Every Wednesday (you know, ideally Wednesday, when he's not slacking off), Fox Van Allen grabs hold of Spiritual Guidance from her holiness Dawn Moore and makes everything just a little darker than usual. Don't worry, he usually remembers to unlock the closet and let her out when he's done. Usually.

I wanted to take a brief break from the Spiritual Guidance series on raiding Icecrown Citadel (part 1; part 2) to answer an e-mail I got in response to it, because there's a really important lesson to be learned. Or a chance to complain about stuff. I'm pretty good at that.
Why is "Stay Alive" in the strats? Are there strats where I should die? It's actually a good question. (The first part, not the second part -- we already know that only gnomes should be sacrificed on Saurfang post fix, and only then for the good luck the act brings.) Why go out of my way to state the obvious -- that your key mission is to stay alive?

Simply put: Because staying alive is just not a priority for way too many DPS players. (I'd go as far as to say that way too many of you stink at it.) And the way some raid leaders treat their DPS, it's not even surprising that this is the case.

The goal of the Spiritual Guidance column -- at least, my wonderful shadowy side of it -- is to help make you better players. Half of you are probably rolling your eyes at the concept here. We all know that we need to stay alive, and we all make at least a C-minus effort to play that way. That's good enough, right?

I have a little bit of homework for all my loyal shadow priests out there. Today, instead of doing your daily heroic in shadow spec, go in and try your hand at healing. We're paying that hybrid tax, so we may as well get some benefit out of it. If you're not dual specced, go pay the trainer the few gold to reset your tree and give yourself a healing build. If you've got at least a little bit of raid experience, you can easily heal a heroic even in shadow gear. If you're not quite at raid level, queue up for a non-heroic instance to make things easier on yourself.

The point of this exercise is simple: To gain the perspective of the raid healer. When running through the heroic, you should ideally only have to be healing one person, the tank. Sure, there are some fights where other players will suffer unavoidable environmental damage (the Brann event in Halls of Stone comes immediately to mind), but this exercise in healing should otherwise be mindlessly simple. Right?

Hesitant though I am to ruin the surprise for any of you, but I don't you'd be shocked to learn that you'll be bouncing heals off at least one of those three DPSers time after time. And often, it'll be because they're barely even putting in a C-minus effort to stay alive.

"Hey, I know I'm standing in fire, but this spell is almost done casting."

"wAT kinda nub priest cant' heal me thru wirlwinds?"

"lol, bloodbeast is attacking me but moving hurts my DPS. MOAR HEALS PLZ"

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