Lame Priest

...hobbling along now, then.

So it's been a couple of months. Things have happened, and stuff continues.

I'm a Discipline Priest now, with a side of Shadow for those rare occasions when we get another healer in the group (or the raid is so choked with healing goodness that they might, conceivably, one day... mmmmmaaaaybe let me DPS -- HA! Yeah right). I'm enjoying it, although I'll admit I slightly miss the Circle of Healing to top people off when I've got nothing better to do.

My heal style seems to be working so far. I even did a round on General Vezaxx as Disc without having to step into the green kill sludge at all. As far as I know, NONE of the healers present stepped into the green sludge, actually. Which came as a surprise since it wasn't intentional. Just... someone tosses down green sludge and your healers getting Shadow Crashed is always a bad, bad thing. Always. So we elected to tough it out, and managed.

Granted, this was on 10 man. But it was still ridiculously satisfying.

My guild is visiting ToC, Uld and when timing permits, we also visit VoA for the loot pinata. We raid twice a week, 3 hours a night, and if we fail, we fail. Hooray for lock out extensions, although we're only using those in Uld for the most part since most of us are soooo tired of most of the bosses at this point.

ToC is pretty fun, and relatively easy. I found it utterly strange that the third out of five boss encounters would be so much more difficult than even the final encounter. It's like, "Oh hey, here, free loot. Free loot again. Okay now that we've softened you up a bit..." *SMOOSH* (x25, unless the hunter or rogues or mages get lucky).

Around the time this went Live, I was pondering which healing spec to keep. I was needling the Powers that Be in the guild to just toss me on Dispel duty (since, you know, I had a spell called Mass Dispel at my disposal and it seemed more important than pinging small heals on people as they dug their own graves). It worked, since our Shadow Priest seemed to have issues with keeping that up on top of trying to overtake the meters, and the other Priest didn't seem to have any interest in watching buffs. So I got my wish and wasn't assigned to aggro heal, and it was good. And it took a ton of mana. I ... didn't spec JUST for Mass Dispel, which in some ways perhaps I should have but on the other hand speccing that way just for one fight? Really? No. I'd rather be a fail priest than cave to that kind of robotic mentality.

And thus I've come to love my Decursive and Focus windows. Lots of single target dispels on the Focus, and clickies on the Decursive squares when I can spare the cooldown and the Focus isn't buttered up in Renew, Earth Shield, or a myriad of freaking Druid HoTs (or pally bubble, that's always a good one... 'zzah Mass Dispel at last). And I do throw out heals occasionally. Especially when the HoT casting NPCs are finally locked down or dead. Bubbles and Penance seems to help a bit, and of course I'm prioritizing.

And then once you get past the grueling encounter (of waiting for your CCers and DoTers to come to some sort of compromise, and people to stop doing silly stuff) finally, you get to play with the twins.

Twins. Valkyrs even. Old lady smoker voices they may have, but they're kinda hot. And how hard are they? Not that hard. Not multiple-raid-night-to-master hard. We've done this encounter in a couple of ways - split the raid, DPS'em seperately, but more recently we've gone with the "All DPS and Tanks bunch up around the clicky thing, and we think it'd be a GREAT idea to have all but a few of our healers running around out there eating up monochrome bullets for us while we focus fire on a single target." Which has worked pretty well except when your healer is one color and is running half way across the room to avoid a mass of 6 bullets of the wrong color trying to explode on her ass and they WON'T STOP FOLLOWING HER like she's got some sort of magical magnetic tether on her.

It happened once.

I'm not over it yet.

And then there's Anub. He's cute. We've played with him a number of times on 10 (and killed him), and a few times on 25 (without killing him). We just tend to run out of time, and since the loot for the other encounters is good enough, we let the instance reset each week for a fresh round of tasty gear.

We do tend to go in blind the first time, and then look stuff up afterward. Which works alright for me.

Anyway. That's my big update since the last one. Stuff has happened, I'm enjoying Disc Priest right now. Looking forward to trying Shadow sometime in the next, oh, decade maybe (aside from soloing and heroics that go by too quickly in a group of very well geared mains).