Mind Control.Follow

As some of you may have seen in General, I'm getting to know my newly-Lv80 priest dungeon-wise.

Prior to getting up to 80, my only group experience with a Priest has been Recruit-a-Friend, and I'm starting to learn the ins and outs of being a priest.

I think so far, I make a better Shadow Priest than a healer, I'm doing.. well.. Surprising DPS to say the least. In healing gear, I'm effortlessly doing 2k on bosses, better than I thought I'd be doing, and better than most DPS in Heroic Pugs I've seen, lol.

Anyways, during a guild Heroic "Gear the guild up!" night, I participated in Heroic UK.

The tank was a Warrior who struck me as being somewhat new to the job (I believe his usual spec is Arms), and the healer was somewhat of a newbie healer priest as well.

The two of them seemed to be having trouble with the larger pulls, especially the pulls that involved the bomb guys. The Warrior was having trouble keeping some of the 4-mob packs down, and would get dangerously close to dying on a few of the pulls.

After having eaten a bomb (he dropped it while I was scrambling to throw a shield on the almost-dead tank and I didn't notice it), I gritted my teeth and said "grrr, okay I'm tired of your f---ing bombs!" and proceeded to mind-control one of those guys on the next pull.

Immediately I noticed _stellar_ results; the tank never went below 50%, never lost aggro on any of the mobs (being 1 less mob to worry about), and I made the mobs eat their own bombs for awhile. lol.

By the time MC wore off, the mob I was controlling had pulled aggro and gotten damaged to about 50% health left. When I dispelled MC, the mob was already half-dead and we easily finished it off.

Throughout the rest of H-UK, I MC'd whenever we had a group of 3 or more, I favored either the bomb guys, or the shamans (saved the priest's life once with a well-placed healing wave) when possible.

My question is...

I rarely see MC in a Heroic Group... is it bad for a DPS priest to MC? Is it only because it drops his DPS, or is there another reason that they don't do it?

I see MC as being CC+1, not only do you CC the mob, but you also get the mob to fight for you, at the cost of some DPS...

Now obviously, if the tank+healer can handle those mobs, there's no real reason to use it.. .but in that group, the results were very favorable.

I kinda figured that was part of the reason, yes... but I wanted to make sure there was no real downsides to MCing, or if there were any specific reasons of why I Shouldn't, other than "less DPS" and "It isn't needed".

Being my first priest at endgame, I figured I should maek sure there's no cons to MCing, if it was dangerous, or what-not.

Back in the day, Mind Control was also a fun way to get amazing buffs for your party. You MC'd certain mobs, then cast their buffs on your party members. One I remember in particular was a huge, long-lasting spell damage buff you could get off certain mobs in the Botanica.

Haven't heard much of that in WotLK, but if you want to see what sorts of buffs you could grab in vanilla and TBC, here's a link. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11871678

Go do Naxx25. You'll love the Razuvius fight as one of the mind controllers.