Good

• Phase 1 was a blast with dps finally not giving it all out and tanks being able to move up and down the spawns without getting too many adds in the way at the same time
• Phase 2 had people inside the portal being quick and focused on the right targets
• Phase 3 had some of the melee dps on the adds together with ranged in order to keep them under control
• No pauses during the whole raiding session kept everyone focused on his job

Wrong

• I needed the loo
• During phase 1 sometime we rushed the dps and managed to get wiped like noobs so we alternated getting to phase 3 and not even getting phase 1 completed
• During phase 3 we had to move some melee dps on the adds in order to keep them under control

It might be of interest to note that we are raiding ToC25 hard mode but actually left Yogg untouched since last June. But it was about time we actually gave a goodbye to that mass of flesh.

Basically the problem is that as dpsers they are way low when compared to mages or locks. It takes too long to build up all the DoTs and it’s totally mana inefficient. The end result is low dps and a spot that could as well be taken by a pure dps class that would do way more damage in comparison.

As healers, they lost their power, especially when Blizzard made downranking of spells no more a viable option. As MT healer, any paladin will do a much better job, with overhealing being channeled to their beacon. Even a disc priest can’t beat a paladin when it comes to single target healing. On top of that, priests have slower spells compared to paladins so it’s still a no-go.

As raid healers, they are being overwhelmed by druids and shamans. It’s simply a matter or rotation PoM, CoH and PoH but in the end by the time you casted, everyone has already been topped up by one of the other classes.

Thus the frustration being shown by our own priests. I talked to a friend of mine who’s playing a priest in one of the top European guilds and he confirmed that priest healing is no longer interesting. It used to require brain to do it properly but since the last changes it’s become just a mere, blow all your cooldowns to top the haling meters (for all it’s worth) and just brainless healing.

It looks like Blizzard is aware of the poor performance of shadow dps and I haven’t done a serious research but I’m pretty sure someone has already brought up the healing issues as well.

So what would you do as a priest to make your role in raids more active? What can the raid do about it?

Now.. I know that this has been discussed almost everywhere on the net, but I’ll throw my 2 cents in as well. ToC is the easiest and fastest way to gear up any toon. Just by running that and farming some badges I managed to get the best tanking gear for my feral druid that can be taken before hitting Ulduar. And I’m planning on doing the same for the resto gear. Anyone out there remembers how hard it was to gear up through heroics in TBC just to be barely able to snip into a raid to Karazhan?

With normal ToC you can get your first epics while still leveling. At 80 you farm ToC heroic and get the rest of the gear and with the badges you buy the two T8.25 pieces and you’re set. Geared and ready for Ulduar and up.

This opens a question though.. why are people applying to raiding guilds showing that they have very bad gear when you can have a decent set in less than two weeks? Is it a sign of lack of commitment? Laziness?  Lack of time? I’d say that laziness is the winner here. And if that’s the case, maybe that’s one of those nice indicators of how dedicated certain applicants can be. Of course gear isn’t everything, but since it’s so easy to gear up with a few runs, why wouldn’t people do it instead of complaining about it?!

Who am I? I am a passionate gamer, who has been designing games and writing them for years, who has been working as a journalist for videogame magazines, who liked World of Warcraft since the first time I put my hand on it during the early alpha stage while attending the E3 in Los Angeles.

What have I been playing in WoW? It all started with my warlock called Sigmundo who was my first main. I started playing it as a noob (ok, I came from the early UO days as I was a beta tester back then and a co-writer of the first server emulator for that game, but still I consider myself a noob ). During plain Vanilla WoW I decided to start a raiding guild at some point. It was a social-raiding guild, not a hardcore one. It was called Anathema and it was run by me and Azuul. The funny thing is that we managed to become server’s third guild progression-wise on the Alliance side even though we were far from being hardcore.

When TBC came out I decided to disband the guild due to conflicting ideas, too many members and too few spots for the 25 men raids and some personal issues. I started again from scratch and made a new guild called Edge but the truth is that it was bad timing as I couldn’t put enough time into it and I had to head leadership over while I took a pause of some months from the game. A few months later the guild was disbanded.

At that point I made my come back quite slowly, leveling up a gnome warrior called Zyxxyz and just playing casually until I found enough time to get back to raids (you all know it’s like a drug.. sooner or later you’re going to want more!). I spent some time with a friendly guild called Rune where I met some very nice guys but they were not raiding so I started looking for the kind of guild who would fit my playstyle and availability. I live in Italy, we are famous for our good food and the fact that we eat late and that’s absolutely true! So I needed a guild who would raid after 9pm server time and that was not too strict on raiding day (aka not hardcore as I couldn’t commit to 6 or 7 days of raids per week). I started inquiring and I ended up writing a sort of guide to the raiding guilds on Terenas (you can find my original thread on Terenas Tavern).
After some research I ended up applying to Malevolence and I’ve been a member of theirs since then.

With the release of WotLK I switched main to a Death Knight known as Soultrap and I chose to take the role of the tank as main spec. At the time I’m writing this, we have just killed the last boss in Trial of the Crusader 25. But I’ll talk about that and much more in the future. For the time being, farewell!