Roxanne Flowers

I've overflown the Shatterspear Troll Village with my Druid flying from Cenarion Circle to Darnassus on Darrowshire and seen people in there mowing down the dancing Troll village. This implies rather directly that it can be done if you know the route to get there from Winterspring (kinda like knowing how to get up to the Dwarven Airport on top of Ironforge from Loch Modan).

I've been using Power Word: Shield preemptively before every fight and so far (through Level 23) my Priest is rarely taking damage. There are exceptions and edge cases of course (such as pulling too many foes) but by and large it has been very successful to just Shield and then Starshards x2 to x4 followed by Wanding to finish, and then 10-15 seconds later be back at full mana again and ready for the next 1v1 PvE fight. Against greys, it's just Shield and then Wand till dead. There's a BIG difference between Spell Damage coefficients buffing your spells and the effects that debuffing will have on your spell damage throughput. The coefficient for Starshards is very good/high because it has a long channel duration and does only damage, while the coefficient for Mind Flay is low because it is a short channel duration and does slowing in addition to damage (which gets accounted for in a lowered spell damage coefficient). You therefore get a bigger (raw) damage boost from +10 Arcane spell damage on Starshards than you do from a +10 Shadow spell damage on Mind Flay. The difference comes in on the debuffing side of things. *IF* you can get all of those Shadow Weaving stacks going (and Curse of Elements, etc. etc. etc.) you're going to be able to produce a deeper "stack" of debuffs for Shadow than you will for Arcane, simply because there are more sources of Shadow debuffing than there are of Arcane debuffing. The presence of those debuffs are what bring Mind Flay back on up into the competitive range ... but those debuffs have to be applied to be taken advantage of, which is easy on a raid boss but not always something you can count on happening (or even have the time to worry about) on Trash Mobs. My point being that conflating the effects of debuffing with the effects of spell damage coefficients will give you misleading results because you're skipping over the understanding of how the mechanics interact in order to produce the results that you're citing. Anyway, enough digression about Priests in a Warlock thread ... ;P Exactly. As Players we like to reduce things down to easy to remember One Size Fits All type solutions, since they allow us to be ... lazier ... in our understandings of what's going on. In many cases, that One Size Fits All understanding of things works perfectly fine ... until it doesn't. ^_~ But you're quite correct. It all really does depend on your mana consumption rate, and that's something that is fluid and dynamic rather than fixed, static and unchanging, so it's hard to decide in the abstract whether a particular strategy with a specific tempo of mana consumption will be sustainable or not in actual gameplay. The difference between "theory" and the "reality" of action gameplay, if you will.

Last I checked, Drain Life does Shadow damage to the target, which I believe creates Threat. It's also adding Health to your Warlock, just like a healing spell would, and healing spells create Threat.

You prevent pushback via Power Word: Shield, which Absorbs damage (so no pushback), and through the Martyrdom talent which procs when you are the victim of a melee or ranged (but not spell) critical hit. Beyond that, it's Threat Reduction so you don't draw PvE aggro in the first place, but that's a group dynamic issue rather than something a soloist can benefit from. As for being worthless, that remains to be seen. The Elune's Spirit Guide build is taking me in a direction that almost nobody goes in ... a dedicated Spirit Priest build ... because Starshards gets far more mana recovery per volley cycle than just about any other spell rotation (aside from Wanding, of course) and has a very good spell damage coefficient (unlike too many Shadow Priest spells). Using 5/5 Spiritual Guidance and 5/5 Spirit Tap creates a sort of "rolling thunder" dynamic in which after every honor/xp kill your Spirit doubles for 15 seconds, in which your mana regeneration is increased by 50% while casting. Because Starshards has a 6 second channel time, instead of 5 seconds, simply chain casting Starshards sequentially for the full 6 second duration is ALREADY 5 second rule friendly, meaning you're already getting a full mana recovery tick while finishing up the channeling and so you'll get a LOT more benefit out of Spirit on a Starshards build than you would with just about any other Priest spec available. This means that I'm expecting the build to get more out of Spirit than it would out of +mp5, meaning that the more Spirit I can cram onto it, the better it gets. Considering that most people consider Spirit to be the "dump stat" of almost every class in the game, I find that inversion of (perceived) advantages to be rather remarkable. Granted, it is a slightly different philosophy/style/strategy for how to play. My perspective is that having the Succubus use her Lash of Pain disables mana regeneration for 5 out of 12 seconds. If she can recover the mana needed for Lash of Pain in the remaining 7 seconds, then over the balance of those 12 seconds she running a net positive mana recovery. So long as the fight doesn't take too long, and you don't have to Dark Pact tap her for mana too many times too quickly, then that becomes a viable option. By contrast, if you're in an endurance fight where you just have to keep constantly casting for minutes at a time, you're probably better off with the Imp as a "pure" mana battery from which ALL of the mana recovery can be transferred to (and through) your Warlock. True, but if you're reaching for Soul Link then use of Dark Pact is no longer available and the entire dynamic shifts concerning which Pet it optimal in which situation because you're no longer using the Imp as a mana battery but rather as a damage sponge.

