Something has to change.

I need to talk this out, and this seems like the right forum.
Missing the LF1M Archimonde kill hurt my heart, I wanted to be there so badly. However, real life has to come first, and there was just no way I was making raid that night.

The job I have now, with the promotion I got, is a HUGE opportunity for me. If we can ship this project on time it will be a huge boost for my resume in a very short time frame. It will let me write my ticket for my next job, ideally with a less insane CEO. In less than a year, it could put me places I expected to spend 2-3 getting to. But that very short time frame means a huge amount of work, and that means long hours. On top of that, I'm doing a whole bunch of things I've never done before, like managing people, and it's taking a lot of time and energy.

It's after midnight on a Saturday, and I'm still at work. What's worse, I could work literally all weekend and not be even close to out of things to do. I spent 4 hours running Kara this afternoon. I don't regret the Kara run, that was fun, but I really should have spent that time working. I'd be a lot further along, a lot closer to getting out of here.

What's worse, what's a whole lot worse, is that I haven't been to the gym since I started playing WoW again. It started out as a medical thing (Doc said take 2 weeks off), but it quickly turned into just not going. WoW's not responsible for that, but it's sure as hell not helping. I'm trying to get in early, so I can leave early, so I can play WoW, instead of coming in an hour later after hitting the Gym, and staying an hour later. Or coming in at the same time and hitting the gym after work.

I've been thinking about Improve Divine Spirit and how valuable that is to the raid, versus the value of Circle of Healing. My opinion is, given LF1M's current raid setup, circle of healing far outweighs the value of Divine Spirit, but I wanted to open the topic for discussion.

When it comes to healing in a raid there are basically three healing tasks: Tank Healing, Healing random burst raid damage, and healing raid-wide damage.

Tank healing is self explanatory, dropping big heals on Grov. Paladins and Druids are the kings of this, but Priests are decent at it. Greater Heal is fairly mana efficient, heals for a reasonable amount, and when properly pre-cast is generally an effective healing tool. Priests are much more latency susceptible than a Druid or FoL paladin (and roughly equally latency susceptible as the big heal paladins) performing the same roll, but they're certainly adequate.

Random burst raid damage is the situation in which a random target in the raid takes a sudden burst of damage and needs to be rapidly healed up. Rage Winterchill's ice bolt is a good example of this. Paladins are probably the best at this, with FoL, but Priests also shine here with Flash Heal (which, given the new mana regen model is viable) and the accidental bounces of a shaman's chain heal are very effective here.