Thoughts on Holy vs Disc, again

I did Naxx yesterday with some alts in our guild. I haven't gotten any alt to 80 yet (on my mains server) so I "had" to go with my good ol' priest. I did it most for funsies and to gear some guildies since there isn't much for me to get in naxx 10man anymore. I have all the gear and achievements I want by now. I also wanted to give holy and disc another testing area. Remember when I talked about disc being the new black? Although the run to Naxx I mentioned back then got cancelled I still wanted to see if Holy really had become (basically) useless or if Ulduar just offered a new type of experience which demanded a different heal-style.
So when healing Naxx yesterday I noticed one big difference (besides the obvious, Naxx being far easier than Ulduar overall) - there is way less aoe dmg coming in. And when there is, it's usually far apart. I switched between the two specs back and forth during the run (we left Grobbulus, Gluth, KT and Sapph tho) and found that they worked about equally well. On bosses like Loatheb, holy has the clear advantage. You basically only use 1-2 heal spells during the entire encounter, and it's aoe spells. So what is the problem with Ulduar then? Well, even in Naxx I noticed that holy really has less regen. Significantly less. Fights which took me to 80% mana in disc took me to 20% mana in holy (yes we actually wiped on some encounters due to undergeared alts ^^). And even tho they nerfed disc regen, by making the shield slightly costlier I still nearly regain all the mana used on casting it when Rapture procs (shield costs 666 mana and Rapture regens approx 580 mana).
We had three healers with us actually, one disc, one holy and me switching and it made me also notice another thing, or rather get confirmation since I had foreseen the problem already. Having two disc priests in one raid is not such a great idea. Where most healers complete eachother, disc rather "take" eachothers heals. If someone already has shielded my target, it means I can't, and I lose alot of my buffs like the possibility of Rapture procs and Borrowed Time (and others).
So to the conclusion;
Although Ulduar demands more aoe-healing than ever, and that usually is where Holy comes to save the day, the regen nerf to holy makes it basically impossible not to oom too early. The encounters in Ulduar need more regen than Holy currently has, which is sad because healing wise Holy works well for many encounters and really being able to switch between them to use the priests healing possibilities to the max would be awesome. Hopefully they will solve this somehow.

New patch, new fail

I was lucky at first, and I usually am. Whenever a new patch comes I have some (most) addons acting up and all I need to do is update them and problem solved. We saw some entirely new issues with this patch tho, one especially annoying must be the talent-bug which can come in various shapes and forms. Some lose all their tp and skills. Some only lose their tp. Some lose half their tp or can't use some skills. Some lose their tp only when they log/zone/switch spec. At first I smirked at those affected, since it seemed I was off the hook on this one. Didn't notice any problems on my chars and could easily switch between specs and whatnot. A friend in another guild had some major issues where all her talents just went gone, she was basically laughed at by some GM (or at least so she felt although I think she over reacted) and quite understandably went rather bananas about not being able to play her main, at all, when new raid content was out. Some hateful mail to Blizzard later, she was given 2 months playtime as compensation. But where was I... oh right. I smirked because I had no problems whatsoever and Love said gleefully to another friend of ours, whos tp kept refunding, that it was all about skill.
Well seems karma got me on this one, or my skill just dropped low. I got it first on my retridin (69). I noticed that all of her talents where gone, but I could still use all the skills. Like Crusader Strike and Repentance etc. I didn't bother much since what I really cared about was being able to kill stuff.
But then some days ago, it happened again. On my (second) ele shammy (41) I was set back some tp. Instead of being to place as if I were level 41, I can place tp up to level 38. Wth? I checked the forums for some easy solution, because I didn't want to spend my hard earned gold on respecs just because Blizzard can't program properly. But I couldn't even see the problem mentioned. Weird, I thought. Isn't this one of the biggest issues in the new patch?
So I ticketed a GM. Yesterday. About 18 hours ago. It still says "Wait time currently unavailable".
Guess I should've seen it coming.

