Shadow Priest Guides, where?

[SomeRocks]

SummonStone.com was my go to guide for everything Shadow. since it has gone poof, where is there good Shadow guide (talents, boss strats, BiS lists, etc)? i know there is these forums of course, Icy-Veins, Noxxic (lol), and HowtoPriest. but where else? Icy-veins just isnt complete enough nor does it have enough info. and H2P is just very confusing. everything on that website is a bit poorly laid out and confusing to read.

[Robula]

+1 for this. There are a few guides, but I've not found many that are in depth. If you play CoP then this guide is fantastic. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-CoP-only-6-2)

[Xraychicken]

If you were using summonstone before just stick with howtopriest. The guy who wrote the summonstone guide for shadow runs the site and its the best source for shadow out there.

[Kilee25]

If you were using summonstone before just stick with howtopriest. The guy who wrote the summonstone guide for shadow runs the site and its the best source for shadow out there.

Drye was the guidewriter for the summonstone guide. His guide was originally on H2P, and then moved to Summonstone. Veiled is the owner of H2P, an was not affiliated with Summonstone. The current guides on H2P are maintained by Speakeasy (of Elitist Jerks, of which his guide is originated and still exists) and Automaticjak (who maintains the healing guides and sections, and took over from Naerdriel).

I might have mispelled some names there. Apologies if I did.

[Djriff]

Drye was talking about writing up a PDF guide, very smiliar to summonstone, not sure how much ground that's gotten.

[Ggtbot]

Why not "Howtopriest"? Their guides are always pretty comprehensive

[zenkai]

After 10 years I am thinking of giving up on mine, I was fine with the lower DPS when I had more tools to play with, since progression is more about executing the fight right then blindly maxing out your DPS

[raghnarok]

i go with http://www.icy-veins.com/wow/shadow-...-pve-dps-guide! it's always updated and nicely on point

[Drye]

Drye was talking about writing up a PDF guide, very smiliar to summonstone, not sure how much ground that's gotten.

I'm not going to continue it. Not worth the work.

[Djriff]

I'm not going to continue it. Not worth the work.

Maybe next patch? Provided you're still playing a priest then?

[SomeRocks]

After 10 years I am thinking of giving up on mine, I was fine with the lower DPS when I had more tools to play with, since progression is more about executing the fight right then blindly maxing out your DPS

yes i am also thinking of giving up on my SPriest. i could go on and mention our no raid utility or our historically mediocre dps. But i don't want to complain. i love my class. I love being in Shadowform and destroying my enemies minds. So i am hopeful for the "very significant changes coming to Shadow in a future patch". I hope 7.0 turns the class around for us, and hopefully gets rid of Shadow Orbs :P.

And Drye, thank you for the time, effort and insight you put into your guide on summonstone. i greatly appreciate, as i am sure everyone else here does. I owe you a beer. \

Since there is really only Veileds guide on H2P now (icy-veins is just a basic starter guide). it seems that is our only option, at least for now. maybe the 7.0 changes, if they are good changes, will inspire some of the top SPriests to start writing guides and help the rest of us scrubs out :P.

[Djriff]

To be honest you dont really need a guide past what h2p or iv tells you. The real purpose of those guides is to help you understand your class more. Once you get a feel for shadow you dont really need it. If youre one of those players that needs to have someone tell you what talent to take on which fight check out the hfc dps thread here. Ive been taking the time to list out good talents and glyphs to take as well as why if its not obvious.

[SomeRocks]

To be honest you dont really need a guide past what h2p or iv tells you. The real purpose of those guides is to help you understand your class more. Once you get a feel for shadow you dont really need it. If youre one of those players that needs to have someone tell you what talent to take on which fight check out the hfc dps thread here. Ive been taking the time to list out good talents and glyphs to take as well as why if its not obvious.

wow, what a condescending comment.

[Djriff]

Sorry wasnt trying to come across that way. What I meant was, H2P and Icy Veins both give a great explanation of shadow as well as their talents. There are countless topics in the Priest section here that debate what talents to use in any given situation and why.

[wombats23]

I actually just looked at the H2P guide (http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7411 for reference) for the first time (haven't bothered to read up on shadow guides since shadow hasn't changed at all since BRF). This guide is freakishly descriptive, almost to a fault. I honestly can't imagine what more you need from a guide. I guess I can see it being overwhelming considering there is just SOO much info in it, but confusing? It's the clearest guide we've had since WoD launched.

