Blizzard drops me a clue

So a few weeks/months ago I rolled a little Retadin on a server with a few RL buddies and the guy who was the best man at my wedding.  He quit playing WoW (the primary reason I rolled there), so I've just been tooling along doing Archeology and enjoying the fact that as Ret it doesn't take six days and seven nights to kill something.  I did some PvP, did a few random heroics, etc, but then Blizzard sent me a message.

 

They want me to heal

 

Every single heroic I run, I get more Holy upgrades than Ret.  It's not that I can't use upgrades to my ret gear, or that they've dropped and I just lost the roll.  It's just a straight up increase in Holy drops.  So this weekend I finally bit the bullet, dropped the 10g for dual spec (when did that happen?), and glyphed myself up.  It wasn't a bad experiment per se, because while I'm very familiar with the Paladin mechanics now, there's certainly a huge difference between Pistonhondo and Adgamorix.  Piston has enough spirit to almost gain mana while casting Holy Lights - Adgamorix is struggling to get heals off in time.  I'm amazed that .1 sec of cast time feels like it's really that long, but I can definately feel the difference.

 

So here I am, on the ragged edge

 

So now I've got a pair of Paladins, one Holy/Ret and one Holy/Prot spread out on two different servers, both factions, and PvP and PvE.  It's certainly interesting to see the difference when I play.  I don't know if it's the PvP server or what, but for some reason I have a different feeling when I'm on Adgamorix.  He doesn't have the gear, heroics are a challenge, but I actually want to do the heroics.  I suppose this is because there's actually something worth getting from his heroics, insteaed of just running a heroic for the sake of running it.

 

Of course there are a few things that I hadn't planned on when I decided to make a Holy build.  First, no mana pots, and no water(!) in my bags at all.  Now while I don't normally use mana pots anyway, at least not on anything short of a heroic raid boss, at the lower gear levels it's always good to have a few of these kicking around.  I'm also enchantless, have no helm or shoulder buffs, and don't even have a meta socket.  I certainly don't have the gold to buy another Tsunami deck.  Since I'm not raiding though, it's not really a big deal.

 

A sense of purpose

 

I think one of the reasons I don't enjoy running heroics on Piston is that there's nothing left for me to buy.  Sure, I could buy vendor mats or more heirloom items, but there's no real incentive to run them.  We don't do runs as a guild to increase our guild level, because really the perks aren't that great.  While having the bigger cauldrons would be nice, our BoE sales more than cover repairs, consumables, and enchants.  Because of this, there's no real pressure to do any kind of farming or collection of mats.  We're a small guild, and with folks playing Rifts, Dragon Age 2, and just enjoying the spring time, there's not a lot of folks on after a raid ends. 

 

Of course this doesn't really matter, because it's not like I'm socially active on Medivh, and with RealID I can still chat it up with the <Team Intensity> folks.  So that's not a big difference between the servers/play.  I'm obviously not bored with the game, or bored with healing.  My UI is identical, keybinds, etc.  Who knows why I 'feel' different on the other toon?  The only thing that I can figure is that I'm not in full 359 gear, and have something to work towards.  Though I'm still not doing dailies (hello tabards!), and I'll be damned if I"m going to level fishing or cooking on this toon (unless I can do it with the harvest fest). 

 

One thing that this little excercise has told me for sure though is that a DPS class just isn't for me.  My hunter sits at 58 or 60, my rogue is still on Malygos (I think I took him to Northrend when the servers were down one day), and hell my Warlock (that I wanted to play as my main in Cata) is still about 5 bars away from 85.  I suppose it's just time to embrass the fact that I am a healer, and that Blizzard wants me to play that.  Maybe I'll roll a priest up and see what the fuss is about there.  I've heard Disc is pretty good for leveling.