Reminiscing vanilla WoW

I don't belong to that (crazy) group of people who claim that WoW was so much better before and it would be great if Blizzard started up some un-patched, or nearly un-patched, and un-expansed servers where people could enjoy the old times of WoW. I believe these people have either turned senile or just never were there. WoW was fun even then, unbelievable enough, but it has gone through some major changes, and trust me people - they were needed. So I thought we would recap some on those changes and maybe everyone will realise that although WoW isn't perfect, and never will be, it is alot better than it used to be.
The good ol' class roles:
Remember the old Tier sets? Remember when hybrid classes weren't hybrid? There was only one tier set and it clearly showed what Blizzard wanted each class to do. End-game for priest, druid and paladin meant healing. For warriors there were hardly much option beside tanking (a notion that is still hard-wired in many people). Remember when Mind Blast had "high threat"? I do. I tried to be shadow at 60 and all I ever got to do was heal heal heal. And I wasn't even very good at that, since I was shadow specced! But I couldn't dps in instances, because everything worth casting had high threat. Fortunately I could at least turn to pvp, but a whole part of the game was locked out to me because I was the "wrong" spec.
The good ol' raids:
Ok, I didn't raid much in Vanilla, but for a reason. Organizing 40 people (of which at least half just statistically have to be clinically dumb) was a stupid idea to begin with. But that wasn't the big problem really. The issue was having to spend hours and hours doing something to have a half decent shot at one gear piece every tenth run. What is the gear per hour on that?! When I raided MC and ZG I was one out of 9 priests. NINE! I'm not even counting in all the other clothies here, but I knew that I would have to spend many many hours in them raids before I could even begin to hope to get some gear. Call me loot-horny all you wish, but I want some kind of reward for what I'm doing. No wonder it spawned those weird dkp-systems for loot distribution. I'd go bananas too if 40 hours in raid wouldn't give me some sort of prio over the rest. Now you have to be fairly unlucky not to get loot at all on 2-3 runs.
And being one out of nine hardly made my effort feel like anything special. There were 8 other people doing the exact same thing as me, offering the exact same abilities and options. During boss-encounters now a days I often think "it's so great that they have me here since priests are such awesome healers", I would never get to think that being one out of nine...
I know some people say "well the encounters where much harder back then, it felt like a really awesome feat when you finally downed a boss". I agree Naxx is a cake-walk, but with Ulduar you can't really complain about easy killings anymore. And besides - a friend of mine raided heavily back in Vanilla and everytime I saw him play he mostly pressed one or two buttons (he played a lock tho, maybe an unfair example of easiness). So although I agree some boss encounters are easy today, back in Vanilla you could have people go afk in the middle of the encounter with hardly anyone noticing. Try doing that in Ulduar!

Gold flows - part 2

Loves ownage of the AH goes on. Yesterday he had nearly 1100 auctions posted, out of approximately 14.000 total auctions on the AH. That made him alone more than 1/14th of the entire AH. That's freaky, wonder if you can get banned for things like that... The market has slowed down tho, like I said last time. He's still only selling glyph, and the occasional cheap blue that he finds, and now when everyone are done dualspeccing and dualglyphing he makes about 4000g a day (or so he claims anyway).
The downside is that you need a large stock of glyphs to make it work. Like I said, he had 1100 auctions up, and although that might be overkill you still need alot of glyphs to make good money from it. Otherwise bastards like Love will just keep undercutting you till they've forced you to so low prices that you actually lose money on the glyphs. (contra herb cost for inks) That's when he buys them and sells them pricier. He's very, very sneaky that Love.

Healing in Ulduar - Razorscale

So I've done some Ulduar runs, three to be exact and we've downed all bosses to Freya so far. I thought I'd give some ideas on how the healing works (for me as a disc priest that is) on the different encounters, starting with Razorscale (skipping Flame Leviathan for obvious reasons).
What are the easy/hard parts and what to think about?
Healing Razorscale:
First of all, this is one of the easier fights in Ulduar. Basically just tell people to stay out of the blue clouds on the ground and you'll be quite alright. What problems can arise? The hard part starts when Razorscale lands. Prior to that she blasts down fireballs (or sumthin like it) on random target which is easily healed with a shield (glyphed) or flash heal. Keep Prayer of Mending up on any target (preferrably starting out on one of the tanks) and it'll bounce around doing good like it should. One can keep shields up on the raid if they like, but on this fight it's no necessary. Any dmg done to the raid can be healed and doesn't need to be prevented.
Like I said, the tough part is when Razorscale lands and she is kited (at least that is how we do it). I won't say anything about what the tanks are doing, because I honestly don't always know every class tactics perfectly but keep an eye on who takes damage and why instead. Now here is a problem with reach. Every so often the tank runs out of range, if you're not quick with running along. Might be worth keeping in mind. Another problem is a rather nuky blow that Razorscale does, which combined with the reach-problem could become lethal. But, again, this is a rather easy fight and just keep shield up on the tank and a Penance ready and there should be no problems.
To think about:
- The healing gets tougher when Razorscale lands
- She does a nuky blow, be ready for it
- Keep range to tanks who will run around