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Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
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Saying hello from Pandaria

My Tala I’ve started playing WoW again, and this week I hit 90 on Talá, my discipline priest, and started gearing up. Gearing up for endgame between Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria feels so different–I dinged 90 without doing a lot of quests, but with the help of leftover Justice Points and the new Scenarios Finder, I got to 435 item level within one night without having to do long convoluted reputation quest lines.

Of course, that also left me rather scared about jumping in and healing all these new heroic instances. I’m still a bit traumatized about Heroic Shadowfang Keep back in Cataclysm; I remember the multiple wipes on Baron Ashbury, the tank quitting on us (and as a healer, that just pretty much puts the blame on me), etc. I didn’t know if I had enough spirit (I read somewhere that raids brought folks up to 10k spirit, and I was sitting a little shy of 5k!), I was worried about not having enough mana regeneration and not having enough throughput. But no one ever wins sitting at home and not trying, so I just dove in last night.

Thankfully, I did have enough spirit, although it would cut close sometimes. But the highlight of the night was in Heroic Scholomance, in the room with the mini-boss after Lilian Voss. The tank told us to wait until he had rounded the mini-boss and the last pack (or maybe it was two packs?) before AOEing. The rogue Tricksed; however, he was out of sight of the tank–and chaos ensued.

What was left was me, a mage, and the tank, all low on health after Tricks played havoc with aggro. Bubbling and healing the tank, I was left with about 20% health; healing myself up, the tank got dangerously low. Pain Suppression on the tank while I healed him up and said goodbye to my mana. The mage was teetering at this point, but then so was I, so after a shield and renew on them, I tried to get myself up as soon as I could. When I got myself up, the tank was again dangerously low. Void Shift saved him–I basically healed myself to get him back up haha. While my Mindbender beat up on mobs to make them give me some mana, I did a quick Hymn to speed things up, after which I got the two of us clothies up again in between trying to make sure the tank doesn’t suddenly die. Eventually (THANKFULLY) the mobs all soon died.

The rest of the dungeon went by without too many problems, and at the end of it, the tank said, “awesome heals”.

And my night was made :)

I definitely first thought there were too many things going on with priests, there is no way I am going to keep everything straight in a fight. I mean, Pain Suppression AND Void Shift? Really? But they saved us tonight and I am crazy grateful I had taken the time to keybind Void Shift this week.

This is why I love healing. The praise might be few and far between, there are no shiny DPS numbers, and oftentimes a lot of responsibility falls on your shoulders on fights. But nights like these, when a tank you don’t know compliments you on your healing, and you know without a doubt that you had kept the fight going by supporting the tank and the DPS by using everything in your arsenal–the feeling is priceless and unparalleled.

Bring it on.

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Ready, set, pull!

I have my two mains (don’t laugh) to 85 now, and decently geared: Tala has been raiding, and Eilonwyn good enough for heroics and maybe a Baradin Hold. Tala is discipline healer main spec, and shadow off-spec; while Eilonwyn is arcane and frost.

Earlier this week, I realized exactly what kind of play style suits me. Planning suits me. Pre-strategizing fights and what I do in them suits me. That’s now evident in the specs and type of play I like: I prefer PVE to PVP because I like being able to plan what to do and when, discipline healing is basically “pre-healing” by mitigating and absorbing damage, and arcane play style relies a lot on how well you plan and sync up your burn phases.

Say what?

This realization came about due to two things:

First, I ended up raiding at 5fps, because we had no healer cover for that night, and I did not realize that the Mumble overlays were wreaking havoc on my FPS (I realized after the raid. GG). I have never been more thankful of my mitigation that night: blind shielding+hasted Prayer of Healing can just about make it, although it won’t get one very far (overshooting mouse turns and running past stack points will get you killed, folks).

