Yeah, I played 3 hours of tennis yesterday, by far the most physical activity I've had in the past few years, so I was kind of beat after that. Only ended up sleeping for about 5 hours, so I got up and did some leveling on a pally I made, and then fell back asleep for another ~5 hours.

after a lil' digging, I found the answer to one question I had about monks:

The other question about pandas lingers:

Does this mean panda's can't be neutral? I thought they would have the option of interacting with both horde and alliance throughout the game if they never chose a side.

It be too easy to move stuff from alliance to horde or vice versa. Im pretty sure you wont have access to even a mailbox until a side is chosen.

Apparently there is a mailbox there, but new Panda's will act like a 3rd faction, so you won't be able to mail anything except heirlooms.

was mostly excited about the prospect of being able to dungeon with 2p2ers from all factions

oh well

Forgot I had an Alliance Zygor subscription. Disc leveling is OP.

Confirmed

Also, lol at me taking till like the 3rd dungeon to realize that I had already learned Howling Blast. Would have really helped with that warrior chain pulling entire dungeons lol

Tanks in low lvls are even more op than before. Somehow manage to get my lock high on dmg by going demo, but it's nigh impossible to catch tanks (though I did occasionally in lk dungeons on my disc priest).

yea ive been leveling a warrior, took until lvl 50 that i tried out prot and havent looked back since. The damage is crazy high and I can pull 6-8 mobs before I even start taking damage.

does anyone here priest heal at 85? i'd love to know wtf i'm doing, but i don't.

i'm disc now, but i wouldn't be against swapping to holy

it's just for 5 mans and the like

I don't raid at all on my priest and I don't really play it much besides occasional 5-mans so this might not be completely right, but for disc in 5-mans, basically just PoM the tank on cooldown, and holy fire/smite spam (you can go slow or maybe just ignore this if you don't have a lot of spirit). Hit Mindbender on cooldown for mana, I gain about 30k over the 15 seconds of Mindbender including my regen from spirit (3093 spirit). PoH for AoE of course. ALWAYS use Inner Focus if it's off cooldown and you're about to cast a a flash/greater heal or PoH. If you use mouseover macros you should be able to just macro it in to all of those spells I think, but I'm not completely sure since I use Clique. Spirit Shell probably isn't too important in 5-mans, but obviously use it before periods of large predictable damage. I guess maybe use it and spam GH on the tank after Baine breaks a platform maybe, as an example. Just remember though that you won't be doing any actual healing with PoH and GH/FH while spirit shell is up, it all goes towards an absorb.

Seems pretty straightforward, and with healing being tuned pretty high right now it seems hard to go wrong really. I imagine if your gear isn't great, mana will be your biggest concern, so just make sure to use Mindbender on cooldown, and you can probably ignore smite/HF as I'm sure that will eat a lot of mana up. You should typically avoid ever using Heal though, it's slow and heals for about the same as a Smite, and when you have 5 stacks of Evangelism they cost the same.

I've only done 1 5-man on my priest so far, so I'll play around with it a little more tonight, maybe try to do a quick DS or something.

It might be better for 5 mans to use Power Word:Solace instead of Mindbender, just since there's typically not that much to heal. I'm sticking with Mindbender though, at least for now.

You get half the mana from each PW:Solace vs each attack from your Mindbender. I think, but I'm not completely sure, you get somewhere around 7-10 attacks from your Mindbender during the 15 seconds that it's up, which would mean you would need 14-20 PW:Solace's each minute to gain the same amount of mana. So I guess it depends on the fight/group and how much healing you actually have to do.

edit: nvm stick with Mindbender. I'm pretty sure your mindbender gets about 10 attacks in, so you would need 20 PW:Solaces, and at 1.43 seconds per cast (for me, at least) that would be almost 30 seconds out of every minute that I would need to be casting PW:Solace.

Low Key, I mained a disc priest through all of Cata so if you have questions let me know.

I'd stay disc for 5 mans since they went back to the easy style of heroic dungeons. Being able to smite heal certainly takes some of the boredom out of it (it's fun trying to out dps the dps)

(For 5 man dungeons):
PW:S / PoM on tank
Penance tank as needed
Greater Heal if big heals are needed
Holy Fire / Smite spam through low damage
PoH when there is party wide damage
Spirit Shell->PoH spam if you know there is big party wide damage coming, create massive absorbs on everyone.

As for mana regen I would lean towards just using mindbender. PW:Solace doesn't trigger atonement so even though there is potential for bigger mana regen, it is wasted cycles as far as healing is concerned. You are then more likely to get behind in healing and need to skip the smites in favour of greater healer/poh and will lose some dps.

