Changing things

I've decided to shift the focus of this blog. Since I haven't been healing very much lately on my paladin or my priest, I dont' have anything related to healing to write about. Instead I'll be sharing my experiences playing the game. For any of you who regularly visit this, I thank you, and I hope you enjoy the shift in focus.
To start my newly focused blog; I am 3 Blood of the Mountain away from crafting Rag's hammer. I've been killing the Molten Destroyers in Molten Core for the last few nights, and hopefully enough will drop before too long. I'm pretty excited because this will be my first legendary, and it will be my guild's first as well.

Wish me luck, and watch yer back.

Reforging Mastery or Haste

Now that my priest is level 83, I've started to think about what stats I want to prioritize for him. I know that critical rating is at the bottom, and that I reforge crit whenever it is on an item, but I am not sure about whether I should prioritize haste over mastery or vise versa.

I know that haste is needed and it's great, but I'm starting to think that I should go for mastery almost exclusively. Here's what I figure; I am rarely overhealing with more than 20% of my heals. Mastery is only third in terms of the spells that overheal. This makes me feel that the extra healing added from mastery won't add to the overhealing and will isntead provide a significant percentage of my overall healing.

Right now Echo of Light is only contributing to around 10% of my healing done. Since this is going to be free added healing, boosting it to provide more output should help it to move closer to 20% of my healing. On top of the added boost to output, the extra mastery will allow me to move on to heal another target sooner. I know that my last heal applied a significant heal over time, so I can move on to the next target.

That's how I'm think about things so far. I think that I'm going to gem for a combination of Intellect and Mastery, and I'm going to try to acquire more peices with mastery and reforge for it whenever I can. We'll see how this works out, as I am sure that I will probably revert to choosing haste to be number one after some more healing on my priest.

Feeling Overpowered

I've finally started leveling my priest and in between questing and leveling his professions I've been able to do runs of Throne of the Tides and Blackrock Caverns. So far, these two dungeons are feeling like warm ups. There really isn't a challenge, and it feels like I have an answer for whatever damage heads my groups way.

I have been trying to stick with Chakra: Serenity for most fights, and I often find myself just standing around waiting to heal. For fights with heavy raid damage I use Chakra: Sanctuary and the same is pretty much true. Lightwell has proven to be very helpful, and I think that people are actually learning how to use it for once.

I am really looking forward to getting into some heroics on this guy because right now healing is not very challenging. Holy priesting is really making me think about which healer I want to play more when I get this guy to 85.

Gearing my Holy Paladin

Until my guild starts raiding, I've been running every heroic under the sun. I've been pretty successful so far, and a lot of that success has to do with my gear. Obviously I'm going for plate gear with intellect on it, but what do I look for once I've found the intelligent plate?

What to go for.
First of all I want gear that has spirit on it. If I have a peice that doesn't have any spirit I want to reforge either Crit or Mastery for spirit. Second, I want gear that has haste on it. Haste makes the global cooldown and my cast times slower, and with enough of it I get an extra tick from Holy Radiance. I try to reforge crit or mastery to haste. Crit is preferred over mastery, but I'm not going to reforge for it anytime soon.

What to gem for.
I like to match sockets, so for red gems I go with +40 int gems, yellow sockets get +20int +20 haste, and blue gems get +20int +20 spirit. This way I'm getting my main stat, intellect, and the spirit and hast I need as well.

What to enchant for.
I go for intellect enchants, spirit enchants, and haste enchants for my gear. Same reasoning as before, when enough haste I can increase my output, and with enough spirit I won't run out of mana.

So far that has been working pretty well for me. I haven't had any mana problems, and there are very few times where someone dies as a result of my healing. They might die because they stood in the fire for too long, but rarely is it because of my inability to save them.

I hope this helps you with your gearing choices. It has defintiely helped me.

Healing Heroics: Not that scary anymore.

Recently I've been healing more and more of the heroics that Cataclysm has to offer, and my experience in them is getting less painful each time. From my first heroic in Deadmines, to my most recent in Shadowfang Keep, and everything in between I haven't felt the same stress when healing heroics now. What is accounting for these pleasant heroic runs?

