Benediction - The Balance of Light and Shadow

[Pottu 290]

Thanks to res for this:

 

This guide will show you how to acquire the epic priest weapon, Benediction.

How do I get started?

First of all, to begin the quest for Benediction you need to find a raid group that is capable of killing Marjodomo Executus, get him to drop Eye of Divinity, and most importantly, make sure you're the lucky priest that gets your hands on it!

Eris Havenfire

When you have acquired the Eye of Divinity you have to make a trip to Eastern Plaguelands and seek out Eris Havenfire.

Note that you can only see Eris Havenfire when you have the Eye of Divinity equipped.

She is located at the yellow dot:

Eris Havenfire is not like most NPCs however, she doesn't stick around indefinitely.

If any priest has attempted her quest "The Balance of Light and Shadow" and Failed, she will despawn for 2 hours. Yes you heard that right, 2 HOURS, so don't be alarmed if you can't see her with your trinket equipped, you'll just have to wait.

However, there is a way to avoid her to despawn if you feel overwhelmed during the quest, which brings us to "The Cleaner". 

The Cleaner[/size]

Yes, the quest giver de-spawning for 2 hours isn't the only annoying thing about this quest. If ANYONE enters the quest zone while somebody is attempting the quest the quest will be interrupted and "The Cleaner" will show up to "clean" everybody up. This usually ends in 2 dead priests.

The bad thing about this mechanic is that if other priests arent aware that you are on the quest, they might log in / go to the quest giver to start the quest themselves only to see that you were in the middle of the quest and have now interrupted it as a big bad demons is now on its way to kill you both.

The good thing about this mechanic is that he interrupts the quest.

This means that if you are about to fail the quest, have a friend stand outside the quest area and tell them to run in, this will interrupt the quest instead of failing it and Eris Havenfire will NOT despawn.

This brings us to the quest.

The Balance of Light and Shadow

The quest is pretty straight forward: "Save 50 Peasants before 15 are slain."

But there's a lot more too it than that.

As soon as you start the quest untargetable skeletal archers will spawn on the hills north of the quest giver, these will shoot at the peasants that should also have spawned further up the road. Your objective is to get the waves of peasants to the beacon of light. 

You will have to escort the peasants to their destination, healing them to prevent them from dying.

The Peasants will also periodically receive a disease that ticks for a fair amount of damage, you will have to dispel it with abolish disease. 

A good tip is to have friendly nameplates activated so that you can see what peasants require your aid.

There will also be weak skeletons spawning that wants nothing else than to mess up your quest progress. They are very weak and have about 100 health, but will attack you and the peasants. You can use a low rank of holy nova to clear them. 

If 15 of your Peasants die, you fail the quest and the questgiver will despawn for 2 hours.

Remember, you can always cancel the quest by having someone interrupt it by activating The Cleaner so the quest giver never has to despawn.

If 50 of your peasants survive, you will complete the quest, the quest giver will do an emote/yell then just go talk to her to recieve your reward: Splinter of Nordrassil

You can use this to craft your very own Benediction, and you already have half of the components!

All you need now is the The Eye of Shadow. 

The Eye of Shadow[/size]

You can get this item by either getting your raid group together to kill Lord Kazzak, buying it off the auction house, or farm high level demons in one of these zones:

Winterspring if you have a small group:

or Blasted Lands if you have a larger group:

Helpful Consumables:[/size]

 Stratholme Holy Water

For Killing Scourge Footsoldiers, 1 minute cooldown.

 Oil of Immolation

For Killing Scourge Footsoldiers, no cooldown.

 Major Mana Potion

For restoring Mana.

 Demonic Rune / Dark Rune

For restoring mana. Shares cooldown with each other but not with Major Mana Potion.

[Undertanker 88]

@Pottu

 

I noticed you are migrating over a lot of important threads from Nost.   I recommend pasting them into Microsoft Word first and selecting the paste option to adjust formatting.  Then copy that and past into these forums to avoid the Nost soft colors and off formatting.  The .jpg files should then show correctly as well.

 

Feel free to delete this after you see this suggestion.

[Docholy 4]

Here is my contribution to the guide, it helped a ton of people over the hump and I'll be adding some more observations below.  (http://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=17526&start=10)

 

All priest, make sure to get Spirit tap from the shadow tree. Every time an oil of immolation slays a skeleton you will get 15 secs of 100% more spirit.  Since the oil last 15 secs  you will be renewing that buff per kill. Its worth roughly 30 secs of 100% up time +100% spirit per oil you use.  The oil also has a cooldown of 5 secs or so.  You will be milking this mechanic to get serious mana returns.

