My Priest

Laszarus, my undead priest, still lives. He has some advantages over my warrior. I actually never really healed in WoW before as in contrast to dpsing and tanking. I did heal some ten times with my druid in late-TBC raids, but found it extremely boring. If everything goes well you have nothing to do. And if something goes wrong you can shine. But WoW being WoW, less and less went wrong in instances, and raid healing was a pure spam at late-TBC.

But the Cataclysm healing revamp is actually a lot of fun. At least up to level 38. I actually can go out of mana quite easily and training to save mana - even if you wouldn't need to - is very effective at keeping the mind busy. In addition to that, my discipline priest can actually do damage and heal this way. Quite often this is sufficient. Actually, the tanks that pull enough mobs in the dumbed down leveling instances to ever require anything but me dealing damage are rare. The skill is called atonement; have a look at the pic.

Now, the leveling game is ridiculous with my priest. He is virtually immortal even if I jump quest lines and try to do quests of my level! There's no way I am going to suffer through this !
But the dungeon running is fun. If the tanks are cautious, like most unfortunately are, I can do damage and heal more than enough at the same time. If the tanks are boisterous a dungeon run takes about 7 minutes and is quite fun. And sometimes I can even join as a DD. This is, however really not fun at all in my experience. I go oom really fast as a shadow priest and without the ability to do ae damage stuff dies before my dots had any chance of ticking through. As a consequence I often don't even switch to shadow and rather annoy the healer of the party by damage-healing everybody. It got me kicked a few times ;)

Waiting times for healer/dd is about 1-5 minutes for me most of the day. It becomes much worse late in the evening for some reason. My goal is to get to 85 and do some random raids. Will I get there? I really don't know - actually I doubt it. WoW with this kind of dumbed down leveling is not worth paying 12.99€. And it's not like I need the 12.99€ for something else. If WoW went f2p I would probably play a bit, but I would never pay a dime. Pick your poison, Blizzard, or improve the leveling game.

Here are two youtube videos. One to demonstrate how much fun a good tank is. And one to demonstrate why I will never, ever play the leveling game in its current state. These are 1080p (1920x1080) and H.264, CRF=20. They look considerably worse at 720p, just so you know :).
I actually found out that my i5 2500K 4x 3.30GHz in combination with the 2x Samsung Spinpoint F3 in raid 1 configuration and the 16GB ram can encode a video, play WoW on highest details, record this session and upload one to youtube all at the same time. The case does get quite hot this way, though. Yeah, sorry for bragging, but I was honestly surprised ;).

Just a silly comparison: This zombie hits me for about 40 with every hit. That is 2.64% of my 1513 total hit points. Now have a look at this. These guys hit my level 5 warrior for 20. And he has 136 hit points (and is a warrior!). That is 14.70% with each hit. Not only does my priest at level 32 take 5.57 times as many hits as my level 5 warrior. He also can heal himself at a much higher rate without ever losing mana and has a myriad of abilities to use in case of an emergency. These are fundamentally different games, really. You could also say that I have 11x as many hit points, but the mobs only do about 2x as much damage per hit. Ridiculous, eh?