Granted I have better gear now, the groups I've gotten have been pretty good, I've been able to learn fights with guildies, and healing as a paladin has been really fun. Why does healing as a paladin feel so awesome?

Being able to heal through AoE raid damage is why. Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn are really fun to use. Beacon of Light is stong, don't get me wrong, but HR and LoD are the game changers. Holy Radiance, while at a hefty mana cost, shines when everyone is taking huge chunks of damage at the same time. While it won't heal everyone to full, it while help keep people from dying while you finish them off. This makes AoE heavy fights much more manageable. Popping this at the right time (and not being afraid to use it) can make healing easy and I dare say overpowered.

Light of Dawn plays a similar role in making the healing game easier. It has been nerfed, and it doesn't seem to be powerful numbers wise, but it is in a sneaky way. You can essentially shoot 5 Holy Shocks at your group at the same time with not mana cost to you. So that's nice. On top of that the health buffer, if you're able to hit everyone in the group with LoD you'll be able to transfer a significant amount of healing toward you tank at no cost.

Both spells are situational, and require some thoughtful positioning, but when the stars align the green bars shine (see what I did there). If you're a paladin, and struggling with keeping everyone alive start incorporating this into your arsenal. You'll be delighted at how much smoother keeping people alive becomes.   

What a Catacalysm!

It has been a while since my last post, but, as I stare at this computer wasting time that could be spent doing homework, I think to myself that wasting a few more minutes couldn't hurt. So Cataclysm is out! As a breif overview, I am very happy with the game so far. My time spent healing has been limited, and I have yet to begin leveling my priest. With that said, though, I definitely think that most of the discussion that I touched on with 4.0.1, proved to be right.

The game of healing has changed dramatically. Everyone has around 100k health, and our heals are not much stronger now than they were at 80. Through the few heroics I have had the chance of healing, I can say that the changes aren't as overwhelming as I thought they would be. The game is more about keeping people from dying rather than keeping everyone topped off, and I like that. The mana game is very interesting (and frustrating at times), and there are very few times when I am not actively saving lives :)

As my guild slowly gets our feet wet in more of the content, I will try to post more regularly about it. I'm not quite sure how many of regular readers I have, but to anyone reading this, I hope that you find this blog to, at the very least, help you waste time that you could could have otherwise spent studying.

Healing in Cataclysm, first impressions

After leveling my paladin to level 82 with my girlfriend's mage, we decided to queue for some random dungeons. We managed to get Vortex Pinnacle four times, in a row, but it definitely gave me an idea of what to expect for healing in cataclysm in this expansion.

First off, just about every tank had 80 thousand health points or more, and everyone else has about 45k health points. So right away the health pools are much larger. With those larger health pools comes larger amounts of damage to be dealt. I was constantly casting something, and often times I was choosing between the cheap heal and the big heal. If someone was below half I would cast the big heal, and if not I went with the cheap heal.

Overall my overhealing was almost non existent, and I did find running out of mana an issue at all. I am looking forward to trying out more of the dungeons, and eventually the 85 dungeons and heroics. It seems like healing in this expansion will be more about making the right decisions, where WotLK was more about having one choice and casting it as fast as possible.

How I use the Healing Meter

For a while now I have been using Recount as my damage/healing meter addon thingy. When I used to raid, I would use the healing meter to tell me how much healing I did and compared that to the other healers in our raid. When we began working on and finally killing the Lich King, I used it to also see how much overhealing I was doing compared to the other healers. And since then I have stuck with Recount to show my how much overhealing I do in the heroic 5 mans that I run.

Now you might ask why would I care about overhealing, those heroics are easy. You're right, they are very easy, and that is exactly why I am looking at what percentage of my spells are overhealing. I know that the amount of overhealing I do does't really matter because the instances are easy and I am no where near running out of mana. But the reason that I am doing this is to try to hone my skills. I need something to keep the trivial instances from feeling trivial.

Now how do I do this? Well, I start by just healing. I don't avoid overheals, and I won't not heal someone just because I think it will overheal. I try to make good decisions when choosing my heals. At the end of an instance if I made good enough decisions throughout then my overhealing should be relatively low. For me I measure relatively low as being around 20 and 30% overheal.

