726 Gold. What’s that? The total amount of Gold I have spent since hitting 85 tuning just my Holy Spec. That is eleven 66 gold respecs.  Could it be me being fickle? Yes– and let’s be real here: I can be fickle and indescisive. (Just look at the total gold spent in the Barbershop and the total numbre of race changes I’ve done!) Joking aside, it is me testing out different spec options and seeing which seem to work best for me and my raid group. As a general rule, there is very little flexibility in the ‘bookends of our spec’. The real questions come in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tiers of the tree- and therefore have the most flexibility. You need to remember to spec to how you are going …

First, I want to introduce everyone to a new article type here at Tales of a Priest: Flash Heal. Flash Heal is a short, quick, and easy to understand post. Flash Heal is something you can easily read on a flight path. Flash Heal is meant to be less involved and detailed than a full article you are used to seeing here at Tales. Flash Heal will be a post that will give you some form of tip, trick, or gem of insight on anything from a spell to a boss mechanic. Leap of Faith, (aka. Lifegrip) I will admit, really wasn’t something I was looking forward to when first announced. Why is it MY job to pull YOU out of your own stupidity? Someone standing in Valiona’s flame breath? …

First off, I know what you’re going to say. Just stop right there and wipe that smug look off your face. I blame all of you for me being here. That’s right – YOU.  All your chitter chatter on twitter and facebook. The emails. The previews. That fiendish asshole Derevka singing how amazing I am, & bribing me with a baby boomkin pet. IT’S SO FUCKING CUTE HOW CAN I RESIST???!!! Add in the fact that once I left, he tried “classing” the site up by adding doilies & curtains everywhere, and now it looks like this – enough is enough. Don’t expect me to match him post for post -I’m simply back to bring the trash to his class, so get the “I told you so’s” out of your …

**Note the date of this post and stat priorities have changed as the expansion has progressed, talents have changed, and encounters developed** Gearing your priest for Holy will be daunting at first and you’ll need to prioritize the stats you want to get. Generally speaking, if you have just hit 85 and are fighting your way through 5 Man Normals and Heroics, you’ll want to gear for regen. This means Spirit. Lots and lots of Spirit. (Remember you can reforge those dual stat items from Crit/Haste to include Spirit!). Once you have gotten to a point where you are comfortable with your regen and you are keeping your raid alive, you can start seeking out other stats. In starter Heroics, I started to feel comfortable in the 1800-2000 Spirit range. …

Traige healing is here! What does this mean to you? Mainly, it means you need to get used to the fact that you will not see your raid at 100% HP at all times. This could take you some time to get used to, and you’ll have to resist the urges to immediately top off all the members of your raid — if you try to, you’ll find mana pool bone dry and your tank getting decimated by the boss. Mana conservation is the name of the game here. Not only do you need to get comfortable with always seeing your raid not at 100% HP, but also your raid does too.  I am looking at you, DPS… Everyone has exceptionally higher health pools than we did in Wrath. This …

With Cataclysm comes a lot of changes in Azeroth, as does come a lot of changes here at Tales of a Priest! As you can see the blog has a new face. I’m really pleased with how it came out. I wanted the change the direction of the look of the blog to tilt away from it’s former more “RP” look to something cleaner, easier to read, and a bit easier to highlight specific posts. With the new Featured Post option, Tales will be able to highlight more than just the ‘most recent’ posts– we’ll be able to highlight some of the more popular and ‘more relevant’ posts via the banner/slider at the top. The Power Auras Pages as well as the UI page will be updated in the next …

Cata is imminent! It will be here in hours! So what does that mean for you today? Here are a few key points to be sure you have yourself ready for Cata! 1. Learn to love Stormwind and Orgrimmar; they are your new hubs to the new zones. 2. Train at the Flight Master and get your license! (Trainers are available right next to the Stormwind/Orgrimmar flight paths) 3. Decide if you want to Quest or Dungeon Grind. From my experience in Beta, I feel questing is your best bet… just for the quest rewards. You’ll be upgrading pretty quickly out of even your 277 HM ICC gear (even faster than dungeon blues)– Stamina Gains will be extremely important! Some of these quest mobs hit HARD. 4. If you are using …

With Cataclysm coming, many folks are preparing to level their existing professions (or perhaps a new profession). It is time to take a good look as to what the bonuses each profession will have… I know many people believe in min/maxing (myself included) their character through their professions. There are also others who would rather not and just keep their professions as a “nice to have”. Regardless of which side of the argument you fall on, the Cataclysm bonuses are very similar to what we had in Wrath—- with a few added perks for some professions.

As promised, now that Ava is retired, Tales of a Priest continues on with coverage of both priest healing specs… I even included a gratuitous horror movie reference! That being said,  I spent some quality time on the beta last week, and I had the chance to join a couple of 10 mans/25 mans to do some raid testing — time to see this stuff in action! Overall, I was fairly unimpressed with how Disc handled in that beta build, however, there is good news! The build that dropped earlier this weekhas some great improvements to the Disc tree, and I feel they actually play to Discipline’s advantage and after testing those same encounters again I was pleased to see that Discipline was working better than the previous week after diving …

This is probably one of the most difficult posts to write. To most of us, World of Warcraft has become a huge part of our life: we talk about it, blog about, we even have get-togethers focused around it. Giant Nerd label or not, I’m sure we can all admit that even though the game was frustrating at one point or another, the benefits far outweighed the cons. Perhaps that’s why it’s so painful to finally come to this conclusion, but my World Of Warcraft career has come to a close. No, it’s not a protest to the state of the game or a statement about what I think of Cataclysm – it’s really nothing more than ‘it’s time to move on’. I’ve been here since the game’s original beta …