Two steps closer to a 10 man drake...

... one more step to go.

Downed Heroic Sindragosa in my mage's 10-man last night, and we went on to pick up Been Waiting a Long Time For This as well, which for many people finished off their meta-achievement and stuffed a dead dragon mount in their mailbox. Woo hoo!

Just one more to go for me. All You Can Eat, which I picked up on my paladin instead of my mage when we went for it due to lack of a second healer, seems like a total cake-walk now after having dealt with Heroic Sindragosa.

My wife swears she will never again suffer through that fight, and I can't say I blame her. What an awful combination of unforgiving, irritating mechanics, glitchy code and at times frustrating RNG elements.

Blistering Cold is a perfect example. Several times we had people die from 30k-40k+ hits while standing at the bottom of the stairs. That's a frustrating headscratcher. Then, there's having one healer get blocked and another one get Unchained Magic during phase 3, leaving one last healer to somehow manage to keep the raid alive through relentless AoE damage, chain cooldowns on the tanks at the appropriate moments, and not to mention, keeping those tanks alive and topped off as well.

Eeeew.

Then, you have the stupid boneheaded things that people normally do on Sindragosa for some reason, like when I miscounted Frost Bombs during the air phase and got one-shot by the fourth one. I'm surprised my combat log didn't list that damage source as "stupidity."

Fortunately, we had one hell of a healing squad on point tonight, and we managed to get her taken care of within a mere hour and a half, including one horrifying wipe with the boss at 20,000 hp left. Hooray for awesome healers, and a 30% buff! I'm positive that Heroic Sindragosa is the only fight in which a halfway-competent raid could use the help provided by Strength of Wrynn. Had the buff been only 15%, we may have struggled for twice that amount of time.

Been Waiting a Long Time For This was a relaxing walk in the park after that, taking only two attempts, and that only because of an unfortunate incident involving an out-of-control Shambler while waiting for the plague stacks to build up.

Next week - time to get a dead dragon mount of my own!

And, I'm back.

I figured this was an appropriate reason to make the first post in the better part of a year. A full week behind the rest of my guild, due to me being on the bench for the guild first kill. But still -- Hail to the Kingslayer, baby!

Disclaimer: This was on my mage, not my priest. Actually, for maximum ironic potential, my priest has since become a full-time healer in the past six or so months, with a primary spec of Holy and Disc remaining the offspec. Not a shred of Shadow anywhere. It actually makes me a bit sad -- for so long he was never, ever intended to even off-heal. I was a committed Shadow Priest player. And now look at him! It almost feels like he's a traitor to all of Shadow Priest-kind.

I may as well start blogging in my new persona as a mage, but it feels really awkward to do so in a blog essentially dedicated to being a Shadow Priest.

Wat do?

Start a new blog... or rename and redesign this one?

Explanations, and a New Main

I've been absent from Shadow Priest blogging for a while not because I got bored, or quit WoW (although I've come close a few times, I think). I just switched my main to my mage, located back on Zul'jin where my wife and I were playing last year before transferring to KT in the final months of BC.

Posting about mage theorycrafting doesn't seem to fit in a blog titled "A Shadow Priest," hence the lack of activity. I appreciate that some of my older posts are still getting comments -- I like seeing that I wasn't just talking to thin air (but I wouldn't necessarily care if that was the case, either!).

In the past couple months, I've been dedicated to my mage and finally got back into 25-mans about mid-August. He's about as geared out as one can get without dipping into Heroic 25-mans, pretty much. I also transferred my priest back to ZJ as well. I suppose I should update my bio on the right sometime.

I'm starting to get bored as getting gear is way too easy when you clear 10 and 25 man ToC and 10 and 25 Onyxia every week. Hell, it was easy before I was doing that. After a couple weeks I finally got enough people to get interested in going back to Ulduar, and finally saw Thorim, Vezax, and Yogg for the first time -- sadly enough. We're wiping on Yogg's second phase, but that encounter is everything I was hoping it would be. It beats ToC hands down.

I especially like and enjoy encounters designed not to be brute-forced through gear. They show thought and effort on the part of the design team, and other than Ulduar, that sort of effort isn't really apparent in the raids so far implemented in this expansion. 80s are perfectly capable of wiping even in BWL these days. I've been in quite a few pugs myself who didn't bother listening to warning to avoid standing in front of Ebonroc, for instance, or to avoid Nef's shadowflame.

We're not likely to ever do much in H-ToC25, due to too much dead weight on the roster, but H-ToC10 is still a possibility. This is an unfortunate truth, but given the direction raiding has been going since WoTLK launched, and Blizzard's stance towards universal content delivery, it's kind of to be expected, although I'm not a fan of it. Lackluster performance and minimal drive to succeed are simply a natural consequence of the level of (gear) quality being so high these days, compared to what's actually required for the current content. Improving skills and performance in order to push progression content is simply not necessary when your gear is already compensating for so much in the regular runs, but not enough to bridge the gap to the hardmodes/Heroic modes. Many people in the guild who might be interested in Heroic modes for the rewards in doing so aren't interested in putting up with the weaker links that we would have to bring in in order to make those attempts.

Blizzard really, really fucked up with ToC, in so many ways. It's a mistake in every way.

This is turning into a much larger post, so I'll cut it here. Hope to write more in the future. May be mage-related more than priest-related, so fair warning.