Welcome to my Circle of Healing questionnaire answers. This was someting started a few years back by Miss Medicina (source) and seems to be popular among the Warcraft healing community at the moment and being a sheep I thought I'd join in.

Q) What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? 

A) Evlyxx, Discipline Priest with Holy tendencies.

Q) What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

A) 10 man raiding although this has only been since Cataclysm, prior to this I was in 40 and 25 man raid groups.

Q) What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? 

A) Atonement, because it is such a unique way to heal and extremely efficient. It heals for more than Heal and has less cast time and because Smite/Holy Fire generates Evangelism it is just as mana efficient despite the extra mana cost.

Q) What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?  

A) Until very recently it was Flash Heal it was just too expensive to cast but with new content I always find it harder to heal using Atonement until I am comfortable with positioning and knowing the incoming damage and  Heal just doesn't cut the mustard anymore, its too weak and too slow so I have replaced it with Flash Heal, so right now the least used spell is Heal.

Q) What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? 

A) Flexibility, 2 healing specs give us all kinds of options and both specs are awesome as either tank healing or raid healing.

Q) What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? 

A) That we don't have a real specialization in healing. Pallies are great tank healers and shaman and druids are awesome raid healers. Priests do both very well but we are not the go to class for either which is a curse of our strength.

Q) In a 10 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? 

A) To be honest it depends what classes I'm healing with. Normally I heal with a Shaman and a resto druid and there I tend to be one of the tank healers and always choose the tank that has the melee group around him so I can heal with atonement for as much of the fight as the incoming damage allows This is because Cork my resto druid buddy is just a freaking God at raid healing and Jibba tha Shaman just loves to tank heal. When Cork vanishes (he works on a boat at sea for weeks at a time) I often end up with  Phöenix, a pally and then I switch to raid healing.

Q) What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?

A) Druids would be my number one class to heal with especially now the shaman totem has been nerfed because they make my job so much easier with all them hots bouncing around.

Q) What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?

A) In 10 man the worst class is another priest who has played Discipline, simply because even as Holy spec their instant reaction to seeing someone in trouble is to shield them which really should be left to the disc priest but other than that it is druids, cos they make me look bad on the meters!

Q) What is your worst habit as a healer? 

A) Believe it or not as a Disc Priest it is not shielding enough. I think 25 man raiding in Wrath made me hate the spell so much because I did little more than spam bubbles, especially on P1 of the Lich King I now prefer NOT to use it. Blizzard also didn't help by increasing its mana cost and halving the up-time of it too.

Q) What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? 

A) People either squealing for heals or saying that X person needs heals. If you can't trust your healers judgement then either the healing team is bad or you trust nobody.

Q) Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? 

A) Yes, extremely well balanced, as stated before we are masters of nothing but good enough at the lot.

Q) What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?

A) The initial check is raid deaths and could they have been avoided if I had healed them and Skada for helping make that decision mid-fight outside the game World of Logs is priceless.

Q) What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?  

A) That Holy priests can't tank heal and that Disc priests can't raid heal.

Q) What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? 

A) Mana conservation. The game until you hit 85 is a breeze on mana and allows the formation of bad habits with Flash Heal and Binding Heal

Q) If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?  
A) I always worry about my healing output and apart from that the other pattern is that I do not use Prayer of Mending enough.

Q) Haste or Crit or Mastery and why?

A) Haste to soft cap then crit. The haste is purely for the extra renew tick and the crit is good now for the Divine Aegis procs and the extra healing now we got 200% from crits.

Q) What healing class do you feel you understand least?  

A) Shaman, I haven't played the resto spec enough and I'm sure there is more to them now than just Chain Heal. I just can't get the time to devote to learning it at the moment. Maybe I should try harder I know.

Q) What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? 
A) Most of my main heal bar is mouseover macros and my favorite is the one I use for Healing and Smiting with:

/castsequence reset=combat [@mouseover,harm,nodead]Holy Fire, Smite, Smite, Smite, Smite, Smite;[@mouseover,help,nodead][@player]Heal

I use a lot of addons, but my favorites have to be Clique, Grid (inc many modules) and GTFO. Clique just make healing so much easier and is really something Blizzard should build into the game, why they haven't is beyond me. Grid is great for raid frames, the Blizzard ones are getting close to replacing it but it is not quite there yet. GTFO is great especially when in healer tunnel vision mode, I have blogged about its awesomeness so won't bore you again, just get it and never worry about standing in the fire again!

Q) Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
A) I like to get enough spirit until I'm happy I can heal stuff without panicing about being OOM halfway through a fight then stack Intellect in order to get more mana and bigger heals/shields more »

A week ago today 4.2 launched and the Firelands raid was thrust upon us. I was happy that we managed to kill Cho'Gall pre-nerf but a little sad that we failed to get Nefarian and Al'Akir down and having seen the Tier 11 content post nerf I'm a little bit more miffed than I was this time last week. Anyhow, I am sure you, my loyal readers don't want to know that, you want the low-down on the Firelands!

