Miss Medicina has come up with a healing questionnaire on her blog to get some cross-promotion going among smaller healing bloggers. She also has an extremely pretty blog design, but that’s another thing entirely. Anyway, here are my answers.

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Elisse, human priest. I’m holy for PVE and disc for PVP.
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) A bit of everything, really. I’m not officially raiding, so I do 10s and 25s PUGs, the occasional heroic, and I love my battlegrounds.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. You project. Laser beams. On your allies. And those laser beams make little bubbles. It does not get any better than that. Aside from looking pretty, I love the fact that it’s channeled, so that some of the healing always goes through in that clutch moment even if you get interrupted.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Binding Heal. I know, it’s a shame. A priest of three years, I just never got into the habit of using it, and now it’s ended up just not being a spell I think of when I need to heal both myself and someone.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Being able to have many niches! We’re great raid healers when specced for it, great tank healers when specced for it, and we’re very viable in PVP.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Being so squishy. I can’t help but feel I’m a liability in fights where there is physical damage going around – like the melee hits from Gormok’s snobolds, or being in the arena on Thorim. Tanks can only help so much when I get healing aggro instantly.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Raid healing. I do keep a POM on the tanks all the time though, and my finger hovers over my GS macro for the oh shit moments.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Holy paladins. If I’m disc, I mitigate, they heal. If I’m holy, I take over the raid healing and they do the tank healing, which I’m incapable of doing effectively. Plus, they have delicious raidwide and personal cooldowns. Win-win all around.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Other holy priests. It’s no secret that priests are notoriously bad to stack, and two or more holy priests have never been a good healing team for any raid of appropriate size.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? I’d say overhealing, but it’s by and large irrelevant right now in the raiding game. Paying too much attention to the meters, I guess. Even though I’m fully aware that they aren’t a true reflection of a healer’s performance, a lot of people tend to evaluate healers solely based on the meters, especially in PUGs. This pressure in turn makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong if I’m not all the way up there.
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? “Heal me” and “healer fail”. If anyone died, healers are acutely aware of their fail, thank you. It’s not like we see damage and consciously choose not to heal it.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes. We’re jack of all trades when it comes to healing – when appropriately specced, we can do anything. Having two viable healing trees is quite the luxury. Other healing classes aren’t as lucky.
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? First – is my assignment dead? If my assignment is dead, no matter how high on the meters I am, I’ve failed fairly hard. Second – am I in an appropriate place on the meters with regards to my assignment? If other healers assigned to the same role have healed twice as much as me, we have a problem. Otherwise, brag brag. If I’m out of mana, I make sure I check the overhealing meter as well.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? “Disc is an unacceptable spec for PvE” (no really, I’ve been kicked from groups/asked to go shadow on my backend Horde server for being disc), closely followed by “hey u priest y are u so low on meters u slackin” when I’m disc.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Using spells appropriately. Priests have a massive toolbox to deal with damage, but most new priests tend to use only a few spells, and then run around like a headless chicken when something out of the ordinary happens. We’re not only about CoH/PoM/Flash Heal (Or about Penance/Bubble/PoM for that matter).
• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? High overhealing, high healing done. Overhealing doesn’t really matter in the content I tend to do, and I overgear most of it, so I spam freely. I’m in the top three in pretty much every 25-man I do, which I feel is where raid healers should be.
• Haste or Crit and why? After 20% crit, I go for haste all out. I primarily keep a bit of crit because it’s good regen and burst via SoL. In contrast, haste is a must have, because Serendipity is always down when you need it most.
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Well, I’ve played all four healing classes. I actively research all four classes. There’s none of them I feel I understand least.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Grid and Clique are love. I have mouseover macros for most of my spells to use with Grid. I also have a Guardian Spirit macro which cancels whatever spell I’m casting and casts GS on my target immediately – I’ve found it to be extremely handy, as it often takes a split second to stop the spell you’re casting and GS a tank, which might mean the tank’s death.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I definitely try for balance – that’s because I do a bit of everything.

Go ahead, answer this questionnaire! How do you heal?

Hi, I’m an undead/night elf priest.

Leave my racials alone. I don’t want to be the same as any other priest, I don’t want a DoT that costs over nine thousand mana to cast at 70 and heals me back for 0.005 HP, I don’t want a racial that restores 0.005 mana. I’m even okay with Touch of Weakness that terribad excuse of a racial staying, just get your hands off everyone’s racials.

In fact, while you’re at it, start realising that balance does not mean every class becoming the same as another, and seeing how much your player base hates your absolutely idiotic changes.

Elysiane the undead priest, Kielle the nelfy baby priest.

