I have been asked a few times recently on how I play the priest class, the talents I chose, the gear I pick, the gems and enchants I use. While there is no perfect answer there are a few simple rules that I use to help me be the 2nd greatest priest you know. Today I'm going to cover the first phase of making sure I end up 3rd on your list, that is your talent choices.

Right, you rolled a priest and got it to level 10, the UI is now shouting loudly at you that you must pick talents. This is your first real choice as a priest and one that we all know you're hovering your cursor over on the far right side ready to click shadow, and sure that is a real good DPS spec for levelling, but you know that no one likes a shadow priest as much as they like a healing one so resist that urge, Shadow can come at level 30 when you get dual specs. You need to feel the joy of levelling as a healer and really the first 20 levels will be so fast and easy there is no excuse not to do the healer thing 1st.

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In 2005, I was a dedicated console player at the time and the mere concept of hooking my console up online was, to be honest rather scary. Then a friend started babbling on about this game he played, an MMORPG, where he paid not just once but multiple times, I really could not see why people played it and paid a fee monthly for the privilege, especially as the software itself was not free.

Being a tight ass bugger, I had already decided that it was gonna be rubbish but as a he had given me a free trial, I decided to install the game just to prove him wrong and me right. 6 years on I'm still playing the World of Warcraft, and ironically he isn't.
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For the past few weeks I have been dual Disc spec. I know I'm crazy but I really love Disc and had embraced the Atonement spec to the full because it was simply faster to cast medium sized heals that way as well as changing it up a bit. Sure I still spent a fair proportion of time doing traditional healing but atonement buffed that.

Now being a raider there were fights when I simply didnt get a chance to lay the smack down and was needed to raid heal when our shaman and druid really insisted on a bit of the MT luvvin'. Then I was simply wasting half of my talents and was simply bubbling most and penancing the real needy while keeping Prayer of Mending bouncing around. Therefore I simply specced for the bubble botting that was so prevalent in ICC.

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Deadwood 1st raid Boss Kill July 4th 2007 and Shynight started a tradition...

While I still consider Vanilla the Golden Era of raiding, it was with Deadwood that I had the most fun and success. As mentioned in my most recent "The Backstory" post prior to forming Deadwood my previous guild, Teddybears of Doom had just killed High King Maulgar and had made good progress through Karazhan. The group of players we had were some very good players but as a raid group we lacked balance. We managed to recruit a few friends into the guild and we managed, with the power of alts, to get 2 tanks and 3 healers and 5 DPS together to go and start back at the beginning. Attumen the Huntsman was our first target...

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Been really unhappy with my UI for a while now and wanted to clean it up again, spent some time over the last few days to change it to:

But I'm undecided if it is not actually worse than the original.......

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Just a quick plug for a new blog I discovered by accident today. The content is something I was going to cover this weekend after a TS discussion with a guildy who is new to the cloth. Andreas over at Lightning and Lava, has made a fine post from a resto shaman point of view and the majority of what he has said holds true for us priests and I see no point in re-inventing the wheel. So take a quick read of his post at Lightning and Lava - Restoration Glyphs, Gems and stats.
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© Mitchel Scanlon, book cover of Call to Arms (click here to buy)

A lot of fuss has been made this past week with blizzards announcement of the Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms. The trolls and haters have /cried and /whined along with those that may have genuine concerns over the system.

Lets examine what we have right now. Huge focus on guild play has made people run dungeons with their guildmates instead of using the Looking for Dungeon (LFD) tool. Invariably this means with tanks and healers and with people you trust to ensure a smooth run. This means that the queue times go up for players choosing to play a DPS role. To make matters worse, Blizzard made healing and tanking harder meaning that some players stopped tanking and healing at the beginning of Cataclysm (remeber Duane Hates Cata?) and those players didn't stop playing and tell Blizzard in their "I quit because" survey "man you guys made tanking and healing too hard lolz, I quit" they respecced or rerolled  DPS, further increasing the LFD queues for DPS.