 

Every wave that is cleared you will gain (http://db.vanillagaming.org/?spell=23108)  a major mana buff.  So as long as you're potting on cd that buff will top you off.  Yes you will hit very low levels of mana as the later waves die. So low you might want to give up. But the aforementioned buff is substantial and will keep your mana up just long enough to re-pot and to get into another wave of skeletons to milk spirit tap.

 

I tried this 4 times in total.  Two times I failed due to late stage interference from random people and one time from failing at the last wave.  

 

One a successful attempt I burned 15 oils of immolation, and five mana pots.  I used a ton more in the total attempts so be prepared.  

 

This spec is what I went with. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bxMrsVZfxtcb0VZx

 

Good luck guys, I wish you have a blast succeeding at this. 

 

OH btw this is the legit quest, not like other servers. No interference will work. No help of any kind. All you, solo, single, you get the point.  

[Docholy 4]

BTW I hereby petition undertanker be removed from this thread!  Only priest allowed to post here!  Pottu is the one and only exception.  

Edited November 9, 2016 by Docholy

[Undertanker 88]

BTW I hereby petition undertanker be removed from this thread!  Only priest allowed to post here!  Pottu is the one and only exception.  

 

Ummmm thanks for the down vote?

[Docholy 4]

Is that was reputation is based off? I thought it was a random thing.  My bad, gave it back.

Edited November 9, 2016 by Docholy

[Pottu 290]

I would prefer if the original authors of the various guides would bring them over or another player picks them up - that way there's better reliability of updating/maintaining them. I'll remove my versions as soon as that happens.

[Res 0]

No, you need the reputation, Pottu!
 

The Priest BiS list thread was always a mess on the other forum (Who would want to look through all those pages to find some relevant information when they could just look at the spreadsheet for the easy guide), this thread always had some useful discussion in it though, some "important" information was omitted in my post and was available in the comments, maybe we should compile it into one post, this is assuming everything works like it did.

 

 

I'll look into it (The Item list and this guide) but if someone else beats me to it they can make the new topics instead.

Edited November 17, 2016 by Res

[nanashi 0]

[...]into Microsoft Word[...]

 

Why use proprietary software when there is a free and open alternative?

[Loreena 0]

I remember getting VERY lucky on all aspects that lead up to acquiring Benediction; Loot master overriding the DKP system got me the Eye of Divinity, the Eye of Shadow was given to me for free by a co-guild master and the quest itself didn't take me more than a few tries. Spoiled rotten is what I was!

[Athena 3]

 the quest itself didn't take me more than a few tries. 

 

Scrub!

[Mot 0]

Good luck to all fellow priests attempting to get Benediction!

[Loreena 0]

Scrub!

Pardon?

[Faith 5]

 

@Pottu

 

I noticed you are migrating over a lot of important threads from Nost.   I recommend pasting them into Microsoft Word first and selecting the paste option to adjust formatting.  Then copy that and past into these forums to avoid the Nost soft colors and off formatting.  The .jpg files should then show correctly as well.

 

Feel free to delete this after you see this suggestion.

or paste it in and modify it. Edited December 14, 2016 by Faith

[Holypowers 0]

I remember taking turns on nost to get the staff. Horde and alliance got on a teamspeak server to make it easy to reset if you messed up and taking turns. Good times 

[cryofsorrow 5]

Wow, it evolved to TS? Last time I did it, we used only hand gestures.

[Gunari 3]

Quest is not trivial like every other quest in the game. Be nice to fellow priests and beg a friend to be a "cleaner" if it gets out of hand. The 2 hour respawnis bad for everyone.

[Shayss 43]

All priest, make sure to get Spirit tap from the shadow tree. Every time an oil of immolation slays a skeleton you will get 15 secs of 100% more spirit.

 

^This. Seriously.

 

Respec and get spirit tap. It makes this SO damn easy.

 

I completed this on retail first time but on Nost I had to reset 3 times, and used over 100g worth of consumables ( -.- ). Picked up Spirit Tap, 1 shotted so easily. I did use a mana pot on completion, but I didn't use any immolation(had used them all before) and I don't think I even needed the Mana Pot.

