Welp, I’m back to Pandaria. Re-reading my old blog for tips, lol.
Also guess I’m back to the archives for tagging. What interesting timing – I was just yearning for a return to decentralized social blogging over consolidated, commercialized social media.
Edit:
Ok just played through character creation! From what I’ve read, this is basically OP alt levelling and when the event ends, they will transfer to normal realms all levelled up!
You can play allied races. You can even (maybe?) play a Dracthyr. It says one per account. My husband is trying that this weekend when we play. He’s going to delete the one he has 2 levels into the starting zone. Given how insane MoP is with heights, I think it will be hilarious. Imagine soar from Mount Neverist – he might hit Timelost Isle or the island with the T-Rex.
Wonder if they’ve tested that… Better make sure there is some handling when people hit the map edges!
I’ve decided to play a Pandarian, though it’s priestess yet again! I’m thinking:
1. Would be nice to get panda heritage armor
2. I already know how to priest all of this, so it will be easy
3. I fall off stuff a lot, so bouncy will get value. And Pandaria has a LOT of stuff to fall off (aren’t there even some raid mechanics which this will mitigate damage for?)
4. Stardew Valley chef dreams. Pandaria actually has exciting cooking mechanics and one of the panda racials doubles food buffs
5. CC for PvP. MoP is an amazing PVP expansion and this is an OP trait.
This is an easy way to obtain a lot of trillium (and living steel).
On a gatherer, set your hearthstone to your faction’s Pandaria capital city.
Fly around and gather (gathering resets the nodes in the area) until you find a golden lotus node. Harvest – note the buff it gives you! For 15 minutes, anything you kill has a chance to drop a treasure chest, which has a high chance of containing ghost iron, black/white trillium and spirits of harmony.
Head to Loremasters and queue for LFR. Clear trash up to first boss. Leave raid, reset, rinse and repeat. The large packs mean you will get tons of treasure chests.
Smelt trillium and ghost iron, send that + spirits of harmony to your alchemist with transmute spec (for extra procs). Turn ghost iron into trillium, turn trillium + SoH into living steel using riddle of steel (or do this every now and then and always have a nice stockpile for daily transmute).
This is infinitely repeatable as long as you don’t kill any bosses in HoF – with LFR, you will hit a limit of number of times you can enter. The biggest bottleneck is finding golden lotus nodes. Augment it with the Halfhill farm for easy daily trillium and/or SoH. I usually do a lap after doing my farm – the monkey village, bamboo forest west of halfhill and Kun Lai summit are all node rich and this path will let you get a kill in on Sha of Fear as well as some rare kills. You’ll also get a ton of lesser charms which you can convert into bonus rolls.
Bonus optimisation options:
– Darkmoon fire-water for increased gathering speed – Pandaria herb gathering speed bonus gloves (chance to drop from rares). I am pretty sure this stacks with fire-water, but haven’t properly tested, I just know it’s hella fast with both. Edit: these do NOT stack – Mist-veiled goggles (MoP engineering craft) to see extra nodes – Ancient Pandaren mining pick (from Jade forest mine) for free gems when hitting ore nodes (unsure if this is still obtainable) – +speed gear set + bear tartare + druid for movement speed to make trash farming faster
If you just want ghost iron, head west of Shrine of Two Moons until you find the area where quillian spawn in an endless swarm. Kill them, mine them. You don’t need to move, just lay down aoe and mine. I prefer a paladin for this as consecration basically instakills everything running by.
Any other good tips?
Update Sept 2022:
– Make sure to harvest herbs as you go. Harvesting a herb clears it out so golden lotus can spawn – golden lotus has a random chance to appear when each node repopulates. DE-populating the nodes by harvesting them forces them to repopulate. If you don’t harvest, then you are just hunting for existing ones, which are much more rare.
– If you have multiple accounts, you can fly around together (eg vial of sands mount) and both harvest the nodes, which makes golden lotus spawn 2x, 3x (X = characters) as fast. Logging out preserves the buff!
– You can use LFR for trash. I don’t know if the raid/LFR is quicker.
Wrote this up for a comment, thought I’d share as a whole post. Here’s what I can think up off the top of my head. Please share your own suggestions!
If you don’t have Shadowlands, I suggest trying several of the following – the key is diversifying into different markets, as old world stuff sells more slowly. This is meant to be a jumping off point, not an exhaustive guide, so you’ll notice a lot of the suggestions involve further research on your own part.
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*Daily Chores*:
– **Pandaria farm**: this takes a few days to set up, but you can grow mats each day. There is also a rare chance for a cageable pet to spawn. You can sell the mats raw or smelt the ore into bars or transmute it into trillium/living steel, or use it to craft items to sell. Engineering has a lot of evergreen items.
– **Garrison**: this also takes a little setup. You get passive resources and node spawns each day and you can use those resources to buy comms. You can sell the comms or use the profession buildings + profession cooldowns to make pets, goblin glider kits, toys, bags, transmog gear, drums or cards of omen (each one is randomly worth values from copper to thousands of gold). The menagerie unlocks daily pet battles for tokens, while the herb garden lets you gather seeds for a pet you can sell. The mines also have a potential pet drop, but you can’t upgrade past level 2 (that removes the mobs it drops from). See this post for tips on maximizing resource generation: https://wp.me/sON4N-garrison
– **Mission tables** from Legion and BfA. These still have some rewards but they are more of a background supplement versus something to focus on.
