Time For a Rethink

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.

The Backstory: Deadwood Days

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...

My new UI

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.......

Lightning and Lava - Restoration Glyphs, Gems and stats

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.

Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms

© 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.

The truth is out there.......

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.....

Do I Suck at Healing?

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.

Forgive Me, I Have Been Slack

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.