Healing Webring 2.0!

I wasn't around for the first incarnation of this, but I was tagged by Kurnmogh over at Kurn's Corner for this round of questions!

Here we go!

1. What is the name, class and spec of your primary healer?
Kaleri, discipline priest.

2. What is your primary group healing environment (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
25-man raids, Rated Battlegrounds, and recently Arenas.

3. What is your favourite healing spell for your class, and why?
This is a tough one... I'd say Penance, just because to me, that's the spell that most represents a disc priest. You see penance go off, and you know that person is discipline.

My second thought was Leap of Faith, though technically it's not a healing spell. It's incredible for things like Atramedes - pulling your gong ringer just a little further or pulling someone so that you can have extra seconds between gongs; I've used it to pull tanks further from Riplimb's spear point to help increase time for the bleed to drop. It's uses are many!

4. What healing spell do you use least for your class, and why?
Heal. I used to use it a lot, but now in raids it just doesn't cut it.

5. What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class, and why?
Versatility. Any priest can (and should be able to) heal the raid or heal tanks or support heal and do both. Priests are incredible in that they have two viable healing specs. There's even specs within specs for discipline where you take Archangel/Atonement and some that you don't.

We also have a TON of cooldowns to use. Discipline specifically has Power Infusion, Pain Suppression and Power Word: Barrier and Holy has Guardian Spirit and Lightwell. Both specs have Divine Hymn, Hymn of Hope and Leap of Faith. Just look at all that utility!

6. What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class, and why?
Hmm...  As discipline specifically I'd say I feel weakest when I have to move and heal. Particularly because I tank heal, and Greater Heal is my mainstay spell. I use Shield, PoM, the occasional renew if the tank and I need to move, but in general if the tank is moving my train of thought goes something like this; "Greater he- oh shit move, greater- oh moving again, Shield, PoM, great- fuck, moving."

7. In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
Tank healing, without a doubt. It's something that I love doing, and I feel like I'm pretty damn good at it.

8. What healing class do you enjoy healing with most, and why?
Druids. When we were healing Heroic Chimaeron and I was paired with a resto druid to heal the tanks, I felt extremely comfortable knowing that the MT had Lifebloom and other HoTs, so I could focus on the Double Attack tank with my bomb heals.

In general, a good resto druid makes me feel like my tank will be safe if I miss a beat!



9. What healing class do you enjoy healing with least, and why?
Another disc priest. I hate it. Shields can be sniped off my tank (which effs my Rapture tracking), Barriers can "collide" and CDs like PS and PI can overlap if not co-ordinated properly.


10. What is your worst habit as a healer?
Not paying enough attention to my own assignment. I have a tendency to "help" when I think the group is in trouble and sometimes it costs me because my tank will die.

11. What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
Another priests shields on my tank (holy or disc), people calling out for heals (duh, I can SEE you're taking damage), watching people die to stupid, avoidable shit.

12. Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yes. Discipline is in a great place right now! With the change to crit in 4.2, we really lucked out. Disc can keep up with raid healers or we can smash the healing done with being assigned to one tank. Partly because DA is totally hax now, and partly because of the crit change to heals in 4.2.


13. What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
I use WoL (World of Logs). I use it to check my own cooldown usage for Power Infusion, Pain Suppression, and Power Word: Barrier. I also use it to check for potions, shadowfiends and mana return from Rapture.

14. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
That disc priests can't raid heal and holy priests can't tank heal. Sure, Holy has great burst AoE healing to top a group back up via CoH and a Serendipity'd PoH and sure, Disc has mitigation and bomb heals for single target healing, but that doesn't mean one spec can't do what the other one can.

15. What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
How and when to use all the cooldowns we have available to us. A lot of people are afraid to use cooldowns because they might need them later, but how silly would you feel if your cooldown never got used and someone died?

16. If someone were to evaluate your performace as a healer via Recount, what sort of patterns would they see? (i.e. lots of over healing, low healing output, etc)?
Lots of Greater Heal, probably a decent chunk of overheal with Gheal as well. Lots of cooldown usage of PI on myself, PS on the tank and Barrier too!

17. Haste or Crit, and why?
When 4.2 dropped, I was all about Crit. I recently swapped to a little more haste, and I feel much more comfortable with my GHeal casts. I'd have to say between the two stats there isn't one that I value WAY more than the other.

