Priests. Why we are so ..umm.. difficult.

[Darian]

First allow me to introduce myself. I'm from Germany and playing on the European Server Kil'Jaeden, and discovered this site through MongoJerrys/Neriads tale of the Onyxia Raids on the Northamerican WoW Raids and Dungeons Forum. Great Work, which made me of course curious about this site.  :) [right][snapback]76335[/snapback][/right]

First off... welcome. :)

Now judging from the reactions of e.g. warriors or rogues to priests, I have come to thinking, that not much love is lost on the other side either, for us priests, as well as for mages or warlocks for that matter.

This strikes me as odd, because in my experience I am closer to my priests than to any other players in the party.

Now I didn't know P2, but during the whole raid, he never did something stupid or demanded something excessivly burdening on the group...

It's entirely possible that P2 is a perfectly competent player, but an annoying person. You just never know about personalities.

Now here's where we get into areas where I strongly disagree with you, and think you're grossly overgeneralizing.

Priests are needed and there are not much high-lvl Priests around. It's a basic fact that one doesn't like people one is dependend on.

If this were true, I guess I would have to consider myself horribly unliked, being the only level 60 Warrior in my own guild, and until last week being the only Lurker playing a level 50+ Warrior on Stormrage. Likewise, I must not like the people I group with night after night (because I can't go raid without them, and am thus dependent on them). Guess I'll go shoot myself now. ;)

Warriors have a complete different rythm of play then priests. While priests loose Mana during battle which they have to regenerate afterwards, warriors gain rage, which they quickly loose after combat.
Now when one pull has been successfully mastered, there arises a conflict of interest. The warrior wants to engage as quickly as possible into the next pull to put the rage he has accumulated into use, while the caster classes want some seconds to regenerate mana, before advancing further.

Quite frankly, the warriors you're playing with are complete idiots if this is the case. While it's nice to be able to start a fight with a full rage bar, I don't want to engage until I see that my priest's mana bar is filled to at least the level I deem necessary for the upcoming pull. If that pull is only one mob, sure. I might well pull while my priest is only at 20% mana -- after telling them to go ahead and drink and not worry about us unless bad things happen. If it's a multi-pull, I have been known to get grumbled at by an impatient party member for not pulling yet when I'm waiting for my priest to get to 75, 80, or even 95% mana, based on the difficulty of the pull.

Any Warrior who is placing his rage bar level on a higher level of importance than his priest's mana bar should be taken out back and clubbed senseless, and then placed on ignore and never again invited to do anything. It's that stupid. If that's the quality of warrior play on your realm, you have my deepest sympathies.

Priests are most often positioned at the back of the group, which allows them to quite literally have a wider viewing angle on the things that are happening around the group. So this is why it comes that priests are the first ones to see potential adds, that may join the fight (and often targeting the priest then), before the guys in the front notice them. That may give the impression priests are prone to panic unneccasary, while in fact they see things from their position, that others may overlook.

No, an intelligent melee player recognizes this as the priest being able to see things which are behind or to the side of the melee cloud. If the priest is getting hit, it's someone's job to go make it stop, period, because if the priest is getting hit, he's going to keep getting hit until someone does stop it. Priests who keep getting hit die, and dead priests can't heal. I would much rather see Grizelle's "Something is trying to eat me, please make it stop" macro than see her lying dead on the floor because she kept quiet.

Non healing classes often cannot judge how difficult a certain encounter was for the priest.

Sure they can. Look at the mana bar.

no non caster reads mana bars, no one, empirically proven

This one really sets me off, and it's going to set a lot of people here off. The relationship between myself and my priests is this: they look at my health, and I look at their health and mana. I don't pay attention to my own health (unless the priest is out of mana); healing me isn't my job, so I don't give a damn what my health looks like. Keeping the priest from dying is my primary job, so I need to know if he's taking damage. Keeping the party on track is my secondary job, and making sure the priest has the juice to heal us is part of that job -- and I can't do it without looking at mana. So don't even charge that it's "proven" that non-casters don't read mana bars. There's at least three priests right here who can tell you otherwise.