Shadow Priest

               I remember when I started playing WoW my second character was a priest, that was back then when TBC was at its peak. I didn't know anything about the class but I did notice the shadow talents had a lot of damage bonus on them so I figured that was the dps spec. And so I did, I played spriest for a long time after.

Shadow priest is a fun spec, not as fun as affliction warlock, but still fun. It's one of those dps specs that shines on high mobility bosses since your dots will keep ticking as you move.

The spec I use is the following:

You have 5 points left which you can place anywhere you like.

Shadow Afinity: If threat is your concern, you can put one point here. Two points is a bit too much.

Improved Mind Blast: You should Mind Blast once per Vampiric Touch cast. On bosses where mobility is crucial, you might have to Mind Blast more often. You don't have to put any here, but you can spare 1 or 2 points if you think you will move too much in a specific fight.

Focused Mind: With Shadowfiend as a small dps boost, you shouldn't worry a lot about your mana. If this still concerns you, you can spare a point or two here.

Improved Power Word Shield: If you want to be helpful, you can put a point here. It comes handy for some boss mechanics like Sindra's Frost Beacon or Putricide's Oozes.

Stat prios

• Hit until capped (11% or 10% with Draenei in group).
• Spell power.
• Haste until Mind Blast and Vampiric Touch are 1 second cast  (1269 haste with 5% totem and 3% aura)
• Critical Strike.
• Spirit.

 How good is Spirit?

Spirit is fine, but too much of it will harm your dps. It's actually very close to Critical Strike in damage per point. With talents and Blessing of Kings you're making 60% of your spirit into spell power. However no spirit will harm your dps in long fights where you might oom, forcing you to use dispersion (if you didn't need to use before to avoid damage) thus lowering your dps. Imo, if an item with spirit is an upgrade considerable enough (at least 13 levels) over another one without spirit, consider switching them. Check the stat prios every time you want to get an item higher level than your current one, if it has Spirit and Critical it might not be worth, but Spirit Haste combinations are fine enough until you get a Haste Critical one.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Mind Flay: A must.
• Glyph of Shadow: A must.
• Glyph of Dispersion: Situational. Best when boss has many 'Avoid this or die' situations.
• Glyph of Shadow Word Pain: Situational. If boss is chill and you don't need to Disperse.

Minors:

• Glyph of Shadow Protection.
• Glyph of Anything.

 How to start fights:

The first thing you need to know is: Never open with dots. Using dots right from start is the worst thing you can do with Spriest.

Mind Flay full duration>Vampiric Touch>Devouring Plague>If you have 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving only then you should use Shadow Word: Pain.

The reason behind this is Shadow Weaving, your SW:P preserves the % damage modifiers when you cast it, so if you open with it it won't get the 2% bonus per stack no matter how many times you refresh it with your Pain and Suffering talent. Once you have 5 stacks and SW:P and other dots are on boss your priorities are as follow:

1. Pop and send your Shadowfiend.
2. Shadow Word: Pain on target.
3. Vampiric Touch.
4. Devouring Plague.
5. One Mind Blast per Vampiric Touch (You can skip this check if you're doing a 10 mode with a Retribution paladin in your raid).
6. Mind Flay spam.
7. SW: Death only when you're moving. It's like another dot tick.

Tips

• Use your Power Word: Shield to shield yourself if your Dispersion is in cooldown, or use it on someone who's about to take massive damage.
• Remember your Fade removes all your threat temporarily, and removes slow effects.
• When dealing with low health targets, you might just put Vampiric Touch on it, followed by Mind Flay.
• Be helpful: Use Hymn of Hope or Divine Hymn if your raid so requires them.

Addons

Class Timer, the best addon to handle dots and timers.


That's pretty much everything you need to know about Shadow priest. Have fun.

Balance Druid

      The Balance druid, also known as Boomkin or Boomie, is a medium damage caster and one of the best team players in any given raid setup. Your job as a Boomkin is not to deal massive damage but be a team player.

Talent Spec

You will have 5 points left. You can put those talents wherever you feel like they will be more helpful to you:

Genesis: It blows, don't even think about it.

Nature's Reach: I put one point, but it's perfectly fine to put another one, or none if your gear is bad since you will not pull aggro and 30yds range is plenty enough for dungeons and other easy raids.

Improved Insect Swarm: This one is bad, it's terrible actually. Once you are way past the crit cap the 3% bonus crit to Starfire is useless, and the 3% damage bonus to Wrath is always useful except if your Insect Swarm wears off, and you will not refresh it while you're in Solar Eclipse since it'd be a loss of dps, and since your Wrath is only 40% of your total damage, in the end this talent only gives you like 0.2% damage per point.

Dreamstate: One point here makes sure that you never oom if you Innervate yourself. Two points allow you to Innervate someone else without going oom yourself if the fight is not long. Three points are a little too much, but they will make sure that you never oom regardless of fight duration.

Owlkin Frenzy: Most people drop one point here. It's moronic since it only procs off physical damage taken and direct spells, but on some situations it might net you a ton of damage. If you're into that, drop 3 points there instead of one. As for myself, I skip it entirely.

