Progress made, badges spent :)

In the 11 days since my last post, there have been some nice updates:

• My guild downed a new boss for us, Rage Winterchill (MH 1st boss). I was there, it was great, nuff said :)
• My server finally reached 100% on the Anvil, allowing us all to mob the smith and buy brand new badge gear. I only had time so far to buy the new healing mace for Solidfaith and I feel those badges are well spent.
• Solidstate became exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive. He is now taking a break from doing daily quests, except for the cooking and fishing ones. Still want the cake recipe and cool fishing loot Blizzard promised :(
• Solidfaith is revered with Shattered Sun and will quickly reach exalted. No idea when exactly, depends on how many daily quests I do. On reaching exalted with him I hope to buy the new alchemist stone as it is a very nice healer trinket. Collecting the mats now... :)

As a random thought, I do the daily quests mainly with a warlock friend of mine. A holy priest + warlock team make a powerful grinding team as he can easily get agro and CC multiple mobs (DoTs + fear) and DPS them down quickly while I can heal him without a problem, including him life-tapping. In effect, when he is with me he has no downtime and no health/mana worries and I get a partner that helps me breeze through quests that would be annoying to do as a low-damage holy priest. So basically on quests where we have to kill X mobs, he goes in, DoTs everything, and even with 5 mobs hitting him together he has no problems and finishes the fight with full life and mana (unless he forgets to life-tap :)). Needless to say I rarely if ever get low mana due to my rapid mana regeneration.
I think this combo of healer+warlock works better than any other I can think of when grinding mobs/quests. A fury warrior or rogue would never go OOM but they are mostly single-target DPS classes and would not be able to tag and hold agro on multiple mobs the way a warlock can. A mage would go oom. A hunter would go oom and is also not a multiple-mob dps class (2-3 at most vs. 5-6 for my lock friend). Other combinations of classes would kill mobs more slowly or have downtime issues due to health or mana.
As for other healers vs. a holy priest, Prayer of Mending is a huge helper in a 2-person group if I get agro as it jumps back and forth healing us both for minimal mana cost. But in reality I don't think I have any special advantage, any healer would have a great time partnered with a warlock.
Healer+lock = PvE ftw :)