– **Crafting cooldowns and transmutes**. A lot of more profitable stuff is locked behind these (eg tailoring’s imperial silk) or they create valuable items (eg living steel). Consider making several characters to have multiple cooldowns available per day.
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*Farming*:
– **Golden lotus buff**: picking a golden lotus in Pandaria will give you a buff for 15 minutes that gives a chance for a loot box on a kill. When you get the buff, travel to the Lorewalkers (near your faction’s city, there’s a person who will fly you up to them if you don’t have flying) and queue for Heart of Fear LFR. Clear the entry transh, leave raid, queue again, etc, until buff runs out. This will give you lots of Pandaria mats to sell or craft with. See this for more details: https://wp.me/pON4N-eg
– **Cataclysm herbs, ore, volatiles, enchanting mats**. These are used in the vial of the sands mount and enchanting and are in constant lowish demand. You can use the Cataclysm potion of treasure finding to obtain extra drops while farming mobs, similar to the golden lotus buff, and the Bastion of Twilight’s entry is the best place to farm with it.
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*Crafting*:
– **Mage tower, twink, farming gear**. Look at which items can have a crafter’s mark applied to make them legion-level and craft ones which will benefit someone in the mage tower. Look for set bonuses and gem slots. Apply the same logic to level 20 players (xp locked twink bracket). These won’t sell super fast but they do sell and there tends not to be a ton of competition.
– **Mage tower, twink, heirloom, farming enchants/item enhancements**. Heirloom ones will sell the most, but these all sell. You’ll need to do research and look at sale rates to decide which ones to make.
– **Mage tower, leveling, farming buffs**. Things like drums, scrolls, certain potions and flasks, certain foods like bear tartare. You’ll have to figure out which ones sell and don’t have a lot of competition.
– **Crafting/farming transmog.** You need to have a ton to see high returns, but it doesn’t hurt to add it to your mix if you find or make it easily. I suggest using a second auction alt for this so you can just skip it for a few days if you’re not in the mood to post all the listings.
– **Old glyphs**. Check your unlearned tab. There are a ton of ways to learn how to make new glyphs and these sell for much higher than the ones everyone learns by default.
– **Other old crafting:** lots of older stuff does still sell. Pets, mounts and toys sell the best, but there are also slow sales for things like contracts, pet name change, bags (especially the larger profession ones). Check sale rates of items. Obtaining more rare or gated recipes will give you access to more profitable items. Check your unlearned tab.
– **Shuffling and transforming mats**. For example, buying a bunch of super cheap cloth, crafting something cheap like bracers, and then disenchanting to sell or use the enchant mats. Transforming might be something like creating enchanted leather or turning light leather into heavy leather. You can also buy cheap greens to disenchant. This will involve research into different material values to determine what’s currently profitable on your AH. See this post for more details about being a crafting middleman: https://wp.me/pON4N-ed
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*Quests, Exploration, Dungeons*:
– **Legion archaeology quest**. Gives a grey worth 5k, can do this on each character and with allied races you can start at level 10, pick Legion Chromie time, skip the intro, hearth to Dalaran and begin the quest in a few minutes. You won’t have flying, though, so the quest will be a slog on a newbie without a 2nd account to help. This quest only shows up in rotation, so it might not be up. Quest: https://www.wowhead.com/quest=41174/worth-its-weight
– **Rare recipe/item resale**. Some vendors sell recipes or items which appear only rarely. You can usually resell these on the AH for some profit.
– **Rare hunting**. Get an add-on like Silver Dragon and check out rares you see on your map. Killing these usually rewards you with something and sometimes those somethings are profitable to resell or useful (eg faster harvesting gloves in Pandaria).
– **BfA island expeditions**. Drops transmog, pets.
– **Old dungeons/raids**. This will net you mats, greens, blues, purples, soulbound items you can DE, maybe pets or mounts…. Basically just think about ways to maximize profit after doing old content, such as by turning the results into enchants or a crafted pet to sell. ***In general, items that are crafted sell for more but sell more slowly than the raw mats.***
– **Pet battle daily quests.** This takes a lot of setup to unlock, but there are pet battle quest chains for each continent. Once finished you unlock daily pet battle quests for that region. Quest completion gives you a bag of pet supplies which can include pets and tokens to buy pets.
– **Fishing**. There are a few ways to make money with fishing, such as fishing up volatile fire outside Firelands. Research which fishing items can be profitable.
– **Archaeology**. This one is rough, but the vial of the sands does sell for a lot. It’s just takes a LOT of work to get. Research the Lorewalkers and Klaxxi trick to make it easier. More casually, it’s a great profession to snag on an alt if you enjoy leveling casually or exploring a lot. You get extra xp as you level and you can sell keystones on the AH if you aren’t interested in leveling it up. You can also exchange fossil fragments at the Darkmoon Faire.
