About the Bloggers: Elizabeth Harper
Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. Click here to read more About the Bloggers.
What do you do for WoW Insider?
I'm the Senior Editor on the Joystiq network, which means I do a little bit of writing and a lot of behind the scenes work on all of the Joystiq network sites, including WoW Insider. Until recently, I was the keeper of Around Azeroth and Two Bosses Enter, but these days I'm focusing my writing efforts on our Priest column, Spiritual Guidance. I've got a "Karazhan 101" idea floating around in my head right now, which will show up on the site one of these days, I'm sure.
What's your main right now?
A Holy Priest, of course! (Though I have a lingering fondness for the underdog Discipline healing build, I finally gave in and specced Holy for increased effectiveness.) What can I say -- I must just have a bit of a masochistic streak. I'd never played a healer in an MMO before, but initially rolled one in order to have something very different to play during downtime from my raiding Warlock. I quickly found that running instances from a healer's perspective was a totally different thing than running them as a DPS class. Instead of being a tedious job of staring at health bars, I found it to be a rewarding challenge and I've stuck with it ever since.
For the Horde or Glory to the Alliance?
For the Horde! When I was but a newbie, I started my career in the World of Warcraft with a Gnome Warlock. But trust me -- I've seen the error of my ways. After all, Trolls are obviously the superior race.
Favorite thing to do in Azeroth?
Instance, instance, instance! Soloing a healer isn't a lot of fun, but I do enjoy instance healing. After all, there's something very satisfying about deciding who lives or dies and holding the party's lives in the palm of your hand. (And, of course, letting that annoying rogue who can't form a sentence without the addition of many superfluous numbers and punctuation die a few times.) On the flip side, an instance with a not-so-good group (or a tank that hasn't entirely figured out the tanking thing) is absolutely agonizing, so I suppose I should clarify: my favorite thing to do is run instances with decent groups of players. In my case, "decent players" means my guildmates: even when we don't have the faintest clue as to what we're up against (and would be told to learn to play by many a game expert), we do seem to enjoy ourselves.
What's the best instance in the game?
Lately I've been enjoying learning the encounters in Zul'Aman, but I have to say that my all-time favorite instance is Blackwing Lair. Each of the bosses presented their own, unique challenge; the instance had a story you could really get into (and some great dialog); and the timed run you had to do to finish the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj questline was a real rush (and came with some unique and highly entertaining dialog of its own!). To this day my (mostly unplayed) Gnome Warlock sits in full tier two armor -- only to get asked by players who have never heard of Blackwing Lair where I got the gear and whether I'm a twink. Kids these days!
What's the number one thing Blizzard could do better?
Like most players, I feel my class is very put upon and in need of major buffs. (Though I'd be happy enough if I could afford to spec Shadow between raids!) However, for the most part, I feel Blizzard does a decent job. I don't always agree with their changes, but I do think their end goal is game balance -- and balance makes a fun and challenging world for all of us to play in. But the path to that balance is rocky... for both us and Blizzard.
When I'm not playing WoW, I'm...
Working! I'm sure you all think that writing about video games for a living is a dream job (and I can tell you my parents to this day needle me about getting a "real job"), there's a lot of hours of work to put in to make everything run smoothly!
If you had 10 more hours to play every week, what would you spend them doing?
Well, I've been leveling a Holy Paladin... if I could get it to 70, I could have a choice of healers to play!
Other games I enjoy are...
I try to keep up with the MMO genre -- at least as much as is possible to keep up with ongoing virtual worlds that don't have any sort of "end." These days I'm playing a little Pirates of the Burning Sea, Lord of the Rings Online, and have just started the trial for EVE Online to see what it's like.