Since you mention talents and gear in your original post here's some more links:
- Talents/Strategies per boss: http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=92&t=7626
- Gear: http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7637 (the H2P guide actually even has a BiS gear section too, which is a nice touch)

I mean you actually listed 4 guides yourself but you still want another guide? So either you're relying on guides as a crutch or you're fishing for some more specific sort of response but you haven't asked the right question for it.

It amazes me that instead of realizing the truth behind djriff's post and following what he said, you call him (her?) condescending. Amazing.

[Ignotum]

wow, what a condescending comment.

Yet he is 1000% correct.

I didn't pick up any condescending tone at all.

[SomeRocks]

I mean you actually listed 4 guides yourself but you still want another guide? So either you're relying on guides as a crutch or you're fishing for some more specific sort of response but you haven't asked the right question for it.

It amazes me that instead of realizing the truth behind djriff's post and following what he said, you call him (her?) condescending. Amazing.

ohhhh this is why i don't use these forums. now i remember. my mistake. who knew that asking 1 question could cause self-righteous people to sprout up. my mistake for using these forums as a source of information, one safe from jerks who would rather belittle you. forgive me, i will not be using these forums again. best of luck to my fellow SPriests. and thank you to the people who had something good to say. i will not be visiting this post again, i have requested that it be deleted.

[Kilee25]

Speaking as a guide-writer... I see a few misconceptions in this thread... Bit of a ranty ramble incoming.... you have been warned.

The notion that we just need a high end priest like Viklund or whoever to come and write a guide for the priest community is not the right angle of approach to asking for a guide. There is no guarantee that being in a highly progressed guild will make one a good writer. There's also a misconception that the skillset required to raid at a "world first" level is the same skillset that makes a person a "guide-writer". Certainly, people in these types of guilds are in good positions to both have knowledge and to share it, but these two skillsets are by no means inclusive of each other.

I can only speak for myself, but I see there being several challenges to overcome when writing guides that one must overcome.

1. You need a host, or some way to get your guide to the public. You can write the best guide in the world, but if it's not put in a prominent place that is easy to find, it will go largely ignored. There's a good case in point about Drye's guide. Now that Summonstone is gone, where would this guide be hosted now that would be in as pominant and easy-to-find location? How To Priest has a stickied guide, and they are not likely to take that one down or share the spot with Drye's guide, since the bulk of those guides/sites essentially contain the same information. Icey Veins has their own thing. MMO-C has a guide and a thread already going. He could try going to the official forums, and lobbying for that one, since I think the current official forum guide writer is no longer updating that one. I mean, the only other option left is tot ry to start your own website/blog and see if that gets a some kind of foot-hold in the community. My point is that it's very hard to even get a foothold in the community because there's already so many sites and guides out there.

2. You have to be careful that you aren't just rehashing existing information. If you're writing a guide, you want to either say something original, or at least try to present the information in a new way. If you're just re-writing something that's already out there, what have you added to the community? At a certain point you may just be muddying the waters by pulling people in different directions. It can be especially dangerous if you're just copying or linking other people's work. Twintop, for instance, pretty much has a monopoly on stat weight and BIS list generating. Basically anything you do in that area is going up against his work, so what do you? Well, you can just link to his work, but at that point why even bother? Why write a guide at all if you're just going to forward your readers to other people's work instead? Again, the whole muddying the waters thing.

3. Who is your audience? This is huge. Who do you want to write to? What point is it for someone in a highly progressed guild to write a guide to the players who are, say, running LFR every night. What use will those players get from reading such a guide? Nothing would apply to them, and their efforts to replicate the strategies that a raider in Mythic gear uses would fall flat and probably not even work. A guide, to me, is about using a shotgun versus a sniper rifle. You try to hit as much of your audience as you can. The best guide-writers to me, aren't mythic raiders... they are people who are in the mid-range, who see both sides of the game and at least have a measure of empathy and understanding towards raiders who are at different stages of the game. It's very difficult to find writers who can write to this target audience - I would say that these kinds of people are very rare...

Additionaly, if you are writing a guide aimed specifically at high-end raiders, there's a danger that your target audience won't care about anything you write because they already know it. Your guide, therefore, just turns into this werid sort of "validation seeking" where people read it to feel good about what they are doing. They browse over the guide, not actually learning anything, but just validating what they already know, and feeling good in the assertation that other high end raiders are doing what they are doing. If there's a descrpancy, these kinds of readers will spend all of their energy letting you know just how wrong you are... a guide aimed at this level of raiding and audience is very exhausting to maintain, and quite thankless as well. (Again, pointing to Drye's experience in trying to maintain the H2P guide).

