Gruul's Lair

For a first time, our guild went into Gruul's Lair last night. Yes it was frustrating, but it was encouraging. I have to say that I was probably one of the most discouraged. My method of healing has always been to stay out of the 5 second rule as long as possible to regen mana. As such, I stack spirit far more than most priests do. I think last night, fully raid buffed with Kings, I had close to 700 Spirit, giving me close to 500 mana per 5 outside of the 5 second rule. However, I only had 150 mana per 5 inside of the 5 second rule (and most of that was thanks to Imp Wisdom...I love pallies).

Anyway, I was frustrated because I was assigned to heal the main tank. And for anyone who's healed the main tank for that fight, you know that you almost have to overheal in case the tank gets critted. Even with 15K health, he can be 2 shotted if you can't get your heals off quickly enough. I am considering trying to make a second healing set focused on more mana per 5 instead of spirit. This way, I can maximize my mana regen based on having to spam Greater Heals on the tank, perhaps a Greater Heal Rank 4 or something to save mana.

What this would then allow us to do is to have a priest, a tree druid, and a holy paladin on the main tank (as we did last night). The priest's job is to keep big heals up on the tank, and keep them coming (Gheal spam). The druid's job would be to keep Rejuv, Regrowth, and Lifebloom on the tank at all times. When the tank goes below 40% HP (which happens a good bit) instantly Swiftmend into another Regrowth, thus preventing the chance of a 2 shot, and giving the priest time to get a heal off. The paladin's job is to spam Flashs of Light on the tank all the time. If the tank gets hit for 9K, followed by an 8K, a Swiftmend and Flash of Light between the two will save his life (if the tank has 15K HP, which ours did.) It will also give the tank then enough warning to drink a potion or use last stand or shield wall or something. The biggest issue was when the tank would take two bursts of damage and not have any heals in between the two. Hopefully next time, I'll have some more mana per 5 and we'll be able to use a better rotation without having to worry about major mana woes.

On the PVP front, we did some quality 5v5 PVP last night, with Murien the resto druid, Patricles the affliction warlock, Gullkurack the marksman hunter, and Alarion the feral druid. We did extremely well against the groups active at the time, which were heavy shadow groups. I think almost every group had a warlock, and most had either a shadow priest or another warlock, one having 2 locks and a shadow priest. We did very well at the beginning, until the teams started learning how to match up with us. I can dispel a seduce, but cannot get out of a seduce myself. I can dispel fears, but not when Unstable Affliction is on the targets. Once I had a dispel, and between the time that I hit the button and Dispel was cast (instant cast mind you) the lock had put Unstable Affliction up. I was silenced for 5 seconds, and we lost. Just bad luck for that one.

One of the groups we went up against had a BM hunter, a warlock, and a shadow priest. These 3 each did more than 30K damage total by the end of each fight. How do you counter that? We tried crowd control to no avail. We tried focusing them down, but their paladin was amazing. It's hard to think that gear can have that much of a difference, but it truly does.

On a brighter note, I picked up the pvp necklace yesterday giving me over 10K HP self buffed. I think this is probably plenty, so if I pick up more stamina on pieces, I'm gonna shoot for some more intellect. More mana is a very good thing for long fights.