Holy Paladin! (Re-visited)

This is gonna be a long one (for me anyway).

Our guild is having a serious crisis of a healing sort.  As in . . . out of our entire roster, we only have ONE mainspec healer.  That makes it a little hard to raid.

So, being the team player that I am, I have volunteered to change my second spec to Holy.  

You know, take one for the team.

Now, it has been documented before, and you may, or may not have read it before, but . . . I HATE paladin healing.

I have tried it a few times throughout my WoW career, and it has always felt . . . "Too hectic!!!  Not enought time to get heal off!!!  GAH!!!!"

Well, that was under the old healing model.  Where throughput was everything.  I understand that Paladins have never had throughput issues, but all I know is . . . Healing on a Disc priest is easy, and healing on a Paladin is hard.

That was until last night.  Our one dedicated healer had other plans last night, so I was the only "healer" available for our nightly heroic runs.  After a little cajoling, off we went.

I realized very quickly, that my UI needed some adjustment.  When I first started working on Rotface in ICC, I was always the ooze tank.  And, since I was a paladin, I was also the ooze cleanser.  So, I had made a mouseover macro for my Cleanse, so that I could Cleanse the targets in the game world instead of having to Cleanse a unit frame.  It is bound to one of my thumb buttons on my mouse, and has served em well ever since.  however, for some reason, and I still can't figure out why, my mouseover Cleanse macro just refused to work on the party unit frames.  I was even using the default (raid style) unit frames.  It always did before, so I am not sure what gives there.  Oh well...I just left the mouseover macro keybound to the thumb key on my mouse, but also assigned the normal Cleanse from my spellbook via Clique to the same button.  You know . . . double dip.

Once I got that sorted, I realized that I need to move my party frames.  As a tank, you need to see your party frames, but they don't need to be the center of your attention.  Has a healer,  your party's unit frames are EVERYTHING.  So, unit frames moved from the bottom right of my screen to pretty much dead center.  Lined up right below my toon's feet.

Now keep in mind, I was adjusting all of these things WHILE we were running heroic dungeons.  So making quick adjustments and such between pulls until about 3/4 through the second dungeon of the night.  

Conclusions?

I was actually having a lot of fun.  Hectic at times, but in a good way.  I need to get out of the WotLK mind set of keeping everyone healed up to max all of the time.  There were a few fights where my mana got dangerously low.  The Beauty fight in Stonecore (for example), I ended the fight with 2100 total mana (keep in mind that my in-combat MP5 is just over 2000).  

I was using cooldowns constantly.  

I was involved.  

I was entertained.

So, the Big Shiny Shiled may have a little more shine and a couple fewer dings in the coming expansion.

We will see.