With that said, there is a big difference between my priest having 30% overheal and my paladin having 30% overheal, and to tell what the difference is Recount comes in handy. On my paladin, for example, I have three main heals that are going to overheal almost all the time. Protector of the Innocent, Beacon of Light, and Enlightened Judgment. All of these are mana free heals (I have the glyph of Beacon of Light so it is free), and Enlightened Judgments is actually giving me mana because I Judge with Seal of Insight and gain about 400 net mana. Knowing that these three abilities account for more than 60% of my total overhealing lets me know that when the meter says that I did 50% overhealing, I actually only had about 20% overhealing (just throwing numbers out there). Which tells me that I made good decisions the majority of the time.

As far as my priest is concerned, he does not have as many free heals that are going to overheal. My mastery often overheals, and my Althor's Abacus are really the only two sources of free and often overhealing spells. so when the meter says that I did 50% overhealing, I know that I was not making good decisions picking spells.

Now I know that in a five man I do not have to worry about other healers. Making decisions is very easy because I do not have to account for incoming heals, but I figure that if I am able to get more used to making good decisions when choosing the right heal in a five man once I am able to factor in other healers I'll be in pretty good shape.

I have essentially gone from never worrying about overhealing, to using it as a gauge of my awesomeness :)

Chakra feels awkward...

There has been a lot of discussion about Chakra, and not all of it has been positive. I personally thought that it was a cool idea, and I was really looking forward to seeing it be the reason that Holy is fun to play. By my use of past tense you can tell that I am disappointed in the current state of Chakra.

In case you don't know, Chakra is a spell on a one minute cooldown, where after you click it the next heal (and by heal I mean Heal, Prayer of Healing, Renew, and Smite) that you use will put you in a specific Chakra state for 30 seconds. Each Chakra state improves the spell that you used, and (provided that you spent the necessary talent points) casting that spell will extend the time that you are in the Chakra state. Sounds great right?

It's not as great as you might think. First of all it is a lot to keep track of. When I tried to describe it to my girlfriend she threw her hands up and said "that is too complicated." While I don't disagree with her, I think that main problem is that Chakra itself has a cooldown (of one minute), and it has the feeling of locking you in to a certain spell.

This problem of locking you in, can cause a lot of opportunities to make a mistake. If you use Heal, for example, after hitting Chakra, but you are transitioning into a phase of the fight when you need Prayer of Healing or Renew, you can't change Chakra states until that phase is (most likely) over.

On the surface Chakra looks like it adds some nice potency, but in practice it has only added constraints and has mostly been useless. For instance, if I am in Vault of Archavon, and one of the bosses does their AoE, I might go into Chakra State: Prayer of Healing. Allowing me to raid heal effectively and all is well. But, that period of AoE only comes in bursts, I'm not spamming Prayer of Healing and Chakra goes away until I can use it again. It's good for one or two casts (in this case).

I am sure that there are a lot of situations where this spell comes in handy, and instances in Cataclysm might prove to make it's one minute cooldown more understandable. Currently, thought, it lacks fluidity, and there doesn't seem to be a seamless transition between Chakra states. My suggestion would be to make the spell not have a cooldown, or become some sort of passive ability. This definitely could make Holy overpowered, but given the current state of Holy's viability making Chakra more powerful might turn out to balance things out nicely.

The New Raid Frames

With patch 4.0 new default raid frames were introduced. As someone who does not use any addons, except for Recount, Decursive, and Deadly Boss Mods. So, these new raid frames were a nice addition for someone like me.

If you haven't noticed the new feature, or you don't care because you use Grid or Xperl or whatever, I find these new raid frames to be a pretty nice addition, and they have some nice features that could allow you to not use on of your addons (saving up some needed memory).

After using this for the past couple of weeks doing heroics, there are some very nice features. Starting with the least important, I like that I can see class color. Adds some pazazz! Next thing I like is that I can move the raid frames a lot easier now than I used to. This goes along with another feature that I like, which is that my bar is included in the raid frames. That allows me to not have to look at my own health bar, and instead I can see it included with all of the other health bars, very handy. I like that I can see the buffs and debuffs that people have on them with more detail than before, but sometimes they take up too much of the bars. And lastly the most important feature with the new Raid Frames, that I have found to be really super totally awesome, is show incoming heal and show health lost.