Day one saw almost the entire server head there and start farming rep like men (and women) possessed, I fell into this trap in Icecrown Citadel and regretted it because all it did was make me bored of the trash upto Marrowgar even quicker than the rest of the place and despite being a complete rep whore I'm not prepared to suffer that again. The reports in /2 of exotic epics and masses of rep kept flooding in but I resisted the temptation. I did have a quick 30 minutes on my lock as some guildies were missing a DPS but I kept resisting the temptation on Evlyxx.
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Maelstrom Crystal prices on Shadowsong EU Tuesday 12 July 2011

Every now and again you come across something by accident in the old Auction House farming business. Yesterday was one such time and over TeamSpeak came the message, "Are people crazy there are loads of 353/9 epics on the AH for less than 100g, that's cheaper than Maelstrom Crystals".......

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Welcome to the first of my guides on healing strategies for the Cataclysm dungeons, yes I KNOW its six months in and us veterans can do it sleep walk but many alts and new players will be coming through about now. My viewpoint will be from that of a priest, but much of the information will be generic to help out other healing classes also. Even if you're not a healer you can get some benefit from reading as you'll understand how you can help out your healer at key times during the encounters.

The Throne of the Tides is a short dungeon with 4 bosses, it is located in Abyssal Depths and is part of the Abyssal Maw complex. Our enemies here are naga, murlocs, faceless ones and servants of the Old Gods.
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Finally after what seemed like hundreds of deaths to Cho'Gall (I'm sure the number was a lot less to be honest) the guys of Saturday Knight Fever (sadly there were no real life gals in the raid) killed Cho'Gall.

Last week I had experimented with a 4 man ranged team that simply obliterated the adds but left too little DPS on the big fella himself and meant we lost a lot of time switching and caused people to make minor mistakes which in turn led to too much corruption which really hurt us in the final phase. This week we went with 3 ranged and 2 melee and on the very first pull of the night down he went.

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A real quick post to plug my current best friend type addon, GTFO.

Put in the authors own words, GTFO is:

GTFO provides an audible alert when you're standing in something you're not supposed to be standing in. In some cases, you'll be warned before you start taking damage. This mod improves your situational awareness and is recommended for dungeon divers and raiders of all skill levels as even the most seasoned veteran sometimes needs a reminder to GTFO.

Its something that allows you to have your tunnel vision, healing blinkers or whatever is distracting your attention from the fire beneath your feet, a simple "beep" type noise alerts you to potential danger. Its really simple works straight out of the box and really I don't know why anyone should be without it.

If you're certain that you avoid 100% of such damage, I challenge you to download it use it for a month and prove to yourself how awesome you are. If you've managed to not trigger this addon for a month please leave a comment below, uninstall the addon and apply to join Saturday Knight Fever on the Shadowsong EU realm. more »

Just a real quick post to introduce you all to a fantastic tool, wowTrader, its not a nasty gold seller site so no need to panic, I haven't gone to the darkside. 

In wowTraders own words "it is primarily a site built around the ability to view auction house prices over time for your server so you know what items are actually worth. Each item has an individual page with graphs showing recent history, long term trending, availability and historic price distribution."

If you're on the US realms  wowTrader isn't available and you'll need to continue/start using the Undermine Journal, which has been online for quite sometime now  but never progressed to pick up the EU data.

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Well 1st I hope you all like the new look to the blog, it was forced upon me by the fact that I wanted a proper banner type logo and as I'm not particularly gifted in the artistic department the image above is as good as it'll get.

On top of that, Blizzard have kindly made some changes to the authenticator system, as described in the US forums in a post from Zarhym that reads:

If you use an authenticator – and we hope you do – you may soon notice that an authenticator prompt may not appear with every login. We’ve recently updated our authentication system to intelligently track your login locations, and if you’re logging in consistently from the same place, you may not be asked for an authenticator code. This change is being made to make the authenticator process less intrusive when we’re sure the person logging in to your account is you.

We hope to continue improving the authenticator system to ensure the same or greater security, while improving and adding features to make having one a more user friendly experience. If you don’t already have a Battle.net Authenticator attached to your account, don’t wait until it’s too late -http://us.battle.net/en/security/checklist 

Do you think this is a good thing? I'm torn and would really like to know more. I ALWAYS log in form home, never at work, at a friends or on a public computer and I don't find having to use the authenticator intrusive, sure it is annoying in the middle of a raid when you get DC'd that I have to hunt for my iPhone to use the authenticator but its always on my desk anyway and if there is a short cooldown on the need to re-authenticate (say 30 minutes to 1 hour) thats cool and will save a few precious minutes. But any more than that and I become more nervous about the security and already I actually feel less secure than I have done since getting the authenticator way back when.

Maybe I'm being paranoid. Do you have concerns over this? If so, please leave a comment so I can judge your views. more »

A lot has been said about raiding becoming too dumbed down in 4.2 much like it was in Wrath and this post is aimed at "solving" the issue.

Problem 1: Blizzard wants us all to see the content and feel like we're not all miles behind the best guilds;
Problem 2: Hard core guilds want hard content;
Problem 3: Normal players want challenging content;
Problem 4: Epics for running heroics kills lower tier of raiding from same expansion;

The solution struck me whilst listening to Totalbiscuit read an email on the Blue Plz! show from June 4th. We can solve all problems at once.

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Hot on the heals (see what I did there?) of the Holy Priest 101, I bring to you the guide to being a Discipline priest, OK finally may have worked better I admit). Once again I shall guide you through the talents, tier by tier and by the end of it you will be armed with the knowledge to allow you to make an informed choice on which of the 2 healing methods suits your style of play best.
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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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