My first respec

I may min-max a little when it comes to gear, but I don't when it comes to spec. I assume it comes from the comfort in the fact that I was able to heal my way through 70 even with full Shadow spec and gear. Your spec may be important, but your skill is more important.

So, as I leveled Shadow, I put points into what I thought would be useful, not necessarily what some cookie-cutter spec progression told me to. Yeah, I had points in [Improved Renew] and [Healing Focus]. I'm sorry, but no matter what anyone tells you, those two skills are far more useful to a leveling Priest than [Meditation] and [Inner Focus]. Don't get me wrong,Med and IF are great, but they just aren't that useful until raiding beyond 5-mans.

Here's a fact: I almost never ran out of mana mid-fight in dungeons before 10-mans. Even when healing. And I almost never had to use mana pots. Yeah, it happened occasionally, but it was always a good sign that our strategy wasn't working. Med and IF would only have prolonged the agony.

Sorry, I'm a little bitter.

In a Heroic PUG this weekend I had a pair of people gang up on me and get up in my business about why I didn't have Med and IF. I explained, very politely, that I was still in my leveling spec and hadn't yet respecced for raiding. Instead of moving on, the two went all holier-than-thou on me talking about how they have SPriest alts and I am nerfing my spec if I don't have IF/Med, etc, etc, etc. I, again politely, told them that it wasn't like I was going to keep this spec forever, but that it had served me well thus far and I'm not the type to respec before every group. That wasn't good enough, and the verbal abuse continued for about 10 minutes.

And yet ... there I was. I was pulling my weight and getting it done, even with my nerfed spec. Go figure.

I keep coming back to the fact that I've been able to surprise people with my skill level, despite being a n00b when it comes to the content. It happened in Kara. It happened in Heroic Sethekk. If I can do that, does my nerfed spec invalidate that? Of course not.

I have an entire post brewing about how too many people in this game are looking for the “one true spec/gear” and forget that there's a progression involved.

But, eventually, I did end up respeccing. The truth is that I don't heal nearly as much as I used to, and [Improved Vampiric Embrace] was getting me into more trouble than it was worth. So, I am now a 14/0/47 cookie-cutter SPriest. Huzzah.

Maybe it's just bitterness, but I am not all that impressed with IF. It's one free spell every 3 minutes, maybe with a bit more crit to count it as a spell and a half. That's not going to make or break a fight. Med is arguably more useful, kicking me from something like 5 MP5 while casting up to 56. That's two free MF per minute, or a free SWP.

But for that, I gave up a 70% chance to get off a heal while getting beaten on. Is it worth it? I'm not entirely sure.