Here we are in another installment of The Core, where we talk to the central, key players in the top guilds, the guys that are the foundation and arguably the best players in their respective guilds. This week we have Method's shadowpriest Valiane with us. For earlier entries just click on the banner above.
Tell us about yourself a bit.
My name is Daniel I’m 21 years old, I live in Denmark. I recently dropped out of my Informatics studies to start on Financial Management this summer. I play the shadow priest named Majinvaliane formerly known as "Valiane” in method
What's your WoW history been like so far?
I started 3 months or so after the game was released in EU and I was basically just running around like a noob on a mage which I deleted when I
reached lvl 29. Then I started playing a rogue til I reached lvl 60 and joined a guild (can’t remember the name!) and started running MC.
Later I joined a guild named Koh I Noor on Emerald Dream with my rogue and raided with them until early BC, this was the end of my rogue for a long time.
In early BC I lvled a druid on Ravencrest and joined the guild imba as resto. Early Sunwell we were in need of an additional shadow priest, I already had a priest I had played as my main alt for a long time so I filled this spot and I’ve been playing shadow since then.
I was imba until early ’09 or so when I joined Immersion who was ranked 43 in the world or so when I joined them I raided with them for a bit more than a year, beating apex to realm first Death’s Demise and Grand Crusader which was amazing!
But I wanted more so a week prior to the release of ICC hardmodes I applied to Inner Sanctum, following Fulshara from Immersion. Fulshara and I moving resulted in us being able to drag other people like Shakaroz and Ellizia along with us to IS. I joined the day before ICC hardmodes was released.
I played with Inner Sanctum until the end of January 2011. I can’t remember why I started speaking to Rei that morning in school over IRC (Rei was in Inner Sanctum for a short period of time at the end of wotlk, and we were talking on and off from time to time after he went back to method) But it resulted in Rei basically offering me and Shakaroz a trial in method. Shakaroz took his time(3 days or so) to decide on this matter. But I had told Rei I would be over for the coming reset and ever since February 2nd 2011 I’ve been in method being a boss SP with Artzie and a few trials coming and going along the way.
What do you think makes you a good raider, why are you a core part of your guild?
Knowing your class in and out, having a proper UI which supplies you with the information you need to play your class properly.
Being able to take time off for progress; you might be the best player in the world but it doesn’t matter if you can’t be there when it matters.
Why I am a core part of my guild? Because I’m a great player who does amazing!
What was your favorite moment in WoW?
EZ
My first KJ kill
What was your favorite boss kill (regardless of whether it's WF or not) and favorite raid?
Ill quote the answer above!
My first KJ kill.
As for raid; Sunwell, because of the overall instance design and I really liked all of the bosses.
What are the best and worst features of your main class?
Best: All the utility you have as shadow, Hymns, Dispersion, shields, life grip and being able to heal in clutch moments.
Worst: SHADOW ORBS, WORST MASTERY IN THE WORLD
What would be the single most important thing about playing your main class well?
Proper dot/buff/debuff tracking.
What makes your guild special, what separates it from the other top guilds?
We have Scott as our leader, one of the danes is even crazier than the rest (Hentrenson!) Last but not least we have the craziest german Protec.
Apart from that I think it’s about the people in the guild all are there for 1 reason, to be the best, no matter our differences, we just make it work and kill stuff when progress hits
What is your favorite game outside of WoW?
Not really playing anything besides WoW at current time.
Would you say DS was a successful dungeon overall (regardless of the drama surrounding the WF race at the start)?
No, I didn’t really like the raid at all as there really wasn’t any fight with anything “special” in it and there wasn’t really any fight where you had to think out of the box. Nothing like Ragnaros P2 where there was many different ways to handle the adds and the triangle on the frost patch in P4, basically no fight in DS had any real depth to it which was a big bummer for me personally.
What are your thoughts on the beta so far?
Since its only possible to lvl to 88 atm it’s pretty boring with not much to do, and since core talents/abilities for shadow priest gets a major change pretty much every new patch the release it isn’t really possible to start figuring out what is the most optimal to use. But I’m sure once we get to lvl 90 and we will be able to test the new instances and pvp it’s gonna be a lot more exciting than it currently is.
What are you most looking forward to in MoP, aside from raiding?
Probably the huge change to pvp with the 2 new stats they are adding pvp power/defense. Hopefully this will be the final death blow to pve gear it pvp which will finally balance it more out. There’s just no fun facing an RMP with the best pve parts, killing you in the opening shatter.
Also the Challenge mode stuff sounds very interesting!
What do you think about the new talent system, both in general and specifically for your main (and maybe alt) class?
I think it’s the way to go for a game like WoW which is constantly evolving. As several of their dev’s pointed out several times in the past, the original talent system worked fine for the original game. I would even say the way they took it into BC was also pretty good, but in wrath it just started to add up to be too much. Too many talents to pick and too many “10% dmg increase” talents you HAD to get, which is why I think the way they are doing it now is better than just building on top of the current one.
Removing all those mandatory talents and giving the player the option to pick a flavor talent is a great idea I really like, which also means that I can finally spec into Power Infusion as shadow!