In general, if you are having mana issues in 5 mans you are doing something seriously wrong.

I also use macro's for all my offensive abilities to cast on target of target if my target is friendly. This allows you to just keep your tank as your target and still cast your smite/holy fire spells without target swapping.

I seriously doubt I'm going to get my Priest to 85 by next Tuesday, and I'm definitely not going to put much time in to leveling her a while after the expansion comes out. I'm just trying to get most of the drudgery leveling out of the way so I don't have to put much time in to her when I do decide to bring her to max level.

She's halfway through Outland, 65 right now. If I could get to 75 by Mists launch I think I'd be happy.

What are all your schedules going to look like next week? I had put in for Thursday and Friday off but at the moment it sounds like I'm going to be scheduled to travel 3 hours to a job site on Thursday. If all goes well I will be back Thursday night and just take Friday off to level all day. Tuesday night I might log in but then again I've done one launch time thing and it was hell getting on my old, medium pop server. Illidan will be just nuts.

ugh Had decided not to buy MoP and look forward to never playing WoW again but I am starting to feel the pull again.

Last time I played was the month after Cata came out. I think all I did was get my Mage to 85 and then grind rep to get the faction purples and then quit playing. Had just resubscribed when Cata was released after being unsubscribed for 9+ months.

I think I have 7 days free playtime so maybe that will tide me over and I won't want to play after that. Sucks that private servers don't even have Cataclysm working yet.

Is it really worth PW:S'ing the tank with the rapture change? I'm not at my computer so I can't check, but I think it costs over 6k, and even with 3k spirit which I'm sure is more than LK has that would only give me 4500 mana back. So I've been mostly ignoring PW:S and just letting smite/holy fire and penance keep the tank topped off.

It's still a very mana efficient heal and good HPS with rapture, despite the changes. It is just less of a mana-tap now.

You are right though, it's not necessarily needed in the rotation.

I think it's hard to tell right now because everyone is so overgeared, the twilight heroic instances are such faceroll. Tanks aren't going to take any kind of meaningful damage, and there isn't a ton of stuff to do real damage to DPS to necessitate doing much other then smite spamming.

True, I guess it's still a ~50k heal for about 1500 mana, assuming it's used up. But overgearing sounds like the much bigger factor at play here. I definitely toss some shields up when I get an undergeared tank.

I'm wondering what's gonna happen to it at 90 though. It should still be the same percentage of max mana, which means it'll be about 18k. Not sure exactly what spirit numbers will be like at 90, but I imagine it'll end up costing at LEAST ~9k after rapture. That sounds like a lot to me.

after toying around with my blood dk, I think I figured out what I don't like about the changes to them, and what i never dug about warriors.

the gcd for DKs was reduced. for blood, it's now a 1 sec. gcd. I dunno what it is, but such a fast cd between abilities just makes the class feel like it's lacking that "oomph" that I like for 2h weapon classes. Feels like you're frantically playing a rogue or something, mashing buttons as quickly as possible. Which doesn't seem like what blood dks should be about.

i dunno, it's probably me being finicky, but that's why I gravitated to DK tanking in the first place.

Have you been DPS-ing in the wrong presence this whole time? Seems like you would have noticed the funky GCD already.

what?

for dks or warriors?

i was unholy presence for frost, now i gotta use frost presence = /

but i'm talking about for blood tanking

Both Frost and Unholy DK's used Unholy presence, which had a reduced GCD. My issue with Frost was the temptation to frost strike all the time (thus wasting Killing Machine procs) because you have so much down time and so little runes.

I really preferred the increased GCD of Blood (pre 5.0). I haven't tried tanking since. I'm guessing that with a shorter GCD I would end up mashing buttons and get back in to the routine of wasting all my runes on dealing damage instead of mitigating it.

I know what you're saying about the 2H oomph feeling, though. I have always been a fan of Unholy even though Frost seems to have been more popular.

i never minded frost feeling sort of panicky, especially if you were dual-wielding. Made sense to me. I never tried UH, so I can't speak to that. But I am really disappoint with how blood feels now. Totally takes me out of a deliberative mindset for tanking, makes it much less enjoyable being a button masher.

My impression of the old Frost rotation (Outbreak...Obliterate... frost strike...wait...frost strike...wait....rune strike ZOMG RUNES ARE UP KM PROC <OBLITERATE>... wait...frost strike....KM proc ohdamnIalreadyhitfroststrike...outbreak...frost strike....loot)