18. What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Shaman. I have one at 85, and she's geared enough for heroic dungeons but I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing on her anymore. (How the fuck to shaman regen mana for instance? JFC)

19. What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Grid+Clique, my "must have" for healing. I have Macros set up for Power Infusion and Pain Suppression so I don't tag the wrong people. I also have a few keykinds for things like Barrier and Mass Dispel.

20. Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others? Balance. For the main stats, I use Intellect as my main gearing stat.

For the three secondary stats, I find that the stats for Discipline are very synergistic.
Mastery increases the size or our shields, Crit increases the chance you'll get DA on your tank and Haste means you can pump out more heals which gives you more chances to crit!

Adventures "on the other side"!

I have a paladin. Not JUST any paladin. A level 85 blood elf with pigtails, red hair and a metric ton of sass.

My paladin trials started a long time ago. I would create a human paladin (I've done this at least 5 or 6 times) and get to the point where I would get the resurrection spell questline and then my interest would die and the pally would sit on my character screen until I took pity enough to delete the poor thing.

I decided later to create a draenei, since I liked the starting zone. I leveled her to 23, put her in a Lovely Black Dress and Ruby Shades and forgot about her. Then I transferred to Windrunner, got bored and decided I wanted my pally there too. My interest stuck until about level 45 when I got bored again. 

Level 43!

Then I transferred to Eldre'Thalas. Then Cataclysm hit. Then we started raiding. Then I leveled my Kalbear, shaman, and hunter. Then I got bored again. My boyfriend, Chronis, decided he'd pay for his warrior to be transferred along with my pally -  if we went Horde. *shudder* I wasn't entirely okay with this, but he was paying and we could level together with me healing and him tanking.

Well, for some reason that I can't recall now, Chronis got way ahead of me level-wise and I was left to fend for myself in the low level Dungeon Finder as I quested along. I leveled ret/holy, and had an absolute blast ripping apart mobs in my BoA gear. During my leveling, Chronis and I discovered an old friend from Bronzebeard had made her way to E'T and we got an invite to her guild (hooray perks!!).

Level 57 - ALONE in the LFD :(

It didn't take too long to get Kalaura (formerly Auragasm) to 85, and it took even less time through guild perks to get enough Justice Points to be geared up enough for heroics! Pally healing is a BLAST. Kalaura is now Holy/Holy (one spec for PvE, one for PvP) and aside from how much fun I've been having lately with Beast Mastery huntering, it's one of the things I most enjoy right now in the game.

When I hit 85 on Kalaura the first thing I ran to do was train my ANGRY MAAAAN! What is the Angry Man? Technically, he's the Guardian of Ancient Kings, but that's too formal. I can't help but yell out "Summonin' mah ANGRY MAAAN" whenever I summon him, too. It really bugs Chronis, but it makes it more fun.

Ms.Sass with her Angry Man

I mentioned PvP too. PvPing Hordeside has been strange; I get turned around in AV, I try to cap Stables and hang around that area in AB, and I generally futz around until I get my bearings on the map. Blood elf holy paladins are particularly deadly in PvP I've noticed. Here's what we have; Arcane Torrent, Rebuke, HoJ. If you're prot you can have the Silence Frisbee as well. How scary(AWESOME) is that? I'm like, a pro CC'er/Silencer on Kalaura now, mwahaha!

Kalaura's nearly decked out in Bloodthirsty and occasionally comes across Kaleri's guild members in Tol Barad. Sometimes she runs like a little girl, other times she stays and dies spectacularly to people like Merkavah, Void, Merlee/Srsbusiness, and Gneiss/Fog. Most of the time my inner dialogue goes like this:

MERK! Cool! I can PvP with Merk! Oh shit. It's Merk. shit shit shit shit *bubble* *Void's Shattering Throw* shit shit shit /try to flee  shiiiiii-dead

It's amazing and hilarious. and at the same time very frightening. The other day Ludde put a bounty on my pally's head (sadface) and I think Void ended up getting 500g for killing me.

LOL RAWR

Kalaura's also the proud owner of a Scorpion mount, by virtue of Apotheosis (Alliance) being a Level 25 guild and the mount being Battle.net Account bound. (Which I think is kind of cheating, but LOOK at how awesome that frigging scorpion is!)

Since the introduction of the Troll Heroics, Kalaura's received enough gear to be able to do some alt runs with the horde-side guild as well! It's been a lot of fun to see another healing class' perspective on certain fights, and let me tell you, there are times I miss having things like Aura Mastery and my bubble on my priest.