http://wow.gamepedia.com/Wrath_of_Cenarius The real question then becomes ... will the item get one proc chance per Arcane Missiles casting/volley, or only one chance per damage/hit? Ranks 3+ Arcane Missiles fire 5 shots in 5 seconds of channeling. If that means 5 proc chances per 5 seconds of channel casting, that basically means: 5% assumed proc chance per hit (see reference above) 1 - (0.95^5) = 22.6% chance to proc per rank 3+ channeling of Arcane Missiles for 5 seconds for +132 spell power for 10 seconds Over the course of two back-to-back castings of Arcane Missiles (for a total of 10 seconds duration) you get: 1 - (0.95^10) = 40.1% chance to proc during 10 seconds of channeling for +132 spell power for 10 seconds So if it's coded that way, that would make Arcane Missiles rather competitive when this item is included. Sadly, I fear that's not the case, since it seems that Clearcasting only procs on spellCASTING rather than on damage/hits LANDING on target. If the proc is coded to only check on casting (i.e. once per Arcane Missiles volley, at the start of the volley) then Arcane Missiles will fall even further behind due to the differential in channel/casting times (5 seconds versus 3 seconds or less).

Should have tried letting your Voidwalker land their second Torment before opening up with the DoTs. I know, I know, that would have wasted 5 seconds with you doing nothing in which you could have been unloading damage ... but there it is. Once you get up into the 40s, even an Improved Voidwalker can't out-Threat the damage/stealing that you're doing from your Warlock. I would argue that in the later game Summons serve essentially three purposes ... Sacrifice ... Mana Battery ... or Support ... with the latter meaning essentially melee plus utility, rather than acting as an Aggro Magnet. The whole notion that your Pet can tank for you falls down when you can (easily) generate far more Threat than your Pet can. This is why I advocate in favor of the Drain Tank model, where the basic notion is that you're not even trying to dial back your Threat generation to a level that your Pet can exceed (and thus act as an Aggro Magnet for you) ... but rather you draw the Threat onto yourself deliberately as the default assumption, tactic and strategy. This then puts your Pet into a Supporting Role rather than being a Main Focus, and once that happens, all the assumptions about what you're wanting your Pet to "do" for you (including whether or not they should continue to EXIST or should only be summoned to get sacrificed) go in an entirely different direction. It's like how most Hunters assume that their Pets are meant to hold aggro while the Hunter blasts away from range. But for Survival specced Melee Hunters, that basic assumption gets inverted. Instead, you want your Hunter to be holding aggro (in melee) while your Pet aids and assists you (in melee). Same deal here with the Drain Tanking Warlock. You build for your Warlock to hold the aggro and survive it while your Pet aids and assists you in that endeavor. It's a completely different philosophy of how to make things work for you. In that respect, a Voidwalker who both CAN'T as well as ISN'T expected to hold aggro away from your Warlock makes for a very poor choice of supporting Pet, since holding aggro and taking a beating is just about the only thing ol' Blueberry is good for. So the usefulness of the Voidwalker to a Drain Tanking Warlock is severely diminished. An Imp makes for the best mana battery, but only if they're not spamming away their mana on Firebolts, since they won't regen any mana (5 second rule) while casting Firebolts. Without a melee attack (worth a damn) if you're using an Imp for Dark Pact you might as well put them on Passive and into Phase Shift and let them be a "pure" mana battery for you, serving no other purpose than as an extra pool of mana that isn't subject to the 5 second rule of your own spellcasting. A Succubus can melee and use her Lash of Pain to inflict damage while having the second highest Spirit, making her the best alternate to the Imp against "physical" opponents in which she isn't expected to play Aggro Magnet for you while you Drain Tank. She can does the highest melee damage of all the Demon Pets and can use her Lesser Invisibility and Seduce to useful effect (particularly against Humanoids) as an assistant adjunct to what your Warlock is doing. A Felhunter can melee (although the damage isn't great) and interfere with hostile spellcasters, which can be useful when facing off against "caster" opponents. This would be more of a defensive option than an offensive one focused more on "controlling" hostile spellcasters. The Felhunter can't "hide" under Lesser Invisibility though and so won't always be the best option when surprise is needed. For these reasons, I think of the Voidwalker as being more of an "early game" Pet useful from 10-30 but then losing relevance after that, particularly for a Dark Pact Drain Tanking build. Once you get to Dark Pact, the only use you should have for a Voidwalker is as a Demonic Sacrifice (at which point, you won't have Dark Pact anymore, or are only summoning them for the Voidwalker Shield Sacrifice and are just churning through Soul Shards for the Shields).

