Getting Started

I am a Discipline Priest, an officer and one of 2 girls in a small 10man guild on a crappy EU realm.  I may or may not have anything worthwhile to share, but I get bored easily so I'll be posting stuff semi-regularly.

Me:

My first toon (super-bad warlock "Int is my best stat after armour lol") hit 70 3 weeks before WotLK hit and my guild took me along as a "warm body" to a few Zul'Aman and Karazhan runs and I completely and utterly fell in love with raiding, despite the fact that I had no clue whatsoever what I was doing (strats? there are strats? why didn't anyone tell me there were strats?!?).

A few months into WotLK, around mid-3.1, I started levelling a little priest with a friend of mine who had re-rolled to my realm.  Partly to level with her and partly to help her out when she hit 80.  When we started, the emblem upgrades had yet to be announced and finding groups for the daily heroic and for Naxx were all but impossible, so I started up the little priestling so she would always have a healer on tap and dusted off my level 63 DK planning to level it to 80 so she would always have a tank too!

When I hit 40 after a night without sleep (At this point it had dissolved into a competition to see who would hit 80 first), I dutifully paid up the 1000 gold and specced my offspec to Holy.  As I was sorting myself out to log off, someone whispered me and asked if I wanted to heal Maraudon.  I made excuses about not having slept in over 30 hours and desparately needing sleep and never having healed anything other than myself before, but my heart wasn't in it and, after a little bit of pleading, I set off for Mara with my shiny new Holy spec in hand.

It was a disaster.

Joking - it went great and I loved it.  I loved it so much that I decided on roughly the 5th pack that my priest was no longer an alt, but a re-roll.  Side note:  you still get experience in Spirit of Redemption.  I even dinged in it once or twice.

When I hit around 77, I went and chatted with a guild priest about heal "rotation", what spells I should and shouldn't be using and why I was ooming and he told me that the reason I was ooming was because I was healing like a Disc priest.  So i did the logical thing - I changed my healing style to suit my chosen spec.

Joking - I respecced Disc.  And nearly 2 years down the line I'm still Disc and loving the hell out of it.

My guild:

We are and always have been a 10 man guild, since the days of Karazhan.  In TBC, we ran Kara and ZA and pugged the 25s.  When WotLK came around and there was a 10man option for everything, there was much rejoicing and happiness, but the 25-man pugs continued, netting us realm no 11 in 25 mans for most of WotLK (yes, our realm is so dreadful that a 10man guild could rank 11th in 25s just from pugging 25 normals).

I joined in late Trial of the Crusader, shortly before the release of the long-awaited Icecrown Citadel, as a social member.  At the beginning of ICC, one of our long-time raiders decided to resign from wow and I was pulled in as a semi-pug.  This apparently required some reshuffling of the raid team (thanks guys!) as a disc priest is not an intuitive replacement for a mage.  The shadow/disc priest went shadow/yay I can do whatever I want with my offspec, the resto shaman went resto/enha and the hpala started refusing to use Beacon (don't ask - I don't know either).

A few months later, I was promoted from Social to Raider, which is effectively the officer rank in our guild.  I then poked our co-gl and asked if I was expected to take on any specific officer duties or anything, he said no but I could if I wanted and he'd be grateful for the help.

At the end of WotLK, some people quit on us and I raised the issue of having dedicated subs instead of playing the pug lotto when someone was afk.  The 2 guild leaders put it to vote in the guild and it passed.  Then I was told since it was my idea (It wasn't, I was tricked into putting forward the co-gl's idea), that I would be solely responsible for it.

A whole new set of problems arose with this idea:

1. Rotations are Out Of The Question.  Our raid team is used to having guaranteed raid spots after 3 years and people tend to get set in their ways.
2. Our guild leader point-blank refused to disallow people from pugging raids in case we needed them.
3. As previously mentioned, our realm is epically dreadful and at the beginning of Cataclysm, 2/3 of the top guilds migrated offrealm, changing the recruitment pool from "Maybe we'll interest someone reasonably good who wants a lighter raiding schedule" to "Maybe we'll find someone who can log in all by himself on his first try if we're lucky.  Maybe.".

The plan:

My intentions are to try not to embarass myself while ranting about officer-type stuffs, provide gear lists and healing advice tailored to Discipline in 10mans and share our Top-Secret (not really) heroic strats.  We're currently 3/13 and on a raid break for officer-burnout but we'll be back to our progression on the 13th.  That gives me time to catch up to where we are now regarding strats and maybe post some gear lists and so on as well.