4. The size of the game has grown almost exponentially in WoD compared to previous expansions. A truly comprehensive guide is starting to become a book at this point. People try to condense this into smaller sizes, but the effort to do so means that entire sections of knoweldge go ignored or glossed over. Some guidewriters get around this by eliminating certain subjects, either by making the assumption that their readers already have a certain level of basic core knowledge, or by making the assumption that certain aspects of the class are not necessary to know - either because they are seldom used, or "inferior" to their way of playing.

5. You need some measure of "buy in" from the community. Let's say you post a guide, and you don't have a good, prominent host for it. Well, you still need a few "important" people to vouch for your guide and to spread the word, or to at least tell the community that what you are doing has value. Even if you post a guide on the same site as "good ones", if it isn't recognized by someone important, it can quickly fade into obscurity, no matter how much effort or care you put into it. If someone comes into your guide and says it's bad, your response to that person saying that you don't think it's bad means very little. However, if someone well-respected in the community comes to your defense, it can mean the entire world. And on the flip side, if someone "important" downs your guide, it can kill it in an instant. "You'll never work in the industry again." Basically, any guide you write can live and die on support from the rest of the community. Who you know, and who you are friends with, can be be VERY important to the success of a guide, even more important than what you actually wrote.

6. There are, in my opinion, two different types of guides, with two very different purposes. One type of guide is informational. These are essentially something like wikipedia articles. They present information, but do not explain it or teach the reader how to use that information. The second type of guide is more of a teaching tool. It focuses on explaining the hows and whys. It seeks to educate its reader as to the why decisions are made and what the purpose of different play styles are. Both of these types of guides have their place in the community, and serve vastly different goals and audiences...

7. When you write a guide, you put yourself under a microscope. You are scrutinized, and often found lacking by some group of individuals or another. A great deal of the feedback you get will be negative, and people will criticize everything about you. Your UI, your guild, your progress. They will stalk you on your armory, and use your progress or lack of progress as amunition for why you are bad and everything you write is bad. It is not an exaggeration that about 50% of the feedback I get from my guide is people just pointing out that something I'm doing is wrong and it makes everything I do/did wrong by association.

8. Guidewriting can, occasionally, border on madness... I think it takes a certain personality to really want to keep doing it. You have to have some kind of perfect storm of insecurity and ego and some kind of strange impulse/urge to say something to people as loud as you can, for no other reason than you just can't keep it yourself. Guidewriting is both, at the same time, an effort to help people, and (even in some small part) an effort to exert your will on other people. At the same time it takes a tremendous amount of patience and effort to see this effort through.. because there are very few rewards for doing so, and you almost need an insane kind of pleasure from just hearing yourself talk to get any kind of satisfaction from it all... Personally, I literally write my guide to myself... and then read it back to myself over and over again... I create multiple versions of myself in my head so that I can have a conversation about different sections, and the merits of them or whether I like what's been written...

......

To echo some of what DJriff has posted, I do think that what's out there is pretty comprehensive, and that there's very little room in the current community to write something new. To write something better and more comprehensive would be a massive undertaking, and where would you host such a thing? What would be the point of it? What would be the reward? Where would you find such a person to do this? I'd like to meet this person and have a coffee with them! That would be a very interesting person!

As for guides in general, my biggest concerns at the moment is that CoP is generally under-represented, and that it is not nearly as bad or as niche as popular voice indicates. I also am surprised that anyone is even mentioning CoPLite at this point, as I feel this play style does not work at any level of play, and is giving priests a bad name.

Additionally, I really feel that Void Entropy needs a good guide/writeup. Even though I think such a guide/writer would probably be criticized heavily, and I personally would not want to take all of that criticism as it would sincerely deflate my willingness to keep working on it. However, I really do think there are some interesting areas of research that could be looked at with this talent, and at the least I would be curious how it performs in different fight situations, if you stopped looking at the other priest talents in comparison. It would be difficult to write such a guide as people might confuse it immediately as someone's attempt to popularize a play style that doesn't work in high end raiding... A battle that I've had mixed results with in my own guide... Still, I would love to read someone's unabashed chronicles with trying to get VEnt to work.

Apologies for the typos and general lack of structure and polish on this post. I just wanted to bash some of my thoughts out while they were fresh on my mind.