Primal Priest

A comment on yesterday's entry struck home:

"I can see no end in sight to the endless farming for primals"

Yeah. Pretty much.

Gear	Fire	Water	Shadow	Mana	Earth	Air	Total
FSW Shoulders	2	10	2				14
FSW Boots	4	12	4				20
FSW Robe	7	16	7				30
Belt of Blasting	15						15
SS Hood	15	5		15	5	5	45
SS Legs	15	5		15	5	5	45
Black Void			3	3			6
Nimble Thought	4			12			16
Total	62	48	16	45	10	10	191

191 Primals. Yeah, that's a ridiculous number. Don't try to figure out how much that would cost you on the AH—it would only depress you.

That 191 number assumes Shadowcloth specialty and making your own Spellcloth. If you can find a Spellcloth Tailor that will make it for you for only the mats, you lower your cost for the Spellstrike set by 28 Primals.

In theory, if you are proactive enough, you could specialize in Spellcloth first, before you can even wear the FSW gear. You'd make the 24 Spellcloth you need (12 trips), then respec to make Shadowcloth. The 150g respec cost would almost certainly be cheaper than the 28 Primals you'd save. But if you do that, then you need to not make any Shadowcloth during that time, as you'll be losing the Shadowcloth bonus. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it is a theoretical possibility.

Unfortunately, I can't really offer any comforting words here. It is what it is. What I can say is that you probably won't farm all 191 of them. Instead, farm enough to get your FSW pieces as they become available to you. Once you hit 70, do dailies instead. Even as a fresh 70, you can pull in 75g+ per hour doing dailies. You won't have to buy all of your Primals, as you'll get a few motes as you do the dailies:

• Fire: The Throne of Kil'Jaeden quests involve killing Fire elementals.
• Shadow: The Multiphase quest puts you by Oshu'gun and all of the Void Reavers around there.
• Water: When you do the Fishing quest, make sure you fish out any pools of fish, especially the Pure Water ones.
• Mana: The Mana Wyrms in Bash'ir Landing drop these while you are collecting Mana Cells. Or, when you go up to Netherstorm to get your Sunfury Attack Plans, stop by the Violet Tower and kill a few elementals in the area.
• Earth and Air: Grab these from the elementals in Nagrand when you are doing your Skinning and/or Cooking quests.

At each stop, make yourself hang around for an additional 10 minutes and farm a few more motes. They'll add up over time.

Don't get frustrated with another SPriest or Lock comes along and says something dumb like "omg you can get more primals/gold if you do ...". Ignore them. Almost invariably, people with that attitude have forgotten what it was like to be a fresh 70 with only 500-600 +Shadow. Farming sucks. Period. It doesn't get "easy mode" for SPriests until roughly T5-level, right about the time you don't need to farm Primals any more.

Yeah. /sigh.

There is one exception. Before I started this blog, I made a short 1-minute video showing how Shadow Priests can farm motes of water with a surprising efficiency. Even before level 70, you'll be good enough at it that the spawn rate of the mobs will be the limiting factor, not your skill.

Oh, and as a general rule:

it is very worth it to take the time to make Primal Mooncloth while you are making your Shadowcloth and Spellcloth.

Healers and bag-makers will trade you straight up for it. The primals to make it are almost always cheaper than buying the Shadowcloth or Spellcloth off the AH. As you pass through Shattrath, do a quick advert in /Trade: "WTT your Spellcloth or Shadowcloth for my Primal Mooncloth". If you get a bite, take a few minutes to complete the trade. If not, no harm done and no time wasted.

(Edit: Updated to include Bracers of Nimble Thought.)

Fresh Frozen Shadoweave Gemming

I wanted to expand a bit on my last Frozen Shadoweave post, particularly on the gemming. I had said:

You've probably been reading quite a bit on shadowpriest.com about how your #1 stat is Spell Damage, right? And how if you are putting anything other than red gems in your gear then you are nerfing yourself? Ignore that advice for now. Come back to it later. The first thing you need to work on before you start worrying about Spell Damage is Spell Hit.

I stand by this 100%. Yes, long term you are going to put in a bunch of red gems and go for max damage. But you must hit-cap yourself first.

I'm not speaking from theorycraft — I'm coming at this from experience. There's nothing more frustrating then seeing a bunch RESIST messages flash by and watching your mana bar drain down. (No damage == useless VT.)

Think about the point at which you are putting together your FSW set. If you've been on the ball, you should already have your shoulders and boots by the time you hit 70. I did it, without a raiding guild to fund me, and it wasn't that much farming. (I am certainly not going to say it was fun — but the first few minutes of running around in my FSW completely made up for the hours of farming.)

But let's say you don't. Let's say that you ground your way to 70 without giving your FSW a thought. Where does that put you?

You've only run Hellfire, Coilfang, and Auchindoun, as Tempest Keep only just now became available to you. The gear in those first three sets of instances is okay, but it's nothing stellar. Certainly not when compared to FSW. As a fresh 70, you can't even look at Kara without keeling over and having to corpse run.

Odds are, you don't have any purples. Okay, maybe one or two, but almost certainly nothing with sockets. If you've been grinding your level instead of your FSW mats, you probably haven't been worried about your rep yet, either. That means no purples from rep rewards. (Who grinds rep before 70? Why?)

With that kind of history, there's only a slim chance that you are hit-capped. You might be, but it would be really odd. It's not like you're going to get hit-capping blues or greens while grinding the mats or gold.

Thus, your first gems in your FSW will probably be yellow, not red. Sure, the reds will come along soon enough. But for now, play by the rules and put the right gems in your FSW. When you do your first Kara run and only get a few resists instead of one after another, you'll know you did the right thing.