 

PS: Holy Nova is your friend for clearing skeletons if u have spirit tap.

 

Edited December 15, 2016 by Shayss

[gotmilk0112 10]

@Pottu

 

I noticed you are migrating over a lot of important threads from Nost.   I recommend pasting them into Microsoft Word first and selecting the paste option to adjust formatting.  Then copy that and past into these forums to avoid the Nost soft colors and off formatting.  The .jpg files should then show correctly as well.

 

Feel free to delete this after you see this suggestion.

Right here on the forums there is a "Paste as Plain Text" function, it's the middle Paste icon.

[Undertanker 88]

Yeah but you lose the base formatting of holds, underlines, colors. Was mentioning it because the contrast of the pasted background would then be normal and easy to read

[Ursh 2]

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

[Euronymous 2]

The best tip I have for this quest is to bind "target nearest friend" under targetting in the key bindings menu to something( shift+tab for example).

Manually targeting the peasants with a mouse while they're marching and their nameplates are flickering and switching positions constantly is infuriating.

[Jeffthekilla 0]

Amazing guides/tips here, can't wait to work on getting mine.

Good luck to you all with Benediction/Anathema.

[Geston 15]

On 12/17/2016 at 3:11 PM, Ursh said:

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

I did this second try(1st try was basically me just getting comfortable with the event) as a decently geared spriest who just switched up my spec specifically for this quest.

The quest can feel overwhelming at 1st but its actually quite easy if you're prepared.

[Midoriko 2]

From a priest that owned that staff on retail vanilla, and earned it at least 3 other times.

It is my opinion the quest is designed to be at the strength of a priest who is part of a guild that kills ragnaros regularly. Not just got the trinket during 1 raid, but you should have a few pieces of gear beyond pre-raid BiS.

You *have* to use a list of potions and buff yourself up for the quest, its an Epic quest, it teaches you to save a dying raid, not a dying group; which gets onto my next point.

As a healer, some targets have more priority over others if you have not learned this yet (not being mean, this is a needed lesson for raids). The tanks life is more important than the healers life themselves, which is why healers die healing tanks all the time.  As with this quest, there are technically 5 waves if you do it right, and you can do it a few different ways, I will try to detail how I do the quest.

Firstly, you want your back to the cave, and angle your camera towards the dirt so you are looking down on the top of your head. Then activate the "V" Bars so you can click and your screen does not go insane (but it still will go insane, just not as bad).

I used Renew Rank 6 and Flash Heal Rank 4, Holy Nova Rank 1 for this entire quest.

Do not forget to use a Major Trollsblood potion, as the HP5 actually helps you not use mana on yourself.

Stratholme Holy Water is also great here, but I still forgot and used Holy Nova Rank 1.

Now as the waves progress its as if its 10, 15, 15, 20, 20 NPC's, by which you will pass or fail.

Cast Renew before Abolish Disease, then heal anybody below 50% health first. I do my best to save everybody in the first wave, and instantly slam a mana potion to start the cooldown early, so I will have it available for when I really need it, and it takes stress off the next wave.

On the 2nd wave you have a choice: You can spam as hard as you can, and make sure *everybody* survives, or actually let a few die.

Repeat Wave 3 as Wave 2, it is ok to let some of them die to ensure others survive.

On wave 4, you will have to spam like you've never spammed before, renew anybody that's missing health at all, targets below 33% health take higher priority. However, if you have not taken a single loss, you may chose to let 100% of the diseased ones die and heal the injured ones first and probably be safe, however this will force you to go through a 5th wave.

You will *have* to receive benefit from the Blessing of Nordrassil to sustain your mana pool, you must spam, this staff is only replaced by Lok'Amir (BWL, last boss) or in Naxx so treat it with that respect, and don't "save" potions, use them.

Also, if your guildies really really love you, get a paladin to sit up there with you for blessing of wisdom, and a few raid buffs before the trip. Also if you want to make a few horde friends, at this point you can mind control existing horde and have your guild-mate paladin buff your new pet. But don't pvp there, its *very* rude.

Lastly, don't anticipate the quest being over, just get into healer tunnel vision and be surprised that you passed and the quest giver didn't despawn, the moment you pass the quest its going to look like you're going to fail and there is nothing you can do about it. As I said earlier, this quest is trying to teach you to save a dying raid.

Edited January 2, 2017 by Midoriko
Priests don't use hunter weapons.