Ah, time for a new background. I went with a tried-and-true flames motif, to fit in with all this fire in the latest wow patch. I honestly feel so sorry for fire mages. I don't think all the mobs are immune to fire damage (or maybe they are, I don't know) but everyone is pretty sick of fire at the moment. Just like how we were all really sick of frost damage back in ICC...
So my latest project (oh I have so many) is a priest alt. My alt projects have a tendency to fizzle out a lot, but this one has managed to keep the momentum going for a few months. She's 84, and it looks like I'll have my third 85 in a matter of days.
I haven't really carried through with my lofty goals for my other alt, my prot pally, the way I had intended. I wanted to deck her out in tanking gear and become an off-tank for raids, but that never really happened. Tanking wasn't so much a challenge as finding the time to do anything with alts. There was always some achievement, some rare mount, an old-school raid to pug, city raids, holiday events that I wanted to do on my main and by the time I was done with those, I never really had time to chain-run dungeons on my alts the way I had planned.
But this priest has been coming along quickly thanks to the RAF friends we've been leveling with. I had made a druid to heal our little 4 man group, but switched to a priest when we had to start from scratch due to tank swapping issues (this is why you should roll a hybrid...).
I picked shadow to level and holy as off-spec to heal dungeons. The beauty of it was that I didn't need a whole new set of gear like I had with my resto/feral druid. I mean, I know I'm supposed to prioritize hit for shadow and spirit for holy, but shadow priests gain hit rating from spirit anyways, so we're a pretty unique hybrid in terms of itemization. Hit and spirit are both good stats for me whether I'm holy or shadow. And besides, intellect trumps both hit/spirit anyways so my itemization is pretty simple. Best of all, I'm not constantly carrying around extra gear for an OS or swapping out all the time.
The shadow priest rotation seemed pretty simple for single-target. Once I learned how to manage my mana using glyphed shadow word: death and shadowfiend, things were pretty easy. It was only in aoe situations that I was at a loss, at least until I picked up mind sear. Spreading DoTs around on everyone was a bit annoying but overall I had respectable multi-target DPS and pretty damn good single-target DPS.
Now as for holy spec - it's been amazing. My aoe heals are off the charts. One moment everyone in party is bleeding health and their bars are dropping into the red zone, and the next minute they're back up to full. All I have to do is spam flash heal on the lowest (or tank) to proc prayer of healing, cast that followed by circle of healing and everyone's topped off. EJ tells me I shouldn't be worrying about PW:shield but I find in 5 man parties it's a nice way to crank out some extra DPS. Just pop a shield + renew on the tank, and I have like 10 solid seconds to heal other people or smite away at the mob. I even almost out-dpsed a pally as a holy spec healer! Now that's pretty pro.
It's been a lot of fun and really different from the melee characters I usually play. I'm halfway to 84 and I can't wait - I have a bunch of BoE epics I can wear at 85 and I'm planning to jump right into heroics!
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