Soooooo healing...that's still what I do, right?

It's been a while since I've posted anything about healing. So, here's a post about healing! :)

I have noticed that healing still comes most naturally to me. DPS and tanking are fun, and I seemed to pick them up fairly quickly (and for the most part hold my own, I'm not sure how good I actually am), but healing flows from these fingers onto my action bar and through my mouse-over macros (thanks Garaba). I one-handed healed a random heroic the other day because I was eating. It was H UP and I was only throwing up Renews and--wow, I don't even remember the name right now, it's #3 on my action bar, it's the jumpy-around-heal that goes to up to 5 people. Yeah, 3. Occasionally I'd use Circle but only because it was easier than putting my food down. My gearscore is pretty high now, so a lot of the older Northrend heroics are so easy to heal they're boring. Which is probably why I'm working on gearing my tank.

I was DPSing on my hunter in H VH not too long ago and the healer was a priest who never left Shadow spec. She Shadow-Healed the whole dungeon. Granted, health bars weren't topped off (like I like to do), but nobody died, even during boss fights. I'm apparently not the only one who's bored with the heroics. I guess this happens when an expansion is winding down. I started playing a month or two before Wrath came out, nowhere near the level cap when it hit, Wrath pretty much popped my cherry in a couple of ways.

Wrath is the first expansion that I got to move through with my guild, together. A lot of us were leveling at the same time, but some were farther than others (*cough*Darwe & Heap*cough*). We were all new 80's around the same time and experienced gearing up through heroics together, before Dungeon Finder. Our first guild raids were Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum. We were working on Ulduar when Kady got geared enough to help and became my main. We never did finish Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader came out before we could and that held our attention. Well, most of us. There are a couple of us (Garaba and I mostly) who want to go back and finish Ulduar to finish it, but that'll have to be a pug I suppose.

And now we're raiding Ice Crown Citadel--which is the first endgame content for a lot of us. We were fairly geared as a guild when we started it, and we have a rather large learning curve, but we work well as a team and inevitably get through one boss after the next. Currently, we've gotten as far as defeating Rotface. We would have raided yesterday and hopefully gotten just as far again, but Hubby and I went to the movies (can't say no to free tickets to an early screening of "Clash of the Titans"!). I'm sure if I logged on right now, I could probably get in with Darwe's guild, but I'd rather wait for Hubby to get home with Little Caesar's and do some random heroics with him on our alts :)

So yeah, getting bored with conflicting raid schedules makes me roll alts while we wait for the new content to drop. I know I'm not alone. How do you kill time waiting for the next expansion?

Newest Level 80

Meet Emila, my new tank. A warrior to be specific. I'll post about her a little bit, but probably more on the viewpoint of the receiving end of healing. A tank's view of a healer, or at least, a reasonably critical tank's view of the healer. We'll see. So far, I've mostly been tanking high regular dungeons to get emblems and gear. I've tanked Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron in addition to the other Northrend dungeons. Have not yet taken on Halls of Reflection or Trial of the Champion (although I haven't done the latter because Dungeon Finder has not put me there yet), but I'm looking forward to it. I like tanking a lot, but not as much as healing. It's something to do on the side, when I need a break from healing, plus several people in the guild have alts they'd like to start bringing to raids and if I can get all 3 of my toons geared up, I will be pretty much interchangeable with anyone else in the raid :)

Dear Heals.

Dear Heals,

I need heals!

Love,
DPS

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Dear DPS,

I saw that you needed heals. I also saw that you refused to move out of the bright pink puddle of death. I decided that the tank needed my attention more.

Love,
Heals

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Dear Heals,

I'm going to pull the entire room at once. All 27 mobs. Handle it. K thnx bye.

Love,
Tank

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Dear Tank,

I'm going to sit and drink Kungaloosh while you pull the entire room. Have fun dying for not waiting until your healer's ready.

Love,
Heals

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Dear Heals,

I like to Life Tap myself to near death. I expect you to keep my health bar full, I need my mana to stay on top of the other DPS.

Love,
Your Favorite Warlock

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Dear Warlock,

I need my mana more than you do. Healing you when you Life Tap wastes my mana. Use a mana pot or learn to use your mana more efficiently. If I see you losing health, I will bubble you and that's it. You are not a melee class, you don't need my full attention.

Love,
Heals

New cell phone. One with a full keyboard. Hoping this will encourage me to blog more, especially since it looks like I can use more than 180 characters...

