by Fox Van Allen

As promised, follow me after the break for the shadow priest’s guide to the Icecrown Plagueworks.

Your Mission: Stay alive. Inoculate yourself and others against Festergut’s raid-wide mega-attack. Pull out all the stops to maximize DPS, cause dude needs to die quick. Marvel at the guest appearance of Koffing above your head.

Festergut, especially in 25-man mode, is a pretty brutal DPS check. This means, of course, that your entire raid could do everything right, and you can still find yourself getting wiped by the enrage timer. To add to the challenge, as a ranged player, you’ll find that there’s a lot of movement involved and your DPS will lag behind the melee classes. Still, shadow priests bring more to a raid than just DPS, and it’s that extra utility that lets us shine here.

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by Dawn Moore

For now, I want to touch on some reasons why priests specifically would want to use macros.

Consolidating

Priests have more healing spells available to them than any other healer. Add into that all our offensive abilities and cooldowns, and our bars can get very crowded, very quickly. Macros are a great way to consolidate the number of buttons you need, as well as clean up your UI so things are easier to see. Since not every ability is used frequently, or some abilities are on cooldown, you can bind two or more abilities to one key. Adding a target condition will let you keep offensive abilities on your bars but out of the way; ideal for burn phases. Here’s an example.

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast [help, nomodifier:alt, nomodifier:shift]Renew; [modifier:alt, target=player]Renew; [modifier:shift]Guardian Spirit;[harm, nomodifier]Holy Fire

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by Zach Yonzon

Priests are an interesting study for this series, primarily because out of all the game’s ten classes, they are the only ones with two talent trees devoted to healing. This means that two out of three times, you’ll be encountering a healing priest. That’s not exact math, but you know what I mean. Shadow, the class’ DPS tree, has had an interesting history with viability and acceptance, having been known as a PvP tree in the game’s early years, later gaining raid viability and losing PvP luster. In the current environment, shadow remains a popular PvP tree but it is far easier to find success in Arenas and Battlegrounds with a healing spec. In this regard, discipline, the mitigation tree formerly considered to be complementary and gimmicky has shone.

Naturally, most fights against priests, particularly discipline-specced ones, will be long and difficult for most classes. That said, let’s take a moment to examine the various abilities used by priests on the battlefield. A priest’s repertoire of common spells is rather limited, and most of their key abilities will depend on their spec. A rundown of stuff to expect from them after the break.

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by Fox Van Allen

The first four battles were designed to be quite accessible to beginning raiders and PUGs, with a relatively low difficulty level as compared to the rest of the content inside. The encounters inside include a cuddly bone dragon monster thing (so cute!), what appears to be the result of Kel’Thuzad after his sex-change operation, a battle involving ROCKETBEARS, and… a lone orc — against the might of the Alliance?

Anyway. Step in, wipe your feet, and let’s earn you that achievement that all those PUG raid leaders demand you have.

LORD MARROWGAR

Your Mission: Stay alive. Burn down spikes. DPS the boss. Give the downed boss cuddles.

One of the easier of the Icecrown Citadel bosses, Lord Marrowgar primarily exists to grease the wheels of progression. Every raid team could use an easy win or two, especially when that easy win comes loaded with 2 Emblems of Frost and a loot table that should make even the most advance raider jealous. Of course, Marrowgar is only easy if you know how to approach the fight. He has two different phases, and your primary goal in each is to stay alive while doing as much damage as you can (though really, in what fight does that not apply?).
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by Zach Yonzon

1Today we’ll get a little more specific and break down the three basic specs and their abilities in tactics. This should answer some folks’ question about why I didn’t mention Penance, which is arguably the most used priest heal on the battlefield. The answer, of course, is that Penance is the last tier discipline talent and not every priest will have access to it. You see someone in Shadowform, they’re not going to be using Penance. You see someone toss a Guardian Spirit — another awesome angel wing graphic spell — they’re not going to be using Penance. Now that we’ve got that little detail out of the way, let’s jump right into the different kinds of priests you’ll be encountering in the Battlegrounds.

The cool thing about the Battlegrounds as opposed to Arenas is that there’s a lot more spec flexibility. The relaxed environment allows for more freedom to play the spec you want to play as opposed to the spec you need to play in order to be optimal for competition. For priests, in particular, this means the freedom to play any of the three specs as opposed to necessarily speccing discipline in order to enjoy success in PvP. For you, the would-be priest-slayer, this means that you should expect to see priests of all kinds in play.

