Looking Back

Thinking about all the raiding I've done (UBRS to BT), and it amazes me how much things have changed. First, when I started raiding, I was a rogue and my husband was a resto druid. I went with swords because I was having a hard time getting behind mobs to backstab. Kb turner ftl.

I can remember being in MC and feeling jealous of the priests. They seemed so important with their buffs and rez's. The thought occured to me while I was taking a dirt nap next to Magmadar's corpse that I wanted to be more than just another dps. I wanted to be a helper, not a helpee who just soaked buffs. So when my group of friends decided to make our own guild, I saw it as a chance to reroll as a holy priest.

I cut my teeth on MC as a healer but by that time we were starting on BWL, so that's where the bulk of my experience came from. My husband was the guild's healing lead, so he tried to help me where he could, but our spell selection was pretty different. I spec'd Holy Nova for Vael and learned all about MT healing rotations. I got pretty good at keeping people up and demagicing on Chromaggus. We could never keep the BWL dragons' names straight (Firemaw, Ebonroc, Flamgor), so my brother-in-law dubbed them all Flebonmaw, which is now our 2v2 team's calling card. Our 3v3 is Son of Flebonmaw. lol

At some point during our BWL assault, my husband retired his resto druid and took over the reigns of his brother's orc warrior, Fozec, when he stopped playing. I can remember being so proud of how hard he studied to be a warrior and how much he practiced. It was a good thing, too, because they tossed him in as BWL MT the very next raid. No pressure or anything. lol

When the new healing lead's attendance became spotty, I ended up taking over the job when he didn't show up. It stressed me out a lot because everyone had been a healer for much longer than me, but somehow we managed. After a while, I just did the job full-time since it was easier to be consistent every week and I had really high attendance.

When BC came out, I had a tough decision to make. Do I continue on with my undead priest or do I reroll? At this point my character had full T2 and T3 bracers, plus every other slot was epic'd out. I knew I wanted to be a healer and I couldn't face ditching her after all the work it took to get her where she was (300 ench/tailor at the time, too). So I respec'd to shadow and started leveling to 70.

It took us about 2 months to get to 70 and into 5-mans. Those that had rerolled pally were about level 60, so we had some time to kill as a guild before we really started in on the raid scene. So we ran 5-mans like crazy and worked on our rep. I went Aldor for the healing thread and got my professions up.

We ran 2 Kara teams from close to the begining I think. We tried to mix up the people between them so everyone could learn to play with everyone else. Sadly, I had terrible luck with drops in there. To this day my priest has the blue mace from Shattered Halls. When the robes dropped, another priest got them and promptly stuck them in the bank.

About the time we started working on SSC, I was really not liking my priest. First, the undead are terrible looking and creepy. I made her look the best I could, but my options were pretty limited. I also hated how the new paladins were beating me to heals AND running around as cute belfs. Plus, one hit and I was toast.

So I rerolled paladin and stopped taking priest drops from the raids. There was no point in getting gear for a character I planned on parking. Over the time it took to get my new character ready, my priest was getting woefully behind the group in gear. So I started making her all the mooncloth stuff I could to keep her moderately up to speed. The most progressed boss she made it to was Morogrim.

My husband bought me a ton of green healing gear off the AH, and I started running 5-mans. It took us one weekend to get my Pally attuned to Kara and by then the SSC attunement was void. I ran Kara a couple of times on my pally and not only picked up the mace from Prince, but the shield from Chess. I quickly traded it in for Gruul's shield, too. I then started gobbling up the SSC gear everyone else already had.

If Blizz came out with a cool hero class healer, I might consider rerolling, but beyond that, I'm extremely happy with my healadin. I have tons of utility and really feel like I'm helping the team when I raid. And for me, that's what it's all about.