I leveled from 0-80 as healy. Sure, I’d tweak it into a leveling spec (SMITE!) while grinding XP, but I poo-pooed luxuries like mind flay. I’m not sure why. By now it’s just tradition, and I admit that it lends itself pleasingly to curmudgeonly grumblings. “Back in my day we had to walk uphill to Blackrock Mountain in the heat, we didn’t have guild vaults, we leveled with wand spec — and we liked it!” Anyway, a few noob observations:
* It turns out that Mind Sear and Mind Flay are two entirely different colored lines of death with two entirely different purposes! More than once I got flustered and mixed them up.
* Perhaps Dispersion has some important function. I don’t know. I had fun using it and shouting to anyone around, “Look! Look! I’m an evil cloud!”.
* Not being able to heal myself when I pleased without dropping Shadowform was odd at first, but with a little practice I got better at timing VE.
Respeccing for the weekend and piling through a bunch of quests was definitely worth it. I did three days of dailies for the Hodir, Oracles, and Tuskarr, as well as half of the Icecrown quest achievement. The DPS change definitely made a difference, although shadow priest damage takes a while to build up so it’s not particularly suited to mowing through quest mobs. More than anything I just enjoyed the novelty of new spells and skills after four years of healyosity.
I was back to my usual spec in time for Malygos-25 on Sunday evening (guild first kill, hooray!), but I think I might have the DPS bug now. By the end of the night I was talking about picking up some off-spec gear before Ulduar, and may or may not have jumped discs during Malygos wipes to go try and get the killing blow off on a Scion.
I have to admit, I feel a little guilty, like I’m cheating on holy spec. It’s okay to experiment with alternative specs on the weekend, right? It’s not like I’m going to start speccing Shadow during the week, or binge on DPS, waking up the next morning dazed and wearing hit gems. Right? Right?
It’s weird you know. I spent 3+ years doing nothing but DPS. 2 Warlocks, 1 Hunter, and 1 Shaman. Since going Resto with the Shaman, I find it so very difficult to play dps. I need to be able to heal myself. I may not do much damage, but I am sure as heck hard to kill!
Thae
The premise of this title is false! I submit that Liore is in fact evil all of the time.
Okay, okay, I’m quite often evil. I just don’t look like it. Nor do I melt faces!
Thae, I’m not sure how happy I’d be playing a class that can’t heal AT ALL, but mostly DPS with a little healing seems interesting.
DPS with a little healing is an odd mix for me now. Before on my Mage if I noticed alot of raid damage all I could do was pray for some quick healers or possibly bandage. Now with my Druid I can pop out and tranquility the raid or toss a few hots on people, I will admit that initially I was reluctant because of the dps downtime but after cafeful thought a dead dps class is worse than not topping the damage charts.
This topic — and talking to Blasfemme about tanking — got me thinking about hybrids, clearly.
I think there’s going to be a lot more of what you’re talking about, Nor. My money is on a good bit of Ulduar requiring “situational” healing and tanking.