At the insistence of my girlfriend, I started playing World of Warcraft again. The last I played was during Cataclysm in 4.2, when I wrote a guide on how to heal everything up to heroics.
Yesterday, I logged into my main (a Holy Priest) and wow, have things changed a lot. I'm looking at how the talents work and a friend explained to me how the artifact weapons work, although I'm nowhere near to getting one. Looking at the game and this forum, it seems like the only thing that hasn't changed is that Blizzard doesn't know what to do with Discipline. I mean, Prayer of Healing isn't party-based anymore, Levitate doesn't give you a walking animation, Spirit of Redemption is baseline, Binding Heal is a talent... So much has changed, I'm sorta lost.
I was planning on starting a brand-new priest and learn the ropes by leveling and healing in dungeons while doing so, but my girlfriend is paying for a server transfer on my main, so I'll be doing high-end content a lot sooner than expected. I figured I'd drop in here again and ask some questions:
- Are Holy Priests decent right now? I never needed to be the best healing option, but I do like to be somewhat effective when raid healing.
- Looking at the talent trees (are they still called trees? They don't look like trees anymore) it seems like Blizzard really wants each talent to be a viable option. Is this actually the case?
- What the hell happened to Spirit as a stat? In all seriousness, what sort of stats should I look out for?
- What are some indispensable addons? I used to rely heavily on Grid back in the day and most of my other addons where just aesthetic or convenience.
- What does a typical fight looks like for a Holy priest? Back in my day, it was mostly spamming Heal in five-mans and relying heavily on Renew, Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing for raids.
- How's the mana? During Wrath of the Lich King, healers had mana in abundance, but at that start of Cataclysm they really made it a scarce resource if you made a couple of mistakes, which was a lot more fun.
- Is leveling as Holy still a terrible mistake, only stupid and stubborn people do?
- Are there other things I should definitely know?