– **Garrison Auction House Pieces**: These can be farmed from specific places in WoD. They are a fairly slow seller but they sell for a few thousand, more if you have enough to assemble a module.
– **WoD Pickpocket Daily**: Look into the quest chain with Griftah. Rewards around 2k gold.
– **Legion Pickpocket Weekly**: rewards 5k gold.
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*Hubs, Events*:
– **Dalaran Underbelly.** There’s a variety of things to do here and you can buy recipes, pets, etc with the currency as well as elixir of tongues to resell.
– **Darkmoon Faire**. Tons of stuff to buy/earn and resell, most notably pets and transmog. Make sure to get inky black potion from the cannibal witch in the woods. Doing special events like Moonfang, the heavy metal show and the rabbit can get you more expensive things to sell.
– **Old Patch Hubs**. Pretty much every one of these is deserted but has pets, recipes, toys, etc. It’s quick to blast through the dailies and gradually accumulate currency to buy things to resell. Examples: Argent Tournament, Molten Front
– **Holidays**. Every holiday creates a new temporary market for whatever people need for the event, as well as a way to earn items to resell like mounts or pets.
– **Timewalking**. Use Timewalking tokens to buy pets/toys to resell, increase rep (for factions you need access to for buying/selling their items) or buy mats to craft with or resell.
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*Other*:
– **AH Flipping**. This one takes lots of research and can be risky, but also profitable.
– **Pet Arbitrage**. This involves selling pets across multiple servers. See this post for more details; https://wp.me/pON4N-ef
So I’ve turned into a bit of a raidlogger these past few months. I’ve been busy diving back into Aetolia lately, and the type of immersion and engagement you get in a roleplay-focused game with a much more intimate community…is heady. The new patch looming has drawn me back, and I feel like I should finish this post just for completeness! Enjoy a beautifully moody song that’s only tangentially related!
So, here’s the last third of Throne of Thunder’s fights from a disc priest perspective.
Man, what is it with Blizz and their love for tornadoes this expansion? I get that the tech to throw people around is new, but….ugh, I hate this as someone who runs a pretty low-end computer. The tornado effects in general are very unforgiving for those with latency, and this fight features a double whammy of invisible ground effects on low settings (I won’t get into a rant about graphics settings). Anyways!
If you have decent DPS, you can push a lot (or all) of the first phase with only a single group stacking in melee. This goes for heroic as well (although the damage is going to be a LOT higher). The basic mechanic here is somewhat similar to the Majordomo from Firelands, with increased amounts of damage being taken by the stacked group in periodic bursts, so open with a spirit-shell fairly quickly (I usually do a holy fire and a smite or two to get an archangel charge or three) to get the CD rolling on that – it’ll be back up off CD when the damage is getting nasty again. Directly bubble the individual members of the stacking group and if you are running power infusion, feel free to use it as needed during this phase. Feel free to go WILD with your mana – there is a lot of upcoming downtime and you can completely regen to full. I tend to pop a shadowfiend at the transition on Iron Qon himself then slip in a hymn of hope – if you hymn while shadowfiend is out, it raises your max mana pool, remember, and shadowfiend is still coded to regenerate based on a % of your mana, so you get like an extra 2 or 3k mana a tick.
I belieeeeve we can fly….it only toooook fifty wiiiipes…. (totally unrelated, I know, but it’s preeeetty)
Spirit shell should be back by the early part of phase 2 (be careful in heroic with timing, as the dogs vanish at 25% health! I kept forgetting this and was using CDs thinking I had until they got to 0 for a phase transition). Tossing a shell out on your team right before the wind storm is a great way to help mitigate that damage everyone is going to be eating, as heals do essentially nothing while inside the radius of the storm. Sidenote – a fun trick you can do if you have a warlock: drop a warlock portal at the stack point for windstorm and one outside of the storm’s area. Hop through the portal and lifegrip the tank to you for basically zero downtime on boss control (having the tank go through the portal makes him unable to taunt for 6 seconds, so you gripping him makes him instantly ready to tank the dogs).
Basically sit and do your nails and atone until the last phase. Very little going on here if people do mechanics right. On heroic, the damage is high, but not insanely so. Get a feel for who’s taking damage and shell as appropriate or just use FDCL procs to shell the tank.
Final phase – shell in the first or second fist smash so it’ll be off CD for the later smashes, which increase in pain the longer the final phase goes for. Gauge your DPS’s potential here to asses how long this phase will go for to help you with the timing.
This fight is insanely boring as a healer. It’s really a facile fight in general (unless you kill blue before red comes out. Don’t kill blue before red comes out, oh god). I pretty mindlessly atone for the majority of it, using spirit shell before tidal force. If you wanna heal snipe, use bubbles/shells on ranged before cosmic barrage. One thing to actually pay attention to – use bubbles on your tanks! Direct heals give a debuff which sometimes kills inattentive healers, but absorbs don’t give you that debuff!
Let the bodies hit the floor. So….so many bodies…. 😦
This fight is actually fairly low on healing demands if your team pulls off the mechanics right – that’s a big if, though, so be prepared for lots of heavy and random spot healing. Atonement + FDCL shines here, as smart healing and flash heal procs give you a nice coverage and instant casting as needed.