In my personal opinion, if you spend ANY points in Fel Concentration, anything less than 5/5 Fel Concentration is counter-productive if you're expecting to be getting hit while casting the channeled spell Drain Life. If you really want to pull 2 points from somewhere, I'd honestly recommend going with either 3/5 instead of 5/5 Suppression in Tier 1 Affliction or just not spending (up to) 5 talent points on Improved Drain Life in Tier 2, because the latter is just a (up to) +10% Life Drain for a single (channeled) spell, rather than for all of the Life Drain spells you can cast (which Shadow Mastery provides in addition to increased Shadow damage). I'm actually getting a little bit interested in Improved Succubus as well for a 31/20/0 build ... or maybe even a 33/13/5 build including Improved Succubus and, in the latter case, also including 5/5 Improved Shadow Bolt in which you use the Succubus as your mana battery, but can have an Improved Imp in reserve, should the situation call for it. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#IE0iVMboVof0VhZx

Okay, if I ever get around to playing Horde (in a year or two?) I'm definitely going to have to play a Troll Shadow Priest because of what you just said. Would make for an interesting contrast with my Night Elf Elune's Spirit Guide build that I'm doing right now on the Alliance side in Darrowshire (which is working out remarkably well so far). I find your arguments ... persuasive ... The other reasons for using Imp are that the Imp has the highest Spirit of all the demons, so it regenerates mana the fastest, making it the best "mana battery" available to a Dark Pact build. The Imp also has Phase Shift, and if set on Passive will be completely immune to any and all damage. The Phase Shift advantage means that you don't have to worry about your Pet "expiring" on you at an inopportune moment. Of course, that also means that the Imp can't be using their mana to generate damage direction via their Firebolts, since all of their mana is dedicated to being "washed" through your Warlock in order to generate damage throughput instead via Dark Pact. If Pet survival is not an issue, then yes, the Succubus makes for the best alternative choice, since her melee attacks won't consume mana and her (unimproved) Lash of Pain will take long enough between autocasts (12s) to recover mana so she isn't net negative on mana consumption. Simply turn off Soothing Kiss and she can become a decent supporting damage source for a Drain Tank build where you're simply not expecting her to hold aggro away from your Warlock. /mr. burns excellent Yes ... my Gnome Warlock will definitely be doing Gnomish Engineering ... yes ...

