I am edumacated.

This post over on DiscPriest.com is one I found really helpful, even as a babypriest. Disc priest gearing seems very similar to holy paladin gearing, which is good because it won't break my brain.

I love it when they lay out stuff simply, like this stat priority list pulled from that thread:
Int
Spellpower
Crit
Mp5
Haste
Spirit
Stam

Caveat: after 1000-1250 int, swapping to the int/spirit gem Seer's Forest Emeralds is more beneficial than the int/mp5 gem.

Some other helpful Disc Priest posts are here and here, on PlusHeal.com's forums.
ETA: Go check out this blog post as well.

I can has buttons?

Yay! Lyr dinged 64 and now has binding heal.

WEE MORE HEALS TO PLAY WITH.

...now where the hell do I put it?

Why I Almost Quit My Paladin

I leveled my paladin to 80 first, mainly because 1) everyone always needs healers and she was my only healer at 70 and 2) as a healer, she's the perfect compliment to the boy's warrior tank. She's also nearly always been my main, except for a brief stint of "dual maining" where my paladin got played a bunch, but my hunter Jamethera was my raiding main on Earthen Ring. Alas, no one needs a hunter.

Now, I've always been holy. Always. I solo'd/instance'd my way to 60...over the period of a year. After that I raided seriously in a guild called Unified (Judgement, I miss you!) and duo'd with another warrior to 70. My paladin did not get the experience in BC that she did in vanilla WoW- vanilla, my healing skills were tempered in MC, BWL, AQ 20 and 40 (up to C'thun) and there were some tenative jabs into old Naxx. In BC, I got into the unfortunate rut of doing Kara until I wanted to vomit. I saw Gruul's four or five times on her, and Mags uh...twice. Arranging 25 mans seemed to be a bitch on ER. It wasn't until I moved her over to our friend Steve's guild BoO on Azgalor that she saw any real action. I moved her over as a tank, because at that point-after pushing the same two buttons I've been pushing for years, in the same gods be damned instance-I had had enough. Thus I got to OT in Kara, Gruul's, and SSC (!) a little bit. YAY FOR DIFFERENT BUTTONS.

Before we'd transferred over-which is to say, before RP to PvP transfers were an option-the boy (alright, Josh) and I had rerolled to play with Steve. He had another baby warrior but I, in my disgust with Two Buttondom, had rolled a priest. It was my 6th priest or so, but dammit, I wanted one.

This was Lyrandre. And let me tell you (again) that I loved my Lyrandre.

Come 3.0, I agreed to go back to healing. Thus I was staring at green bars again for more SSC, and some playtime in BT and TK. It...wasn't terrible. It wasn't great, but the combination newer content and a couple of new buttons meant I plugged along while leveling my priest between raids.

Then came Wrath, and a new form of hatred for my paladin. Or rather, not for my paladin...but for the combination of encounter design and paladin healing limitations that resulted in me weeping in the corner. It seemed that Blizzard had in mind for some fights handy little things like...AoE heals. And sometimes shaman poison cleansing totems. I'm not sure how this fits in with "bring the player not the class" but I felt maligned for awhile. Fights went something like this:

Holy shit poisons everywhere I need to cleanse them but OH MY GOD THE TANK IS DYING heal the tank and OH MY GOD THE DPS IS DYING heal the DPS and OH MY GOD THE TANK IS DYING and there's more damn poison and I need to cl-OH MY GOD THE TANK AND EVERYONE ELSE IS DYING and and holy shit how did I end up dead?

See also: Loken's nova, whirlwinding mobs, Skadi's Hallway of Adds AND Whirlwind, Pools of Mojo, and many other things that made my single target healer self weep. Alright alright, so they gave us Beacon. Sweet, so I can heal TWO targets at once with a semi-expensive spell that only lasts a minute that I have no idea when it falls off unless I install another addon. AWESOME. Oh, and I have another somewhat expensive instant heal with cool down.

How many poeple are in a group, Blizz?

FIVE.

This resulted in 2 DPS dying on several boss fights until I got some sweet, sweet Naxx gear and learned some crazy coping methods. Three seemed to the most people I could keep alive in dicy situations, which, frankly, sucks balls. I take deaths personally, and that was a lot of guilty, failure-tinged feelings building up.

That fact that Josh and I ran Heroic UP over and over and over and over again, combined with multiple trips through Heroic VH (yet ANOTHER instance that made me emo) did not add to my sanity.

