Another piece of BoA and healing as Shadow. . .

Well, last night was another excercise in interestingness. I try to read all I can, and I have played as just about every class/role in the game at this point (besides hunters and rogues, but we've been down that road before). The last class that I have yet to heal anything with is a priest. I changed that last night.

I got home and didnt really feel like hopping on the shammy, and I had a full bank of rested XP, so I thought "why not run around hellfire and take the priest for a spin?" I learned a few things about shadow, namely, those DoTs are powerful! I somewhat multi-dot'd on my warlock, but with the felguard and rain of fire, it wasn't exactly just the dots dropping the mobs. With a shadow priest, thats about all you've got. It was a surprise to be running around and just see mobs dropping. I still don't like taking more than one at a time, but it's nice to know they're not as helpless as I'd thought (I'd still me more comfortable if you got mind sear at 65 instead of 75). However, I knew that shadow was a good DPS leveling build. What I had my doubts about was how well I would be able to heal.

Now, I will admit, I leveled my priest with free levels from recruit a friend, so his gear was lacking. I had picked up a couple outlands pieces, I had the BoA chest and I had a few pieces of green invoker gear saved up. My spellpower going into ramps was about 241. Not great, but not super horrible I guess. Anyways, I was able to heal the instance with a few wipes. Huntards, I am addressing this to you: A) the tank is the only one who should be pulling unless he specifically tells you otherwise. Any ability you have to tank on your main does not transfer to other charaters. B) If you absolutely cannot resist the urge to pull, don't do it when the healer is at less than 50% mana. Two of our wipes were a direct result of the hunter pulling when I was all but out of mana. I have to say, I like priest healing, prayer of healing is a great ability in spots and I absolutely love renew. I've read a lot of raid healers don't spec fully into improved renew, I guess that will be a choice at 80, but for 5 mans, I really like it. Prayer of healing seems a lil overkill when only 1-2 DPS are taking damage. Shield + Renew + greater heal were generally enough to keep the tank up, even on boss fights. I also figured out good times to use dispersion to get my mana back so I wasn't constantly drinking. Obviously I would prefer a holy dual spec, but after 3 dual specs and 3 northrend flying purchases, I'm a lil tapped for cash at the moment. I have around 1200 on my account. It will be a little while before the rabbi has a holy spec, which is ok because I normally don't instance in outlands except for ramps and BF.

I finally got my 200 stonekeeper shards, but I had to go to bed before wintergrasp was over so I couldn't buy my shoulders. I am buying the cloth PvP shoulders for easier leveling for my Priest, Mage, and Lock. I think my next BoA purchase might be a mail melee DPS chest, although I doubt I will level my warrior or DK so I might just buy the purple tanking belt I've been putting off for months (I don't NEED it, I just kind of want it, and I keep hoping Skadi's belt will drop in H UP, I've never even seen it. It will probably drop when I'm on my priest or shammy). We ran H ToC which I had never actually completed, a couple DPS pieces dropped both of which I lost rolls on (I was in my ret spec at the time. I'm not comfortable tanking things I've never run unless they're like straightforward tank and spank). It doesnt really bother me losing DPS rolls, I don't much care for melee DPS after leveling. I had even contemplated dropping Ret for a holy off spec, but I don't much care for paladin healing. No real Hot, no AoE heals, no thank you. Ruhtra is pretty darn good at it, but I think he would have been good at any healing class or even tanking if thats what he'd wanted to do.

Anyways, I have to say in handicapping my "who will be my preferred 80 DPS/heals?" race, the shammy is still definitively ahead. Having not healed as holy though, it really isnt a fair comparison as my shammy has a full resto build and gear set. However, I really like earth shield and chain heal, and having a big instant emergency heal is pretty awesome. I wonder if healbot can run macros?

Speaking of addons, in general, I love Dominos. I pretty much can't play with blizzard's stock UI. With that having been said, I got the weirdest error last night when playing my priest. Normally, I use bar 1 as my main bar so I can hit number keys to activate abilities. I have this on other characters whose bars can change: Warrior and Druid. What somehow happened was that my bar 6 icons showed up in bar 1, which went away and wouldnt show my shadowform icons whether I was in shadowform or not. I don't really know how to fix it or get it right, I just put a different number bar in place of bar 6 (I have about 4 bars I don't need, which is still 6 bars I'm using). Anyone else have this issue? I am gonna probably play around with it some more after work to see if I can find a better fix.

On a non-Wow related note, did anyone notice Dragula is available for Rock Band? Besides a lack of Living Dead Girl, can you think of a better halloween song? (seriously, how could they have missed that one, I'm not a big fan of superbeast or the other one in the pack and I bought more human than human when it came out earlier).