Now I know that these features come with most UI addons, but since I don't have these, I find this to be especially awesome. Being able to see exactly how much health a person has lost, allows me to more accurately choose the right heal for the job (reducing overhealing), and being able to see how much my Renew and Mastery heals will heal for lets me know if I really need to cast a Heal, or if those HoTs will do the job for me.

These two features will be very useful in a raid becuase I'll be able to tell whether I need to heal someone or not. Overall this will help healers become more efficient, and accurate when keeping a raid alive.

Forgive me if you use an addon that already allows you to use these features, but to those who don't I hope that you think that they are as awesome as I do.

Why do I like healing?

Recently me and my girlfriend have been leveling some new toons while we wait for the expansion to hit. It has been a blast, and I am really enjoying the new class changes and the leveling experience overall. But after spending a couple of weeks leveling as a frost mage, I found myself wanting to hop on my pally and priest and just heal something.

I don't exactly what it is, but it was like I was craving healing again. I enjoy dpsing and tanking (at times), but there is just something about being a healer that I find to be much more fun. I think that it has to  do with the difference in gameplay, and general role.

As a tank, I am making sure that I am the one being hit, and that I am able to take those hits. As a dps, I am making sure I am killing things when I need to, and that I am not getting hit unnecessarily. But as a healer, I am directly responsible for keeping people alive. I need to use heals that will keep green bars from going black, and I need to use them in a way that keeps my blue bar blue until the fight is over. There is something really cool to me about that role. I know that a groups success is dependent of everyone doing their job and doing it well, but if the healers aren't doing their job no one else can do their respective jobs. Everything rests on the healers shoulders.

While some people might find that to be too much responsibility, I find it to be pretty cool. The desicion making involved, when choosing the right heal, combined with knowing that my failure means death to everyone else makes me find healing to be interactive and really cool feeling.

About Surge of Light

I have seen some points that have been brought up about Surge of Light. Currently this talent gives you a 6% (if you spend two points in it) for your Smite and Heal casts to allow you to cast Flash Heal instantly, without mana cost, and without a chance to critical.

Before 4.0.1 this talent gave you the ability to instantly cast a mana and crit free Flash Heal 50% of the time after you get a critical with any of your spells. This allowed for instant Flash Heals to proc very often. Which in turn allowed you to obtain 3 stacks of Serendipity very easily, which also made casting a faster Prayer of Healing (or Greater Heal) easier.

Now the proc chance is very low. And by very low I mean that if I were to cast 100 Heals in a row, Surge of Light would only pop up 6 times. In a night of raiding (in WotLK content) spells like Renew, Prayer of Mending, and Circle of Healing are the major spells that are used. So out of the total amount of heals you cast the chance to pop a Surge of Light is even lower. Making a lot of raiding holy priests (a lot better than me) find this talent to be very useless.

I personnaly specced into Surge of Light. I have been running a lot of heroics, since I stopped raiding, which means I have been using Heal more often, so it is more useful to me than the alternative (Tome of Light: reduces the cooldown of Holy Word spells). Having said that, I definitely think that the proc chance is too low. I like having talents that cause spells to pop up, but I like them because those procs actually happen. With Surge of Light, it rarely pops up. If they want to keep it from being OP, I would either let it take the form of the older version with a 25% instead of 50% chance, or allow it proc off of all spell casts at the same 6% as it is now.

Something to make it cool and useful. Right now it feels like one of those old Darkmoon trinkets, or one of those Vanilla legendaries with a cool put rare proc.

I think that BlizzCon is really cool

While I did not go, me and my girlfriend did order the live internet stream, and watched the panels and most of the events. This event is so cool to me because I always like the opportunity to meet people who play WoW, and BlizzCon brings so many members of the community come together like nothing else.

I can't wait to get the chance to go, and I am very glad that I have been able to watch it online over the last two years.

The new healing model

I will start by saying that I have really enjoyed healing on my priest and paladin. Now here is why.