This isn’t really a big glaring spiritshell! fight, so just kinda weave it in where you want. If you want to game numbers, toss it out at the very start to absorb the first thunderstruck and stagger use from there, or use it before each transition to a new platform to absorb the raid damage. After the first intermission, shell can be good if you preblanket the raid before ball lightnings are formed. For phase 3, you can pretty much use it whenever as the raid takes fairly constant damage, but I like to save it as a tank CD option if things are getting hairy.
First, hey! You only need 50 lesser charms to get your 3 weekly Mogu Runes of Fate. Seems Blizzard realizes that the dailies are…not being done daily. I may actually get mine each week. My raid team will be happy (shh, don’t tell them, I’ve just been feigning horrid luck).
So, a post. Since I’ve been lazy.
1. Jin’rokh the Breaker: This fight is actually a fairly simple one. It took my team 2 pulls to down him, and that was the first week with Tier 14 gear. The trick is just managing where you drop the ball lightning (hint: the grates at the edge of the area are all outside of the puddles) and healing through lighting storm.
This fight is GREAT for a disc priest. First, when your tank gets slammed across the room, a pool forms underneath him. Standing in that increases your healing AND your DPS. Hello – atonement! Lightning storm is a great time to use barrier and it happens every 2ish minutes, which means that you can preblanket the group with spirit shells every time (and the spirit shells benefit from your increased healing from the pool!).
1.5 Bridge Trash: The banshees here put a debuff on everyone, reducing healing done, so once you get 5 stacks for archangel, when she is at 75%, spirit shell for a few prayer of healings to eat up the damage before it gets to your team (and is subsequently harder to handle since the healing gets eaten by the debuff).
2. Horridon: This fight is more about properly dispelling and add management and is fairly relaxed as a healer. Atonement works well as a low-mana spot heal. If your team is having issues getting all the dispells off, switch to the glyph of mass dispell to help there – remember MD and purify are on their own CDs so, glyph or not, you still have 2 dispells to work with. Just be wary of overextending yourself mana wise – MD completely eats it up. Spirit shell is best used here as a tank CD (I like to pop it when I have 2 from darkness comes light procs) and it can also be helpful during the venom phase, when the second priest comes out, as you should see an increase in AoE damage there. At the 4th gate, when people have the reflective damage curse, it’s also useful to mitigate the damage they are doing to themselves, since DPS are lazy and bad. >_> Switch to atonement once Wargod Jalak is dead, as the raid gets a DPS boost at that point.
3. Council of Elders:Disc can be helpful on this fight if your team is having trouble burning Suul before his phase. Our DPS, although low, can definitely contribute. Aside from that, both holy and disc work quite well for this fight. For disc, use barrier at the very first empowerment from Malak to eat the damage from his empowered frost dot; follow that with spirit shell and/or bubbles on the 3 people splitting that. Make sure to put bubbles on the people with the dot when he is not empowered, and spirit shell if desired. I tend to leave spirit shell for a tank heal, with FDCL procs, especially when the tank gets stunned and can’t mitigate.
4. Tortos: Great fight for disc, as every time you kick a turtle shell at Tortos, you get a 30% temporary DPS increase! Keep bubbles up on the tanks and (at least) on yourself before quake stomp. The few seconds before that can be good for spirit shelling the team up, but the hectic nature of that fight makes that hard in actuality, especially once more than one wave of turtles has gone out. FDCL procs + bat tank sprit shells are a good alternate use which is much easier to do while remaining mobile.
Ignore the skeletons…
5. Megaera: I think this fight is DESIGNED for disc. Spirit shell can (and should) be used every rampage. What I do is power infusion for the 1st ramage, barrier for the 2nd, power infusion again on 3rd, and the 4th (THE ONLY RAMPAGE I CAN’T COVER OMG HOW AWESOME IS THAT COVERAGE!) is handled by our Shaman. Then barrier again! This fight works so so so nice with our CDs.
6. Ji’Kun: I pretty much exclusively heal up top during this phase, but atonement is great for helping kill the hatchlings/healing quickly. Spirit shell is great for quills. The fight itself is pretty basic, as a healer. I use barrier as needed (usually when we get a downdraft into pools because WHY DIDN’T YOU INTERCEPT THEM DPS ARRGGHHH).
7. Durumu the FORGET IT: I have a crappy computer, so I hate this guy SO. FREAKING. MUCH. Can barely see the maze. Anyways, disc is very useful for this fight – pop spirit shell during the beam phase to eat up damage your team will take from red. If I have any FDCL procs, I’ll convert those into shell as well before disintegration beam just to give me a bit more wiggle room with running the maze.
8. Primordius: We really only pulled this guy once so far, and he died, so. But, from a theory standpoint, I like holy better for this fight. I think disc can potentially be potent if you snag all the empowerments, but until that point, you’re going to be switching targets a ton while also being mobile (Primordius himself takes reduced damage unless you get buffs). Bubbles and spirit shell are good for caustic gas to mitigate damage, as well as for the single dot that gets slapped periodically on people.
