4 Tips on Priest Shackling Successfully

Shackle Undead

As Priests, we’re limited to blessed with 3 forms of crowd control:

  • Mind Control
  • Shackle Undead
  • Psychic Scream

Unlike mages, Priests are not frequently called upon to CC targets. That means some of us are a little wet behind the ears on shackles. Honestly, how often have we used Shackle Undead on the road to 70? Maybe once or twice leveling in Duskwood. Or on a ghoul out in either Plaguelands. While you don’t need to be a Gnomish rocket scientist to figure out how to shackle targets, there’s no reason why you can’t shackle better.

Shackle Position

Figure out where your tank is going to stand when he engages the mobs. It’s doubly important if you have a Paladin tank. Is your tank going to pull mobs back or is he going to charge in? Don’t forget that any kind of damage will break shackles. Ideally, you want to time your shackles to land the moment your tank gets threat on all mobs. Try to park the Shackle in an area where it can’t receive AoE Damage. If there’s two Priests and you end up shackling your targets above one another (I’ve had it happen), you can try to split them up. What you want to do is get some distance between you and your shackle, put a shield on yourself, hit it Shadow Word: Death, and then shackle it again.

In the case of a Pally tank, I shackle after he hurls his Avenger’s Shield. If for some reason the shackle ends up getting consecrated, there’s nothing more you can do but heal your Pally tank and pray.

Shackle Often

The tooltip says that Shackle Undead lasts up to a certain amount of time (30 seconds or something, but I never read tooltips). Up to is the operative phrase here. It means that Shackle could break at any moment. I mentally set up my own heal rotations so that it ends up looking something like flash heal, greater heal, renew, shackle. I might throw in a Prayer of Mending or a shield to vary it up. The point here is that shackle is not going to last the entire duration.

Max Range Yourself

I’ve gotten myself killed by loose shackles before. Why? Because I was ingrained to keep my shackle target and my healing assignments on the screen in front of me. This leads to me literally standing on top of my shackle so I can watch it and the tank at the same time. If the shackle breaks, I die since Shackle generates something along the lines of 9000 threat.

The solution is to park yourself as far away as possible while being able to heal your tanks. Remember you don’t need to look at them. Look at your shackle and use your frames to heal.

Shackle When in Doubt

I almost always defer shackles to the Shadow Priest. But if both of you are holy, then it doesn’t matter. Draw straws or something. If there’s one shackle target, only one needs to stay on it unless it breaks.

I did Hex Lord yesterday out in Zul’Aman and one of the 4 mobs was an undead ghost. My Shadow Priest guildmate locked him down for a while until he got stunned and then killed because he was not able to get the shackle off in time. I think his shackle got resisted.

That’s why it’s nice to have 2 shackles go off. If the mob is secured by you and the shackle responsibility belongs to the other Priest, let him know so he can shackle it again so that it’s on his cooldown.

Raids are no time for showing off your ego. If no one volunteers to shackle, then step it up and volunteer.


On another note, thanks for all the positive comments and emails. I really appreciate everyone taking the time to read my blog. I would not have put this much effort into it if I didn’t think the effort was worth it. Have to admit though, I’m a little surprised no one’s expressed displeasure about the ads on the side. I was expecting at least 1 or 2 people. I guess it’s because it’s out of the way and doesn’t seem to be bothering the main stuff in the middle.

How Terribly Clumsy of me…

Sometimes it just goes to show that no matter how much time, effort, and preparation you undertake in a task there is always something wrong that happens. I spent the past month and a half working on a new design and a layout. It’s what I do when I’m not raiding or farming.

I just finished transferring the files from my beta subdomain and it is now officially live. But I’m a little disappointed because some things don’t seem to work the way I want it to. Instead of the new layout being polished, it’s a little rough around the edges.

Changes

So what have I done to my blog exactly? I’ve made it look simpler and complicated at the same time. The design and look has a lot more white space. There isn’t as much clutter or noise. It’s also more complicated in the fact that I’ve stepped up some functionality.

Front Page

Hey! Where did the blog on the front page go? It went here. The front page is now static instead of having new posts dynamically changing. The front page now contains my favourite articles on the right and a listing of recent posts or pages on the left. Those of you with RSS readers (Google reader, even) will be unaffected.

Blogroll and links

I have way too many links on my blogroll. The stupid Google Reader export plugin doesn’t want to cooperate. My plan B? I installed an addon that harvested every link on my blog and displays it neatly on a new links page. I’m going to start getting in the habit of posting new blogs that I run into or posts that drill a point.

Article Selection

For the moment, I’ve put my favourite Priest and Raid Officer columns up as links on the front page. You can click on the tabs to choose between the two topics. I plan on adding more later. The articles there are what I consider the best I have to offer on those subjects.

Advertising

They aren’t really ads per se. Those are just affiliate banners of companies that I’m presently using. I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t like them. If you want a more detailed explanation on why I’m running affiliate banners and information on the companies themselves, please read more about my recommendations.

