Priest is 80

My priest turned 80 the other day. I didn't blog about it because I was busy enjoying the benefits of being 80, namely running heroics. This makes my 5th level 80 character, after my hunter, paladin, death knight and warlock.

Though discipline healing remains my greatest and newest love, I didn't jump straight into healing heroics because I wasn't sure I could handle it with the gear I had. As you all know, when you hit 80 you're equipped with gear up to ilvl 187. It's true that I was 100% equipped with blue dungeon gear but I am of firm opinion that one shouldn't step in heroics without at least ilvl 200 items on average. I don't consider myself sufficiently skilled as a healer to simply jump into these much harder dungeons.

For this reason my plans for the near future are to heal one normal dungeon daily and run at least one heroic every day. It's amazing how quickly you can get good gear by running just a few heroics. I've had a couple of runs where I needed (and won) 2 items in each.

Amongst the nice upgrades I am especially happy with this trinket called Spark of Life which is awesome for healing and not bad for dps either. It has a ton of haste and also helps with mana regen. I will also mention Wand of Ahn'kahet which is another big upgrade for me. Oh and just after 1 day at level 80 I bought Helm of Clouded Sight with emblems and I promptly gemmed and enchanted it.

But wait, there's more! I also won two rings and an amulet which are all ilvl 200 and have some very nice stats on them.

Now you might see a pattern here. I'm concentrating on items with healing stats, dps-ing be damned. Stuff with int, spirit, haste and spell power. Not so much crit rating and I won't even think about hit rating. I'm not doing terribly as shadow, pulling about 2K dps.

Yep, things are looking peachy.

One more thing before I sign off. I've noticed that having crappy gear gets you quicker in a group as dps (using the dungeon finder). This has been happening consistently ever since I hit 80 and the same thing occurred for my death knight who tried a few heroics with crappy gear. The queue timer says something like 10-15 minutes but very often I'm in after only 5 minutes. The perks of sucking, I guess.

Lolhealz

So I ran my first Northrend dungeon today on my priest, as shadow DPS this time. Since I wasn't 70 yet and I didn't have the latest level 70 skills, I didn't want to risk making a mess of healing. Besides, DPS is so much more leisurely...

After a very long wait of about 30 minutes, I finally found myself in Utgarde Keep. We had a paladin tank and a shaman healer.

A couple of minutes into the run it became apparent that the healer was having trouble keeping the tank alive, even when fighting small groups of trash. This wasn't gonna be good. In between DPS-ing I would pop a Power Word: Shield on the tank when her health dipped really low.

The healer was also constantly running out of mana and at one point told us to slow down so she could drink. That's when the tank said "You wouldn't run out of mana so often if you'd use your mana totem". At that point it dawned on me that the healer wasn't using a single totem. I was like, WTF.

From there on, she started using the mana totem. In the words of the tank (with whom I was having a private conversation about the healer), "facepalm".

After our first wipe I decided to switch specs to holy and heal the tank myself so we were pretty much dual-healing during the rest of the run. We tried initiating a kick vote but apparently the other members weren't aware how much she sucked so they declined to kick her.

Eventually we finished the dungeon though we almost wiped at the last boss thanks to those pillars which kept the tank out of line of sight.

There's no purpose to this post except to vent a little bit and wonder how the hell is it possible for some people to be so clueless at bloody level 70. At least, that healer is now on my ignore list so I won't have to suffer her incompetence from now on.