Paladin --> Priest Lesson #1

Paladins wear plate. Priests do not. Really, it should be as simple as that. It's not.

Spend a year in exclusively plate, running balls out into every encounter, barreling into rooms of badies and coming out nearly unscathed and then switch to cloth. Cloth heals, no less. Guess what? You're supposed to stay waaaay back! Healers taste like marshmallows and I've met very few mobs that don't like marshmallows. There is an entirely different attitude when it comes to healing. Even as plate DPS, I was right behind the tank, in the middle of the action, picking up wayward mobs that wanted to eat my precious healer. It's really hard to break that mindset. It's especially hard when I go on a tanking streak with my paladin. Tanks and healers are the protectors of the group, but it in totally different ways.

So, lesson #1: You're no good to anyone dead and if you don't stay back, you will die.

Confessions: That's what a Priest does.

Forgive me father for I have sinned. I took the easy way out when it came time to play my first real clothie. My confession for today: I've had a warlock for a long time now. I know, I made it seem like all I had ever played was plate, other than many disastrous alt rolls that ended after ten levels of constant deaths and mana guzzling. My alt graveyard would be a sad place indeed. Here's the thing, I don't see my lock as a true clothie. She's tough, she had a built in tank with Big Blue and once she outgrew him, she became a cloth tank. Mana issues? My lock doesn't know what that means; she has a mana battery following her around in the form of a so-ugly-he's-cute Felhunter. Dark Pact is a mage's wet dream. So, I felt like locks were in some sort of category all their own: most definitely a cloth wearer,but with comparable survivability to higher armor types. My mage pees her pretty little robes when she gets ambushed by more than three mobs (frost nova + blink, anyone?), but my lock laughs in their faces, DoTs them up and burns them down with her typical Blood Elfish indifference. Ok, so I cheated with my first cloth wearer. Honestly, I had no idea they were so hard to kill when I rolled one.

There are four players that factor heavily into the next chapter of my WoW life. Charl and Ojetheonly (Oje), who are mages in my guild, and Ometreis (Ome) and Drsilver (Silver), who are priests in my guild. Once Koco hit 80 and started running heroics and raids, I got to learn a lot more about the other classes in WoW and what they could really do in end game content. In my first Naxx run, Silver threw up a raid warning "I MELT FACE", which confused me. Priests were only good for healing, right? How wrong I was. My jaw dropped and I forgot to push a few buttons as I watched Silver blow up my Recount. From that day on, I coveted shadow priests but I had no desire to actually level one. My attention then shifted to the mages in our guild, who were also making me cry in a corner when the raids were done and they had pulled 2-3K more than my pally. By this point, I had quite a few Emblems of Triumph and Stone Keeper Shards lying around with nothing better to do so I bought myself some Heirloom pieces and set out on a personal challenge: to level a mage. I figured when the going got tough, I could get a few levels in through instances (my transition from PUG phobia to merely PUG reluctance could be a whole new blog). I fell in love with the relative hardiness of the frost spec and slogged my way to 20, when my mage world then became a lot happier. She's now 52 and doing fine, but very very boring. Her greatest achievement to date: teaching me that I can level a (true) clothie.

The Change In Me

I've been playing WoW for about a year and a half. In that time, I have overturned a lot of preconceived notions about the game in general, the play style and the people that play it; I like to see it as my pixelated spiritual journey. With all of this knowledge gained and stereotypes demolished, you might find it surprising to hear that I still have some very strong ideas about each class and my personal like or dislike for them.

I was raised a Draenei Paladin. She is my love, my heart and soul in this game. A silly moniker, Koconut, but appropriate considering how much I adore the fruit that bears the same name. Just try and kill her! Good luck with those layers of plate and her Edge of Ruin slashing and hacking at her adversaries. Alas, this OP leveling and resistance to death spoiled me. How could I ever have the patience to level a clothie, especially a priest? Sitting down to drink after every fight? Facing certain death should I appear tasty to more than one mob at a time? How tedious and frustrating. I held my closest priest friends in high regard for getting those toons to 80. I didn't do squishy.

The smallest things can change our lives in a big way. Two things made me peek around the corner into clothie camp and take a new look at these classes. Heirlooms and RDF.

The real world calls to me now, so next time I'll let you in on the beginning of my journey from Paladin to Priest.