Hi all! (if there is anyone reading)

It’s been a while.  Going to school and taking studio art classes seems to be my main time-suck instead of WoW, but alas!  I have been playing.  I got a name change- psyløcke is now Mandyheals and I don’t have to explain the “ø” to people.  If the alliance mage had just deleted their toon, I would have stayed as Psylocke.  Anyway-

Priesty’s currently saving up for her epic flying.  She is a bit over halfway there, doing dailies, picking up quests in Northend (yay fairly easy gold?).  She’s also been working on the Northend rep. grinds and various PvP achievements.

I’m finally learning how to use rapture to my benefit as much as possible.  And I’m going to try start doing the pve healing thing more.  Priesty’s currently wearing full furious gear sans weapons, which are in need of a massive upgrade/overhaul.  I’m trying to figure out if a one/main-hand and off-hand weapon offer better stats than a stat stick.  Any thoughts?  Looking at armory I see more with main hand and off hand, but I guess it’s a matter of putting them right next to each other.  Sigh.  So much do to and not enough hours to fulfill academic obligations, personal wants, and be able to sleep.

And I can’t remember what I was going to say here, other than not writing for a while so hopefully there’ll be an update sometime soon of some substance? Yes.

So it’s been a few days since I last posted.  Psy hit lvl80 today!  I grinded through lvl79 in a handful of hours so she could get her “lovefool” title.  Thank you BoA gear and rested xp.  I couldn’t have done it without you.  Many BG’s, a handful of quests and a couple instances later… she hit 80, grouped with a nice paladin and zoned into naxx.  It was quite rewarding.

But now what?  Well, she’s working on getting her furious gladiator gear (currently only has the helm, farming honor for her legs next I think).  And my hunter’s old guild is coming back together!  This means I’m actually going to try get comfy in PvE heals.  Might switch my off spec to PvE Holy (cookie cutter build via elitistjerks most likely) and run heroics and try get into raids (oh boy…) so I can gear myself as much as I can to play with the guys.

She still has a number of low lvl70s pieces on her, so she’ll be running through Lich King normal and heroic mode dungeons to try get herself geared for raiding.  At least with the dungeon finder that was released last patch, she can collect emblems and buy gear to help speed up the process.  Psy also needs to rep grind with nearly all the northend factions for her enchants.

I’m also slowly getting over being flustered by healing PvE.  Improvement, I guess.  By the time Mason gets back from being offline, I should be more than ready to take on healing his drood in heroics. ^_^

getting closer to love fool, unfortunately i need to hit 80 in order to get it. 2/3rds through lvl77 though so I think I can do it! Hope.

I try to keep my addons as light weight as possible.  I’m currently playing on the older 2006 model Apple Macbook which has served me quite well over the last four years, but as the boys at the Apple Genius bar keep telling me “… you know your model wasn’t made to accommodate WoW, right?”  Yup, but I’m still playing!  I lag a big in Dalaran but I do okay in battlegrounds. I keep my graphic/visual effects to a minimum and after WoW came out with a built-in quest helper, Carbonite went out the window.

A lot of healers I chat with use Healbot.  I haven’t tried it but I hear a lot of nice things about it.  Since some people said it’s a little weighty, I asked about alternatives and found Grid and Clique. (Both can be found on curse.com under WoW AddOns.)

Grid is really nice, even with the default settings.  I’m able to see who I can heal, who’s taking damage, who needs to have a disease abolished or magic dispelled, etc.  It’s very simple and straight forward.  I learned how to use this add when I was playing AV.  In a 20+ player fight with Alliance and NPCs, it’s impossible to click a single target and click the right one.

Clique is my newest addon that I’m still getting the hang of but it’s been fairly easy to work with.  Assigning different heals to different clicks of a mouse.  I only have three set up right now.   Shift+left click is my PW:Shield, shift+right click is renew, and my middle button is my flash heal.  Nothing fancy but I’m sure I’ll be able to toggle with it more once I get adjusted to playing with a mouse (yup, played up to lvl70 or so without a mouse… finally caved to use clique and I have to say the re-adjusting has been worth while)

I also use npcscan, more to get bloody rare than anything else.  It has no benefit to healing so I won’t get into it.  Just a fun addon to have if you like your rare spawns.

My first experience healing in PvE situations was for Utgarde Keep.  It was a bit unnerving.  The tank couldn’t hold aggro, the DPS out aggro’d the tank, the DPS died, tank lost aggro completely so I died. It took a couple tries but we eventually finished for the achiev.  I learned to use “fade” as much as I could, to keep renew up, flash heal handy (which got easier with my addOns), and PW: shield is nearly a must if the tank is tiny.

My second experience healing was tonight.  Mason took me, a couple 80s and a few DPS lowbies to Molten Core.  Mason’s druid was main tank, and with him was a lvl80 warrior.  The group was solid, for the most part, with the exception of a moron rogue.  I don’t know that I’d call him a moron if he knew how to follow instructions.  They were quite simple “If you’re under lvl70, stay back” this was to make the run go smoother/faster and make my job of healing easier.  This rogue hopped in the lava, went in AoE range, attacked things, etc.  After a couple res’s I opted out of healing and res’ing him.  It was counter-productive.  I got mean psts from him but I rather use my mana to keep the tanks alive.  In that moment I learned how to choose who to save and who was “expendable” for lack of better words.

Actual healing wasn’t that bad. I had a better idea of what to do and since it was a lvl60 raid it was also a lot less demanding so I was able to heal the warrior and druid without much decision making until the last boss.  With how the floor is laid out, I would have had to stand in lava to be in healing range of both of them.  At one point I was able to run between the two but when the boss started hitting harder I had to pick one to save. I chose to save the druid, not because he is a irl friend (and one of my favorites) but because I was closer to him and was pretty sure in the time it’d take for me to reach the warrior, the warrior would have died which would leave me out of range to heal the druid and essentially cause the party to wipe.  So how do healers, who are primarily single target healers, choose who to save?  And what’s the decision based off of?

Mine was based loosely on location and the druid having a far larger hp.  This whole thing taught me one thing:  I’d like to have a bigger mana pool.  Even with all the little tricks and points in Disc to lessen the mana suck, it’s still there.

With this, I am off to bed.  I think next time I will talk about the AddOns I use.

I got manabonked in Dal while ‘hanging out’ at an Inn with Mason, who was busily getting my priest wonderful BoE gear for lvl78-80 PvP and enchanting them, (ty buttbutt!) I saw Minigob Manabonk and chased him around ‘til he manabonked me. Mason didn’t understand why I was so excited, until I ran back in with my mischief maker and manabonked him. If that ever happens again, Mason will need to make a BAAAA macro.

I was looking at other disc priests and think I’m going to try out this build…

Thank you Buttbutt for gold to get dual spec! The perk of being ill: laying in bed, playing WoW because you can’t do much else.  Might try to get her in a random dungeon this afternoon.

Elitist jerks’ forums have always been one of the first places I’ve gone to when I have questions regarding my class.  I’m still in the process of reading the bulk of this thread but I’ve found it very useful.