Second, I bit the bullet and changed Eilonwyn’s secondary spec to fire, because the number of frost instants just isn’t ideal for my latency. Initially, I thought that maybe since I was doing alright with my shadow priest spec, I can go fire now with its DOTs and all and work that out–right? WRONG.

It’s not like shadow priest dots, where you refresh them just before they run out, and cast other stuff on cooldown. I was even better with the mage frost spell priority, with its multiple instants; the problem I was having with fire is, how to align the goddamn DOTs for Combustion, y0. I set up my auras and everything, and I know I just need a bit more muscle memory to get it all down pat, but when you finally get the insta-Pyroblast and have the dot up there, Ignite or Living Bomb or freaking both might be down to, what, 2 seconds before they run out, but you need to hit combustion now now now!!. *dies*

Arcane is great for me. Arcane rewards the prepared: knowing when the best time to burn is, shifting your rotation according to your mana levels. It sucks for mobile fights, though, totally. Can we get Firestarter for arcane, please? On the move but hit less, maybe? Kthxbye.

So what now?

I’m a big believer in enjoying the game. It’s a game, you should play the way it’s fun for you. No one should ever feel forced to raid if they don’t feel like it, just because it’s “expected” of them. In the same way, I don’t want to play a spec I get a lot of frustration from (I think I’m a bit too obsessive-compulsive to hit Combustion while all three dots are not up). Sadly, arcane is the weakest mage DPS spec at the moment, and I don’t feel comfortable asking for a raid spot when I’m going with the weakest DPS spec. I know that arcane still puts out well for certain fights…but those fights are a minority. :/

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Renewed

Starcaller Tala, 82 priestWell, not exactly–I seldom use Renew as a discipline priest, but then calling this post “Shielded” isn’t really appropriate.

But yes, I’ve started playing again. :) As with most things, once you complain to The Internets things improve or change for the better ;) so I decided I’d give WoW another run. Instead of going straight for Eilonwyn though, I decided I’d go for levelling Tala, for a couple of reasons:

  1. Arcane right now sucks for anything that needs DPS to be mobile and for multiple-target DPS, and I’d been feeling it as 84 in dungeons like Vortex Pinnacle. The mana required was also crazy. Maybe patch 4.0.6 will help with the latter for mana, but it seems the bigger problem is still there. My second option, frost, is bad for latency- and/or lag-challenged players, due to the number of instants you need to react to. I’ve never been able to get the hang of DoTting, which is why I’m not very keen on playing Fire, although it’s certainly the best if we’re talking about latency or lag spikes (your dots are still ticking even if you lag a bit).
  2. I want to raid! I was watching kill videos last week, and I got caught up in the memories of raiding with my friends. Going with a healer does not only mean a better chance at a spot in a raid, but possibly faster gearing as well (shorter queue times).
  3. This is very superficial, but I feel like I like “Starcaller Tala” more now because of her having a Filipino name, and a title that goes well with it ;)

So I decided, well, what the hell, I’ll see how Tala does. Right now I have a Shadow offspec (the Spirit to Hit conversion is fantastic!!) for questing, which is what I did when I started off. I was nervous about healing, because of the purported mana problems, of the difference in healing as discipline. It also meant I needed to change my bindings, which is HORRIBLE. As DPS, if you change your bindings, you do low DPS for a while until you get used to your bindings. As heals? I forget the binding for Penance and end up using the slow Greater Heal, someone will die.

Well, that’s what happened :( I fumbled along at Throne of the Tides (why!! why not in Blackrock Caverns where I know the fight better!!), wiped once, died another time a few seconds before the boss did.

I considered calling it for the night. It was too stressful. I had two spirit items ninjaed off me as well by the DPS, while I passed on the hit items (which were upgrades for my healing!), but I couldn’t be huffy because, well, I kind of sucked.

But, well, okay. I queued again and finished a couple quests while waiting, staying in my disc spec and just smiting. They take a while longer to die, but it wasn’t so bad. (I still remember the days of hitting frostbolt… waiting for the cast to finish, then hitting it again… then hitting it again… ah, the days when you didn’t know about spell queuing.)

