My apologies to John le Carré for butchering a title from his books, but after a year-and-a-half of absence my priest feels like he came in from the cold, having been frozen in time. And it is somewhat curious how time solved some of my problems. When I left World of Warcraft in April 2011, said priest was in trouble: I had done all the normal dungeons and was wearing all the gear you could get from them, but when I tried the next step, heroic dungeons, the groups I was in weren't doing so well. Which might or might not have been my fault, but as a healer I tended to get blamed even if it wasn't my fault. And as I couldn't do heroics, I couldn't get geared up for heroics neither, a vicious cycle.

Now I'm pretty certain my skills haven't gotten any better during my absence. If anything, I'm older, slower, and a bit rusty on healing. But it turns out that I can run heroics now. Yesterday I even did Zul'Gurub, which presumably is harder than the first batch of heroics, and I was healing just fine. Okay, I caused one wipe because I didn't know I had to move into the green bubble on the final boss (I tend to stay out of the colored spots, which works fine as basic strategy on most bosses), but on the second try we did it without problems. The only problem I have with heroics now is that they feel very rushed in most cases, so although I have a cheat sheet printed out with what I should do at each boss, I never get the opportunity to read it because the people pull so fast. Even just drinking for mana is difficult to find time for. And yet I'm racking up valor points (after having reached the weekly cap for justice points from normal dungeons).

I don't remember having read anything about the heroics having been nerfed a lot during my absence. Maybe it is simply that the other players are now both better trained and better equipped. If the rest of group is doing well, the job of the healer is getting easier, even if he is slow and undergeared. That allows me to visit the dungeons I haven't seen yet, those that aren't even available on normal, like Zul'Gurub.

Having re-installed a lot of addons I used to have, including Recount, I noticed that there are huge differences in performance levels between dps players; you see everything from 5k to 25k dps. Presumably there are also huge differences in the quality between different players playing healers, or different players playing tanks, but those are harder to measure. And that makes me wonder how heroics will be in Mists of Pandaria. As a rather average player, will I be stuck again after finishing the MoP dungeons on normal? Will I have to wait until the other players have become a lot better at MoP heroics again before I can set a foot into them with my priest?

The reason I wonder is because if Mists of Pandaria heroics are a repeat of Cataclysm heroics, I might want to level up another character as my main. For example my frost mage. I find that one easier to level than the priest (even with shadow dual spec). And let's face it: If you are a mediocre player in a 5-man group, you are far better off with a dps class. Your lack of performance can more easily be compensated by the other players, and even when underperforming you are less likely to be blamed. Generally I do like healing in a dungeon more than I like dealing damage, but if the tuning of MoP heroics and the expectations of the other players require healers that are much better than me, I might have to give up on dungeon healing. Man, I miss vanilla WoW, where I was considered a good player in a hardcore raiding guild beating BWL. The skill required from a healer these days have nothing to do with what was needed back then.