My (decade old) experience of Drain Tanking with a Dark Pact build was that it made almost no difference if you were fighting 1-3 PvE mobs. Just DoT them all and pick one to Drain Life and it's wash/rinse/repeat until all dead. This is where having Siphon Life on multiple targets starts really coming in handy, since you're transferring Health from multiple sources simultaneously. The net effect is an (over)abundance of incoming Health, which you can then 2/2 Improved Lifetap into mana as needed. That then keeps you flush with resources (health and mana) while you channel Drain Life on whatever you're burning down into the ground, whether or not they're in your face. In fact, under most circumstances, you wind up with "too much Health" from using Drain Life all the time and need to keep shuffling the excess through Lifetap into your mana pool. This means you need to think differently about how you "acquire" the resources (health and mana) you're using to output damage. Rather than using regeneration to acquire those resources, instead you're STEALING those resources from whatever it is that you're fighting. What's mine is mine ... and what's yours is mine too ... is the mentality you want to take. If mobs aren't beating on you, then you've just got that much more margin to work with ... but if they are beating on you, it's almost "ho hum, why are you hitting yourself?" because you're often stealing health as fast as they can hurt you, leading to a somewhat dynamic equilibrium state in which it's really hard for PvE Foes to send you deeply negative. It's a truly "vampiric" playstyle that feels even more overtly necromantic than playing a Shadow Priest. Well, a decade ago I could pull 3 PvE mobs, DoT them all and tank them myself, with the Imp not engaging (since I was playing a Dark Pact build) and I'd end the fight with minimal Health loss and minimal Mana loss, because I'd just be stealing all those losses right back via drains. Even when fighting sequentially, rather that AoEing them down in parallel, there was plenty of margin in being able to Drain Tank. Never really messed around with Enslave Demon before. Always felt like more trouble than it was worth, to be honest. And yes, when vanilla Pets don't scale with your equipped gear, that does mean that as you approach 60 and start maneuvering into BiS gear the contribution from your Pet will diminish simply because your Warlock will keep getting that much more powerful. Right, it's all about the tradeoffs and the "comfort level" you have with the demands of the playstyle that results from those choices. And yes, it annoys me to no end that Improved Lash of Pain is in Tier 3(!) of the Destruction tree, rather than in the Demonology tree. As for the Black Book Trinket ... that's nice for a 1/10th uptime of amazing Pet performance, but like you said earlier, as you start working your way towards BiS gear that contribution becomes increasingly marginal. Granted, it's a factor when accounting for everything, but the Pet Share of what you're doing keep diminishing as a proportion as your Warlock gets stronger. For me, the big question was always one of Pet? (Y/N) ... with Dark Pact yielding something halfway in between a Yes and a No since you want to keep the Imp on Follow/Passive in Phase Shift so that he's just a mana battery because he's "present" but not "participating" in the battles you fight (and thus isn't subject to being destroyed). Soul Link is obviously a YES answer to that question, but that brings about the follow up questions of "at what cost, and for what gain?" ... while the Demonic Sacrifice results in an obvious NO answer to that question, where almost the only reason you want to be summoning demons is so that you can sacrifice them (which has it's own "I am Ebil" connotations for roleplaying). At the same time, the Demonic Sacrifice choice basically feels like playing a "petless" Warlock, which then becomes a sort of Shadow/Fire Priest/Mage hybrid ... so as you can guess I wanted to have a good "look" before leaping in that direction. As matters stand, with all the input so far, I'm much more inclined towards the SM/DS build at 60, while having a preference for using a Dark Pact build while leveling my way up to 60.

I was only teasing. But yeah, there's a lot of barnacles and kruft in the coding/databases for a lot of stuff. I doubt it's a case of "last priority" and more a case of "there's a mountain to move" as far as bug fixes go. When you've got multiple THOUSANDS of bugs reported, it's going to take a while to work through them all no matter which order to you them in.

Let me guess ... not a Ret Paladin issue?

