And a Happy New Year

With welcoming in the New Year tonight we also say goodbye to the holidays. I'll admit, I'm relieved, even happy to see them go and ready to go back into my normal routine. If there's one thing I can get behind, it's a good routine. I swear, I'm only a little bit of a control freak which I think is partially why I love healing so much. You'll notice that I elected to sit home and write on my blog rather then go out and get belligerent drunk, that's partially the control thing.

Anyway, with the return of normal day to day life both Cy and my parents will go back to working their regular hours and I will be left with more peaceful hours like the ones I'm using now to work on writing. Obviously, I can't speak for anyone else but I find it so much easier to put my fingers to the keys and post something when I'm alone. When Cy is home he always wants something from me be it doing dungeons or that he's hungry and wants help in the kitchen so I don't get the opportunity to sit down for an hour and work on new posts. When my parents are off mum always wants me to come over. She likes having me in the house, even if we're not doing anything together, which is fine but I never get any work done. Most of all, I will be glad to go back to school. I miss my lunch hours which have always been set aside for the reading, commenting, and replying to my own comments. I feel utterly lost without them. I miss my friends too, and I am anxious to see the new class rosters as there are some people I would like to see both in my class and not in it.

A few quick updates from the past few weeks. I'm now 1/2 of the way to owning my own Mr. Bigglesworth. I would be 8/12 but I've been running with Cy and we've agreed to run the dungeons until both of us finish the achievement and as such the pets that both of us need, both of us roll on. We run all four raids together and then I run AQ to Visidius and Molten Core, just the Harbinger solo. Also, I got my feral vermling by securing 250 unique pets.

I've been gearing up my priest I'm 10 ilevel points away from being LFR geared. Really the more I heal heroics the more I love Disc again. I can hardly believe that there was a time I felt I would never get into the absorption style of healing but gee, I just love it. I was sad to read that in 5.2 they are removing Spirit Shells ability to benefit from mastery. I understand that they need to make other stats attractive to Discipline, I just feel like scaling it back might be a better option than removing it altogether (this is just an opinion based largely on the rhetoric used in the description of our mastery and not at all on any actual numbers). Another note on the 5.2 changes, I really like the spell Holy Fire, mostly because it gives a nice little dot and breaks up the tedium of always spamming smite. It irks me that it's being trashed and consolidated into Power Word: Solace because nothing will ever make me give up mindbender. I really like my mana regen to be passive and not take up time I could potentially use for healing people. On a more positive note, I will happily take the buff to Angelic Feather so thank you for that Blizz.

A few notes on the New Year.

I'm sure everyone is doing this, but what good is a New Year if one does not make plans for it? Did I mention yet that I absolutely love plans? Oh and lists, I love lists.

1. I'd like to be able to make a blog schedule, one that I can realistically commit to that includes some sort of weekly or bi-monthly segment. I'd really like to do some sort of recurring segment.
2. Level. At the very least I'd like to have my DK and one of every healer leveled with the exception of my paladin who is currently being geared for Herald of the Titans because that is more important than leveling her.
3. I'd like to work on a new blog layout that's not just a stock blogger layout or at least some new images for it so it looks a little less like stock.


As a final note, I'd like to thank everyone who dropped by this past year, and I hope to see you all in the new one.

Doing Heroics

I once said that I would never be geared for heroics.

Looks like I lied.

Again.

 I haven't done many heroic dungeons yet, but the few I have done have surprised me. They aren't impossible. They are doable. Dare I say it, they are even fun.

Allow me to make something clear, new heroics... maybe even new max level dungeons are what puts me off of new expansions. Ever since Cataclysm hit and I couldn't heal through one group, much less a whole heroic, I've become a little bit wary of new dungeon content. I am pleasantly surprised that Blizzard learned from the travesty that was Cataclysm and did not make heroics so punishing that they were un-fun again.

That's not to say I found it easy, I have pretty much the baseline required ilevel and have an average skill level. If it was easy for me, I would have been disappointed. If I were an exceptional player, I would probably find them too easy.

I've made it through all of the dungeons I've gone through with minimal mana starvation and only one or two party member deaths which were all due to lack of attention paid to mechanics on their part and not really because of my lack of skill or mana.

I am so pleased that I can complete them without A) going holy or B) ripping my hair out in frustration. I've been reading lately that a lot of players find that Disc output is lacking (maybe it's just for raids?), but I was able to keep my group up adequately and; therefore, have no real complaints except that I still want my Divine Hymn back without going Holy. I feel a little bit lost without carrying it around in my back pocket in the event I fall behind, get stressed, and want a get out of jail free card. I'm sure that will pass though, I still have plenty of toys in my toolkit to play around with.

I still need to work on using Spirit Shell optimally, but I think that will come with time.

Also, LFD has given me decent, non-douche bag groups lately. I didn't know those existed, but am thankful, I needed a break especially after learning that I'm being forced to work both Christmas, and New Years. If I could afford to quit... Anyone want to hire a poor college student trained pastry chef?

I'm trying not to dwell on that.

I suck at not dwelling.

I would also like to draw your attention to my blog roll. It seems that it only took me two months to learn how to make one, and I'd love it if I could get suggestions for awesome blogs to put up there. Priest related, or WoW related, doesn't matter, anything that's worth a read.