Post this questionnaire, with your answers, on your blog. Pick the healing class you know most about (or is the focus of your blog) for the questionnaire, and then send it over to another healing blogger you know and love who heals with a DIFFERENT class. Include a link to the blogger who sent you the questionnaire, as well as a link to the blogger to whom you are sending it.
- What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Sinespe, Discipline Priest, primarily shadow
- What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) When required by my guild, I heal Trial of the Grand Crusader 10-player, up to and including the Twin Val'kyr.
- What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Lightwell. No, seriously; stop laughing. Lightwell. I know it's not even in my spec, but it is my favourite Priest healing spell. People need to be educated in its use, because it is ludicrously powerful. Coming in a close second is Binding Heal. Both of those spells are unique to the Priest class, in spite of all the homogenisation that has gone on in Wrath.
- What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Either Greater Heal or Divine Hymn. The former just because I forget or don't find time to use it, the latter because by the time I realise I have it we've probably already wiped. I need to work on that.
- What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? As just about every other priest will have said, our biggest strength is that we have a spell for every occasion. Specific to Discipline, Borrowed Time allows for quite amazing single-target burst healing when it's needed -- Power Word: Shield is an instant 7-9k's worth of prevention, and following that up with a GCD-capped Flash Heal ... there's nothing quite like it.
- What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? I ... really don't think we have one in PvE. Specifically where Discipline is concerned, we have quite a lot of ways in which we can remain mobile while still casting useful spells -- Prayer of Mending and PW: S being the instant ways to do that, and Borrowed Time allowing for very short bursts of standing still while needing to move. I guess you could say that we have problems where our itemisation is concerned, because the lines between throughput and longevity are very rigidly defined: Intellect gives negligible throughput, and spellpower negligible longevity. But that's not a bad thing -- all it requires is intelligence enough to focus on a particular philosophy according to what you and your raid need.
- In a 25 [10] man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? (I don't do 25-mans, so I've edited this question.) I don't actually have a preference. Discipline has very strong supportive raid healing with its shields and Prayer of Mending, but also strong supportive Tank healing with Penance, Bubbles and Flash Heal. In a 10-man raid where the other two healers are a Resto Druid (Almost certainly a raid healer) and a Holy Paladin (Almost certainly a tank healer), I like to fill in the gaps between the two.
- What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Discipline, of course. I wouldn't give up my offspec for anything. I like to feel that I have an intuitive knowledge of both Discipline and Shadow -- as such, if either spec gets jumbled by changes, I get jumbled by them too. (In the words of "Kungen", "Live inside your character. If it dies, you die. FOCUS!")
- What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? I would most likely have trouble playing a Holy Paladin. I know that they have a lot of utility if they spec 51/20/0, but they are, for the most part, a "Stand still and heal" kind of a class. They get most hamstrung by movement fights, and especially in ToGC with fights like Gormok the Impaler with his Snobolds and Jaraxxus with his bassément Mistresses, I'd feel annoyed if a tank died because of my inability to heal them.
- What is your worst habit as a healer? The same as when I'm DPSing: Jumping (to the left or right, generally) whenever I cast an instant spell. If I hit PW: S, I jump. Prayer of Mending? Jump. However, I see this as a good thing: I have been conditioned to associate "Instant-cast" with "jumping" -- i.e., when I need to move, I will know my limits in terms of my healing capability, and I will know where my instant-cast buttons are.
- What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? I dunno ... I guess when I'm in PuGs I get annoyed at DPS who pull less DPS than me (while I'm healing. I smite in 5-mans to alleviate the boredom) -- and there have been people who do that, in epics, no less. I know they're only heroics, but I do wish people would focus just a little bit. I don't like slacking from other people, when I'm always trying to run at >90% efficiency for whatever I'm doing.
- Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Oh, definitely. I mean, I'd love some kind of Power Word: Bacon that I could apply to a target, and which would mirror my Penance healing -- that would give me a bit more single-target healing output to compete with Paladins, but, really, it would be a luxury. It's not something we need.
- What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? I use Pitbull. If Boss health is at 0%, fellow raiders' health are above 0%, and my mana is at 10% or lower after having popped every mana cooldown I have, then I consider myself to have performed perfectly. I do check the "Deaths" section of Recount to see if there were anything I could have done to keep dead people alive, but apart from that I don't generally focus much on anything other than what I'm doing at the time of a boss fight. If I screw up, I know it, because it doesn't happen often.
- What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? That we are tank healers. I think that misconception still exists -- I don't think enough people yet rate Power Word: Shield spam as a viable form of raid healing; or, if they do, I don't think they realise that we not only can raid shield but also can tank-heal at the same time.
- What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? The importance of Meditation. While levelling my Death Knight, I've seen so many holy priests who have gone too deep into Holy before hitting Northrend, and thus haven't picked up Meditation (including one train-wreck of a priest, but he has since respecced Discipline and it doesn't look as terrible as it used to). I find that Discipline is pretty self-explanatory. It's obviously about shields, and it's obviously centred around Flash Heal and Penance.
- If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? They wouldn't see a pattern. I try to keep low overhealing, but apart from that, it is entirely fight-dependent
- Haste or Crit and why? MOAR DAPPS
- What healing class do you feel you understand least? Holy Priest. It's changed far too much since Wrath came out, and I don't really recognise it any more. I sort of get it, but ...
- What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? /cast [target=focus] Power Infusion, on the Macro side, and that's all. Add-ons, I use Grid, Quartz ... that's about all.
- Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I follow Paolo's advice: Intellect comes on gear, Spirit comes on gear where there are no double-dip slots, so stack Spellpower and Crit as high as you can. Moar DAPPS.
So. Tone. Your turn. You're not a different class, but I don't know anyone else with a blog. Go go.
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