The introduction of Heal and Holy Light as the medium efficient heal. This change has really changed how I have appraoched healing. I have a choice to make. If a tank is near half health do I use Heal because it's cheap, or do I use Greater Heal because they might die if I don't top them off soon enough? If a dps just took a huge chunk of damage do I use Greater Heal to get them to full health, or do I use Flash Heal because the sufficient heal won't get there in time?These options are a welcome change from the previous model of healing. (these apply to paladin just insert Holy Light, Flash of Light, and Divine Light respectively)

The new mechanics for priests and palains. For my paladin I really like how Holy Shock is the go to spell because it will buff the other heals. With the four peice set bonus on my teir 10 a Holy Shock critical makes Holy Light cast ridiculously fast, which is very cool. And I really like the options I have once I get 3 charges of Holy Power. Do I use Word of Glory now, or save that instant for when I won't have time to cast something?

For my priest I have enjoyed how Chakra has been working. Certain cases are better for corresponding Chakra states, and there is a decision to be made there as well. Surge of Light procs are a nice way to save some mana (I just wish it had a higher chance to proc), and like my paladin I really like the healing mastery bonus.

Mastery has turned out to be a very nice change. For my paladin I add some extra mitigation (which explains why Sacred Sheild went away), and for my priest the added heal over time helps me heal someone and not have to use a wastful heal to "top" someone off. Balancing how much mastery I go with, and making sure I still have enough Haste, Spell Power, Mana, Spirit, and Crit is a nice added bit of depth to stat choices.

So all in all I am very pleased with all of these changes. I know that a lot of people are not very pleased with these changes. To those people I say "QQ Moar!" The game is changing, and healing is changing with it. Hop on and enjoy the ride, or role a dps.

Healing at the speed of Heal

With the addition of Heal (Holy Light if you wear plate) the healing game seems to have slowed down a bit. I still find myself trying to fit in as many heals as the global cooldown will allow, but what I mean is that healing doesn't feel as jumpy. At least, it doesn't seem like it.

Currently damage goes out at the speed of Flash of Light, and at any moment a raid/party member could be on their death bed awaiting the speedy embrace of your fastest heal. And that worked before because the faster heals were alright to spam. But things have changed now spamming fast heals means the decrease of mana at the speed of Flash of Light. So what do we do? We spam the new cheap heal. But this heal is soooo slowwwwww! And people are dying! UGH!

But is it really that slow. I mean, I wouldn't consider 2 seconds to be slow, by any means. Maybe if we'll be able to play in a world where damage didn't kill people every 2 seconds, where we will have 2 seconds to heal a wounded ally. A world torn asunder, with men who become wolves, and giant molten dragons who destroy entire cities. If only such a world was out there ready to be played, preforably before X-mas time. *sigh* If only...

Reforging...

With the new patch hitting the servers today a new way to customize gear comes with it. Reforging, is a new tool that will let players pick a stat (ie. haste, crit, etc) on their gear and turn 40% of that stat into a more preferred stat. On both of my healers, this looks very appealing.

For my paladin I can turn some extra spirit into haste or crit, or I can make some of that extra crit into mastery or haste. I am not entirely sure how I am going to tackle this for my paladin, but I am thinking that crit is going to be more attractive for me.

For my priest, I've decided that haste is going to be very attractive. Not only will it help spells like Renew, and my mastery heal over time, it will help make the (very) slow Heal a little less slow. More Heals, will increase my chance for Surge of Light procs, and of course a smaller global cooldown. So haste is looking like a good first choice. So what I've decided with regards to Reforging I am planning on taking items that have crit and adding haste to those.

For my second choice, I am really liking mastery over crit right now. Crit is always unreliable, and only provides more overhealing. I won't need to rely on it for procs (like I did before 4.0), like I will be on my paladin (Holy Shock procs are nice). Which makes me think that mastery is going to be a nice stat to go with.

