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Spiritual Guidance: Priest gems for raid roles
Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance takes a step into the light to reflect on the subtleties of healing for discipline and holy priests. Your guide, Dawn Moore, enjoys bubble wrap, bubble milk tea, Bubble Bobble, watermelon bubble gum, water bubbles in space, and dolphins blowing bubble rings. She is lukewarm toward bubble spamming. I have a 6140 gear score. Don't get excited though; I just said that to rile some of you up. I loathe the concept of the gear score addon, and I actually had to look it up just to know what mine was. The real reason I bring up my gear score is to give you, my fair readers, an idea of what kind of gear I typically work with as a player. If you have no idea what that number translates to, it is full 264 item level gear with a few 277 level items sprinkled in. So for the most part I have a fantastic set of gear. If I walk into a PUG 5-man, most players will glance me over and immediately feel at ease about their fate for the next 15 to 20 minutes. This is ironic though, because despite the quality of my gear being well above average, I am currently rocking a gear set far worse for healing heroic dungeons than I was 3 tiers ago. Why, pray tell, is that? Because my guild and I have spent the last three weeks working on the heroic Lich King encounter and I've been slowly optimizing my gear for the past month in preparation for this one, single fight. How's my mana regeneration? Pathetic: I get all of my mana return not from trinkets, flasks or mustache-twirling meta gems, but from carefully timed Power Word: Shields and the Rapture trick. What about haste? Awful: my GCD isn't even close to 1 second if I cast two spells back to back. My sole purpose in the Lich King fight is to cast one spell, on as many people as possible, for about 10 minutes straight. As such, all my gear, gems, enchants, and glyphs are selected to work in this fight alone, even if it cripples me in every other aspect of the game. And it is quite crippling. I used to love spoiling myself with haste. I loved the 1 second GCD; but now, because of my gear, I find myself having to smash my buttons frantically and repeatedly in the easiest of 5-man dungeons, because my inner sense of timing is all thrown off to what I'm accustomed to. I have trouble healing Halls of Reflection! (If you could hear me, there was a cry of shame in that last sentence.) So, what are we going to talk about today? Gems. That was obvious before now, right?
