Healing Priests Get The Short End of the Gear-Stick... (QQ post)

Healing Priests get the short end of the stick when it comes to gear. Period.

First off, we're clothies. There is only one kind of gear we can use. We can't be like Druids and use leather AND cloth. Shammies get mail and lower, and Pallys get it all. Cloth, that's all we get. It's an exchange, yes, lower armor for more powerful heals, and yes, I chose to play a priest knowing the armor restrictions. That's not what I'm writing about today.

Today, I'd like to QQ a little bit about cloth gear with hit on it. In addition to only being able to wear cloth, healing priests have absolutely no need for hit and therefore gear with hit on it is not for them. If we want to roll on cloth gear with hit, it has to be offspec. Even if it's a huge upgrade. It doesn't work the other way around either. DPS classes that wear cloth can roll on any cloth gear and it's all mainspec for them, sometimes they don't even need the hit if they've reached their hit-cap. Healing priests already draw from a small gear pool, made even small by the fact that half the gear has hit on it.

Rolling against a DPS clothie is a pain, especially if there's no hit on the piece, because if I'm rolling on something, I need it, there is no other option for me. If I'm rolling on something, that's because it's 1 of maybe 10 things I can actually use from ICC or whatever the raid is. If I lose the roll on a piece of gear with no hit, I can't necessarily roll on the next piece of cloth, I definitely can't roll if it has hit (unless it's offspec).

Kady does have a couple of pieces of gear with hit on them, because all the stats were upgrades from what she had been wearing. My guild has yelled at me a couple of times for rolling mainspec on something with hit, mostly if it was against a pug or some other cloth DPS. I always end up getting the piece the third or fourth time it drops because everyone else has gotten it by then. I get third-generation leftovers, even though they're complete upgrades, all because of a few points to the hit stat.

I maintain that if cloth DPS can roll on gear without hit, I should be able to roll on gear with hit, especially if it's an upgrade. I'm talking a decent upgrade too, not a few extra points in intellect or something like that. If a few extra points in a stat is the only part of the upgrade, I'll roll offspec, but if it's a huge upgrade you better believe I'll roll on it. If Druids can roll on my cloth pieces because it's an upgrade for stats (and they'd be losing an armor class), then I can roll on DPS cloth pieces with hit.

/QQ