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It's time I faced the cold hard truth.

I can't remember the last time I used my Holy spec.

I am a Disc priest.

In BC I was Holy/IDS (hybrid Holy-Disc build) for a really long time until I was converted by the cult of CoH and became a devoted Holy priest. But Lich King (and Moz) have slowly chipped away at my love of the Holy tree until, when I do switch to a Holy spec, I can't remember how to play it. I don't even know what the buttons do. And where's Penance? FOR THE LOVE OF DOG, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO HEAL WITHOUT PENANCE??

Wonder what Cataclysm will bring? I think Holy's mastery thingie is interesting and it'll be a great spec, but I doubt I'll change. The emergence of Disc as the mitigation healer is just too exciting for me to go back, I think. (I mean, you know, WoW exciting, not I got tickets to Bon Jovi exciting.) I love being proactive. I love throwing shield on everyone and then ignoring them while I smite down the enemy. (Smite/Disc build FTW.)

Insert your waffling between trees story here.

I'm actually not sure where I went down the disc road. I've been holy on all my priests pre-WOTLK for ages. I think when I was leveling my new priest I decided "to try out that new disc thing" as I was dinging 71-72.

That said, I do still love holy, though. B&S gave me back a lot of love for the tree, and Serendipity+CoH just work so nicely together that the playstyle just works out for me.

I feel that this depends on the content you're doing. If I'm healing Val'kyr twins or Festergut heroic, I really don't mind having a rotation for once. If I can just stand still and focus getting it perfect, topping the meters as a result of that is enjoyable. For other fights, I see Serendipity as a pure bonus - I can still pick the right spell for the right situation, but if I find a way to fit in Flash Heals I'll get a pretty neat bonus on my next PoH.

I am very curious about how Cataclysm is going to feel like though, with the whole Holy Chakra thing. On one hand, having to cast three heals to upgrade my tank healing feels a bit stupid - it's like I spend a lot of time tank healing after which my tank healing improves, at the moment I most likely need it the least. On the other hand, it does supply me with interesting boosts. Until we really learn how it works, though, I guess it's all guesswork. I'm thinking the 3X same spell thing will somehow change before release, though.

I have no doubt you're right. If you're a progression raider you don't get to be a special snowflake and cast whatever you want when you want it anyway. All I do with my priest is a.) goof off, b.) get achievements and c.) run battlegrounds. In all those situations, I love a spec where flexibility and spontaneity don't have a negative impact on my healing.

I also disliked this about the druid back in the day when the rule was three-stacks-of-Lifebloom-if-you-let-it-bloom-you-fail. One of the reasons I prefer healing to DPS is because I've got the freedom to choose. Of course there is always going to be some level of button-b-always-follows-button-a. But there's a lot less of that with healing in general. Unless you're a pally. Then it's button-a-always-follows-button-a.

Actually, I think I never really liked Holy that much.

I played Holy/IDS for raiding, but I also played a Resto shaman sometimes because our group preferred it.

I think I had actually tried out Shadow 69-70 on that first priest or something, at least I wasn't completely new to that when I stopped using my primary account and then leveled another priest (this time as shadow because I thought it was so awesome!), and respecced her to Disc at 69 for some BG fun, and I remember constantly respeccing between Disc and Shadow depending on what I wanted to do. TBC sucked a bit in that respect.

Anyway, I initially wanted to make my Troll girl shadow, too, but then I sort of got back into healing and with Disc being viable for PvE, I actually have a healing class/spec I really enjoy now. And I'm quite certain Shadow was ten times as awesome in TBC as it is now. Resto shamans also, which means I don't really enjoy it at all right now, but I really want to try Elemental at 80 and stuff, because that seems like fun.

Ooohhhh now I get it. You want to be able to eat Oreos, watch TV, and heal at the same time.

I kid. I got what you were saying. I would never think you were elitist, honestly. I mean, except that you play with Aethien.

Aren't you just precious

Hey, I have proof from a friend that you can pull 8k+ as BM in ICC, so don't say it is impossible to do good dps as BM. A lot of people thought of Disc as a bad raiding spec, but look at it now. I have not seen one post on this board not about Disc healing, or atleast with a mention of why disc is better then holy. What WotLK did to Disc, I am predicting Cata will do to BM, from the looks of the class preview.

To be fair though, there's a legio of reasons why someone could use another spec and try and optimize that. Jaysgl used to be an awesome raiding frost mage, and I really respect the effort he's put into that as he must've gotten a lot of ******** because of it.

