The Return of the Shadow Priest

So over the weekend a couple things happened.

First, I did a 25man ToC with my guild. I came as feral DPS and did decent for my gear ~6.5k DPS. But I realized something during the run. I don't enjoy playing melee DPS very much. One of the reasons I "rerolled" druid was because I wanted a class that could tank 5mans, since I get extremely irritated by piss poor 5man tanks, but one that I could have fun DPSing in raids. I never enjoyed ret on my Paladin, but I thought it was because ret's rotation is pretty boring. Cat DPS is more involved and I thought it'd be more interesting for me. It definitely is a difficult class to master and I'm far from mastering it, but I'm finding that I just don't like melee. Things feel too hectic when I'm up the boss's ass. I prefer the methodical nature of caster DPS. The obvious solution would be to go boomkin, however I find boomkin to be a hideous sight and I can't ever imagine myself playing one.

So while I was considering what I would do next, I figured I'd level my shadow priest some more. If you've read my first blog entry, you'll know that my Shadow Priest was my first ever main. He's who I played when I killed Kael and Vashj and scored a ZA bear. When I had the time to raid 20+ hours a week, it was my priest. My shadow priest was my first love.

So I logged on Tuwei, bought dual spec and cold weather flying and start leveling. I had left him at 73 a while back when I'd play him occasional between raiding on my Paladin. I went with a holy off spec for now just because it's nice to heal the occasional instance while leveling since it doesn't take much effort or energy.

I healed a couple runs, ran a couple quests and then decided to finally queue just as DPS so I could remember what it felt like to melt faces. It felt good!

My priest is still wearing mostly T5 and some heirloom gear. I only ran a couple Hyjal runs before I quit back in the day so I don't have any T6, but I have the sweet pink mace from there. The gear is about on par with level 75-76 blues it looks like but I'm raping damage meters against people whose "gear score" is considered higher than mine. And it's fucking fun. Especially after getting Mind Sear. My experience when tanking is that ret pallies and DKs usually dominate 5man meters. But it really seems like shadow preists have excellent tools for 5mans. Mind Sear is one of the best mass AOE spells in the game, and with multi target dotting, SPs can dominate on 2-3 pulls too. I really can't tell you how fun it is to play my priest again and how many memories it brings back.

I don't know yet whether I'll actually raid on Tuwei when I hit 80 or if this is just a temporary fun little tangent. But I think I might be done with my Druid for now. I know I'm going to miss being able to raid on a consistent schedule when I hit 80 though so there's a good chance the fun will only last until I'm fully geared from badge/heroic gear.