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by Fox Van Allen

1. What is Shadow?

Shadow is quite clearly the most awesome spec known to man (and dwarf). It is the priest’s only spec dedicated to damage dealing. Originally filling a PvP and leveling niche in vanillaWoW, it is now a viable end-game spec.

2. Shadow benefits

• Strong mana-regenerating abilities help make leveling less tedious.
• Shadow priests self-heal through single-target attacks, providing an unusually high level of survivability
• Shadow priests offer a number of raid-wide benefits, including party-wide heals, mana regen, and 3% improved spell hit.
• In emergency situations, shadow priests can provide some (suboptimal) heals to the party.
• Shadowform looks totally bitchin’.

3. Shadow drawbacks

• Limited healing ability. To maximize the damage you deal as a shadow priest, you need to be in Shadowform. You cannot cast holy spells while in Shadowform, kneecapping your ability to provide heals to the party when needed.
• A poor reputation. Shadow priests provided subpar damage throughout much of Wrath of the Lich King, leading many raid leaders to underestimate the value of the class. As such, some shadow priests find it difficult to find end game opportunities.
• Sub-optimal damage. Because our class also has a healing spec, shadow priests are subject to a “hybrid tax,” which puts our damage 5-10% behind that of other pure ranged DPS classes.

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by Matt Low

The professor has a masters degree in potions and a Ph.D in raid wiping. Even the most stalwart of healers will have face a barrage of obstacles that will affect healing ability. This guy is my personal Achilles heel in Icecrown so far. Not more than a few days ago, I went an embarrassing 8 for 8 on Malleable Goo deaths. Talk about my pride being wounded. I’m supposed to be good at dodging stuff that comes flying toward me not running into them or getting drilled in the face by this green exploding goo.

Anyway, keep reading for my awesome mistakes and what I learned from them.

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a basic understanding of the Professor Putricide encounter. This article is meant mainly for the healers.

Alright, on to phase 1!

Phase 1

Pick two tank healers to cover your tank on Professor Putricide. If one of them gets focused by a green slime or has to kite the orange cloud, at least you’ll have one more for support. In any case, this early phase is a light one and there isn’t a whole lot of healing that needs to be done. You can probably get away with five healers. If your DPS is jaw-droppingly amazing, take 6 with you instead.

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?by Fox Van Allen

Taking down Arthas is the big time, and I want to be rewarded commensurate with the effort I put in. I’ll admit it — I have an incredibly unrealistic expectation of getting an Inflatable Pink Arthas Balloon vanity pet trailing me wherever I go, or some trinket that summons miniature Arthases down to destroy a hopelessly outmatched Keristrasza in a way that elicits “ooohs” and “aaahs” from those newly minted level 80s thrown into the same random dungeon as I.

And after glancing at the Lich King’s loot table, I have to say that I’m a little bit disappointed. I’m not saying the loot isn’t good, but if we shadow priests are going to be getting little more than a staff for beating the legendary Lich King, it better be one hell of a damn special staff.

But it’s not. Even the art is a bit underwhelming. And you almost have to scratch your head a little bit and wonder why — why did Blizzard drop the ball on this one? It’s far from perfect, but when you consider what went into the design and the (relative) originality of it, the coolest damn piece of loot in all of Icecrown Citadel is probably going to wind up being the Nibelung.

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by Dawn Moore

The following is meant to be an introductory guide to the priest holy tree. It is not going to tell you what to do step by step (at least not until you get to the enchants section) instead it intends to show you some options from which you can get started. If you’re already a veteran holy priest, feel free to add anything I left out in the comments so readers who use this column as a resource can get as much help as possible.

1. What is Holy?

Holy is one of a priest’s two healing specs. In raiding, it is most frequently used to fill a raid healing role, where as in 5-man dungeons it offers a diverse palette of abilities to keep any party alive.

2. Holy benefits

• Flexible to many different styles of play.
• Benefits from almost every caster stat and thus makes it easy to find gear upgrades.
• As a raid healer, holy offers excellent reactive and preemptive healing options.
• Provides a variety of utility spells to assist the raid.

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