Bad Altoholic...Bad

I've been a particularly bad altoholic lately, having stopped leveling my remaining army of alts and have instead been messing around with gearing up my warlock. The sad thing is - I'm not even sure why I'm doing it. I have absolutely no intention of raiding on this toon. I do enjoy running heroics on him every now and then when I have time - so it's probably just a desire to get myself in a better position for heroics.

In any case, over the last week, I managed to get him to Exalted with both Therazane and Earthen Ring, which opened up a nice set of epic gloves as well as stylin' new shoulder enchants from the Stonemother herself.

I'm also just a step away from Exalted with Hellscreams reach, although I need about 70 more commendations before I can get the epic trinket that I want. Again - not even sure why I want this stupid trinket. It's all about hit, and I'm already hit capped for heroics. But - I should be able to unreforge hit to haste or something else on a bunch of gear, so I guess it's all good.

I also maxed my tailoring and accumulated enough Dreamcloth to make an epic belt and I'm half way to having enough for the epic pants. I'm tempted to work on gearing my hunter next. For some reason, I still just don't enjoy healing on either my paladin or my druid all that much, and there's so much good daily questing to do for nice shinies, that I don't really mind the longer dungeon queues.

Plus, it guarantees that I'll have at least one dps in the group that knows how to crowd control and move out of fire on the ground, which is one more than I often get when I'm healing.

I did manage to get another level on my shadow priest, so he's at level 83 now and working his way through Uldum. A few interesting observations on the shadow priest. With the healing reductions to Vampiric Embrace, he's not quite the indestructible tank he was questing through Wrath. In Wrath, I took no net damage at all while questing. Now that's not the case.

The thing that I've really been enjoying on the shadow priest though is with the addition of Mind Spike, I found that there are really two different play styles available to you while leveling. One is what I would call the traditional shadow priest style. Loading your targets up with dots and slowly destroying them from the inside. Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay, Devouring Plague and Mind Blast when your shadow orbs proc. Dark Evangelism procs. Big fun.

The addition of Mind Spike has provided another leveling style that I call the Shadow Mage. Big quick casting nukes. Stuff gets hit hard and dies fast. Mind Spike, Mind Spike, Mind Spike, instant cast Mind Blast. BOOM! And the best part of this is it really requires no changes in spec, gear, talents, glyphs..nothing, to switch back and forth between these two options. I can alternate it on individual mobs if I want to. You're mastery and dark evangelism are basically wasted with this style. But it's still a lot of fun to be a nuking Shadow mage!