my other bubbler

I have been doing a random splash of things lately. I'm still raiding ICC10... we've gotten Sindragosa to almost 10%, and we took out the Blood Wing last week. It's bizarre that we waited so long to do it; my progression was Rotface, Festergut, Valithria, then Professor Putricide, but we finally swung by the Princes and Queen. Princes we two-shot, and Queen we didn't spend more than a few attempts on before we got the achievement.

My guild is having the same problems many others face: calling raids to attendance, players quitting or disappearing, and being lucky to get down the farm bosses each week. It's been rough. Before I was conscripted to Healing Harpy, we raided with lots of healers. Now we are running less because we just don't have them on the roster. We're making it work on the nights we get into the raid.

Codi at Moar HPS and Larisa from The Pink Pigtail Inn have some thoughts on the state of the game, and and they say it better than I can.

healing sparkles - penance and divine aegis are so beautiful and shiny.

I brushed off my priest after months of being my enchanting slave, and gave her the noble mission of roflstomping Horde. I did my very first arena last night: we ran 42 matches and won 22 of them on our priest/lock Chronic Pwnitis.

Resto druids/anything make me sad to fight against, almost enough to make me consider switching to my thick-skinned tree ("for research"). I feel as though perhaps it's something I am doing wrong that druids annihilate us. If we can't burst down the druid's partner in the first ten seconds, the match will last long enough for me to start burning cooldowns again. It will be long and painful, because we will run around until I'm finally forced OOM and then we lose.

I tried staying mana-conservative, but I can't outlast a druid. I tried aggressively mana burning and dispelling hots, but I merely emptied my blue bar. Helplessly I watch those branches wave and dance towards victory.

I was surprised by the variety of skill we ran into. Some losses were taken, hard, by opponents who outplayed us. Some of them outgeared us (I ran into priests with 6,000 mana more than I had). Some of our wins weren't 'earned': I saw players who went matches without using powerful abilities or communicating target-switches. I ran into melee I could kite, giggling at how frustrating I must have been to them, and I watched myself die faster than I could trinket from a rogue or a warrior.

I retired my priest sometime in 3.1, so my gear is a smattering of ilevel 200-213's, but I do have four set Gladiator bonus and almost 900 resilience. I'm not terribly ashamed, since at one point it was pretty nice gear. I am using a different spec than ever before: I went without Inner Focus (which I haven't missed), and I replaced the glyph of Flash Heal (by the gods, I almost called it Flash of Light!) with Glyph of Pain Suppression.

I have to confess, though, how often I don't need Pain Suppression while stunned. I have found that my partner gets focused more often than I do, so I'm buffing him with lots of sparkles. I am still learning, however, and it's possible that if we move into more brackets I'll love glyphed PS. My playstyle leans strongly on the defensive side, I'm still not sure when to mana burn and when to spam dispel without leaving myself wide open. Who knows, maybe I'll figure out when it's right for me to burst, too!