January 13, 2010

Since I last wrote I've been either on vacation or extremely busy at work. But, I've had a lot of fun both in and out of WoW, so I'm happy. As for the WoW stuff...

ICC 25 (Priest)
The second wing of Icecrown, the Plagueworks, has opened. Last week we got down Rotface with no problem, but were having trouble with Festergut. We finally killed him on Sunday by the skin of our teeth. It was a very very close kill.

We moved on to Professor Putricide and did a few of our 10 attempts then called it a night. Hopefully we'll get a few more attempts in this week.

ICC 10 (Priest)
The progress of the 10-man group was the opposite of our 25-man one. We had no troubles getting Festergut down, but Rotface was a big problem. We finally got him down last night, so we were able to get our first attempts in on Professor last night.

Healing Meters
In the last week I've been noticing a something very disconcerting. My numbers on the healing meters have dropped tremendously, compared to my fellow healers. I don't put too much stock in the meters, as the true gauge of effectiveness is whether or not we succeeded in the encounter with minimal deaths. But, the significant drop in my numbers has concerned me.

What's going on? Am I being slower to react? Are the other healers beating me to targets, leaving me with less to heal? Am I not healing efficiently lately?

I'm running out of mana occasionally, so it's not for a lack of casting.

One change I made recently could be contributing to the problem. I put in a Power Aura setting to indicate to me when Prayer of Mending is off cooldown. I added it because I often try to cast PoM and realize too late that it's still on cooldown. So, I wanted to stop myself from wasting the click. I had hoped it would make me more efficient. It has helped -- I no longer waste the click. But, it's had an unexpected side effect. I end up casting it more often -- every time the cooldown is up. The problem? Sometimes I'm doing so before the previous one has had a time to jump to all of its targets. So, I'm effectively clipping the spell. I'm not a math whiz, so I'm not going to try to put it down with numbers and calculate it all out. I'm just going to try to be more thoughtful about when I actually cast PoM. The signal from Power Aura should only be telling me I can cast it again, not that I should cast it.

I'm also wondering if I overdid the haste on my gear. The other holy priests in my guild who are out-healing me have far less haste than I do and higher spellpower and/or crit. So far in Icecrown I find myself casting instant spells more than anything. I'm not sure how much benefit high haste has when using all instant spells. I focused on haste because I wanted to make Flash Heal / Greater Heal / Prayer of Healing faster. Back in the Ulduar and ToC days I was using Flash Heal a lot to proc Serendipity for GH or PoH. I'm finding I'm using it less and less now since there is so much movement and so much raid damage in ICC. I have very little time or need to build up Serendipity procs. When I'm consciously doing so, it almost seems forced. Like I'm casting Flash Heal on just anybody in order to get Serendipity up. Definitely a waste of mana.

I'll see if I can play around with gems to change things up a bit.

Miscellaneous
Not much more to say than that. As usual, there's a lot to say if I post every day. But, when several days go by, the mundane things seem less interesting.