It wasn't until I got to raids where I had AoE healers to back me up that I didn't want stalk over to Blizzard and stab some dungeon developers in their sleep.

How I coped:
-Beacon. Depending on the fight, I would either beacon the tank and myself (^&!%^&!%@&! mojo pools), beacon the tank and the highest DPS and pray, or beacon the tank and the ret pally who was raping himself with martyr (I'm looking at you Steve!).
-Juggling judgements as best I could for a bit of haste...though frankly, there were fights where interrupting healing for anything was fatal. Judging Light took a bit of the sting out, though, in the melee heavy groups. I mean it's not as if I was too likely to whack the thing for mana back anyway.
-Holy shocking the DPS just enough to keep them limping along until such a time as I could be sure that the tank wouldn't die while I healed them. If I got a crit, the instant FoL would go to them too. Often related to the below:
-I'd Holy Light the tank to near full, hurridly FoL the DPS up a bit more, then rinse and repeat. This required having a good sense of incoming damage on the tank, and a tank that won't start to panic if he dips lower in health. HL is a gloriously huge heal (20k crit in Naxx once, zomg).
-Sacred Shielding the tank as often as possible where rage starvation wasn't an issue. It doesn't seem to be, by the way. Just bubble after he has aggro and some incoming rage and you're golden. Josh hasn't complained yet and trust me, he would if it was a problem! I also sacred shileding myself for the afore mentioned &!%*&!%*$%& mojo puddles, because moving and healing just didn't fly.
-Wings + Divine Plea = mana return with no healing nerf!

It also helps that I know my tank very, very well. I've been healing Josh's warrior ass since Molten Core. The 5 minute oh shit buttons help, too. Don't be shy about using those, guys!

I'm hoping that with the incoming "nerfs" to CoH and Wildgrowth, Blizzard will tone down the AoE damage some and make life a little easier on we HoT and AoE healing lacking paladins. At least Naxx makes me feel USEFUL-I'm queen of Patchwerk OT healing. /flex

tl;dr:
I almost quit my paladin because:
1) Blizzard threw in a lot of AoE damage and AoE poisons and shit.
2) Paladins don't cope well with the above.
3) I'm tired of pushing the same gods be damned buttons for four years. I'm still pushing the same two, I just have....3 more to push sometimes. Flexibility is notably lacking.

I coped by:
1) Madly flailing and pushing some buttons really really fast
2) Praying a lot
3) Bitching even more

Priest Shinys and Enchants

My baby bubblepriest dinged 63 last night. I'm still enjoying her immensely, although I have to say if I do nothing but heal my pet DK tank I'm bored as hell. I mean I don't even heal most of the time, I just...bubble. That's alright, Lyr can also pewpew far better than poor Ambro. Let me tell you, if I'd leveled a priest first I don't think I ever would have managed to level my paladin holy. Then again if I'd played just about anything first that may have been the case. Except rogue. I totally fail at rogue.

Have I mentioned that if I don't /dnd while in Outlands, I get whispered to hell and back? Most of the time I'm the only healer in the entire damned zone. Helloooooo, DKs...

Anyway, gear and enchant research is not my strong point (read: I'm lazy), so I shall just point you at some lovely posts from Soap Bubble and World of Snarkcraft.

For useful food and pots: Clicky.
For priest gems: Clicky.
For disc priest enchants: Clicky.
For disc priest gear: Clicky.

Mp5 and Crit ramblings.

If you took a peek at my paladin's armory (and I can't link it here, alas-work is silly) you'd see that I have around 300 mp5.

While casting.

Those strictly following the current paladin trend of "omg CRIT!" would probably pull back in shock and horror at this number. Why do I have so much mp5? And only 27% crit!?!?

Well the short, lazy answer is: the shiny purples had it on there.

Since said shiny purples completely outclassed my previous gear in every other way, well, it seemed the obvious choice. I usually took slight hits in crit for each upgrade, but gained a large amount of int and +spell power. Certainly the benefits granted by the increase in those other stats was worth the hit taken in crit. A lot of people also forget that the mp5/crit debate is influenced in part by playstyle and group makeup. Is crit important? YES. Is mp5 bad? NO.

My fellow healers in 10 man raids are usually a resto shaman and a CoH priest. That's a good bit of raid healing coverage. I stay mostly on the tank, and cast Flash of Light more so than anything else. FoL benefits more from mp5 than crit-the opposite of Holy Light. I also get inflated crit from Sacred Shield, which I keep up on the tank where rage starvation isn't an issue.