9. Dark Animus: This fight is fairly easy from a healing standpoint, with the only heavy lifting coming in at the end. Use bubbles on the matter swap people and dispel them as soon as the bubble is there (it’ll be about 7-8 seconds on the debuff) – this will ensure that the person with the debuff is taking the majority of the damage, which your bubble then mitigates! Use spirit shell before interrupting jolt (make sure to stop casting before it hits), both to mitigate AoE damage and in case your fellow healers (but never you!) get interrupted and can’t heal for a bit.
And! This is as far as my team has gotten. Hope this is helpful!
Awesome, awesome dancing in this video. Picking it out of C2C’s selection (my favorite new group) because I am happy! Why am I happy? My guild did an impromptu run of Throne of Tunder – we reached critical mass of all our raiders online and decided to dive right in. After only a few pulls we downed Jin’kroh and this happened:
Anyways! 5.2 is here and with it comes some pretty fun new things. WoWInsider already does a great job of covering the fundamentals of this new, huge bunch of content. Byeond the core new additions, here are some fun little “extras” I’ve found so far.
Fish upon fish upon fish!
Ben of the Booming Voice makes a surprisingly quiet addition to this patch as a new NPC fishing from the river east of Halfhill.
There’s a one-time intro quest to meet him where you learn about the ability to fish without poles (although this was introduced in Cata, not everyone knew about it!), and you can get some easy golden carp. After that, however, is where it gets awesome.
Ben gives you a daily “secret” about where the fishing is hot. And by hot, I mean on fire.
Dozens of pools spawn in the daily fishing spot (make sure to use your Ancient Pandaren Fishing Charm!) and not only can you fish up the the special Nat Pagle rep fish, sealed crates, a minipet fish and the infamous turtle, fishing up enough pools eventually makes a super big pool spawn, called “Large Swarm of [insert daily fish here]”.
This pool can then be fished up, ala The Lurker Below, to summon a big ol’ monster named Krakkanon. This elite doesn’t do much damage, but he has a huge health pool, so you might want to bring some pals. From what I’ve observed so far, he can drop a stack of 20 fish, Nat Pagle rep fish, and Nat Pagle journals (increases your fishing 50 points, BoA, worth 1k gold!). He might drop even more fun things!
I advise systematically fishing each pool, as every pool you clear has a chance to make this pool spawn. It’s not a quick process (at least 30 minutes or more for one person; 50-100 pools), but I think this will become quicker over time as more people become aware of this new little bit of fun!
Faster Farming!
The master plough, introduced in 5.2, is now more effective than ever, finally stunning and (nearly) killing pesky vermin found in untilled soil. This is a great speed up to clearing your farm’s land (it’ll till up to 4 plots at a time).
There are also new seed bags, which let you plant up to 4 of each seed type at a time. Each bag holds 10 charges, so don’t be deterred by the price. Once you buy one, just point and click to plant all the plots in a targettable circle (plots must be tilled first!).
Pets, Pets, Everywhere!
If you are a fan of battle pets, 5.2 is a goldmine. Basically ever new part of the game drops battle pets. If you haven’t checked out the new Jurassic Park Island, head on over there. Bring a friend or 5 (we had a group of 10 at one point) and kill dinosaurs to collect bones which you can turn in for a mount or a battle pet. OR, go alone and just pinpoint the Zandalari trolls. These guys have a CRAZY high drop rate for minipets. They have 4 different ones they can drop, and we were seeing one pet drop for about every 3-4 trolls we killed.
Who’s a cute widdle dinosaur? You are, aren’t you?!
The rares on Isle of Thunder also hand out shinies. Our very first kill on Haywire Sunreaver Construct (down on the southern beach), Muttonhocks and I each got a Sunreaver Micro Sentry. Mutton’s the pet battling fiend in this relationship, so I asked him if the little dude was any good. His reply? An emphatic, holy shit of a yes. Apparently rare mechanicals are hard to find, and this guy can do a variety of attack types, making him great for hunting all sorts of pets in the wild. Plus, he’s so big he can’t even display properly in your window, which makes me giggle far more than it should:
DGAF PROTOCOL ENGAGED. ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL.
The Raid That Wipes Together…
Finally, if you are on a raid team, you are going to want to have your team camping out Ra’Sha. He drops an item that lets you kill yourself. Ra’Sha’s Sacrificial Dagger is insanely useful for a progressive raid team – not only does the death incur no durability costs, if your whole raid has it, you can quickly die to fully wipe and end an attempt, instead of wasting time waiting for people to stand in pools or whatnot.
He hangs out in a cave tucked away in a little beach cove past the troll area. If you see a Hakkar look alive (bone wind serpent) you are in the right spot. Hang a right past that ominous little clearing and there is a cave guarded by two elites. Inside is Ra’Sha.
This way to self-initiated doom!
My team’s been camping this guy on rotation. We have about half of our raid team equipped with the daggers so far. He only drops one, you see, regardless of however many people attack him, and that drop only goes to whoever tags him, so it can be a bit of a slog to get them. They are completely worth it, however, for any raid team trying to be efficient!
Darkmoon Arising
The Darkmoon Faire also got some minor upgrades! The daily quests now reward a sack instead of a single token. The sack can contain between 1-5 tickets, as well as a chance at a fluffy Darkmoon toy, like the sandbox rides. Minor upgrade, but definitely a change that makes doing the dailies a lot more appealing.
