A Noobs First Steps to Raiding

As a fresh level 60 I knew that the time had come to change from a shadow priest to a holy one. Life outside instances was going to be hard but as a healer I would be able to get into group really easy. The good news was that as soon as I made the change I realised how much easier healing was, bigger heals meant I needed to heal less and that meant my mana lasted most fights instead of having to drink mana potions or drink copiuos amount of Morning Glory Dew constantly. I had done my research and learned that spirit was my best friend and started to collect armour with this stat on. But gearing up as a newly level capped player back in vanilla (level 60) was a very different environment to the one freshly dinged (or should that be dung?) level 80 has now (patch 3.3.3 May 2010). 

The Final Countdown

The day I hit level 50 was the day Shadowsong EU opened the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Knowing a few people in the know I got the tip that it was happening at 6am server time on a Saturday morning to hopefully avoid the server crashes that followed the attempt to bang the gong.

Masses of people were there to watch and then the inevitable disconnect and when trying to log back in getting the world server is down message. This fiasco went on for an hour but eventually things stabilised and the ceremony went ahead and the gates opened.

I was still 10 levels away from being able to join the end game raiders who went their way downing the one-off world bosses and onto the 2 raid instances, The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj a 20 man raid and the 40 man raid The Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. It would be quite some time before I went there but there was still plenty of content for the non-raiders to get their teeth into to save Azeroth from the bug invasion!