It's a bad habit of mine that I keep wanting to challenge the Conventional Wisdom. Sometimes you find stuff, and sometimes there's really nothing there ... but it's better to quest and fail than to have never quested at all, right? That's the curious thing about being an Affliction Drain Tank. You don't CARE if you steal aggro from your Pet. In fact, if you DON'T steal aggro from your Pet, you aren't putting out enough DPS and are (in effect) gimping yourself. The whole point of being a Drain Tank is that you're stealing enough Health that even if mobs do try to pound on you, they can't hurt you fast enough to survive what you're doing to them. The playstyle has a lot in common with the Beast o' Melee Hunter Survival build I posted over in the Hunter Forums, except that instead of trying to Debuff Attack Power (via Screech from your Pet) you're instead just draining Health directly from your Target(s) to "negate" incoming damage. That's because whether or not the Pet has aggro is a distraction, since in either case you want your character to be tanking, not your Pet. For a Warlock, it's cheaper (quicker, easier, more seductive...) to Drain Tank directly than it is to be using Health Funnel to try and keep a Pet healed up. PvP, by its very nature, strongly favors the insta-gib surprise attack where you defeat someone in as little time as possible so as to close off opportunities to counter quickly, thereby securing the victory. Very rarely does PvP favor "the long grind" to victory in which you can win on the margins after applying sufficient pressure. This is why PvP builds tend to be built for "spike" damage rather than for applying a steady load of "pressure" damage over a long enough period of time. It is, in its own way, about as formidable a change as Shadow Form is for a Shadow Priest. It does require a different mentality to make use of it most efficiently though, but when you're doing it right, there definitely is a sense of "I'm Invincible!" To do it properly though, you do need spend 21 talent points in Affliction to get Siphon Life and 5/5 Fel Concentration. I would imagine so ... ^_~ Point of distinction. Are you saying it's "totally not viable" on 40 man raids? Because I'd think that build ought to be plenty viable on 5 man dungeons and other single party content. Also, I'd expect that if 25% of your damage is coming from your Pet (as you cited) but is not being attributed to you on the damage meters that I can see how that might become an issue for certain raiding groups, since it wouldn't look like you're "pulling your weight" in the raid (even if you actually are). That then becomes a "hazard" of empowering your Pet at the expense of yourself, even if the combination is stronger than it looks (on the meters). The thing is, you can get somewhat the same performance out of a Dark Pact build too, and for a lot less talent points invested, than doing a Voidwalker sacrifice. The difference is that you're tapping your "mana battery" (usually Imp) rather than relying on a heightened Health Regeneration to make your pool(s) bottomless. Different means, similar performance (overall). The key is to maximize recovery by adding more recovery methods. Not so much dungeon tanking as solo tanking ... although being able to "pocket tank" in a pinch makes for a really nice fallback option when things go sideways. And yes, being able to figure out how much you can get out of a vanilla Pet that isn't being influenced by the scaling of your character (and thus your gear) is the fulcrum point of being able to decide which option is better. That's all good to know and important factors to consider. The more I look at it, the more I come to the conclusion that deep Demonology is more of a PvP build than a PvE one, where the advantages are intended to be defensive (longer survival time) than they are offensive (higher DPS and burst potential). Ultimately though, I keep coming back to the notion that the Demonology tree is just really ... inefficient. You wind up spending a lot of talent points in the first 3 tiers that you can't use full time, if going for Demonic Sacrifice, or which will only be situationally useful, if going for Soul Link. That's a lot of investment that can't be working for you full time ... unlike Affliction and Destruction.

Immolate (optional). Siphon Life has the longest duration (30s). Curse of Agony has the lowest damage to start with and and needs to tick most of the way to be really efficient (24s). Corruption has the shortest duration of your non-channeled DoTs (18s). Lifetap x1 or x2 to refill mana. Drain Life (5s) ... Shadow Bolt if Shadow Trance procs ... then Drain Life again (5s) ... Shadow Bolt if Shadow Trance procs. Drain Soul (15s) ... 2/2 Improved Drain Soul tops off mana. Against most trash mobs, that should be quite sufficient from Level 30 onwards. You can use this with a Voidwalker, but you'll want to let your Voidwalker get in a couple of Torment hits before loading up the DoTs if you don't want to pull aggro too soon. I can usually start casting an Immolate while the Voidwalker is charging the target and have the cast land after the Voidwalker has made a melee attack so I don't pull aggro too soon. Alternatively, you can use any of the other Pets and simply tank yourself with 5/5 Fel Concentration and simply let your Pet deal extra damage when (if!) they can. If tanking yourself, you're probably going to be wanting to use either the Succubus or your Felhunter depending on whether you're up against Humanoids and/or Spellcasters.

If there's "edge cases" for Tranquility canceling early, QA is going to need reproducible steps to run the cause of that to ground so they can curbstomp it in the code.

After posting this, I was amused to watch the thread views climb over 100 with zero replies, but then I started thinking that maybe the reason no deep Demonologists have spoken up about their experiences with Soul Link is because ... there aren't players here who have experienced Soul Link? According to some historical youtube videos I stumbled across, there were apparently some Players who thought that Soul Link was OP ... and then they proceed to demonstrate it in PvP Battlegrounds, without ever explaining the "nuts and bolts" underpinning the playstyle and how the parts and pieces all fit together in a way in which the whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Or maybe there are plenty of Soul Link Demonologists around, but they don't want to let the magic smoke get out of their build strategies. ^_~ After all, it's hard to counter what people don't understand. Still, with all the recommendations for DM/Ruin or DM/DS that we see to frequently in these forums, I'd like to think that someone out there is playing a Soul Link Warlock somewhere on our servers. Be nice to hear how Soul Link plays, both in PvP and in PvE. Sort of a look into "how the other half lives" kind of thing.

