Well, while the servers are down I finally have the spare time to write something resembling a post! It’s not really a post, though. Instead, it’s a … todo list!

Finish levelling professions on Lunedi
Thanks to this guide and some mat donations from a guildie, I got Lunedi’s mining and jewelcrafting up over 400 this weekend. She’s just starting to mine saronite from Sholazar Basin, and will soon be fighting it out with everyone else for titanium, which I can prospect for blue gems to level JC!

Organize daily profession stuff
Continuing my gold-making plans from last week, I’m trying to make better use of my professions. Liore has an epic gem transmute each day that I should take advantage of, plus unlimited meta gems. Lunedi should do the JC daily every day, and make icy prisms when I get to that point. I have a level 70 tailor/enchanter who should really get her shatters and specialty cloth cooldown timers sorted. And on that idea..

Switch Liore to Transmute Spec
Liore has been Potion Spec since the beginning of time. Back in the day, being able to make my own mana potions was extremely cost efficient. It’s still pretty handy for the first few months of any new expansion, but overall I’d be better suited by being able to proc extra transmutes.

One Light In The Darkness (10s)
Both me and another healer just need this achievement to get our Ulduar drakes. I have a timer up to the Keepers saved — ask for help with this from the guild!

Get Exalted with Keepers of Time
Find some poor suck– um, helper to run Heroic Black Morass a few times. How am I just short of exalted with KoT, anyway? It feels like I ran BM a million, billion times to help people get keyed for Karazhan.

Get the Perky Pug on Liore!
Oof. While the LFG system was top of my daily priorities when it debuted, I admit I have been slacking a bit as of late. It’s also really tempting to just run with guildies instead of puggies, but that does not get me any closer to an adorable doggy of my own! Just 19 more random people to go…

Send mats from Guild Vault for flasks
Find a nice elixir master.

Repost all auctions on Friday morning
I’m going away for the weekend, so I’m listing everything my banker owns on Friday morning on a 48-hour timer. Let’s see how much gold I’ve REALLY made with this AH mogul thing.

Evaluate new recruit
Check the logs tomorrow morning.

Read up on new ICC bosses, kill Putricide
Argh, Putricide! 16% last week.. assuming people are on the ball, I think we’d have it… except our Abom driver is away for work this week. Figure out if we should wait until Monday (traditionally a weak roster night), or power through with a better roster but novice abom driver on Thursday.

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Random ICC, LFG, quests/dailies, silly

The great tragedy of healing is that the better your team gets, the more boring it becomes. It’s been said many times that while DPS can strive for bigger and better results on farm bosses, healers just see their numbers dwindle. Easy farm content leads to boredom, and in my guild bored healers lead to trouble. All of us enjoy the crazy chaotic fights with lots of running and stuff to do. Healychat after the first couple of Festergut wipes read like wide-eyed kids in a candy store: “Did you see that? There’s so much raid damage. It’s .. it’s AWESOME.”

This is particularly applicable to LFG pugs at the moment. Given a halfway decent tank, I can get away with Prayer of Mending and a shield or two, leaving me to space out and spin around in my chair for half the instance. So what’s an overgeared healer to do? SMITE!

I know a lot of healers queue up with DPS gear and specs now to help out with damage, but I’m not that brave. I burn through mana really quickly in my shadow set, and my hotbars and keybindings are all wrong for the kind of panicked “oh shit” healing that might be required. Besides, you never know how good your next Heroic tank will be. Instead, I like playing the Battle Priest, Smiter Extraordinaire. I’ve beaten DPS on many a pull, which is vastly more entertaining than dancing in the back of the room.

The secret to healer dps is this macro, which you probably already have in use somewhere:

/cast [harm,nodead][target=targettarget,harm,nodead] SpellName

Set up all your offensive spells to use this macro. Now you can DPS a mob without ever leaving your friendly target — instead it will hit your target of target. I use this to pop shadow word: pain, devouring plague, and shadow word: death on a boss as much as possible (assuming you can give up the GCDs). Hey, every bit helps, and I’m pretty sure my 200 DPS on Rotface was what put us over the top. Totally.

Anyway, this can be used with smite too, which is your friend on pugs. Throw SW:P on anything, and pop devouring plague and SW:D on the big baddie. Is there a single target? PoM and shield your tank, and Smite away! Is it a pack pull? Oh, you lucky dog, it’s MIND SEAR time. I love mind sear. I love it so much. All the tanks in my guild can testify to my love of mind sear, as it’s killed them each at least once. (What? I can’t stop and heal you, I’m clearly MIND SEARING. Duh.)

It helps to have a bit of +hit. I have 70 incidentally from a wand and offhand in my main gearset, which is good enough for me. The hit cap for Heroic bosses is about 130 for Alliance and 160 for Horde, not that it’s a huge concern.

A well geared healy priest can easily pull down 1-2k DPS during a Heroic (again, assuming a good tank), which means that you will clear the instance that much faster. Being a Heroic Battle Priest and occasionally beating Mr. Mouthy Noob Hunter on the charts has made LFG much, much more fun.

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Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic: Feed it a WoW macro, and it will explain what the heck is going on in those many square brackets. Oh, clever website!

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Healing, WotLK LFG, priest

Right before 3.3 hit, I knew it was going to be an exciting patch. There was a whole new raid instance! And new recipes, a new legendary, new crafting orbs, three new heroics, and a new faction. Oh, and some change to the Looking For Group interface, but whatever, pug runs are stupid.

So here we are, a week after launch, and I have to admit that my 3.3 fangirling was right on the mark. Everything is fun and exciting! What I didn’t expect was becoming such a Looking For Dungeon addict.

I cannot say enough about this new system on a few different levels. As a guild leader, I love seeing lots of people on being active, and now in between raids you can look at the guild list and see people running everything, all over the place. Two or three guildies wanna group up? No problem. There’s no more “Oh, sorry, I ran that already,” and alts are suddenly really popular. I’ve even had a few people return to playing simply because they love being able to run a heroic any time their heart desires.

On a personal, player level, I have really enjoyed all my groups. Some of them were with excellent players, like the time I cleared Halls of Lightning in a fraction of the usual time (props to you mad chainpulling tanks!). Some of them were with barely adequate players. One of them was a heroic Nexus where I was not only the healer but also second highest DPS, and it was a BLAST. Granted, it was with a really good pug tank who didn’t need much looking after, but being a battle priest was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in Nexus, if not in recent heroic memory.

I even had the stereotypical dumb DK in one group, who announced halfway through that he was leveling his unarmed skill. I replied that I was going to start leveling my “unhealed” skill. The rest of the group chuckled.

Each LFG heroic is an adventure. Where are we going? What kind of tank will I have? Will the DPS be any good? Will people talk or be silent? Will they have silly names that I can ask about? (Favorite so far: a DK named Schmarthas.)

Before 3.3 my resistance to pugs was pretty well known by the guild. And I was happy that way! But suddenly I have become a Liore of the People, with badges and gold and titles and adorable puppies and alt gear and good stories.

So bravo, Blizz. I would never have asked for this feature, but now that it’s here I cannot get enough of it.

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Technical Issues, WotLK LFG, patch