Well, I finished two more dungeons that night (one was just the final boss) and I feel better about my healing now. There are still times when I think, omg what modifier is Penance again? but muscle memory is starting to kick in. In the last dungeon for that night, Blackrock Caverns, the tank and I actually finished Rom’ogg alone because the DPS did not move away from Rom’ogg after the chains, and they were all one-shot (they started listening to boss strat after that). Last night, dungeons also went well, no mishaps, although WoW inexplicably hung on me twice on trash packs–good thing the druid Tranquilitied <3

The leveling trek is crazy now, though :( I’m still rested, but two dungeons and I’m not yet at 50% to 83, with questing while queuing. Oh well, it’s plenty practice for more difficult dungeons…which I should be trying tomorrow :( (specifically, Stonecore and Vortex Pinnacle).

Good luck to me!

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Baby disc heals

So a while back I’ve braved the horrors of LFG and pugged a couple of normal Utgarde Keep and Nexus runs for my then-early-70 draenei priest, Talá. My first ever try at healing in 70+ instances was UK at 69, which was somewhat traumatizing, even with a kind group (read: a group who didn’t kick me out for the number of times we wiped, or I died, or the shadow priest had to backup heals; the whole group actually either had healer mains or alts, lol).

Talá, the priest

Talá, the priest

Prior to Northrend, I’d been healing holy-specced with Healbot. As I did lowbie instances though, I realized that I was doing a lot of shielding; so it made sense to me to respec to discipline. I’d also felt that in addition to having too many raid frames (on Eilonwyn I was running with Pitbull and Decursive; on my priest I was running with Pitbull, Decursive and Healbot!), Healbot was sometimes being a bit too smart for me. It’s possible I just hadn’t configured it correctly, but knowing plenty healers went with Grid and Clique for healing, I decided I’d go with Pitbull and Clique (and get rid of Decursive).

So, a spec change and a UI change was probably not the best way to go about trying a “new” dungeon as heals. It put me off even playing with Talá for a while, as I wasn’t too keen on leveling her if I was just going to go DPS in endgame again.

After a while, I finally did join LFG, with a comment about being a newbie disc heals. Almost surprisingly, I did get people to invite me along (woo!) and was able to practice, and I seem to be doing relatively well as the parties I’ve been to have told me. The last one I’ve tried (after a long break of not playing her) was Old Kingdom; sadly we kept wiping :(

I can certainly use more practice, especially with the “rotation” (and my click-bindings!), but it’s not so bad. I basically keep shields up on the tank, drop a Prayer of Mending on a melee DPS everytime it’s up (ranged sometimes too), and shield people up if there’s raid damange going around. I can have a good bit of trouble with too much raid damage though, as I haven’t exactly found the best way to deal with it other than Circle of Healing which positively consumes mana like arcane mages (nom nom nom!).

The gameplay is certainly quite different from a DPS point of view, and something I feel keen enough to continue playing with. The pressure can be worse, and the rewards not-as-evident. With DPS there is a sense of satisfying finality when the boss dies; with Arcane there are even “exciting” phases when you pop all your cooldowns and burn mana for some extreme pew pew. With heals it’s either you failed to keep people alive, or you didn’t. It’s certainly a good thing to experience though; healing has opened my eyes to a couple things in fights I’ve done countless times as DPS, like how annoying it really is for the healer if the DPS is being stupid, or even small things like “oh, there is raid damage in this encounter?”

I haven’t really decided on getting parties and raids will be easier on a healer. I know there is a general shortage of healers/tanks sometimes but I’ve seen a lot of instances where you end up being on standby if you have a particular “role”, i.e., a tank or a healer; one raid can only bring so many tanks and healers into an encounter after all.

But, cheers for all end-game healers! This is one (squishy) DPS who certainly appreciates you. <3

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