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

We has Skoll <3

While herbing in Storm Peaks on Kady yesterday, I happened to see a worg down in the corner of my screen as I was flying just north of Brunnhildar Village. At first I didn't think anything of it until I realized that worgs aren't something I normally see while herbing in SP, so I stopped and turned around. Much to my immense joy, I saw lightning on this blue worg's fur and squealed with delight! While my main is a priest, let's not forget that my first 80 was/is a hunter and I'm very aware of what the spirit beasts look like and how rare they are to find.

Super was about to start dinner but I called him out of the kitchen and told him to hurry and get on his hunter (Ulfgarz) so he could tame this amazing beast (he likes worgs more than I do, I prefer the cat family of pets). Unfortunately, Ulf does not have Beast Mastery. He's a Survivalist and having switched to leveling Super almost right after hitting 80 on Ulf, the gold for dual-spec went to Super instead. Lade, however, does have dual-spec. I got it on her specifically so she could tame the worm pet (who I think I actually named recently though I can't for the life of me remember what it ended up being...).

Super got on his hunter anyway and we partied up. I camped Skoll on Kady while I waited for Ulf to show up and camp him while I got Lade over there. Thankfully, Lade wasn't too far away in the Argent Tourny Grounds and I logged and brought her over as quickly as I could. I had a minor panic attack when I saw a horde flying towards me while waiting for Ulf to arrive, it ended up being a Mage and they continued flying, thankfully. I was worried that they'd see Skoll and want to kill him or tell a horde hunter where he was, but that was the only sign of another player that we saw the whole time.

I arrived on Lade, ecstatic to see that Skoll was still alive and patroling his little spawn point, as I knew he was because Ulf was busy guarding him. I hopped off my mount, set a freezing trap, and began taming. With no other players around, and the freezing trap holding, the tame was easy as pie. I had my sparkly new Spirit Beast in mere seconds and was off to the Tourny Grounds again to show him off. I spent the whole day today using the random dungeon tool and playing with my new pet (whose name is Aemilia, which comes from Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors"). I've only seen one, maybe two, people on my server with this pet and I couldn't believe my luck to have stumbled across it the way I did, it almost makes me want to track down and tame the other Spirit Beasts. Almost ;)

Race Change and a Perky Pug

Besides doing Thanksgiving and Christmas achievements on two toons, I've been enjoying 3.3 changes, especially the new dungeon finder tool. But, first things first: who did I change?

One of my Christmas presents to myself was a race change for one of my toons. I've been thinking about doing it for a while, just as a change that's not a new alt (it's the same kind of thing as when I go get my hair cut, a dramatic change that's not actually too dramatic), and Christmas was the perfect excuse to spend some money on myself. I thought about changing Ladelyia to a Dwarf hunter, but if I was going to spend money on a toon, it was going to be a toon that I played a lot. I thought about my warrior tank that I'm raising up (dinged 70 the other day with my hubby's shammy!), but also didn't want to spend money on a toon that wasn't level capped either. That left Kady.

Kady, my pretty little Human priest. The one I raid with, the one I do dailies on. My main. Could I change the one I spent so much time with, the one I brought up from a little level 1 who started as a lark? Fo sho. It took a little while to decide which race to go with. On Lade, the choice would have been easy: Dwarf. I liked the idea of having a priest with Stoneblood, something I could use to at least remove the poisons on myself. I still liked the idea of having a pretty priest and I think the Dwarf females are cute, but not pretty. I already had a Night Elf so I didn't want to go there again (I'm not a fan of the ears or the unibrow) and that left having a Draenai.

Draenai. Aside from the hooves, there's not a sexier race than the Draenai imo. Tall, sleek, even the tails are sexy. My absolute favorite hairstyle with the female Draenais are the two pigtails, all of my alt Draenais start out with them. I also liked that I could have another HOT, Gift of The Naaru, to use either in my "oh-shit-heal-myself" macro or on another raid member. So really, there was no other choice, I now am the proud player of a Draenai priest. :)

(I didn't go with the two pigtails for Kady yet. However, she does have a ponytail and what appears to be 3 "bump-its" in her hair XD)


My Perky Pug.

OMG, it might be the cutest pet ever. I love the corehound puppy that everyone with an authenticator got, as ugly as it is, it's still adorable because it's a puppy. So it's ugly in a really cute way, or cute in a really ugly way, I'm not sure.

The pug looks like a real dog, which stands out and looks unusual in the visual style of WoW. But the part that won me over, besides the fact that you can see fur on it, was the fact that it rubs it's but all over the ground. It's hysterical. And the fact that I got it by doing random dungeons, earning emblems, and keeping my heals up to snuff, makes it even better.