But, again, this comes with a disclaimer. Everyone is different. I'm speaking in wide generalities here. Maybe you have gotten some really lucky drops or have been consciously working on hit-capping yourself before getting your FSW. It's certainly possible. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the guy behind you that got to 70 and said "now what?".

Frozen Shadoweave

FSW. Frozen Shadoweave. Shadow's Embrace.

The set is both a blessing and a curse for Shadow Priests. The three pieces (shoulders, boots, and robe) are probably the first gear set that SPriests are really going to lust after ... and in many cases they are also the last.

The Good

The set is relatively easy to obtain: just level yourself to 375 in Tailoring. This is, I think, easiest done as you level, but you can also grind it out in an afternoon if you have a few hundred gold to spare. (Hint: make bags and AH them.) The patterns are available from your Shadoweave trainer, Andrion Darkspinner in Shattrath, for a pretty reasonable price.

The Bad

Unless you really like to grind elementals, it's going to cost you about 1500g to make the set:

36g	Netherweave Cloth, 234 pcs
28g	Arcane Dust, 26
275g	Primal Shadow, 13
275g	Primal Fire, 13
760g	Primal Water, 38
80g	Netherweb Spider Silk, 8
1454g	Total

And that 1500g? That does not include the cost of the 6 gems that you'll need to put in it. But more on that later.

The Ugly

The cooldown for each pair of Shadowcloth is just under 4 days. The set takes a total of 13 pairs of Shadowcloth. Assuming you are devout in your trips to make Shadowcloth, that's 48 days between the time you make your first pair and your last pair.

Want to save yourself some money?

Farm, baby.

At the just-dinged-70 level of gear (roughly +500 Spell Damage and no real +Spell Hit) I was able to grind roughly 8 Primal Water per hour, and about half that for Primal Fire and Primal Shadow. Netherweb Spider Silk ran about 4 or 5 per hour. Don't sweat the cloth or the dust. You will have an abundance of cloth from questing, and the dust is very cheap on the AH.

Don't be fooled by the people that talk about being able to grind more than that -- they probably are much heavier geared than you will be when you need to do this.

If you don't want to spend anything you are looking at roughly 13-18 hours of grinding, on top of saving all of the cloth you get from questing. Sure, that's a far cry from the 7 weeks you are waiting on Shadowcloth cooldowns, but it's still no less than 13 hours of doing nothing but killing the same 4 mobs over, and over, and over.

The reality is that you are probably going to be somewhere in between. Personally, I made it through 6/13 batches of Shadowcloth, or just about 3 weeks. The other 14 pieces I bought on the AH for about 70g each. I farmed my way through roughly half of the other mats, probably spending a total of 500g on motes and primals. (Always check the prices for both before you buy either.)

Gemming Your FSW

You've probably been reading quite a bit on shadowpriest.com about how your #1 stat is Spell Damage, right? And how if you are putting anything other than red gems in your gear then you are nerfing yourself?

Ignore that advice for now. Come back to it later.

The first thing you need to work on before you start worrying about Spell Damage is Spell Hit. Before you are hit-capped, all the damage in the world doesn't do you any good if you keep missing on spells. There's a boatload of theorycraft involved here, but the short version is this:

1. Make sure you are maxed out in Shadow Focus.
2. Get your Spell Hit up to 76.

At the fresh-FSW gear level, your best and easiest bet is going to be to go for the socket bonuses and put in the correct gems, not just red ones. I recommend pairs of Great Dawnstones and Glowing Nightseyes. Yes, there are better ones that you will eventually have access to, but both of those are readily available for a decent price on the AH.

Each pair grants you +8 Spell Hit, +5 Spell Damage, and +6 Stamina. And, oh look, by following the socket colors you got another +9 Spell Hit, for a total of +33 Spell Hit from the set. That's almost half-way to getting hit-capped. Sold! You even still get your +15 Spell Damage, and a little extra HP to keep you alive a fraction of a second longer. It'll cost you between 200g and 250g for all 6 gems, total.

At the gear level you are going to be at when working on your FSW, completing the set should add roughly +100-150 Spell Damage to what you were wearing before. For me, that translated to about +650 Spell Damage, unbuffed. With that, you should be able to sustain roughly 500 DPS on boss mobs, spiking to 600 DPS if you have a good tank and can really go all out and get your rotation down. You're basically ready to take on any Normal-mode dungeon without breaking a sweat. Heroics will be challenging without other gear upgrades.

Oh, and you can start soloing level 68 Elites. It'll take practice and you'll die a few times, but you can do it. How cool is that?

The Curse of FSW

Did I mention that FSW was both a blessing and a curse? Oh yeah, I did. How can a set so be uber and amazing and at the same time a Bad Thing?

You're going to be in that set for a very, very, very long time.

The problem is that we can get the FSW so early in the game. It's T4/T5-equivalent, and yet we can get it within a few weeks of hitting 70. The psychological effect is that SPriests are easily lulled into thinking that continuing to enhance their DPS at that rate will be easy.

The reality is this: if you're not in a raiding guild to where you can get into 25-man dungeons whenever you want, you may never outgrow that set. In fact, many/most T4 and T5 items would actually be a downgrade from that set.

Back to the Upside

Still, FSW is a bucket of awesome.

• For the next several months you don't even have to think about it when you see a Chest, Shoulder, or Feet drop -- it's just auto-Greed.
• The HP regen as you do damage is nice. It won't keep you vertical if you start taking serious damage, but it's nice to know that you can soak small amounts of secondary damage. Also, in PvP it's an easy way to keep tabs on people you've DOTted.
• You have 6 gem slots to mix and match as your other gear gets you closer to, and eventually over, your hit cap.

Oh, and it's not bad looking. If you don't like it, well, that's what Shadowform is for.