So long as you let your Blueberry land the first hit (or few) and have his Taunt on Autoattack, he can hold aggro while you DoT. I usually wind up the Immolate spell while my Voidwalker is charging in to melee, so the spell lands after the first Voidwalker hit. After that it's just Curse of Agony, Corruption and then either Wand or Drain Life (not yet up to Siphon Life) or Drain Soul while the Voidwalker holds aggro just fine. This is with no talent points in Voidwalker in the low/mid 20s.

Based on my (decade old) memories of playing with Dark Pact, I'd honestly say that Shadowburn isn't THAT worth it. It gives you access to a "finisher" shot that costs around ~1 to ~1.25 damage per mana (plus a Soul Shard) base and its an Instant Cast spell, so the spell power coefficient isn't all that wonderful (43%?). But hey, on a DoT build, sometime you're going to want that "YOU DIE NAO!" option, rather than waiting, so it might be worth it to you. To be honest though, I think I'd personally prefer the 36/15/0 build you posted, with the one exception of swapping 2/2 Grim Reach for 2/2 Improved Drain Soul. My rationale for that exchange is ... 2/2 Nightfall and the Shadow Trance procs. If your Affliction spells have a 36 yard range, and your Shadow Bolts have a 30 yard range, you can wind up "wasting" the occasional instant cast Shadow Bolt due to being at 31-36 yards from your Target. Conversely, if you're finishing stuff off with Improved Drain Soul, you're not only going to be recovering mana faster after (honorable) kills, but you can then turn around and "bank" some of that mana into Health Stones that you get into the habit of using simply to churn damage spells more quickly via Lifetap. That then gives you a Mana to Healthstone to Health to Mana "churn" cycle that gives you a much deeper Health (and thus Mana) pool than you'd otherwise be expecting to have, not because the mana/health is "extra" (per se) but because it's time shifted. It also lets you "hand Healthstones out like candy" in group situations and gives you plenty of reserves for making Spellstones to use for absorbing Magic damage. That's because, at its core, an Affliction spec "wants" to be a Drain Tank that just DoTs things to death. All of those stacked up DoTs make Drain Soul pretty reliable at generating Soul Shards. Might as well get more mana out of each (xp/honorable) kill so as to keep cranking out the damage than to put an extra 6 yards of range onto your DoTs and Drains while not extending the reach of your Shadow Bolts, because all mana that gets used needs to be recovered from somewhere. The less you need to worry about going OoM (or worse, OoH...) the more you can just cut loose and start piling on and adding insults to injuries. The beauty of the Dark Pact build is that if you play it right, you ought to feel like you've got bottomless Health and bottomless Mana ... but it's still wise to hedge against edge cases where things don't always go according to plan. So it's wise to make sure you've got "margin" on your Health and Mana burn and recovery rate, even if you don't always "need" to have it ... hence why I'd recommend the 36/15/0 build you'd posted as being the more satisfying one for a Drain Pact build.

According to the Vanilla database ... Immolation = 5 ticks at 3 seconds per tick over 15 seconds, regardless of rank 1-5 http://db.vanillagaming.org/?spell=13797 Explosive = 10 ticks at 2 seconds per tick over 20 seconds, regardless of rank 1-3 http://db.vanillagaming.org/?spell=13812 Higher ranks only increase the damage per tick, not the quantity of ticks/duration of effect. This in turn would tend to imply (if the above is correct on our servers) that 5/5 Entrapment is most "efficient" for immobilization when used with Explosive Trap, since Explosive Trap features more ticks, faster ticks and a longer duration, giving you the greatest synergy for your investment (assuming you use Traps at all) due to offering 2.5 Entrapment checks per 5 seconds of Entrapment duration for Explosive Traps, rather than 1.67 Entrapment checks per 5 seconds of Entrapment duration for Immolation Trap.

Since Judgement is a single target Instant cast spell, I would expect it to have the "standard" co-efficient of ~43% spell power applied to it ... much like every other (natively) Instant cast spell.

Clues are not for everyone. And some of us have more than our fair share ...

You're fine. There are plenty of other Dwarf Priests around.

Look at King B's Level. Kill mobs 2-3 Levels above King B's Level. Continue grinding mobs for King B until he scores enough XP to get to the Level you want him to be at.

EVERY game server ever goes through a massive ramp up in population when it opens followed by a huge crash a few months later. This isn't some new phenomenon. When Anathema and Darrowshire opened back in December there was a huge "land rush" on the new servers which has since abated. The notion that high populations upon opening will be sustained indefinitely is not well considered.