Strange coincidences keep cropping up where the Dungeon Finder is concerned.
Philly had recently reached Exalted with the Kirin Tor faction, and wanted to start working on faction rep for the Wyrmrest Accord. That led her to spend a couple of hours doing quests in the Coldarra area of Borean Tundra. The early quests are low 70s level that don't even show up on the map unless Philly turned on the special setting to see them, which she did. Most of those quests are tied to a starter quest that's dropped by the Spellbinder humanoids in that area. Philly got lucky and picked up the starter quest on her first mob kill. Eventually the easy questing led her to the Nexus, where the five man dungeon of the same name is located. Philly's only trip inside the Nexus was the aborted random dungeon run of the other day (the one where the healer wouldn't heal). Philly poked her head inside anyway, and then left to finish her questing.
Philly got to Friendly with the Wyrmrest Accord, and that enabled her to buy their tabard, which grants higher reputation points when worn during heroics. That task completed, Philly signed up for her first random heroic of the day. Want to guess where it was? Yep, the Nexus. Like I said, strange coincidences.
The Nexus group was a potent one - three paladins, Philly the priest, and a druid healer. I don't know what Philly's problem with healers are, because our druid quit the group after taking down just one boss. We certainly weren't having any problems, and how easy is it to heal a group in which every player can heal? Perhaps he had mother aggro or something. Anyway, one of the paladins healed until we got a new healer, and we finished the run. Philly did 2193 DPS and made liberal use of her AoE spell on the trash as Philly would never be able to pull aggro off of three paladins.
Back in Dalaran, a Wintergrasp battle was nearing so Philly hung around for that. We won handily. At this point Philly always heads back to Dalaran to work on her dailies or grab another random heroic. Also as usual, raiders were spamming the general chat around WG asking for VoA raids. A VOA25 was forming. No gear score requirement was mentioned. Philly's own WHGS in shadow was an underwhelming 2297, and even lower (2121) as a healer. Funny, but the only reason Philly "looks" better geared in shadow is that she uses higher ilevel pvp gear in that spec, which most raid leaders would rather I not be wearing into a pve raid. Coupled with that and the fact that healers are in greater demand than DPS, Philly whispered the raid leader, "DISC priest lf voa25". There wasn't an immediate response, not unusual if the raid leader was checking Philly's gear score or looking at her gear on the Armory.
Philly was prepared to head back to Dalaran, but surprise of surprises, Philly got an invite. It took about fifteen minutes to form up the raid, and while waiting I felt like an underage teenager that had slipped into an "R" rated movie. I figured Philly would get booted at any minute. But the raid filled with Philly still in it, and she was joined by four other healers (a holy priest, a shaman, a pally, and a druid - wow, one of everything!). There were no healing assignments made. Philly, in her first appearance in any raid whatsoever, decided she'd be best off doing "shield spam" duty. This is what disc priests do when assigned to raid heal. Or so I've read.
We started on the trash. I was using a special addon to Recount that attempts to calculate how much healing was "saved" by having a Shield on someone that was taking damage. It's not perfect, but it gives disc priests a better sense of how well they compare to other healers. I was also very interested in what Philly's numbers would be in a full raid like VoA with all of the buffs raiders get. And of course, I was hoping that Philly wouldn't get killed too quickly or too often.
Philly did fine on the trash, and soon we were in front of Toravon, who drops i264 gear. Philly was in the big time, now. Philly figured she had two main worries - one, would she run out of mana spamming Shields across the raid, and two, would she get eaten alive by the first Spark that elected to spawn close to me. Philly's healing priorities included ensuring that there was a Shield on both tanks, that Philly always had an active Prayer of Mending (POM) in play, use her Prayer of Healing AoE on every AoE attack by Toravon, and firing off a Penance on the tank or anyone else taking damage as often as it was available. All that activity did draw Philly's mana down to around 55% midway through the fight, and when a shaman cast Bloodlust to speed up the DPS, Philly loosed her shadowfiend pet on Toravon, which does a little damage but more importantly also regens Philly's mana over 15 seconds. Philly got a few spark tickles, but Philly was also keeping a Shield on herself (clever girl) and was never in any serious trouble.
Toravon died. Among the three drops there was a cloth item that Philly rolled on, but she rolled low (24 out of 100) and didn't get it. But Philly was dam proud of getting her first Toravon kill.
We then went and killed Koravon as well, with only 22 raiders. A beautiful DPS cloak dropped, but then Philly realized it was for Mages only. Sigh.
There was considerable interest in getting to Emalon as well. Although Emalon is a "lesser" boss, the fight mechanics require a lot of coordination. We were grouping up to see if we'd have enough after those that wanted to leave had left, but it became a moot point because someone aggroed a trash mob with no tank in sight. We ran for our lives. Philly had a bit of a head start, and made it as far as the foot of the long, high set of stairs up to the exit, listening to the death screams of raiders behind him all the way. The screams gave way to the aggro warning that the mob had targeted Philly. It was moving much faster than Philly could go. As it came up behind me Philly cast Fade, temporarily dropping all aggro. It went to kill someone behind me that it had missed, and then came back after me - and ran straight past Philly and after the one raider that was farther up the stairs than Philly was. Philly was under no illusion of safety, though. It didn't matter whether that raider escaped or died. Either way, the mob would be coming back for Philly. Sure enough, the mob killed the raider and set it's sights back on Philly. With Fade still on cooldown, all Philly could do was gain a few seconds with Dispersion, which greatly reduces damage for a few seconds. Not enough seconds to reach the exit, though, and Philly died.
The raid broke up and Philly didn't get a chance at Emalon.
I'm still a little astonished that Philly was able to sneak into a VoA run. She now has the Achievement to prove she's done it, too.
On the Toravon fight Philly's health per second (hps) was 4415, and she contributed 12.5% of the healing, good for 5th (ie, last) among the healers. The others did around 5k, with the pally at the top with 5652, also aided by his Bubbles (the pally version of a shield).
Philly's hps was lower on Koralon, but she contributed more total healing: 4282 hps, 17.9% healing. Philly moved up to 4th in total healing, but surprised herself by leading in hps. The shaman came in second with 4147 hps.
Overall, Philly's numbers were 3780 hps/13.7% healing, counting bosses and trash mobs. She was second in hps, and beat the druid in total healing for 4th. Philly did a lot better than I expected.
Philly proudly displays her Toravon and Koravon kills:
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