I have settled into an odd mood with WoW. I am not quite bored of it, nor am I burned out, but I am not exactly feeling the need to log in constantly.
I have my two 85s and now that Tattia is starting on heroics the challenge is back, but in a different way. I am not saying that heroics are by any means really easy on Lyssi, but I know them (except for ToT, I still haven’t even seen that place) and I don’t really have any “O Shit! What do I do here?!?!” moments on her anymore. With Tattia there is the challenge of healing. This has put a whole new shine on everything and I am kind of looking forward to logging in a bit more.
Healing at the end of Wrath sucked. I was bored to tears of ICC and I never wanted to heal it again. The new healing style of Cataclysm suits me so much better and I am loving healing again. Looking back, I pretty much already healed this way. Until I switched my druid to SR she wasn’t geared to where she could spam heals and never go oom. I had already been working with a “stand there and don’t heal unless you have to” mentality. The difference from then and now is that back then I actually was trying to top off everyone and now I don’t even worry about it.
I had been healing regular dungeons here and there on Tattia. Mostly in PuGs. Yes I know, I am a sick sick person. I actually got pretty lucky in my groups. I only had to drop out of one and that one was destined to fail no matter what I did. Since I didn’t want to be blamed for the “dps queuing as tank” fail I quickly & quietly left the group. Most of the time my regular dungeons were specific ones because I was hunting for the gear upgrades that I needed. It took forever and a day for me to upgrade my green quest reward relic in regulars. Get this! In my first heroic dungeon I got a relic upgrade.
Go fucking figure.
The original plan for last night was for Slice to tank some regulars and for me to heal him. I tried to get Del to log in when he got back from class but he was a no show. :-p What ended up happening was Slice took a nap (he had been feeling sick) and I got into a heroic with Sorak and Zarm. We nabbed Dro (one of our new guys) and Sorak told him he was tanking. Now Dro has never played an MMO except for WoW and he just started playing a few months ago. He is one of my brother’s friends that came over to play with him. From what I understand he leveled mostly dps (fury) but tanked here and there. Since he was so new to the entire everything there is a learning curve, but all things considered he didn’t do too badly.
We first went in as 4 guildies and a PuG dps. We got a mage and I immediately started squeeing over getting mage food. The stingy mage made me ONE STACK of mage food and didn’t even offer it to the rest of the group (shaman & druid). I was kind of sad I didn’t get a table, but I thanked him in chat and then talked crap about him in vent.
It is just how I roll bitches!
We had a bunch of afk time in the beginning of the dungeon then wiped to the first pull (bad positioning and too many kobolds). The amount of damage was fast and high. I think I was one shot. The mage left. It was rather funny. We had just been talking about the rightness of booting him and bringing in a guildie. For once I wasn’t the mean one (I am looking at you Sorak!) and was actually saying it wouldn’t be cool to boot him because he probably waited like 45 mins to get a queue. When he dropped we grabbed Slice (who had finally woken up) and headed back in.
For some reason Deadmines can either fly by super fast or it can just take you 50 million years to complete. There is no in-between. Between Dro’s tanking, and my “just barely heroic ready” healing we ended up with a LONG ASS Deadmines run. Guess what dropped? All rogue gear. There were 2 pieces of non-rogue gear: the caster staff and the caster relic. Both of which I snagged. Yes I know the staff doesn’t have spirit, so it isn’t that great of an upgrade, but damn it! It was still an upgrade from what I had equipped. You can always reforge some spirit onto the item! The relic was the biggest reason for squeeing. I was already anticipating having to wait forever to get that item upgraded just to have it drop in my first heroic. Yay for me!
My impression with healing wasn’t too bad actually. As I mentioned above, I already was kind of healing this way. While healing regulars I got the “rotation” down. It is amazing how much healing you can get done with very little mana. I never went oom in the entire heroic run. I never used a potion and I rarely used my innervate. If I got below 40% mana (I usually ended the fight around 50 something %) it was because I had to cleanse a lot of stuff. I also never use the ToL form, which I know is probably very bad. The times when I used it during Wrath I went oom so fast my head spun. I find that in panic situations (where I should probably pop it) I just pop rejuvs and move my lifebloom stacks around. When it is really bad I hit tranquility.
This is typically how I heal:
3 stacks of lifebloom on the tank. I pop a rejuv on him when he starts taking damage. If he gets below 80% I let the lifebloom stacks bloom. If not, then I refresh them using lifebloom (it is less mana AND faster than nourish). I pop swiftmend EVERY time it is up to get Efflorescence down. I use my Clearcasting procs to pop a regrowth up on either the tank or on a dps that is low. If I don’t have a Cc proc I don’t usually use regrowth (unless it is an emergency and I need that heal fast) and the dps will get a regrowth and possibly lifebloom stacks if I don’t need to keep them on the tank. I have been trying to remember to pop Wild Growth each time it is off cooldown (I forget to use it, long cooldown & yes I have a timer on my screen for it) so that probably needs to be used more. I’ve been typically trying to use Innervate when I hit around 75-80% mana, but even then sometimes I forget until I am around 50-60%.
Yes this run wasn’t exactly proof that I am pure win and healing is easy peasy for me (although it kind of is) but it definitely was a nice intro into heroics. We didn’t really CC each pull, and the bad dps *cough*Sorak*cough* kept pulling off the newbie tank. Several times I had healing aggro and Dro wasn’t able/didn’t seem to know and Zarm switched to bear form and saved my furry ass. Even then I was usually able to recover. I did die a lot though. I do mean a lot. Even with the guild perks we have I had broken gear halfway through. >.>
I don’t want to take full credit for the lighter load on my healing run. Slice was on his shadow priest and he can’t resist helping heal. He has twitchy fingers. I would constantly see weakened soul up on people (yes babe I see when you are “helping” me heal) and Sorak has his healing rain macro’d to go off when he gets some proc. So I know I was getting help. I don’t think I am quite ready to fully PuG a heroic, but I just might be ready to do a run with Zug. Not necessarily Zug tanking, but a Zug dpsing run. Maybe.
Yes he will be allowed to die several times.
Both Sorak & Zug know that I will flat out not heal them when they pull aggro & die. They take it good naturedly and laugh about it.
Once I thought Zug had bitched me out, but he was complaining about the boss. It was kind of funny actually.
Anyway, it is kind of quiet on this front. Depending on my work schedule (meaning if my boss shows up or not) I will post when I can and if I have something to say. I know I missed Friday’s post, but in my defense Slice was visiting and I wasn’t really thinking about my blog if you catch my drift.
You blushing yet sweetie? 😉