Been a bit since I worked on these guys, most of the time has been spent fiddling with the UI and the addons instead of actually questing (ah the joys of treadmill gaming!). Those posts are still in the works, but I figured I’d better get content up that isn’t based on a Blog Azeroth Shared Topic for a change.

Thus Illysu and Illysa are back on the warpath and it’s time to burn up some of that yummy blue rested XP! Plus I’ll get a few more miles under my belt and hopefully hammer out the last of the bumpy treadmill learning curve.

I had no idea I spent so much time looking at my keys when I play… Doh.

Current Keybinds

As a recap of what has come before, here is my current keybind setup at Level 8. The details for the macros (m:) can be found in the previous post.

I moved Inner Fire from ALT and ~ to =, but otherwise it stayed the same. Having to retarget after 7/8 is a bit of a pain, but I like being able to attack different targets if need be.

Keybinds

	Illysu	Illysa
~	—	m:Share Target
1	Smite	Smite
2	Shadow Word: Pain	Shadow Word: Pain
7	m:Heal Me	m:Heal Them
8	m:Heal Them	m:Heal Me
9	Arcane Torrent	Arcane Torrent
0	—	m:Follow The Leader
=	Inner Fire	Inner Fire

I logged off last time a little bit shy of 9, so it didn’t take that long to ding. Mostly I spent the time relearning how to play and playing around with some alternate keybinds and macros—none of which panned out.

Level 9

Abilities: Mind Blast (17% of base mana, 40 yd range, 1.5 sec cast, 8 sec cooldown)

Mind Blast uses slightly more mana than Smite (17% vs 15%) but it has a longer range and the same cast time, but is hampered by the cooldown. The way things are going now, I’ll use it once per fight, which means it’s time to start getting creative with my macros.

Basic Strategy: Open with a Mind Blast, since it has comparable range to Shadow Word: Pain, then SW: P, then Smite until dead. One fun thing I’ve found is that I can do a Heal Me/Heal Them while running and am thus able to ignore monsters up to my level as long as they don’t slow me or gather in packs of more than four.

Macros: Mind Blast has an eight second cooldown and five Smites is only 7.5s of casting time, so I’m assuming some lag between spells. I’ll need to test it against a training dummy at some point, but with the reset at leaving combat and 8 seconds– it should do a Mind Blast every time it’s up (hopefully).

Since I can’t do a show tooltip with castsequence, I’m going to setup a Power Aura to show me when it’s off cooldown (which should be a good test of the castsequence timing)

KillIt :

• castsequence reset=combat/8 Mind Blast, Smite, Smite, Smite, Smite, Smite

Keybinds

I’m pulling out Arcane Torrent since I never use it, replacing Smite with KillIt, and adding a ‘heal someone who isn’t me’ set after fumbling with the spells the one time I ran into another player. Sigh.

	Illysu	Illysa
~	—	m:Share Target
1	m:KillIt	m: KillIt
2	Shadow Word: Pain	Shadow Word: Pain
7	m:Heal Me	m:Heal Them
8	m:Heal Them	m:Heal Me
0	—	m:Follow The Leader
=	Inner Fire	Inner Fire
ALT and ~	Renew	Power World: Shield

The next level took about a half an hour, give or take, with lots of puttering about and wasting time on non-questing things.

Level 10

Abilities: Mind Flay (20 yd range, Channeled, Inflicts Shadow damage to an enemy and reduces its movement speed for 3 sec.)

Mind Flay is interesting (I picked it up via the Shadow Talent Tree), but it won’t kill off a mob by the time it gets to me, even with the slow and double the normal damage. So, erm, yeah. I’m leaving it off the action bar for now.

Basic Strategy: No change.

Macros: No change.

Keybinds No change.

Talent Trees

Since I’m going to be solo-ish leveling, both this gals are going Shadow. Later on I may dualspec them into something else, but eh, it’s kinda fun being an anti-healer.

With the shadow tree, we pick up two new passive abilities:

• Shadow Power – Spell damage increased by 15%. Increases the critical damage of your Shadow spells by 100%.
• Shadow Orbs – You have a 10% chance for your Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Flay spells to grant you a Shadow Orb each time they deal damage. Casting your Mind Blast or Mind Spike spell consumes all Shadow Orbs, increasing damage of that spell by 10% per Shadow Orb, and granting 10% increased damage on your periodic Shadow spells for 15 sec. You can have up to a maximum of 3 orbs.

So there are three choices for the talent point:

• Darkness – Spell haste increased by 1%.
• Improved Shadow Word: Pain – Increases the damage of your Shadow Word: Pain spell by 3%.
• Veiled Shadows – Decreases the cooldown of your Fade ability by 3 sec, and reduces the cooldown of your Shadowfiend ability by 30 sec.

Since Fade is an agro dump and there’s no one else to pull it— I’m ignoring Veiled Shadows for now. If I start playing with tanks, I’ll have to shift things around. Darkness is nice, but I’m going to put the points into Improved SW:P for now. Better to do more damage per mana than spells per seconds.

Battlegrounds

Low level BGs belong to the twinks. Unless you are very lucky, or very good, all that awaits you is death, more death, and a nice crispy side of constant insults.

It would take much thicker skin than I possess to take priests into Warsong Gulch, especially dual-boxing priests. Actually, I avoid low-level BGs like the plague no matter how I’m playing—I only join in BGs where there are large numbers of players, thus reducing the chances that the resident trolls will focus fire in my direction.

It’s Pretendy Fun-time Games dammit, leave me alone! *mutter*

Achievements

Seriously Blizzard, an achievement for Level 10? You are basically rewarding me for finishing the starting area, which while nice, is sort of silly. Then again, I’m comparing it to the hell that is To All The Squirrels I’ve Loved Before—so maybe I’m being unfair.

Still, yeah, not really impressed. Sorry.

And on we go!