The elite pet you can battle there also now rewards a sack of fun things instead of the single ticket he used to give. This sack rewards the same thing as the daily quests AS WELL AS pet battle goodies. Not a bad change, at all!
I’m not sure when this change went in, but fishing at Darkmoon Island also now fishes up Pandaland fish, instead of the crappy level 1 stuff.
Plus, finally, you can get this:
AM I NOT FABULOUS?!
(Caveat: it actually gives 10% extra rep/xp when used and using it consumes it. It doesn’t stack with the carousel buff, and you can only use it during the Darkmoon Faire Season. Still, for only 10 tickets, it’s kinda worth it just for awesome screen shots…)
Those are some of the less advertised goodies I’ve noticed with 5.2. Hope you are enjoying the new patch!
So I’ve been sucked back into MUDs and have only been playing WoW a bit every now and then between raids – my guild is now up to 3/6H MSV, 6/6 HoF and 4/4 ToES! Huzzah! I intended to post this ages ago, but it might still be helpful for other teams given how 5.0 raid content will still remain semi-viable for gearing in 5.2.
Spirit shell is, in my opinion, the best trick up discipline priest’s sleeves right now. I loved the spell since the moment we got it, even with all of the initial wonkiness and awkward feeling it first had for use. It rewards intelligent foresight, which I think is a core aspect of discipline priest play – we don’t just heal reactively, but we also use our knowledge of the fight and our raiders to blanket the raid before the damage hits.
So, here’s my quick breakdown of the best spots to pop spirit shell in each fight this tier:
Mogu’shan Vaults
Stone Guards – Excellent to use before an overload if your tanks identify that they are going to be unable to execute a juggle with the dogs. This can and does prevent a wipe. I ran holy for this fight due to the better mobility until I got better gear (plus disc was bad off back then), but spirit shell can have moderate use here. For heroic, the mines do enough damage that using it whenever you have a free CD can mitigate raid damage – however I saved mine for when I had From Darkness Comes Light procs and used it on tanks due to the immense amount of damage they take.
Feng – Perfect for every phase of the fight. If your tank missed grabbing an interrupt, use it for epicenters where nullification barrier is off CD. Use it at the start of draw flame that nullification barrier isn’t eating (draw flame damage ramps up, so starting the shell at the start of draw flames is good timing). For phase 3, use it for the arcane velocities that are not mitigated by nullification barrier.
For heroic, you can use it for a general damage blanket during throw shield (though the damage is a bit spotty, so atonement covered that quite nicely).
Gara’jal – Spirit shell is stupid awesome in this fight. Voodoo doll damage almost always starts at the tank, so use bubble and spirit shell to absorb that damage off the bat with spirit shell and flash heal (even better with From Darkness Comes Light procs, but remember to save 2 for when you go in totems). The other voodoo dolls will take minimal damage.
Spirit Kings – Great right off the bat to absorb Qiang’s massive attacks. Spot heal until Meng is active and use spirit shell before maddening shout.
Elegon – Use early on to mitigate damage from Total Annihilation. A good timer for this is to start blanketing right after the celestial protector spawns. Atonement is amazing in this fight because of the dps and hps boost, so smite and offensive penance are your prime heals for most of this fight (especially since THOSE heals can reach the other side of the platform during draw power, whereas your direct heals can’t reach). I usually toss in another shell (or do a hymn of hope) while pillars are being taken down, just to absorb any splash damage from adds. Finally, in the last phase, spirit shell is obviously useful against the constant damage – try to get it out during that moment your team is grouped up at the console, so everyone goes in blanketed in absorbs.
Will of the Emperor – Use right before titan gas, obviously. However, there is time for 2 shells between titan gas phases, so I pop shell when I get FDCL procs to give the tanks extra absorbs.
Spirit (binder) shell(s)
Heart of Fear
Vizier – AMAZING before force and verve. For timing, I do instant holy and 4 smites to get full Archangel and then shell and prayer of healing. Timing is perfect to eat most of the force and verve – follow with a cascade or halo during the active F&V.
Bladelord – If you can get the timing down, this is great to use before unseen strikes. It makes a huge difference and can prevent wipes if people are slow to stack. Also, start shelling around 25-23% of the bosses’ health to give your team a nice blanket that absorbs nearly all of the damage from storm unleashed (during which you can’t heal!)
Garalon – Start shelling when your pherome carrier is around 15 stacks, assuming you switch in the early 20s. Or just shell whenever it’s off CD, since the constant raid damage is just that nuts. The trickiest part of this fight is being able to heal people in range, since there is a lot of movement from the melee DPS. Bonus points – stand in the blue ring and smite/penance the legs. 200k heals for each penance tick? Yes, please!
Windlord – Shell before rain of blades, especially in the later parts of the fight. The trick to this is that the DBM timer shows you the ability’s CD, not actually when the ability is about to happen (the actual ability is several seconds after that) so shell once that CD is at 0, instead of anticipating having a shell up at 0 on the timer.
