Friday 20 June 2008

The lure of the Dark Side

Yes, I did it. After levelling the whole way from 1 to 70 without ever putting a single point into the shadow tree, I succumbed and re-specced shadow for the evening.

Tufva was always meant to be a heal priest, so that was how I levelled her. I really enjoy being a heal priest, despite it sometimes being quite a stressful role. I've never had any wish to spec her in shadow at all.

Then last night happened. We were nowhere near getting the numbers for Karazhan, so we decided to hit a heroic instead. The priest that was supposed to have healed alongside me in Kara desperately wanted to do Heroic Botanica. He needed just a little more reputation to be able to buy the +81 healing weapon enchant, which would benefit all the healers in the guild as no one else has it.

We have several people in the guild that have more than one 70, there's even a couple that have the triumvirate of tank, healer and DPS. However, unusually, what we were lacking yesterday was a DPS. I only have one other 70, a hunter, which was retired when it hit the level cap, so has neither the reputation to buy heroic keys nor a flying mount. I explained that I was happy letting the others go without me, when someone suggested I respec to shadow for the evening.

After having spent the day levelling my shadowpriest together with someone else, I found myself quite excited about the prospect of seeing what it could be like DPS-ing as a shadowpriest at the top level. Of course, my gear would let me down horribly as I don't have any off-spec damage gear to swap in, but I was looking forward to the outing with excitement nonetheless. A quick visit to the priest trainer and some scrounging for damage elixirs, oils and buff food and I was ready to roll.

The run was as smooth as a baby's bottom, we got through Botanica in 1h30 and if it hadn't been for the Badges of Justice we would have thought we'd done it on normal. Admittedly, the group was very well geared as well as skilled, which helped a lot. I had great fun DPS-ing, it was a very relaxing experience compared to healing, so it has really given me a huge incentive to level my shadowpriest as fast as possible. With my heal gear, I managed to output around 500dps, which makes me think that I could quite easily achieve credible DPS when my shadowpriest gets its Frozen Shadoweave set.

So it was a good evening, great fun was had by all, but it did feel somehow wrong to see Tufva in shadowform and she will be speccing back to holy. However, I am very much looking forward to having both a heal priest and a DPS priest to play with.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I always have to smile when I find other priests who have leveled or are leveling multiple priests; I tell my raid and guild it's not that uncommon, but they don't believe me.

Tufva said...

Who would NOT want to level multiple priests? ;-)