As a rule, I find that GMs respond to my tickets within a few hours, even when I ask to talk to a GM rather than just report an issue. Ensidia has it even better: it’s well-known, in the community and to Ensidia themselves, that Blizzard has GMs specifically watching world-first attempts. A member of a raid making a world first attempt would have a response within seconds.

As for the bugs themselves, I guarantee that every encounter in the game, even those with non-unique mobs, has bugs. They may never be encountered, but they’re there. Sometimes they’re not fixable without breaking something else; sometimes they’re minor and not worth delaying the patch for; sometimes, it’s just that nobody found them. Blizzard did extensive internal testing on the Lich King encounter, as they have on every other major boss encounter, but sometimes bugs just slip through. In this case, it occurred to nobody in the Blizzard testing team to use siege damage on the val’kyr adds. When they found out about the bug, they disabled the means of dealing the siege damage while they worked on fixing the bug itself.

Meanwhile, Ensidia knew there was a bug and used it to their advantage, even if they didn’t know how it worked. They are very, very well aware that when you know there’s a bug and you use it to your advantage, that’s exploiting. No, they didn’t have to report the bug – but they had a choice between reporting, not reporting and continuing to exploit, and not reporting and not continuing. Two of those would have resulted in Ensidia being allowed to keep playing. They chose the one that didn’t.

Personally, I think most raid level players know an exploit when they see one and players at the level of Ensidia should definitely know.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that they had members recently leveling Engineering.

Then there’s the fact they’ve been known to use exploits previously so, all in all, I’d say Blizzard has…finally…done the right thing.
Theliana´s last blog: Rise and Fall of the Lich King: World of Warcraft Developer Interview

Chaotic Skyflare is great for Shadow priests, and as soon as I get an spriest hat I’m stickin’ one in. But healers generally are at the bottom of DPS meters for good reason. ;)

And yes, you should! The site’s there when you want it. :)

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41398

Shadowpanther.net is a well-respected authority on number-crunching and min-maxing for rogues, and here’s their PvE gem chart:

http://shadowpanther.net/gems-pve.htm

You say, “It’s tempting to think ‘oh, they mean “critical spell effect”.’ They don’t. It’s just damage. Steer clear.” It’s not quite “just” damage– that 3% translates to a reasonable boost in dps. In fact, all of the top rogue metas have that particular 3%. =)

I totally understand that this is a list for priest /healers/, and you say you’ll be “leaving out the gems that are clearly not healing gems”, but the Skyflare was still in there and caught my attention, so here’s my comment on its usefulness– if not for haelz priesties, maybe some food for thought for a future Tiryns? ;)

I highly recommend it for healers, particularly if you’re pugging frequently. Tanks who run without raid frames, and are oblivious to the fact that Charge and Pursuit of Justice can carry them swiftly out of heal range? Less of a problem. : )

That said, I think most priests should probably stick with IED just because mana is an issue for everyone who’s not just stacking Intellect like it’s sweet, sweet candy.