Categories

I’ve cut my categories in half. I’m going to axe some more tomorrow. Right now as it stands, there’s a lot of categories that had 1 or 2 posts in them. My intention is to combine them all in to broader categories. This is one of the fatal errors that I’ve made in my blog. I didn’t give proper thought to the kind of topics that I would cover. Now I’m stuck with having to go through all my old posts and editing what category they belong under.

Archives

I think I’m going to do away with chronological archives altogether. I don’t know if anyones ever used them. I suspect that you, as a reader, would be more inclined to browse through my older topics via topic or category instead of month.

About Page

Updated the about page with a better picture of myself, a description of me, and what this blog is about.

Contact Matticus

Created a new contact page which offers multiple methods for you to contact me including a spiffy email form (because Outlook takes forever to load, right?). I don’t mind emails. In fact, I encourage them! Sometimes I’ll even post up a few on the blog here to help answer some questions.

I’m just getting warmed up. This is my new look for the new year. Let me know if something breaks or is non-existent or gets pointed in the wrong direction.

It’s 3 AM. I’m going to bed. I have this feeling when I wake up I’m going to get a dozen or so comments either a) liking the new look b) hating it c) finding some error. I look forward to it (after precious sleep).

Setting Up Dual Ventrilos, What’s Your Client?

I say this every year on January 1st and this year is no exception.

I will never drink again.

But anyway, yesterday afternoon I was in Karazhan again with several friends (and that one random hunter pickup) and my Guild leader popped down into my Ventrilo channel to ask me if I was talking to myself. I guess from his perspective it looked like I was, but in actual fact I had two separate clients set up: 1 for my guild and 1 for a different guild. It’s not a trick that’s well known, but here’s how it can be done.

1: Right click on the shortcut to your Ventrilo
2: Click Properties
3: In the Target field, add -m to the end of the line

Now you can be connected to multiple vent servers simultaneously. If you’re going to do this, I strongly advise setting up different user profiles. Do that, then you can separate different keybinds for each user. Otherwise, what will end up happening is that pressing your transmit key will see you talking on all servers your connected on.

Then people will get strange ideas such as you talking to yourself.

I also know that teamspeak is a fairly popular voice client that some Guilds use. But I’ve never ran into anyone on Ner’Zuhl asking for people to use it. It’s always been vent. I’m interested to know if you use any 3rd party voice communication at all and if so which ones and why?

What third party voice client do you use?

  • Ventrilo (76%, 82 Votes)
  • Teamspeak (18%, 19 Votes)
  • Skype (6%, 6 Votes)
  • I don't use any (1%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 108

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This is My Last Post

… of 2007.

Tomorrow I will be out and about celebrating and counting down to New Year and all that fun stuff! I’m going to use what little time I have left today and tomorrow to finish up my new layout. It’s going to be simpler yet more functional. I hate coding. I transferred out of this profession years ago and having to modify this theme extensively for the past two months has reminded me why.

With a New Year comes new resolutions! Much like Honors Code who recently published his goals, here’s my list of things to do for 2008.

World of Warcraft

Mallet

* Kill Illidan
* Kill Zul’Jin
* Obtain Epic Flying Mount
* Break the base 2000 +healing mark
* Break the 300 MP5 while casting with full buffs mark

Saphfira

* Obtain 5/5 Vengeful Gladiator’s set (Elemental)
* Finish out Vindicator’s pieces (Ring, Belt, Boots)
* Level fishing to 375
* Improve myself more in PvP

Valoray

* Acquire Thunder
* Become viable in PvE as retribution (pigs might as well fly)
* Acquire a Flying Mount
* Become keyed for Karazhan
* Level blacksmithing to 375
* Become elixir specced
* Get reputation with Sporregar so I can transmute these useless Primal Earths to Waters

Personal

Blogging

* Start and finish out example healing assignments in Mag/TK/SSC
* Write less, but frequent
* Write more, but less often
* Continue pushing myself to deliver quality, timeless references

Academic

* Studying smarter, not harder
* Studying instead of raiding
* Not suck

Those are my resolutions. What’s yours? I will see you all in 2008!

Have a Happy (and safe) New Year!

Shadow Priests! Help!

I got a question from a guildmate who is a Priest of the… shadowy variety. Dealing damage and melting face is not my forte, so I’m hoping someone out there can help. I checked out Fate and Trollin’ as I know they’re both shadow but I couldn’t find their emails to contact them. So alas, I will post an open question on my world.

It’s a question of gear:

[item]Battlecast Hood[/item]
– OR –
[item]Uni-Mind Headdress[/item]

The Battlecast Hood has 2 gems on it: +6 Spell Damage and +5 Spell Penetration / +5 Spell Critical Rating and +5 Spell Penetration.

Let’s assume that there are head enchants on both of them (+22 Spellpower and +14 Spell Hit rating).

I have no idea what to look for in Shadow Priest gear. All I know is crit isn’t valued as highly. Help!