The Holy mastery will allow my direct healing spells to add a heal over time onto the target. You might not think that this is that great, but this is what I am thinking. Say I heal someone who just took a 6.5k hit. I heal for 6k, and apply the heal over time on top of that. This way the HoT will heal the remaining health preventing me from feeling a need to cast another heal that would then overheal. So if I can make this heal over time stronger, I'll be able to add a nice health cushion to targets, which I think will help out a lot.

So with regards to Reforging, I'm going to take items with Haste, and turn the Spirit on them into Mastery. I will warn you, though, Reforging can be very expensive if you decide to reforge all of you items at once.

Overhealing, and my Healing Approach

Since I started healing on my paladin through BC heroics, I used the approach of "big hit, use Holy Light, small hit, use Flash of Light." It worked pretty well, and during that time I began to get pretty good at keeping the green bars full.

Then Wrath came, and with it brought the "OMG everyone is taking big hits!" approach. As I began raiding in Naxx, and OS 25 man, it seemed as though everyone in the raid was taking a lot of damage. Combine that with my position as the tank healer, I began using the "use Holy Light" approach. No matter how big or small the hit was this was my heal of choice. This caused a lot of overhealing to be done. But it worked, all the way into ICC.

And then I started playing my priest. As I progressed through ICC 10, I found that about half of the fight were perfect for me. Whether there was constant pulsing AoE, or splash AoE damage, I used Renew, CoH, and PoH accordingly. I noticed though, that I was contributing to a lot of overhealing. Especially once my former guild began to work on the Lich King. So I wanted to start smart healing. Rather than throwing my array of heals at situations blindly, I stopped to think "Do I really need to cast that now, or can it wait?"

This shift in my approach, helped me become very efficient (notably on the Lich King fight itself). I would still use Prayer of Mending on cool down, and keep Renew on the tanks, but I became a little bit more selective on when I would use my other heals. Making sure they would not overheal, so that I would not waste my mana on heals that weren't needed.

Since I stopped raiding, I've kept this approach into my daily random heroics. Trying to fine tune my strategy and seeing a long I can wait to fill the green bars.

Now that I've begun testing my new spells and talents on my paladin and priest, I have tried to keep up with smart healing. And it has been going pretty well. with the change to Heal and Holy Light, I have that cheap small heal for when little damage is going out. I have the fast larger heal for when people get low, and I have the slow big heal for when people need to be brought up.

I have been working on utilizing these three heals when they are needed, while still using the rest of my arsenal when needed. While every fight, and group set up may shift my strategy, I still try to avoid overhealing as much as I can. This mini game that I am playing to keep people alive, while reducing wasted heals is why I like healing so much. The balance between mana efficiency and still preventing deaths is why I am especially looking forward to Cataclysm because overhealing will matter.

OMG I MOVED MY SPELLS!!!

After a good conversation with my friend about our keybindings and where we put our spells, I have come to a conclusion. My system didn't really make that much sense.

To start, the way that I set up my bars on my two main healers is as follows: I would put the three spells that I use most often at 5,6, and 7 with the rest going around those three. I wanted the main spells to be centrally located so that I could still reach the plethora of other spells in my arsenal if I needed to. This caused me to realize that a lot of the spells at the far reaches of my bar aren't really being used that much, and if they are they are being click. If they are going to be clicked that means they don't need to be on the bar.

So I reelvaluated. Now I have my three main spells at 3, 4, and 5 (GASP!!!!!). Big difference right, I know. But it has made a difference. My action bars seem more streamlined now, they feel effecient, and I feel like all is right with the world of action bars (a great idea for the next big MMO btw). I have healing and mana cooldowns above my bar and to the right, I have my dispells and "OH $*it" buttons above the bar and to the left, and my buffs to the far right. I move the AoE heals and the single target heals around depending on the content (raid AoE is closer to the big three, pvp single targets closer you get the idea).

After trying this out over the past week I am happy that I changed things up. From leveling to raiding my bars didn't really change. I would find a place for new spells, until just about every spot was taken. Now I've realized that I don't need Mana Burn on my bar all the time. I can keep those barely used spells where they belong, in the spell book until I need them.

Thoughts on 4.0

After doing some more testing on the PTR I have come to a couple of conclusions regarding the paladin and priest healing changes.