Typhoon: It's good for certain situations where creatures are summoned and you're required to keep them away. It's safe to pick it as a whatever point.

Gale Winds: Don't.

Nature's Focus: This is useful for dungeons and perhaps several specific encounters to prevent loss of  dps.

Stat prios

Hit rating until capped (10%)>Spell power>Whatever


Why Whatever?

         The biggest flaw Boomkin has are the low caps in every relevant dps stat other than Spell Power. Haste cap is 401 to make your Wrath 1s cast when Nature's Grace procs. Crit cap is 37% with all raid buffs to make your Starfire crit 100% of the time. Hit rating cap is 10% (9% if you have a Draenei in your group). Once crit and haste caps have been reached, since your Wrath and Starfire each make 40% of your total damage (80% both), you basically only benefit 40% from any extra Haste and Crit stat. You can add Starfall to the list, which makes up for about 8% of your total damage. Therefore, your stat benefits are Crit (48%), Haste (40%) and Spirit (33%). It might seem obvious that you should be getting that crit up, but in practice considering all the moving you'll be doing even Spirit can surpass Crit on particular encounters. Haste can also do more benefit than Crit if you are forced to move a lot. In summary, don't give it much thought.

Meta: Chaotic.
Red gem: Runed.
Yellow gem: Runed.
Purple gem: Two Purified to activate meta, the rest go Runed.

Socket bonus +9 generally demands 3 matching gems; if at least two of those gems require red gem, you can match the third non-red socket with one Purified/Reckless/Potent/Veiled gem depending on what you need most.

Glyphs

Glyph of Starfall: Starfall is your best spell, not only because of the damage, but because it also gives you plenty of procs from Nature's Grace talent.

Glyph of Insect Swarm: Insect Swarm does slightly more damage than Moonfire.

Glyph of Starfire: The less you have to cast Moonfire, the better.

Situational:
Glyph of Wrath: For dungeons, mostly.
Glyph of Moonfire: Don't.
Glyph of Focus: Also for dungeons where your dots don't last the entire duration and the rooms are small enough to not worry for the loss of range.

 Minor

Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth: Save yourself the shame of wiping the raid because you didn't revive the healer or the tank.

How to play

1. On pull, be a nice guy and put Faerie Fire if there's no Shadow Priest.
2. Afterwards, place your Force of Nature spell right behind the boss, because Treants will do more damage if their basic hits don't get parried.
3. Use Starfall if possible.
4. Apply dots, starting with Moonfire and then Insect Swarm.
5. Wrath once, then Starfire. Here's where it gets tricky; if no Eclipse, repeat this process until you get a proc, then spam the spell that benefits from that Eclipse. The reason to do it this way is to save time and make the most out of your Eclipse.
6. Refresh dots only when no Eclipse is active or while you're moving.

Addons

The usual addon I recommend when playing a dotter: Class Timer.

Tips

-Don't be shy of using Barkskin often, specially if you're predicting tons of damage taken in the next few seconds.
-If necessary, heal yourself with Rejuv>Nourish in this order.
-Go Cat+Sprint to save yourself.
-Innervate a healer over Innervating yourself, don't be selfish.
-Your Wrath is a projectile, while your Starfire is instant hit, take that into consideration whenever you wish to hit a target that is either too far or too close to you.
-Avoid putting dots on low health foes.

That's pretty much everything regarding Boomkin. Have fun.

 Raid Grid and Addons

There are three components that when combined make you a good player:

• Encounter knowledge.
• Class expertise.
• Raid awareness.

When you know the bosses and raids you classify that as Encounter knowledge, this is a crucial aspect and you won't have a good time (and others won't have it either) if you miss this; lacking this can cause a wipe or your death (and your subsequent removal from the raid group).

Knowing how your class works, what skills do the most damage/healing and when to use them is considered Class expertise. This is basically how much you can make out of your gear and it's the main reason why "gear score doesn't matter". If you know your class from hundreds of battles you will be a step ahead of those that ask what gems they should be using and think that's enough to know how to dps/heal with a class.

Lastly but not less important is the Raid awareness. This is what will make you a true player, being aware of what's going on around you and adjusting your actions accordingly. Whereas knowing bosses and your class will greatly put you ahead of others, noticing the small things happening during the boss fight could be the difference between scoring a kill or wiping.

How to be aware

Unfortunately the blizzard UI doesn't help much and makes raid vision kind of awkward, you will need to use a few addons to be aware of what's goin on. I recommend using each one of these as combined they will provide you with the best possible experience while raiding, regardless of your role. I will give a brief explanation followed by more in depth information afterwards.

Important: Go to Options>Interface>Names and uncheck everything, this will remove all names. Then go to Status Text and uncheck everything. Do the same with the Buffs and Debuffs section. I will explain later on.

