Smiting My Enemies

Happy 2011 to you all, a New Year and a new expansion (well it is less than 1 month old) and I'm full of hope for a cracking year in Warcraft and my plan is to bring you my news of what it is like playing a priest in Cataclysm on these very pages. I can't promise much in the way of theorycrafting but when anything noteworthy happens in game to Evlyxx, I'll post it here and my aim is for this to be done regularly each Wednesday and Saturday, there maybe times when I post additional "newsflash" type things in addition to the standard posts and today is one such post. I'd love your feedback so please leave a comment.

During a recent guild Heroic Blackrock Caverns run, I had an epithany moment. I was running with a group that was 2 pallies and 2 warlocks. The crowd control was good and on trash I was being under utilised as a healer and decided to help speed up the trash clearing by actually using my Atonement build (33/6/2) and smiting the main target.
Then one pull went bad as one of the CC mobs caused a patrol to aggro, one of the huge axe twirling drakonids, which as the original mobs were still high health and the drakonid was most dangerous enemy it became on main DPS target. I decided that I would lend a hand DPSing until Dixxie, my tank, needed healing at which point I would switch to healing him.

There was not any need to switch to healing. This was not due to luck, Dixxie avoiding damage (although the damage he did avoid helped I'm sure) but rather that my healing through Atonement by me using Smite and watching my scrolling combat text I noticed that the healing I was doing was actually more than that provided by my heal by about 2,000 HP, not just that cast time was 0.5 seconds faster than my heal. The only "bad" thing was that I couldn't prioritise the healing target, which really is only a problem if DPS are taking damage.

We hit the 2nd boss and I knew from previous experience that the difficulty in this fight is not the damage output (only the tank will be taking damage) but in the mechanic of the Evolution beam. Myself and the 2 warlocks looked after the beams and I choose to Smite and let Atonement do the healing. It worked remarkably well, the only time I needed to switch to proper healing was when moving in and out of the beam and even then a shield, renew and GHeal was sufficient.

My DPS was not earth shattering, in fact at around 3,500 it was actually quite poor, but considering my HPS was sufficient to keep Dixxie alive as well, it made the fight faster and even more fun for me. We finished the night by getting our guild first kills of Karsh Steelbender and Ascendant Lord Obsidius which also gave us the guild achievement Heroic: Blackrock Caverns Guild Run. Although the acheivement was cheesed as we just couldn't beat Beauty, not sure if this was just a group composition thing or us failing a gear/DPS/startaegy check. We will be back and next time Beauty will be on the hit-list!!

I feel really stupid for not picking up the Smite/Atonement benefits before but previously I have never seen the opportunity to add DPS in because of the need to heal. I'm now looking forward to more HC runs to see if BRC is just an ideal stomping ground for the Smite/Atonement or if I can continue to do it successfully elsewhere, particularly on Admiral Ripsnarl who is prooving to be a block for us, which I believe is a DPS issue.