The Difficult First Entry

With the retirement of the Dwarf Priest blog, I’ve been finding myself increasingly frustrated in my quest to find holy priest blogs with which to emphathise / glaringly disagree, and the solution?

To start blogging about holy priests myself.

I’ll admit, I don’t know everything, I’m still learning about Holy (making the switch very recently myself), and I’ll shamelessly plug Elitist Jerks for filling me in on the changes since I last holy healed (TBC), so this will be a fluid blog, and I’ll more than likely correct myself as time continues. I’m always up for revising my opinion, and admitting when I’m wrong, and my word is not gospel, but at least it will be informed.

So, for all the holy priests that gem mp/5, prefer spirit over intellect, skip Holy Specialization, and don’t understand the merits of binding heal… this one’s for you!

I myself play a priest on the infamous Defias Brotherhood server, birthplace of mmodrama, Jordi, WoWRadio’s Kikkijikki, and… Soltys. After a brief sojourn to a resto shaman, I found myself back on my priest for Wrath. However, the woes of playing a resto shaman (albiet briefly) in raids had put me off healing. Yes, even I, the hardiest of healers, had been discouraged from healing. In hindsight, I blame it on a mixture of pug raids (featuring 600hps shammies – yes it is possible, and no it wasn’t me!) and the fact that resto shamans’ arsenal of healing spells is simply not as extensive as priests (although arguably, they are more versatile). So, what did I do?

Spec shadow. Whilst shadow is the most dynamic dps role I’ve played whilst raiding (enhancement shaman in wrath: waiting for MSW to proc, dulldulldull; resto shaman in wrath: riptide, chain heal chain heal etc.etc; destro lock in TBC: SHADOWBOLT, SHADOW BOLT, FFS CRIT, YAY CRIT YAY CRIT OH SHIT AGGRO HALP SOULSHATTER IS ON COOLDOWN OHNOEZ I AM DEAD; affliction lock in vanilla / TBC: refresh dots, shadowbolt spam), I just find dps less… rewarding. And I’m sure all the shadowpriests reading will definitely sympathise in the fact that the effort:dps ratio is seriously flawed as far as shadow is concerned. I’m watching bars like a maniac. Like healing right??? No. They’re not the little green ones, oh no, they’re cooldown bars, and dot timers (I do maintain, however, that as I’ve deveoped as a shadowpriest I just *know* when things are off cooldown.). That, given my self-diagnosed ADD, leads to boredom. What’s more, I never feel as integral as dps as I do when I heal. DPS are integral, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not for me- I obviously have a personality that needs validation and constant praise (which you don’t get as dps in my personal opinion, however, a good healer is hailed as the second coming of Christ – self-ress not included unless you have an ankh/soulstone). So after a short begging speech to my RL (he loved it – the begging, that is), we agreed that I would return to healing when feasible.

Luckily, the priests in our guild are all decent, and a couple are excellent, however, the number of bad priests appear to be multiplying. Yes, specs are fluid, especially now we have such an array of decent talents, but a holy priest skipping divine providence, Spiritual Healing, GUARDIAN SPIRIT and taking Improved Power Word:Shield is enough to tell me that you are completely clueless about your class, and don’t understand how to even read tooltips (extra healing from spells = GOOD).

Rather than simply mock those people, I feel that their scrubbiness is at least somewhat excusable, because there is a lot of confusion going on regarding holy priests, and maybe at least a little of the poor speccing / gearing / gemming is not entirely the fault of the playerbase’s increasing stupidity. Yes, our spec has been uprooted since TBC, our stats have been demolished, but we will adapt or we will fail horribly whilst trying to spam Circle of Healing and then remember that we’re not at Najentus anymore and we’re not actually healing anything because CoH has a cooldown….

So here’s hoping for some informed discussion (and yes, I expect to be corrected – I am not a fount of all knowledge, and priests have some wonderful talents these days so I expect variety), and general holy love.

ROLL ON 3.2!