Monglo of Icecrown, a level 70 night elf warrior, showed me tonight how the new patch changed shadowmeld for night elfs. shadowmeld lets night elfs go into a basic "stealth" mode, which allows them to go stealth as long as they don't move. It had a 10 second cool down and was really pointless for night elf rogues to use as our stealth's cool down was faster (at least mine is, bein' a sub rogue).
Well, Monglo showed me that shadowmeld's changed, now it has a two minute cool down, BUT it allows you to do something amazing... now you can go shadowmeld in combat. Now shadowmeld is like a night elf racial vanish.
For non-night elf rogues, it allows you to break combat to eat, mount, whatever you couldn't do in combat. For night elf rogues, like myself, it allows you to go into shadowmeld to break combat, which instantly allows you to go regular stealth. Basically, it allows us night elf rogues to have an extra vanish, we just have to hold still while using it. I have a total of two vanishes I can use, with preparation. Well I have my preparation cool down cut down from 10 minutes to 5 because of a talent spec, but still... I hate using preparation to vanish unless it's for an emergency. So now, if my vanish is on cool down, I can save my preparation and use shadowmeld instead. The only thing is that it can be broken from DoT's just like vanish, so you have to be careful not to use it if you have DoTs, or to use cloak of shadows right before using it (unless you have a bleed DoT). And of course, you have to stand still to use it, then immediately go stealth and you can move.
Some of the practical uses for it can be when you're stuck in combat because someone started fighting an NPC near you, which puts you into combat until it's killed or for those times in AV when you're near a tower and want to stealth or mount or eat. Vanish would be a over-kill for those times because, for me, I have a glyph of vanish that gives me increased movement speed once I vanish. I'd rather have that extra speed using vanish when fighting an enemy, so using shadowmeld in situations where you simply need to mount up or stealth is perfect.
I consider this to be very important because my vanish has a cool down of 3 minutes (improved with a talent spec), and this shadowmeld only has a cool down of 2 minutes... so I'm gonna' try to shadowmeld - stealth as my first resort, rather than my first vanish because I only have to wait 2 minutes.
And yes, shadowmeld can be used while fighting NPCs. Man, this is some awesome shit, something I haven't seen any night elfs use yet in battlegrounds 'cuz I don't think any of us knew about it yet.
So add this near your vanish icon and key map it near it too; start gettin' use to usin' this. Enjoy it night elfs... we've earned it.
Jeaxx
Posts
