A new trade

Selwyn has had the most convoluted professions out of all my characters.

He was born a miner/JC and did rather well flying around Northrend swinging his little pick axe while waiting for raids to form.

But then we (Tir and I) got the bright idea of having a tailor of each cloth type within our combined stable of characters.

His priest was already shadow, my mage was spell, just needed moon.

It was always a little nervewracking on a PvP server to be a little heal-spec priest in the middle of nowhere distracted by a dot and being unsuspecting prey to just about anyone that wandered by.

I don’t recall ever being attacked, but it still made for some nervous times.

About this time I pulled off my 66 to 80 leveling of a DK in one day, I now had a miner on the server to supplement my JC.

A rather articulate crab

Nothing from me today, but something from a crab.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2053469

As much as I’ve struggled with new playstyles and pondered leaving healing behind, I get what Blizz is doing and I applaud it.

For those of you behind the evil walls of filtered internet content, the entirety of Ghostcrawler’s post is below the break.

What does disc healing feel like?

As requested, this post will be all about the touchy-feely aspects of healing as disc.

So gimmie just a minute to get myself all cozy on the couch and start off by telling you about my mother…

OK, OK, I won’t go all Freud on you.

But how a class/spec/role *feels* is a very valid and legitimate subject.

I don’t like the way fire *feels* on my mage. I understood it, I even geared for it once upon a time, but I never liked the way it felt, too frantic and reactionary. Arcane had an order, a flow, and I was in control of it. If I wanted more damage, *I* could take steps to burst while my fire cohorts were sacrificing gnomes and praying to the gods of RNG.

OK, Seriously now, the “even as disc” Post

I got you good last time, didn’t I?

Thought I would actually finish up my long-winded manifesto about disc healing, didn’t you?

Ha!

Anyway, we were talking about Deathwing fucking up the world when last we met.

Along with the birth of goblins and worgen, we were witness to the death of the bubble.

Now don’t get me wrong, PW: Shield is still a VERY valid tool in a disc priest’s (or any priest, for that matter) arsenal of defensive tools. I die a little inside when I’m healing alongside another priest and the only bubbles in the raid are my own. It is always better to keep the damage from happening than to play catch-up while scrubbing the gore out of your target’s armor. Unless it’s a paladin tank and he’s low on mana, But that’s an exception so we’re ignoring him.

For reals, the “even as disc” Post

So yeah, we just might finally get around to finishing this up. Maybe.

Anyway… I’ve recapped what healing was like in Wrath, glanced at some of the new abilities available to priests in Cata, and looked at the monumental increase in the mana cost of providing even the most basic of support utilities: dispels and buffs. I’ll not kill you all with the math, but rest assured that the heals, especially AoE heals, suffered a similar inflation.

But truly, the most important part of healing is the mindset.

Healing is a beast unto itself, just like tanking and DPS require different schools of thought.

In the days of yore, disc healing had its ups and downs.

Take Two, the “even as disc” Post

The problem with not blogging in a while is there’s so much to say that it just wants to all come bubbling forth at once. I’m not sure how many are willing to sit through multiple thousand-word posts, so I’m trying to limit my exuberance to more manageable sizes.

Last time I talked about how disc healing, and healing in general, was in Wrath.

By the end of the expansion, it wasn’t too difficult at all.

And then Deathwing fucked up the world.

The “even as disc” Post

So I mentioned the other day, something about something being cake to heal, even as disc.

And I promised an explanation to be forthcoming in a future post.

And the peanut gallery proceeded to all but place bets on when the next post would be.

Har-har-har, guys.

So here’s a rose-tinted view of what healing was like in Wrath:

Easy.

Oh, I know, if I went back and read all my posts about learning how to heal it paints a far more frantic and bloody picture.

But truthfully, I bring a lot of that upon myself.

25463-D

Is down!

That is to say, Atra-fucking-medes has been slain.

In simpler terms, we finally were able to beat the shit out of a blind dragon.

Yeah, we got rolled repeatedly by a handicapped reptile.

The new raiding season started out very well.

Sometime in December the guild wandered over to own the new VoA-style encounter in Tol Barad. I’ve gotten to do the fight once, and it was cake to heal, even as disc. (What do I mean, even as disc? ZOMG. More on this later. Not today later, another day later.)