Amber Shaper – Use bubble and shell, especially with FDCL procs, on people afflicted with parasitic growth (and tell your other healers to stop freaking healing the people). In the later stages of the fight, this can and does save lives! Also be very wary of atonement if parasitic growth is up during phase 3, due to the smart-heal nature – a quick shell, however, can ensure that the person with growth remains with higher health than others, allowing you to smite away!
Empress – Shell is excellent to blanket the raid before a dissonance field pops. You can also use shell to absorb damage from cry of terror when targets are inside the dissonance field. For phase 3, damage is fairly constant, so you can just use it on CD.
Terrace of Endless Spring
Protectors of the Endless – The best use of this (especially if you are going for elite, which you should! It’s especially doable with a disc priest!) is to eat the increasing raid damage from corruption. Use it more heavily as the fight goes on and the damage builds up.
Tsulong – Simply use on CD during night phase to mitigate constant raid damage. Bonus points – during day, save your inner focus and 1-2 FDCL procs for sun breath. Start casting greater heal shortly after he begins casting sun breath (so your greater heal casts RIGHT when he starts breathing). You can get several million healing each breath this way.
Lei Shi – I use my FDCL procs with spirit shell to give tanks extra absorbs, especially during the spawn elementals phase. Ideally I’d use this for get away, but it’s really impossible to predict when that’s coming. 😦
The Sha of Fear – UGGGHHHH. Hate this fight. I use spirit shell when I’m on the main platform to give extra absorbs in case people get hit by the adds’ bolts.
I’ll write up a version of this for the next tier, once we start raiding. Happy priesting!
So my guild downed the Sha of Fear on Sunday. Yay! Incidentally, you can play the above song 3 times and hit the chorus of a 4th repeat before that stupid boss dies. I know. I counted.
For the final boss in a raiding tier, it’s a completely underwhelming and irritating fight. I mean, feel free to watch it and see:
Ha. Yeah. You totally didn’t watch that whole thing – I wouldn’t have either, and it’s a video of ME.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy that we downed him (though irked at myself for doing Karasang and Townlong on my paladin instead of my priest, so now I have to go back and do quests again to kill the Shas of Despair and Junkfood or whatever to get my raid title). I am not, however, looking forward to doing him next week for farm.
Here is my issue with this fight:
– First, if you’ve done it on LFR, you basically have done it on normal. The mechanics are exactly the same; the numbers are just kicked up a notch. So, there isn’t really an extra element, mechanically, to deal with – to me, that’s a let down.
– Second, the few mechanics that the fight has are really easy. Don’t stand in shit on the ground. Stand behind pillars when the panda is at 20%. Kill adds when you have the debuff from killing panda. Stand in cone when debuff is gone. That is it. It is REALLY easy.
– Third, however, is if anyone messes up on those mechanics, you’re wiping. Because of how your group gets split up, you don’t have leeway for anyone to die unless you have INCREDIBLE dps, or you won’t kill the panda quickly enough to get back in time for cackle, and then the boss just starts 1-shotting everyone because there’s nobody in range for him to tank. You can hope for a brez, but half the time your brezzer(s) will be in the other group or in the wrong pagoda.
– Fourth, your team is split up for basically 90% of the fight. This means that if people ARE messing up those mechanics, you won’t even see it half the time. I literally NEVER saw when people were dying – I’d just see them suddenly dead and hear the raid lead sigh and say, “Wipe it.” This kind of design is bad bad bad for team morale, as it’s a lot easier to get irritated and frustrated with people if you aren’t even seeing what they are tripping up on. There’s just also an emotional change, I think, that you feel in a fight when you aren’t really WITH half of your team. I actually felt a bit lonely without the other half of my healing team.
– Fifth, the fight is LONG. Nearly 15 minutes. That’s insane. You dedicate a lot of time to each pull, and that wears on people. We bloodlusted twice. I started fear warding myself as a joke to pass the time. As a side note, priests – shadowfiend shares a perfect cooldown with cackle, so pop it on the panda each time to help your dps team out.
– Sixth, and my biggest issue with the Sha of Fear, is that it is monotonous. You go through one mechanic in the first 3 minutes, and then you repeat that 5 times. There is NOTHING that changes the entire fight. Deathwing used a similar setup but HE GOT HARDER EACH PLATFORM. There is no rampup with the Sha, nor are there any phase transitions or extra elements to juggle as you push him lower. It’s basically 10 superfluous minutes of not fucking up.
Yay! Dead. FINALLY. We didn’t fuck up 🙂
Not fucking up a static setup is far, far, far less exciting and fun than actively doing things to culminate in a win. Another fight with only one phase, Stone Guards – the very first fight in this tier – was more exciting than the ultimate boss, because Stone Guards gives us a continually increasing number of tasks to handle: the mines keep going off, littering the floor with more and more pitfalls. Chains and puddles mean that players have to dance around these obstacles, while maintaining heavy situational awareness. At some point, the lead will probably make a call to clear chains or clean up mines, and there will be a quick scramble to create breathing room while the tank juggles an overload.
