Hulan The Disciplined

Hulan is finally 80.  I had planned to level from 70 to 80 as Shadow, and did actually respec and do half of level 70 as a Shadow Priest, but then one of the priests in my guild suggested levelling as Discipline.  She said it offered good enough damage to make levelling a less painful experience but would hold its own as a healing spec in instances.  I hadn’t taken a lot of notice of priest changes in the run up to WotLK, but as she is a very experienced and knowledgable priest I was prepared to take her word for it.  I will probably remain eternally grateful to her for the suggestion as I am deeply smitten with Disc!

The only issue I had levelling (and it’s a fairly minor niggle) was how quickly I blew through my mana.  With hindsight I perhaps should have put 5 points into Spirit Tap but in terms of damage I progessed through the solo content at a reasonable speed.  The first few instances I healed I felt really at sea.  Partly this was because I hadn’t healed much with Hulan in the months immediately before the expansion was released but it was also because I was still trying to heal like a Holy Priest.  Call me naive, but I hadn’t really expected the healing to be very different between Disc and Holy!  Once I realised there was a difference I started doing some research and adjusted my healing style accordingly.  I stopped gearing like a Holy Priest too and started ninja-ing mage gear and that has also helped (just joking, in all of the instance runs I’ve done I’ve been the only clothie there).  It took me a couple of runs to get a feel for what I was doing but now I’m feeling settled and really enjoying healing.

Talking of being the only clothie…where has all the ranged DPS gone?!  I don’t know if it’s a situation peculiar to my server but it feels like a real treat to get any ranged DPS in the group at all.  Today I was in Healer Heaven when I ran an instance with two!!  Having said that, doing a run with 3 melee DPS is certainly challenging and very satisfying when we get to the end.  It’s certainly helped me get to know my strengths and weaknesses as a healer and what my limits are.  There are some runs where the pigtail is going crazy from start to finish…who needs levitate?