Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Bear is for tank! Spriest is for fite!
It's time for a heartfelt confession. I think I'm done with
Cataclysm heroics for a while. Don't get me wrong, they can be fun, but as of late, they've become miserable endeavors.
If you're not running heroics yet, you may not know what I'm talking about. If you are running heroics (through PUGs), you know
exactly what I'm talking about. An awful lot of tanks, healers, and DPSers think
Cataclysm heroics are the same kind of faceroll instances that
Wrath heroics were. Nothing could be further from the case. And as more and more "casual" players reach level 85, a greater percentage of players are just so terribly lost that they don't know what to do.
Wipes on the first pull. Frustrating attempts on bosses with "teammates" who just don't listen. People who AoE when they should nuke. People who use AoE and ... no, no,
wait! Don't attack that, it's CCed, and ... well, crud. Now we've got
merchants throwing fruit at us now, don't we? Simply put, most people are just not prepared.
It's forgivable, of course -- new, more difficult instances mean a new, gigantic learning curve. Even the best
Wrath shadow priest can muck things up in a
Cataclysm heroic. But that doesn't need to be the case! The shadow priest spec is an incredibly powerful one. Not only do we do get to churn out the DPS, but we have an incredible number of tools at our disposal to make up for the problems that PUG groups routinely face. From crowd control (yes, tanks, we
can CC) to mana regen, there's an awful lot we can do to make heroics run smoother. Even if you're saddled with a group of four 12-year-olds from