All in all, I've been rather pleased to have an alt on the Horde. I enjoy seeing things from a different perspective and the questlines have been wonderful. I still try to go places where I shouldn't, and occasionally Kaleri suffers because I'm used to going to a different flight path, or zone, but it's all in good fun!

There was a rather touching questline during Children's Week that I'm angry I didn't take a few screenshots for, but your Orc Orphan asks you to take him to Cairne's resting place. Once you arrive, Baine gives a small speech and you see the ancestors of the Tauren and Thunder Bluff welcoming Cairne. I really liked it, and after years of Alliance Children's Week quests it was a relief to do something completely different.

Maybe I'll level another Horde character...

For the Horde!






 I mean...


Derp.

An Update!

Hello, hello!

I feel awful about letting the blog slide, I meant to keep it updated - I really did - , but since my time in the hospital life's been pretty busy! Some real life updates; I finished up my school term - passed with flying colours, might I add -, went to my friend's wedding and loafed around eating everything in sight. Seriously, Prednisone makes you turn into this monster eater and you're like "WHERE ARE THE CRUNCHY/SALTY/SWEET FOODZ?!" and your family and boyfriend are afraid that they're next!

So I'm stuck at home, with a PICC line, (that's not being used, since I'm an eating machine) waiting on a date for surgery ("urgent" is anything from 4-8weeks). Which means I get plenty of WoW time, since I'm bored out of my tree.

To WoW;
I've been raiding with Apotheosis and we've done pretty well for ourselves. We're 2/13 Heroic Modes (Halfus/Chimaeron) and we're 9% from getting Maloriak!

I leveled a paladin (post to come about that)!

Kalbeari's been tanking some alt runs (likely a post inc about that), and I have to say, if I didn't love Kaleri so much I would gladly swap mains in a heartbeat.

Finally got my 100 mount achievement, reorganized my UI, did some housekeeping across all my toons... You know, sundry stuff.

At any rate, I *do* plan on writing a few posts soon, and actually have time for it now so there's no excuses!

AFK, Hospital!

It's the end of March, and I'm certainly not where I thought I would be a couple months ago.

I saw March as the crazy time before exams, but still a time to play WoW, drink beer, get ready for being done my second last year of school but things never go as planned.

Here I am, in the hospital. I have Chron's Disease and I'd been feeling pretty shitty since October, losing weight since December and getting physically sick since the end of January. The tipping point was last weekend. We called my GI team and told them I was coming in to the ER. Mom and I packed up some things and we ended up getting a bed that day, and an MRI within the next two days.

Things aren't ideal, we have the results of the MRI back and it's looking like 2-4 weeks on IV nutritional therapy to prep for surgery. Four years ago I had emergency surgery for a similar trend of bad happenings, and the subsequent scarring from that surgery is where the active disease is which means, drugs can't fix that. So surgery it is.

April is a busy month for me. Exams. A wedding. Luckily, the surgeon is on my side for waiting because I'm pretty undernourished and he wants me to have the best recovery possible by prepping with IV nutrition for a while. That means I can do exams AND go to this wedding that I am so psyched for and do NOT want to miss.

Needless to say, I'm not actively raiding. If I'm able to have the IV therapy at home, I can raid! And the docs don't want me to have to be here for a month, so it's in my favour for having a sweet portable IV backpack machine! Mwahaha!

That's what's been going on. Hooray life? I'm bored out of my tree!

In other news, HIMYM is an amazing show that is excellent for watching back to back to back to back.

Pixellated acts of kindness.

After posting my last blog entry, I logged into the game later on. I had mail from "unknown", so at first I thought it was a bot for a gold site. Imagine my surprise when I see that it's from a guildmate of mine and contained 6 flasks and a chunk of gold.

However, this person went to the trouble of making a level one alt, and then deleting it so that I didn't know who sent the care package.
If my boyfriend wasn't around while I was looking at it, I would have been crying. It's a small thing, to give someone something from within a game, but to me it was a big deal.

Today, a similar thing happened where I had mail from a guild member (name included this time). This person sent me a wrapped gift, and when I opened it the Darkmoon Card: Tsunami was in it. As if one gift wasn't enough to set me off, this one was definitely worth a couple of tears.

I feel lucky to be in a guild where the people care this much. To those two guildmates who sent me the mail, thank you. You don't know how much it means to me, even though it's all pixels.