I found my ticket

As I remarked in a previous comment, raiding is not looking for loot just for loot's sake. It is looking for the ticket that allows you entry to the next level of raiding. And last night I found my ticket: the Shard of the Virtuous from the Maiden of Virtue in Karazhan, a one-hand mace with a huge bonus to healing. As I had already previously found a off-hand healing item from Aran, the two items together increased my +healing bonus by 200 points. On my first Karazhan raid I had under +1200 healing buffed, at the end of last night I had +1515 healing buffed. And as one of my readers remarked, once you have such a nice epic weapon, you are willing to spend the ca. 500 gold to enchant it with the +81 healing bonus enchantment, which would get me up to nearly +1600. There isn't a fixed number of how much +healing you need as a priest to visit Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, or Zul'Aman. But I'm pretty certain that 1200 was too low, and 1600 is more like it. I'm feeling more confident, and less than a burden to my guild, if I sign up for a raid now.

One nice thing about the growing healing bonus is that due to recent patch changes one third of the healing bonus is also increasing my spell damage. That doesn't do much in raids, but it does make my soloing life easier. I'm not greedy, I pass on all damage caster loot I find in a group or raid. It is nice to know that by concentrating on the stats that help my priest most to become a useful raider, I'm not gimping myself for soloing. I just wish Blizzard would come up with a way to introduce something similar for protection warriors. The gear I collect with my warrior has armor, defence, and stamina, and is only marginally helpful for soloing.

Last night's raid was a blast, not only because of the loot. We had an unusual raid composition, as we were the "B Team", the second Karazhan raid group formed that night by my guild. We had 4 druids in the group, one healing, the other three switching between tanking and melee dps as required. 2 hunters, me as only priest, one healadin, one shaman, and one mage. Kudos to the guild officers of managing to balance the two teams so well, we actually finished our planned "first half Kara" before the first group. Well, they had the Wizard of Oz in the opera, and we had Romulo and Julianne (again, grrr, third time opera, third time Romulo), and apparently our encounter was easier. But we were really on a roll, killed Attumen, Moroes, the Maiden, and the opera event on the first try, and only wiped once on Nightbane before downing him too. And it only took 3 hours to do all this.