give you a much better outlook on this, as I only made it up to blood guard in vanilla and did organized pvp with my guild for fun on nights when we weren't raiding. We were not dedicated pvpers. It's been a long time since I've done premade vanilla pvp groups, but as a shadow priest you're pretty effective at killing the other team's healers, or harassing them enough that they're only focusing on their own survival instead of healing their team. Having said that, I usually preferred to protect my team's healers. If I melt their damage guys trying to go after my healer, their healer has to either move forward to get in healing range or let their warrior die. Either way, now their healer is in range of both our melee and ranged damage dealers so everyone focuses him, I silence him, and he dies. In theory that's how it works, but when playing against other organized teams it can be something of a damage race, and being able to drop a lot of burst damage becomes really key. Shadow priests aren't good at burst damage. Mages are going to outdamage you, so will warlocks most likely. Mages have better survivability because they have more escape tools. Other than psychic scream, priests have no way of getting melees off of them. Even with the 15% damage reduction from shadowform, your health is going to disappear pretty quick if a decently equipped rogue or warrior gets on you.

yeah, about that. Uhm, the non-healing specs for shaman/druid/priest get really good in TBC. Elemental shaman can blow people up sometimes in pvp, but it's a bit RNG dependent. Even as a pure dps though, you've got CC abilities that you'll need to be using if you want to contribute the most to a win. If you're a hunter, you should be freeze trapping people and doing silencing shot and other stuff hunters do, as a mage you should be sheeping people, as a warlock you should be fearing people, etc. For Vanilla, you may want to pick a non-healing capable dps class if you want to wreck some people.

QFT: Many of the people that want you to heal them absolutely will not support you if you do. The arms warrior won't hamstring melees that are on you, the mage won't sheep the hunter that's blowing you up, etc. Dispels, bubbles if it's helpful, but mostly you're job is to melt people, fear bomb, mana burn healers, and other offensive stuff. If there is a healer on your team, you can rack up kills by melting rogues and warriors who overextend themselves trying to kill them. Your healer will live, your team will win, everyone wins.

They're having some kind of technical issues. No one can get on.

Probably another attack.

Should add for any prospective young leatherworker, follow this advice: Skin everything you come across, including other people's mobs. You will not find enough leather on your own with the appropriate level ranges unless you're exclusively grinding animals to level.

I think WC is the only one you might have to run 2-3 times, depending on how lucky you are with ninjalooting the quest drops. Way too much junk to collect in there and you'll be competing with people who are also trying to loot everything so they only have to go there once. The leather drops in there are pretty good though, so just roll need and make the hunters, shaman, and rogues cry.

Same here. I think it's the holidays for some people though, so I expect that the queue time will go down significantly after the first week of January. Don't give up!

This is so much easier if you have a couple of tier 1 pieces first. Consummables are your friend. Spirit tap is cheating, so definitely use it

Normally I mind blast, sw:p, renew, wand. That way the first renew tick normally happens right about the same time as the first incoming damage. Non-stop grinding.

Having raided MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxxramas back in vanilla as a priest, my personal opinion is that with the number of addons you're advocating, raid healing actually is pretty casual. I found it to be a pretty relaxing experience, and drinking heavily during raids didn't impact performance much. Pay attention, heal your assignments, don't die. That's pretty much it. It's harder to be elite dps than it is to be an elite healer, because while healing is reactive and proactive, it doesn't rely on you hammering through the most min/maxed rotation every possible second of up time. The biggest distinguishing factor between good healers and healers that you don't want on your raids is situational awareness, which is a difficult skill to teach to potatoes. I started in a family friendly guild and we progressed all the way to the end of BWL despite carrying 10 casuals on almost every raid night. Then I joined a hardcore guild and we progressed pretty deep into Naxx before TBC dropped. That's just my personal experience.

I'll be doing a fresh start on the pve server tomorrow, along with one RL friend. PLayed WoW from early 2005-2010. Tried Kronos pvp server, and it's not for me. I like doing battlegrounds, particular when on voice comms with guildmates, but I don't get much of a thrill out of haunting low level zones smashing lowbies or getting a group of people together to gank stragglers outside MC.

When you get shadow form, you also pick up the precursor talents that give 10% bonus damage to shadow spells. 15%+10%=25%, right? Add in the shadow weaving, which admittedly doesn't help a whole lot when clearing basic trash, but does add up on elite mobs in dungeons, and going full shadow at 40 makes a lot more sense. You'll be bored of wanding everything by this point anyways. Also, mounts look way cooler when you're in shadow form, because it covers the mount as well.