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You know how it is, all rush in the office 2 urgent mails to send out and you get things wrong by sending your email to customer A instead of customer B. Well it seems the reason for Rift being a WoW Clone is that they are dealt with by the same company.

Of course it could have been a hacker having a bad day I guess. All say a prayer for Gilles Haas..... more »

I consider myself a good healer, I've been round the block a few times and have healed most things in the game with little difficulty. Sure I know healers that are way better than me regardless of class but in general I feel that I can cope with anything thrown at me.

Sure at the beginning of Cataclysm some of the encounters made us all ask the same question I pose in the title here but like you, I powered through, relearned the old style of healing, adjusted to the changes (/mourn Flash Heal) and even embraced the Atonement playstyle and have gone on to complete all heroic 5 man instances pre nerf and progressed reasonably well. I'm currently at 7/13 in T11 and you may well be further in or even in heroic modes, but I have never really doubted my ability as a healer. But just recently there has been 1 encounter that has frustrated me immensely and caused me to really doubt myself.
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Just a  quick post to say sorry to all you guys and gals that have waited patiently for my next post.

Real life has been a bit chaotic at work lately and that combined with some of my free time consumed with some normal boring stuff like looking for a new job closer to home so I can actually afford to go to work and pay the bills at home. What this resulted in was a lack of time to play and keep up the blog posting.  But things seem to be slowing down a bit now, thankfully.

My posting schedule will change to once a week until May, hopefully the early part rather than the latter but don't hold me to it. But over the next 4 weeks I'm hoping to get back on top of things and I'll be able to get the ideas I have for posts fully written up and can once more return to a regular twiec week schedule on a Wednesday and Saturday. more »

Smith Hauthaa, the Badge of Justice vendor, is in there.....somewhere

In a blue post (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2228415544?page=10#183) yesterday Blizzard have announced that the daily heroic reward of 70 Valor Points is to be replaced in 4.1by a weekly maximum reward system. Their reasoning is that this will allow players who don't play every day but play lots on a few days will be able to earn the same number of Valor Points as someone who logs on and does the daily heroic. They also stated that they didn't want the daily heroic to feel like a job, which I admit it does.

Also in 4.1, the heroics will be split in 2 levels. Tier 1 heroics will be all those Cataclysm heroics already in the game and these will continue to give 70 Valor Points per run. Tier 2 heroics will be the new Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub instances will give 140 per run.

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Still back in Vanilla, WoW Classic, WoW 1.x whatever you choose to call it I was happy raiding as "one of the team". Then one day Gemmlas, the priest class leader and healing lead announced he was taking a step back for a few weeks for work reason and announced that he would be looking for someone to step up and take over the healing assignments when he wasn't around.  I never considered that it would be me that would get the /w asking if I'd step up and assist. There were much more prominent guildies in the healing team I assumed would get the job and to be honest at that time I was managing a team as a job and enjoyed being in the pack.

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Today I'm bringing to you 2 ideas. The first is not mine, but that of Gevlon. himself, I'm a regular reader of  the Greedy Goblin and have been since I began researching gold making. He stopped blogging mainly about gold making and focuses on the social engineering side of the game. I admire some of his ideas, The PuG, Undergeared, his ganking project and even his beliefs on M&S but I do question his motivation and his propensity to over analyse the situations at times (maybe its just advanced thinking that I cant follow) e.g. his recent post on guild and progression.

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Well what a chaotic time it has been. Been busy at work these past few weeks and been enjoying my WoW time a bit too much and have neglected a couple of updates and certainly forgotten to keep the ol' blog upated with my most recent exploits.

Since hitting the That's A Lot Of Bait guild achievement and eating many Seafood Magnifique Feasts me and the guys and gals of SKF have been having a blast. We've added 2 more boss kills to the list first was Maloriak and that was soon followed by Valiona and Theralion.

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