It's still a mindset that is completely unknown and makes no sense to me.
I cannot understand why anyone would intentionally drag themselves down by using another spec that they consider to be more fun when I can't see the fun in pressing 1233233 over 11211223 or 128646291583629107737637659875424171985 (hai there ferals).
Rotations aren't of such great influence on playstyle as some people seem to think.

I'll take BM vs MM as an example here, because Wowboo wants to distinguish himself by going BM.
MM has Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot.
The basic rotation is to apply serpent sting then shoot Chimera shot > Aimed shot > Steady Shot x4 and repeat.
Once Culling the Herd and your 2pc T10 setbonus proc are up at the same time you reapply serpent sting so it will keep the 18.45% damage boost for the rest of the fight. (Which also increases the Chimera - Serpent damage by the mentioned 18.45%)
Once that is done, it is (for me) literally 231111 and repeat, replacing 3 with alt+3 when there are multiple mobs and I shoot a multishot, and making it 253111 when Kill shot becomes available.
This is not particularly difficult, in fact it's really easy.
The difficulty, or the room to perfect yourself, with MM comes with readiness and when to use it to make absolute optimal use out of it.

For BM, you have serpent sting multi-shot and arcane shot.
Arcane > SrS > Multi if I'm not mistaken.
Which also doesn't make for a terribly difficult rotation/priority.
Apply serpent sting once every 21 seconds, then shoot arcane > steadyx3 > arcane while replacing a steady shot with a multishot whenever that is available, and once kill shot becomes available it becomes Kill shot > 5x steady shot > Kill shot while replacing steady shots with arcane and multi when available.
Not all that difficult, albeit a little moreso than MM, the difference once more comes from how to make use of your cooldowns.
Recklessly blowing cooldowns whenever they are up often leads to a badly spread out array of buffs that rarely stack up.
And knowing that buffs stack multiplicative and not additive (10% more AP is much more effective with 15% haste than without etc) just blowing cooldowns at will is not efficient.
It's there where the fun lies in playing a hunter, correctly stacking your buffs and planning out what to use when so that you gain the maximum benefit out of all your buffs.


Between the correct use of your buffs, debuffs and procs and minimizing movement is where the excellent hunter distinguishes him or herself from the mediocre masses, not by speccing BM and having a big red pet.
I find that so far, nobody has come up with a decent argument for sticking with a sub optimal spec, it all boils down to "But I like this more" which is pretty much the same as the 0/71/0 hunter or 71/0/0 special flower people who "play the game their way".

That all said, if you love having a big red pet eating faces, I can definitely understand. If I could have enough specs I'd have a BM spec just to make my little friends big, red, scary and face-melting.
But don't take it into any serious sort of raid where performance matters, because at that point you're doing nothing but holding back yourself and your raid.



Edit: replying to a single sentence with this many words, I feel like Gbaji.

Edited, Jun 9th 2010 9:15pm by Aethien

Oh, I know that I'm hardcore and if your raid doesn't mind that you're losing that much dps then by all means go ahead, as long as I'm not in the raid you can play with fireballs and big red dinosaurs all day long if you wish to.
It's simply not understandable to me why someone wouldn't care though.


That said, I reacted to this:
Going with non cookie cutter just to be different is a really awful reason.
If he has typed something along the lines of I want to keep playing BM because seeing fluffy my devilsaur go all big and red and ZOMGGODZILLAmode makes me grin and feel happy inside then I can understand it, I still think that he should keep that outside of raids but until we're in the same raid it's not my problem.

There's also no "in" there's the top dps spec because it allows you to do as much damage as possible.
And yeah, I guess that getting my fun from optimizing myself during fights and using my cooldowns right as those two procs are up and sidestepping that Bomb with a single step right before it lands while shooting an instant shot so I don't loose a single point of damage is hard to understand for others. I think that's just how the world works, our differences make things about other people hard to understand or even hard to imagine or acknowledge the possibility.


But yeah in short, going for something sub optimal just to be special is lame and you're much better off distinguishing yourself by perfection.

I'm sorry, but no.
The people building the next cookie cutter specs are not the ones sticking to their one sacred tree above all else.
The people building the next cookie cutter are the min maxers, the absolute hardcore EJ fanatics who try out everything to find the perfect build regardless of which tree it is.

Look at the title under my name my little friend, it's there for a reason.
And using a wolf over a devilsaur as BM is yet another couple hundred dps loss.
But that aside, you get to the last tier of pet talents without the 51pt BM talent.

And what about the BM tree is more interesting than the MM tree?