Once over a certain amount of crit, then spamming Holy Light becomes viable. I believe that 30/35% crit is the current magic number. It also seems to be the number everyone is shooting for. Certaintly, being able to toss around more than one or two HLs per fight is important. It'll happen, trust me. But I argue against rushing towards that level of crit, which seems to be what I'm seeing.

Mp5 is considered the stat for "lesser geared" holy pallys. I don't fully agree with that, either. I'm not at that magical crit point yet...and honestly, I'm not worried about getting there. Unless your raid is set up in such a way that you need to be spamming HL outside of Patchwerk...why? Keep on hand some extra crit gear for Patchwerk, perhaps. Do you really need OMG CRIT all the time? ...no, not really.

Since I am light on crit, gear-wise, I chose to gem for it (though Int would be my preferred choice otherwise and I do have int gems). I'm also trying to swap over to crit trinkets, rings, and neck. I do fine in both 10 and 25 man Naxx as is, however. I do fine in 5 man situations as well, barring those clearly meant to rape all will to live from a paladin*.

I really don't understand the paladins who stack crit to the point of having only 30 mp5 casting. While I've never operated at the level of crit they also carry, I have to wonder if they're not gimping themselves. The key to being a good paladin healer is to not be a FoL or HL spammer. Both are bad. Healing is situational. Learn to adapt. As I said, mp5 is better for FoL than crit. You will, sometimes, want to be tossing around plently of FoLs. So why not balance your stats?

Mp5 isn't bad!

Balance is good!

...which is why I am going to TRY to lessen that crazy mp5 amount for some more crit. But...but the shiny purples, they have it by the metric shit ton!

*Another rant in and of itself.

Hi there.

My name is Amber, and I like bubbles.
I like paladin bubbles, which allow me to /laugh my way through the dreaded Frogger Boss. Paladin bubbles are amongst my oldest friends, ever since I rolled my paladin four years ago. My dear Ambrosine has been holy for the entire length of her career, if you ignore one rebellious stint as a tank. At 80 I have come to love Sacred Shield as well. Mmm. Bubbles!

Always an altaholic, one day I rolled a night elf priest.
At level 14, I deleted her. This is what happens when a noob tries to solo holy. Said noobishness allowed me to limp through an early holy paladin Back In The Day without much pain because I didn't know better, but that didn't save me here.
Years later, I rolled a blood elf priest. I got her to 16. Then deleted her. Sorry, but horde and I are like oil and water.
Then I rolled a draenei priest and got her to 29...and quit playing her after my shaman buddy outleveled me.
Then I rolled a draenei priest on another RP server and got her all the way to 10 before I quit playing her, too. If you can guess, her warrior buddy quit playing. I sense a theme.
Then one day I rolled a draenei priest on a PvP server of all things to play with some RL buddies of my boyfriend's. I still wanted to play a priest, and I still wanted a draenei, so it seemed logical to combine the two (again) and I'd have a leveling partner once more. I hate soloing. See above theme.
At this point the boy transferred his 70 warrior over instead and stopped leveling his alt. Oi. My paladin followed. Curse you, RP to PvP transfers! My priest was a mere 27, but I was depressingly bored with my Two Button Healer. I had been pushing those same two buttons from Molten Core onwards and the idea of continuing to do so made me weep. I was also a much better player than in the past, so I decided to stick with it. I would solo my damn priest!
...and I decided to do so as disc, for the first time ever.

Oh. My. God.

I leveled her relentlessly-and with joy! Even on the pvp server!-until 58, when it became Wrath-time, aka level your paladin bitch! time. So my dear little Lyrandre sat until my live-in leveling partner (er...the boyfriend) felt that it was time to bring out his frost DK.
I was most impatient, however, because this was at last a class I ENJOYED! And that people WANTED in their groups (sorry, hunter alt)! I could HEAL! And yet I could SOLO! And incidentally kick other peoples ass when they tried to gank me at least as often as I died!

Hell yeah!

I still play my paladin-after all, we needed healers to raid, and she is that, even though healing aoe/poison DoT happy Wrath 5-mans with her nearly destroyed my soul. As a raid healer I find myself almost enjoying myself again (o hai, Patchwerk!).
But my not-so-secret love is still my disc priest. I love having a flexible healer with more than three buttons. I love being the perfect compliment to the boy's frost DK. I love being in love with the game again.
So hi. I love bubbles. And this blog shall chronicle my adventures with said bubbles, of both flavors.

Long live healers!