Healing priest converting to shadow

[dalliah1]

Like the title says. I'm soon going to be converting to shadow and i'm a little scared since my guild has very competitive dps. i'm an all around good player but i haven't really played shadow since BC. I did argaloth last night and pulled 19.3k in healing gear mostly and 1 healing trinket which maybe is 2k less?

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...rabbles/simple

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-iy...=11643&e=11833

A few pointers, maybe addons would be helpful and am I suppose to refresh SW:P once I get that mind blast off for the mastery buff?

[Achaman]

join a diff guild then

[Zuziza]

A few pointers, maybe addons would be helpful and am I suppose to refresh SW:P once I get that mind blast off for the mastery buff?

SW: P will be refreshed automatically with a MF cast. Never do a hard refresh of that. You should also only refresh DoTs when they're about to fall off, even if something procs; cutting off the extra tic is usually a dps loss. (This can also be situational with boss debuffs, like just before Chimaeron's feud phase; if you stack up and didn't refresh just before it, it's a pain in the ass to get those DoTs back up.)

As for your gear, it's looking okay, but you don't want to be over hit cap. I saw you reforged out of spirit for haste on items with no haste, and for crit on items that do have haste, which is good. However, it's better to be at like 16.88 than 17.12 just because the .12 is utterly useless when over. That can be fixed with getting some gear without spirit on it though. Reforging can get messy easily when you have excessive spirit from using healing gear. The obvious note is to switch your healing tier for damage tier, but I'm sure you were aware of that. The bonuses are meh, but still more useful than the healing ones.

One decision you'll want to make for sure is whether hit cap is your priority or not. You'll find spriests all over bickering about whether or not you should be (and usually calling each other bad), but it comes down to whether or not you're quick at noticing a DoT refresh miss. It's a big pain when you miss a VT refresh during a proc, but if you're quick to notice and recast, it's trivial. (Note: Even if you miss a MB cast with orbs, you will still get your ES buff, so it's no big loss.) If you're just getting back into shadow, I'd say be close to hit cap until you're comfortable watching the timers, then slowly switch over to haste prioritization. Sim's shown favoring haste over spirit/hit increases dps way more than going for hit cap first, and many have experienced it in practice. It's up to you to decide how comfortable you are below hit cap and how low you can go with it.

One quirk: For your gems, go straight up Brilliant Inferno Ruby unless the bonus is +20 intellect or +30 other stat. It's generally not worth it otherwise. You had that on some of your pieces, but not others.

[Arlee]

Good advice so far... you had asked about addons too. I would suggest shadowtimers or event horizon. Both are really useful for tracking your dots on mobs and are doing in a way that is very easy to understand the info they are telling you. Shadowtimers is probably the easier of the two to get used to though.

Also I don't think Zuz covered this but at first you will probably only want to cast Mind Blast when you have one or more orbs up so that you won't have issues with empowered shadows falling off. However, once you get a feel for things and feel more comfortable you can start casting MB on cool down. The thing you will have to be aware of there though is if you only have 6.5 seconds left on MB and no orbs you won't want to cast the Mind Blast because you Empowered Shadows will fall off before the cool down of Mind Blast is up.

[dalliah1]

Thank you guys that helps alot. I'm hoping the volcano card will increase my dps by at least 2k. I'm a badass healer but dps is a little foreign to me since I haven't done it in so long so I feel like a noob!

[Dubzil]

19.3k is pretty good, you're probably doing everything right if you can get that high in healer gear with healer trinket. Just make sure not to let your dots drop and only MB with an orb up. Refresh dots early doesn't cause you to lose the last tick anymore, your dot is just extended, not reset.

[dalliah1]

19.3k is pretty good, you're probably doing everything right if you can get that high in healer gear with healer trinket. Just make sure not to let your dots drop and only MB with an orb up. Refresh dots early doesn't cause you to lose the last tick anymore, your dot is just extended, not reset.

Awesome! I didn't know that! That will help alot

---------- Post added 2011-04-30 at 06:56 AM ----------

Does any shadow priest know if the evangelism cooldown will be back up for magmaw if you use it at the start? For the head phase that is. I would ask a fellow priest but there aren't any that are shadow in my guild