P.S If you are a night elf and feel underpowered in PvP with Elune’s Grace (saving you from melee zergs since 2007), Starshards that costs no mana and has the biggest annoyance value in the game after Moonfire spam, and Shadowmeld drink, you are retarded, please reroll dwarf/undead and stop being bad thanks.

I and my 2v2 partner Rinny the rogue had the following conversation about druids and our twice-gladiator friend Kiyu the other day, while we were struggling to climb out of the 1600-1700 bracket.

Rinny: I hate druids.
Me: They aren’t that bad.
Rinny: Yes they are.
Me: Well, they aren’t, you know, immortal or anything.
Rinny: You know that Kiyu used to be Alliance before we rolled here.
Me: Yeah?
Rinny: Well, the other day we learned that a friend of ours had an Alliance hunter on another server, so Kiyu transferred his 70 druid to play with him. Said druid is in greens. They got to 1700 within one day of playing.
Me: Well, that’s Kiyu for you.
Rinny: He’s in greens.
Me: But it’s Kiyu playing.
Rinny: He’s in greens.
Me: I hate you.

The more I play Rochalie, the more I realise just how much I enjoy every aspect of the paladin class. Pre-TBC, just like the majority of the Horde, I looked down on paladins and derided them as a one-button class that required no skill. When TBC hit, I promised myself that I would never, ever, ever, ever roll a paladin. When my old GM was trying to convince all of our priests to go shadow or reroll paladins, I still faithfully stuck to my class and didn’t budge. Even when my boyfriend rolled one, and sang the class’s praises, I was stubborn.

In time I rolled one of my own, though, solely because of PvP reasons – most people would remember how in S1 warrior/paladin was the warrior/druid of S3 in 2v2. We played rogue/priest and regularly got beaten by the combo, so I made a paladin to go with my 2v2 partner’s warrior.

Of course, with leveling a paladin being what it is, and me getting sidetracked by other projects constantly, by the time Rochalie hit 70 we were well into S3. Plus, along the way I had decided I would go prot instead of holy – after a holy priest and a resto shaman, felt like a change was long overdue. So I tanked my little heart out for a long while.

However, at one point, our Karazhan runs ended up having too many tanks and too few healers, so I went holy for one run to ensure the run actually went ahead. And surprise, I actually enjoyed it. A lot. Then messed with holy PvP a bit with the same result – loved it. After ages of being a priest and even as disc, being as squishy as they come, wearing plate and being able to heal forever for a change… amazing.

Nowadays, Rochalie is the only 70, in fact, the only character that I log on to with any regularity aside from my bank alt. Even though she rocks either a holy or a prot spec depending on the time of the week, I enjoy doing all the daily quests with her. I love taking her through content no matter what it is. She’s been able to afford her epic flying on her own, and with ease, and is back up to 4.5k gold in no time again. She’s well on her way to a netherdrake and being exalted with SSO. She gets to go to Karazhan every week and she still enjoys the content there, despite being my 4th character to go through the same content. I run battlegrounds with her just for the sheer fun of it, not to grind honor or marks. She’s refreshed my enjoyment of the game, and all this from a class I used to loathe.

I’ve been asked whether I considered switching mains – the answer is yes, and I’ve scrapped the idea as soon as I thought of it. No matter what, the priest class has a special place in my heart and I can’t see that changing anytime soon.

However, the inadequacies of priests are glaring at the moment. A class that is advertised as “master of healing” is so far from that state that it’s painful. For every healing situation one can think of, there is a better alternative than a priest and/or stacking priests.

Want a healer for heroics? Take a paladin or a shaman – you get very powerful blessings, or totems and Bloodlust, plus the advantage that your healer won’t fall over dead if a stray mob so much as looks at them the wrong way. Want a healer for small-bracket arenas? A druid is by far the superior choice. Large-bracket PvP? Paladins are your man. Raids? You need a single priest, specced into Improved DS, bringing any more is a waste when you could be stacking paladins and getting more blessings. AoE healing? Lol shamans. I rolled a priest to be the best at what I do, not to sit around watching other healing classes be better than my own class at everything, because it sure was not what was promised to me. And no, going shadow is not a viable option – I want to heal, healing is what I rolled a priest for.

Looking at class changes, I don’t reckon Blizzard wants to fix this issue. Priests are the hybrid healers of the current highly-specialised healing scene, and ever since TBC, there is no support for hybrids in any part of the game. You either specialise or gtfo, and priests are “jack of all trades, master of none” when it comes to healing. A very fragile jack, at that.

So, as things stand with priests, I don’t see myself going back to Elysiane full-time anytime soon. Sure, she gets dusted off whenever my guild needs an extra healer for something Roch isn’t geared for, or when I get the urge to go melt faces a little. I’m really looking forward to a priest revamp, but until that day comes, I am perfectly happy with Rochalie.