I found the paladin playstyle to be very fun. Holy Shock, Word of Glory, and Holy Light work really well together. The combination of chosing the right heal and managing holy power is much better than throwing the same heal at every situation. I also like how many choices there are for spending talent points once I spend 31 in the holy tree. The ret and prot trees have nice healing options, and there are a ton of nice soloing and utility points left in the holy tree. All of these changes make me very interested in playing my paladin.

As far as my priest goes, I am content with the changes. I haven't been able to get the most out of Chakra, but it is still a nice ability. What I have enjoyed is the desicion process when chosing the right heal. I've managed to figure out that I want to use Heal when the target is above 50% (give or take), and Flash Heal when they get below, and a Serendipitous Greater Heal if they are near death. I really like the dynamic that is going on here. Before Flash Heal was the only filler between Prayer of Mending, or Renews, or a needed Circle of Healing or Prayer of Healing. Now I've got some options. I also like how Surge of Light has found its way back into the spec. The instant  free procs from Heal go very nicely with Serendipity. I have realized that Archangel isn't as terrific as I thought for healing as holy, but it is still nice for pvp or soloing, and  I am going to want a ton of haste to make Heal as fast as it can be.

All in all, I am excited to heal on my pally again, and I am just as happy to heal on my priest. A win win for sure.

the PTR is Wonderful!

With all of the class changes coming out with patch 4.0, I decided to test out the new talents before they went live.

I was like a kid in a candy store. So many changes, it is like relearning how to play. I'll start with some of the broad changes, and get to the priest and pally stuff more. The new glyph interface is very nice. I am really looking forward to this change. Being able to get all of the glyphs that I want, and swap them in an out as I please is going to be a lot less of a hassle than the current system. The new Power Auras addition to the interface is very handy. Not only do shiny things appear around my character, but the button that you get to hit lights up too! This is a very nice change from constantly looking to the upper right of my screen for spells that poped up. And lastly, I am looking forward to Reforging. This looks like ti will add some much needed flexibility when prioritizing gear.

Now to the goods. I started first on my priest. I specced holy using this spec (minus Evangelism and Archangel because you're only lvl 80 on the ptr). To start, Chakra is a nice talent, and I love how it can stay up for as long as you want, and provide a nice boos to the heal that you need. Holy Word: Chastise, is pretty cool. I think that the cooldown is a bit long, but I like how it changes depending on the Chakra state I'm in. Also I am glad that Surge of Light is in the tree and easy to get. I get free Flash Heals, which give me Serendipity buffs which makes the use of the big heals much easier. I like how those talents work with eachother.

Also in case you were wondering I did try out discipline, so that I could get Archangel. It looks awesome (gives you wings), and it makes casting smite boost healing. I decided that I won't pick it up (too many better options, but if you want more about it you can see Miss Medicina's post about the numbers behind it's awesomeness here.

Next I went to my Paladin. The spec that I used here is different from the one that I linked in my previous post. I wanted to test out the healing, later on I'll test out the kind of damage I can dish out as holy, but for now I want to get used to healing. So here is the spec. There are some things off the bat that take some getting used to. Holy power is one of those things. In the spec that i linked, you will gain Holy Power by using Holy Shock and by healing the target of Beacon of Light with your casted heals. You can only have 3 charges of Holy Power, and once you have any number of charges you can use Word of Glory. While Word of Glory doesn't heal for much unless you have 3 charges, it is free and instant so you would only be wasting a global cooldown if you use it with less than 3 charges. Another thing that took me sometime to get used to was all of the buffs the pop up. Casting Holy Shock gives you haste when casting, and if you crit it makes Holy Light even faster. At the same time, casting has a chance to allow you to use Holy Shock without it triggering a cooldown (2 in a row). These buffs are really nice, and they make the playstyle a lot more interactive and fun. Managing the buffs to the casted spells, managing the buffs to Holy Shock, and using Holy Power effectively is a lot more dynamic than spamming the most efficient heal all the time.

The last thing I want to say about Holy paladins is Light of Dawn!!!! It looks really amazing.

All in all, holy priests will still be a lot of fun, and holy paladins will have a much more dynamic playstyle. I am looking forward to playing both when 4.0 goes live.