Now that I’m well out of the starter zones the time between new abilities is starting to drag out. Since I’m not changing things as much, I decided to go with my gut reaction from last post and start lumping more levels together.

While I was tempted to hold to my initial concept of doing every quest in a zone before moving on, I’ve found that I’m outleveling the content too quickly. I’m tired of doing green quests so I’m going to start pushing the envelope and see how good I really am at this.

My guess is ‘not so much’, but we’ll see.

…and YAY For Mounts!

Current Keybinds

I’m getting ready to do a full review of these keybinds and macros before I stick my nose into PVP or a dungeon, so expect a post about what I’m changing and why sometime in the next week or so. *pokes setup* Hmm…

	F1	F2	F3	F4		F9
Illysu (Leader)	m:Heal Illysu	m:Heal Illysa	Power Word: Fortitude	Inner Fire		m:MountUp
Illysa (Follower)	m:Heal Illysu	m:Heal Illysa	Power Word: Fortitude	Inner Fire		m:MountUp
	~	1	2	3
Illysu (Leader)	m:Share Target	m:KillIt	Smite	Wand
Illysa (Follower)	m:Share Target	m:KillIt	Smite	Wand
	Q	W	E
Illysu (Leader)	Renew	—	Psychic Scream
Illysa (Follower)	Power Word: Shield	—	—
	ALT ~	ALT 1	ALT 2	ALT 3
Illysu (Leader)	—	—	—	—
Illysa (Follower)	m:Follow	—	—	—
	ALT Q	ALT W	ALT E
Illysu (Leader)	Flash Heal	—	—
Illysa (Follower)	Renew	—	Psychic Scream

Level 19

Abilities/Basic Strategy/Keybinds/Macros: No change
Sixth Talent Point: finally I’ve got a whole new tier to play with!

So let’s see what we’ve got:

• Improved Psychic Scream — Reduces the cooldown of your Psychic Scream spell by 2 sec.
• Improved Mind Blast — Reduces the cooldown of your Mind Blast spell by 0.5 sec., and while in Shadowform your Mind Blast also has a 33% chance to reduce all healing done to the target by 10% for 10 sec.
• Improved Devouring Plague — Your Devouring Plague instantly deals damage equal to 15% of its total periodic effect.
• Twisted Faith — Increases your Shadow spell damage by 1%, and grants you spell hit rating equal to 50% of any Spirit gained from items or effects.

This tier has some interesting options on it, but in the end it was pretty easy to choose what came first.

Psychic Scream is a PvP talent, at least for me, since fearing mobs while questing just leads to them dragging more mobs back at you. Could be useful in certain circumstances where I wanted to gather them in, but right now it would just cause wipes.

Mind Blast is my opening spell, but that 0.5 seconds isn’t going to help any since it’s only in my rotation once. I don’t get Shadowform until level 29, so the healing debuff is also pretty useless.

Devouring Plague we don’t get until level 28, so it’s a little stupid to have it in this tier (much like the Veiled Shadows bonus to Fade and Shadowfiend in the first Tier)

Which leaves us with Twisted Faith and its generic buff to everything I do. Even if it wasn’t the clear winner, I figure when leveling it’s best to go with the talents that will be useful the highest percentage of the time.

If I swap over to leveling by battleground, I’ll probably go back and respect (or wait and dual-spec at 30).

I finally went back and killed off my level 21 nemesis and they were a snap. I probably could have done them at 18, but the last two levels were more about learning the new keybinds and less about Getting Revenge™.

For the moment I’m running with Mind Blast/Mind Blast, Holy Fire/Smite and that’s killing 99% of the foes right off. Which makes for easy leveling and manageable mana drains. I may go back and tweak things, but for now it’s repetitive, but it works.

Level 20

Abilities/Basic Strategy/Keybinds/Macros: No change

Riding! Finally!! *breaks out the Sparkle!Ponies* (Technically I only have the sparkle ponies on my main account, but the general sentiment is the same.)

It’s sort of sad that all we get at 20 is riding and an achievement, since I’m used to the earlier bombardment of abilities and ‘unlocks’ from earlier levels. It’s going to be slow going from here on out, so I suppose I’ll have to get used to the slog.

…but YAY SPARKLEPONIES! 😀 *runs in circles around Silvermoon—empty, vacant Silvermoon*

Why can’t our capitol be as popular as Orgrimmar? *Blood Elf Woe*

Level 21

Seventh Talent Point: Twisted Faith again (of course)
Abilities/Basic Strategy/Keybinds/Macros: No change

Not a whole lot to say here, other than levels with no immediate rewards are slightly depressing.

Level 22

Abilities: Cure Disease (16% of base mana, 40 yd range, Instant, Removes 1 disease from the friendly target.)
Basic Strategy: No change.
Macros/Keybinds: No change.
For the moment I’m not adding this into my keybinds. The plan is to reinstall Healbot on Illysu, since that will give me color indications when someone has been hit with a disease. I haven’t played a priest much before, so I wouldn’t know a disease debuff icon if I saw one… (doh)

Onwards

Things have become slightly harder since leaving the starting area, but it’s still not much of a challenge. I’m not dying near as much as I expected and I’m not sure if that’s just because Blizzard nerfed the content or if dual-boxing is making things smoother.

As grindy as it is, it’s fun seeing the horde side of things in the twenties. I’ve got a lot of alts, but they are all low level alts and most of them were leveled before Cata hit. So on one hand I don’t mind taking my time and on the other– I want less facerolling!

I love challenges, one of the reason I picked up dual-boxing and I want to be forced to play to the best of my ability, not just ‘good enough’. *sighs*

Which means I may be PvP-bound in the near future…