In short, shit gets harder the longer the fight goes on. You feel a mounting sense of pressure and the fight gets more hectic. Small mistakes add up and you push more, hoping you can just hit hard enough, just heal fast enough, just keep going and hang on to down the boss before the slip-ups overwhelm you. There is tense anticipation, true excitement and shouts of palpable relief when you finally manage to succeed. To me, that’s a great fight.
Sha of Fear is not that. You could take away 10 minutes of it, and the fight would be unchanged. There isn’t even any long-term concern over resource management, because of the orbs and their mana return. The fight at 3 minutes in is exactly the same as the fight 10 minutes later.
I have to wonder what exactly Blizzard was aiming for with this fight. It seems to be a complete dud, but perhaps I am missing something essential and vital that I just didn’t experience during our pulls (I only heal right now, so my view is from that side of things). I hear it’s much harder and more exciting on heroic, but I don’t think “It’s way cool on heroic” is a valid excuse for a poor version on normal.
I think a simple change or two could have made this fight a lot more epic. Have the difficulty increase as the fight goes on, even if that just means tweaking damage so it ramps up over the fight’s duration. Maybe increase the number of adds that spawn; by the end, players would have to leave a good handful of them up, and focus on hectic avoidance of their ground effects. Have the cackles come sooner and sooner. Have a second type of cackle (an ominous chortle?) where something else happens in the pavilion (even if it’s just a RP change ala brain room with Yogg-Saron). Have an ominous giggle where you just swoop around on a baby sha taking damage for a while. Ok, so maybe I really just wanted to fly around on the baby shas more….They really did do something right with the animation for that part. The movement feels awesome (why can’t the rocketway in Azshara feel that fast and swoopy?).
In any case, anyone else out there downed this guy? What did you think about it? Any thoughts to how he could have been spiced up?
[edit from 2024: this post will get some serious traffic when classic MoP launches, you’re welcome to the future, check out my mop disc stuff]
So my raiding team has had the first fight in Terrace of Endless Spring (TOES, as we call it) on farm for 3 weeks now. The council fight, Protectors of the Endless, features a unique mechanic called “elite” mode. Basically, if you kill the bosses in a harder order, you get better loot. How much better?
ARE MY BOOTS NOT AWESOME
Normal is 496. Elite starting level is 503. Heroic is 509. Two upgrades on an elite item and it is BETTER THAN HEROIC QUALITY. This is an amazing opportunity for guilds who are behind the gear curve, like our team was. We started the tier quite slowly and with a lot of hiccups. We weren’t showing enough discretion in who we brought, and tried to just let everyone have a try, with the more experienced and geared raiders doing a separate Heart of Fear run. Once we realized that we had more progression in Heart of Fear than in Mogu’shan Vaults, we knew we had to switch things around. We now have training raids for the newer members, and a dedicated progression group…which means we are flying through content, downing at least one new boss every progression night.
But, like I said, we had a slow start, so we’re playing catch-up with gear. And one trick we’ve used is leapfrogging ahead into TOES.
Yes, our server has a lot of raid teams.
We downed Garalon last night, but WoWProgress is being stupid and won’t update. Anyways…
As you can see, we downed protectors before we even killed the second boss in Heart of Fear. It’s actually a very simple trick and something I suggest considering if your team is struggling on DPS checks or with gear. Terrace basically won’t let you in if you haven’t cleared HoF yet. The stupidly simple solution is just….clear Heart of Fear.
The thing is, only one member needs to do that. It’s just like switching to heroic modes. As long as the person who has gotten the requisite kill is the first one to enter the raid, the rest of the team will also be able to enter.
For us, we had the fortunate situation of one member in our group being an alt from a hardcore raiding team. They are already on heroic modes and had someone who had to miss a day, so they were happy to bring our rogue (and his ranked DPS – yes, he ranked 113 in the world on our Garalon kill!) along for a HoF farm. Same with our (nearly as DPS-tastic) warrior. So both of them now have a clear of HoF under their belts and we can all progress in Terrace simultaneously with progression through HoF.
Now, I will advise one caveat about this idea – gauge your guild. Some teams might feel offended by a member jumping ship for a week to get a “carry” (although in our DPS’ case, they definitely held their own) to a clear. It might make members feel as if the raid leader has lost confidence in their own ability. Take careful stock of your team and your members before you consider something like this, and decide if it is going to hurt team morale. It is a sort of a gimmicky short-cut, afterall. For many teams, the value of defeating the boss together is more important than advancing in progression – hell, I’d say the same likely will apply to our team for next tier. We just are trying to recover from that initial hold-up at the start of the expansion.
Plus, our raid lead definitely framed it as something to be proud of – we’re basically the only team on our server outside of the top 15 getting kills in TOES. That’s kinda cool, especially for a group that hasn’t started heroic modes yet.
And DO try elite mode. Our first pull, I freaked out, panicking into mumble, “Hey, I think this order isn’t the one the guides suggest…!”
Our raid lead just mumbled “You must be confused321pull!”
After a dozen or so pulls, we downed them (as seen in the video above) – and my eyes immediately widen when I see the loot.
“We did it on ELITE?!” I was stunned. I felt tricked, but also really awesome about the deceit. I felt proud of us – we had not only downed the encounter, but done it far tougher than intended, all unknowingly!
a little bit of everything all of the time 