CYPHAN? Sounds like a venereal disease, doesn’t it? I assure you, it’s not. It’s a new Midwest Scifi/fantasy convention for costumers, collectors, gamers and fans located in the Chicago Suburbs, and it’s happening this weekend.

One of the weekend seminars is a World of Warcraft discussion, and a last minute change of plans (or desperation) has planted yours truly as one of the speakers. It’s nothing hardcore, raiding or even healing related – more of an intro to the game for new and newer players. We’ll be covering such things as choosing a faction, race, and class, leveling, gold making, guilds, dungeons, & etiquette. So if you’re in the area, and need something to do this weekend, come check out the convention! The seminar is scheduled for Saturday at 11:00 am, so come join us and share your experiences with newer players….and you can say ‘hi’ to me. I don’t bite. Hard.

Check it out here and hope to see you there! Oh, and yes – they do server liquor there. That’s the only reason I agreed to do this.

This weeks post is a guest post by Suzushiiro, from BigCrits. (see my Previous post about Stoneybaby’s project, BigCrits). Stoney warned me about this one… perhaps, too little too late! HALP!

And remember to enter our Curse Premium Client Contest here! You could win a Year of Curse Premium!

This is Suzushiiro, resident pro Holy/Disc Priest and comic relief character of the guild/show about the guild Big Crits, gracing this blog with my presence to teach you nubs a thing or two about Priest-ing. Today’s discussion topic is how to handle a Holy and Disc dual spec, so those of you who run shadow for their second spec might want to change the channel for the next few minutes.

You real healers still with me? Good.

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This post title has far too many C’s in it (Yay for alliteration!?)

It’s time for another contest and giveaway here at Tales of a Priest! As many of you know, I am a little obsesed with my UI… I love mods;, I love seeing what they can do to improve my gameplay. One of the most annoying things about having a UI that you love: is keeping it updated.

The Curse Client is a great  application that lets you search for mods, read the description, install them, and helps you be sure you have the latest and greatest version. If that was all that the Curse Client did, I would be happy. But wait –– There’s more!!

The Curse Client also helps you keep your mods synched up across different computers. Many of you who follow me ton Twitter, know I travel a lot for work  and I bring a gaming laptop with me. The Curse client helps me keep my Desktop PC and my Laptop synched up as the Client keeps my Mods and Settings synched up! Had to reformat your computer or zombies stole your hard drive? You can use the Curse Client to restore your mods and settings.

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Bigger is better right? Bigger heals means it is better— just like Gearscore, brah!!

Not necessarily.

The key with bigger heals is to be using them effectively… just because you CAN cast a GHeal that will crit for 30K doesn’t mean you should. The same goes for Flash Heal, Renew, COH, POM, Penance, etc.

Wait, what?

Overheal, at its core, isn’t going to wipe your raid, but if you aren’t overhealing it can be indicative that you are healing more effectively. Bigger isn’t always better!

Blizzard has introduced Strength of Wrynn (SoW) and Hellscream’s Warsong (HW). This mechanic is something moderately new. We haven’t seen much similar to this before: a scaling buff over time. What does this mean? Does it mean that when it gets increased that you are now 5% more awesome than you were the previous week? Maybe… but in reality, as healers, you need to figure out what this actually means for YOU.

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Some self promotion here, but Ava and I’s guild has been able to bring the bastard down on Heroic 10 Man. (25 Man to follow!)

Remember – Full HD Versions are available at YouTube.

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Batten down the hatches, pour yourself a beer, and be ready for a rather interesting exchange between Ava, Derevka, Sompalina and Hafrot… we’re doing their Priest Rountable! Even though Stomp can’t pronounce my name to save her life… LOL For those of you who have heard Ava and I Podcast together in the past, or have read our exchanges on Twitter… this should prove entertaining!

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Big Crits is something that Stoneybaby has been working on for the last several months. Many of you know Stoney from the Totem Talk column at WoW.com, Big Hit Box, and his Starbucks Foursquare updates on Twitter. This project is really somewhere between a documentary and “Real World: Azeroth”…complete with the “Confession Booth” like interviews — and I love it.

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Ava did a great post a few weeks back called How To Disco With the Lich King, and it has generated some great feedback and questions on the encounter. I do, want to dive a bit more in depth to the Infest mechanic of the fight and how PW: Shield works at handling it.  (Both on Heroic and Normal Mode 10/25).

One very common misconception about Disc Priests and the Lich King encounter is that it is all about Bubble Spam– nothing more, and nothing less. If you have a Disc priest, Infest is irrelevant: just spam and /profit. This couldn’t be further from the truth – the key to this fight is an INTELLIGENT Disc Priest, not just some Bubble Monkey. There is a lot you need to keep track of during this fight all while protecting your raid from Infest: You need to be very aware of your ability and the detriment of “outgearing” Infest. (Yes, I said DETRIMENT).  On top of all the other stuff that is going on during this fight you need to remember that the LK Encounter is a 10 minute fight, can your mana pool stand up to 10 minutes of blanketing the raid with a 900 mana per cast Power Word: Shield?

To better understand all of this, first lets go over what Infest actually does…

Infest: Deals X to Y Shadow damage to all enemy players within 50000 yards. In addition, the targets will take increasing Shadow damage per second. This effect is removed when the target has more than 90% health.

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Because it doesn’t tell us jack shit about what a raiding guild is really looking for in a player.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

What, you actually want an in depth answer? No one wants an in depth answer any more ! No one wants to THINK! If they did, we wouldn’t have this WUTS UR GS mess in the first place.

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“To ensure all participants in the Arena Tournament have the best experience possible, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for any inappropriate character or Arena team names created on the Arena Tournament realm.

Characters with inappropriate names will be deleted. This means that you will need to customize another template from scratch and re-earn all personal and hidden ratings. Keep in mind that in a later phase of the Arena Tournament team rosters will be locked down. If your character is deleted during this time, no exceptions will be made and your team will need to use whoever is left on that roster in order to continue competing.

Arena teams with names deemed inappropriate will be dissolved. This means that you will need to create another charter for your team and climb back up from a rating of zero.

Please think twice before naming your characters and Arena teams!”

I have to admit that my eyes widened a little when I read this blue post in my RSS feed the other day. Is Blizzard actually drawing a line in the sand?

Let’s take a closer look at this a little closer. Yes, we all know that harassment and inappropriate names are all against the EULA– however Blizzard has never made such an explicit statement comment regarding naming. I find it more interesting that Blizzard feels they need to make this distinction. Of course Blizzard is covering all types of inappropriate names, including racism, sexism, domestic violence, etc– and for that I applaud them. I really want to dive into this a bit more as to why does this need to happen?

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