• Xperl: This addon comes with many options and its primary function is to make your party/raid layouts more friendly and clear. If you heard about Xperl before you were probably told it has a lot of options that make it hard to use; this is not true, if you take 3 min to play around with the options (by checking and unchecking stuff) you will notice it is very user-friendly and effective, definitely worth to use.
• Bartender: This is an action bar UI that will allow you to move your bars around. If you play a class like Hunter or Mage you most likely realized you run out of buttons in the vicinity, thus making it harder to notice when something is ready to use; Bartender fixes this and also makes the management of your hotkeys an easy task. Ever since I started using Bartender my awareness improved considerably.
• Class Timer: This is best used by classes that rely on timers, be it Combat rogue, Fire mage, Warlock. Although it may not be that important for raid awareness, the less effort you invest in tracking your timers the more you can focus on other things.

 Here is a simple screenshot of my UI using Xperl and Bartender together, from a shaman point of view:

My screen resolution is high and I had to cut the screenshot a little, either way you can see the party members and each of their targets, the tank is selecting one of the enemy NPC while the druid is currently selecting the tank. You can also see the hunter has resurrection sickness. A little below my character model you can see my buffs (Devotion Aura, Stamina, Spirit, etc); right under the buffs my name and my health/mana bars, with their respective percentages. Percentages are important to see, to know when to use certain skills that give you an exact % of mana or health, like for example Thunderstorm or Evocation.

Around my health bars you can see my icons, those are all the skills I'm concerned about when I'm in combat, other skills like Weapon enchant, Far sight, Ancestral Spirit, etc. are shown in a separate bar that I configured to be invisible while I'm in combat, giving me a little more vision.

You might wonder why I chose this particular setup and the reason is simple. As some of you might know men have a focused eyesight, we focus on something and everything around it looks a little blurry (this makes men successful hunters); on the contrary women have a greater vision spectrum thus they can see things as a whole more clearly with less blur (this helps them multitask); this is gender related and you can't do anything about it. By having the important "data" near the center of the screen you will be more aware of buffs/debuffs/health/mana. Even if you are not a guy I suggest you use this setup.

If you want to see my whole screen and get a better view of the full UI copy/paste this link: http://i63.tinypic.com/s3lohf.jpg


Configuring Xperl:

Xperl has lots of options, here's a quick recap on how to set it for a new user. Click on the pearl icon located somewhere along the border of your minimap:

• On the upper All tab uncheck Pet, Party pets, Raid pets, Raid helper, Raid monitor, Raid Admin. Click the Reload UI icon below to apply changes.
• On the upper Raid tab, uncheck Raid buffs and Check Raid debuffs. Uncheck castable/curable so you can see all debuffs in your raid frame regardless of being dispel-able or not.
• On the upper Party tab, Uncheck Show Party in Raid and Party buffs. Check Party Debuffs and Wrap Buffs if not checked. Uncheck Big buffs and adjust the debuff size you're comfortable with. Check Cast bar.
• On the upper Focus tab, Check Enable buffs and uncheck Enable debuffs. If you put a boss on focus this will show when it gains a certain buff like Lich King's Soul Reaper. If you prefer to put a teammate on focus you can switch, Check Enable debuffs and uncheck Enable buffs. Check Cast bar too.
• On the upper Target tab, Check Cast bar.
• On the upper Player tab, Uncheck Player portrait and the other options that are useless at level 80 like Player level, Player class, etc. Most options here are self explanatory and you can play around them and find the setup you like the most. Check Cast bar and uncheck Original Cast bar, check Cast Time and Inside options; Pre-cast indicator may be important if you have high latency, if you don't you can uncheck it.
• You can only move your frame and the party/raid frames while the Xperl options menu is open so drag the menu out of your way so you can move around your frames comfortably.

That should be all. I know this seems like a pain but it's really not, you will only have to do it once as it saves for all your characters.

Remember I previously told you to remove a few options from the WoW interface? That's because when you click on anyone in your raid frame, regardless of the group, you will easily tell where that player is since its nameplate will stand out among models and graphics, this is very important and will allow you to locate others just a click away; this is one of the reasons I don't use mouse-over macros, to get used to clicking on others.

As you can see by the image, names are disabled and only the player I have selected has its name visible. Since I'm clicking from my raid frame I know its name and health, and thanks to the green select circle I can also tell its position as it stands out among others. Try this out and you'll realize raising your raid awareness is a pretty fun skill to develop.



If you pile up your frames like this you will have a very good view of everyone's doing. You can see those in combat, also a dead druid, some of them have Exhaustion debuff and one guy has an orange color around his bar, which means he's being affected by a disease (in this case blood plague), other dispel-able debuffs are also shown and you can quickly do a dispel just by clicking on them from your raid frame. Classes are also shown by color. Additional statuses shown are Afk (gray health bar) and Offline (Faded out bar).

In fact, once your encounter knowledge reaches a certain point you won't need to look at anything, aside from your raid frames. As for Bartender, the action bars positioning is on your own taste, but I recommend you to pile them up in a similar fashion as mine so you can have everything within your sight.

Remember raid awareness is the last skill you will develop, focus on knowing encounters and your class first, and when you feel comfortable enough you can start working on that awareness. Players that do Arena Pvp very often will have an innate higher raid awareness, since you need to pay close attention to your partner and your foes all at the same time if you ever want to climb up the ladder. Thanks for reading and happy raiding!