The Joys of Healing Heroic PUGs

First one, Heroic Vortex Pinnacle!

I picked up healing once again!  yay.  now this blog can actually be useful for once (if you can read through all the QQ, that is).  my first experience was with a few guildies and one pugger, which wasnt so bad.  we had a raiding healer with us but she was asked to dps so i can practic some healing.  we zoned into vortex pinnacle with me, my gf in her dk, a guildie tank, and a guildie shaman who's dpsing the fight.  it was pretty intense up through the first boss.  my gf took minimal damage, the tank took a lot of damage (and fell off the ledge several times) and the guildie shaman was doing pretty well as dps.  after the first pull, i was pretty much OOM.  everyone was alive, but i was OOM.  You know that pull with the air elementals? all five of them?  one was bound, so there were four at once hitting the tank.  luckily, he was probably able to heal himself. 

I got a little better with mana conservation after the first pull.  We go down the first ramp, with each pull costing me about half my mana instead of all my mana.  we slowly pushed towards the first boss and i actually drank, took mana potions and innervated myself after each pull.  oh the fun of being mana starved!

at the first boss, i was at 50% mana going in.  apparently my guildie figured i needed extra healing stress on my first time back!  in any case, the damage was normalized after the first cyclone pull, and no one died.  i was sitting at <10% mana for half the fight, but during that half of the fight, i really didnt need to heal much.  I didnt even need to go treeoflife either, which is good because they look sooooo goofy healing.

anyway i was having a blast keeping the tank and the group up.  it seemed that, not only were my heals hitting for a lot less and the mana costs were a lot more, the tank and group were taking a whole lot more damage than what i remembered in wrath.  or maybe it was because everyone was overgeared in wrath. now although i was constantly healing in wrath dungeons (ABC of healing--Always Be Casting), i would usually never drop below 50% mana and my healing usually compensates for a lot of aoe damage that happens even in dungeons like H.HoR, or H.PoS.  But in Cata heroics, my healing spells feel weak and overpriced, even for a decent group, where the tank knew how to tank and the dps knew how to stay out of bad, i still felt that my nourish wasnt helping much, my swiftmend (which used to be emergency) didnt do much, and my swiftness+HT (my other emergency) didnt really put much health back at all.  i am not one of those who think tranquility is an emergency spell.  sure it might be for 5-mans and some druids love it, but i find it very limiting.  the amount of healing might be lovely, but channeling the spell limits me so much, i find it almost unusable, especially when i tried using it for a while, i'd break the channeling prematurely to do another, more important heal.

But anyway, my healing sucks, my mana efficiency sucks and my hope in all treekind began to erode.

and then the tank tells us he was tanking in healing gear.  <.<
(oh and that i was also doing a great job for the first time back... right.)

So after he put his tanking gear back on, healing felt a lot better.  even though i had craptastic healing touch and swiftmends, i found it a whole lot easier to heal.  the fights became more mana efficient where i was able to heal several pulls without having to drink (except for those two pulls where we attack swirling wind things.  its just fun trying to keep everyone up because damage was just everywhere. 

Overall, boss fights were easy to heal, trash was a bit harder to heal and tanks in healing gear is pretty hard to heal... but not impossible. I welcome all the dps-geared tanks to come and give me a workout.  well okay, maybe not.  but at least i know if there are some who do come to tank with a couple of pieces of dps gear, i guess its okay.  we'll be fine so long as they know how to tank. 



And then, there is Heroic Stonecore. 

After my first (mainly) successful stint at healing again, i decided to try my luck without my guildies.  i grabbed my gf and we went on our way to another random heroic queue.  My second try at healing heroics turned out to be stonecore.  now every instance has their own bane, but this one has seven.  yes seven.  Four bosses and three types of trash groups that really makes this difficult. the first type is the group of five trash with Millhouse Manastorm.  The second is the trash rock elemental.  the third is the cultist trash after slabhide.  add to that the meandering sentinels and the ogre and you have some of the most hated trash pulls in all of Cata. 

First thing's first, the tank did not want to CC anything.  after every pull, i was pretty low on mana.  however, he did mark Millhouse with a Skull, so he wasnt completely clueless.  but even there, i had to let one guy die.  sorry ele shaman.  you were good. but i cant keep everyone up. 

on to the first boss and i was actually glad we were done with trash pulls.  the boss was great until he did his crystal spit thing and out came the shards.  my gf tried to blood boil them but did not get any help from any of the other dps.  it all seemed like they were focusing on the boss.  Death and decay has a long CD, so my gf could possible DnD down every other group of shards, but not every group.

So the first boss fight ended up with a wipe.  first my gf dies, then one of the dps, then the other.  the tank was last to die.  he completely ignored the shards, or any other of the borers that were still running around.  i dont know if he knew his team was in trouble.  but i kinda figured he didnt like saving the day much.  in any case, with nothing to save me from the shards, i died, then him. of course, he left the group.  but that's okay.  he wasnt a great tank anyway. someone who cant call out cc after the first pull, seeing that the healer was OOM, or help pick up deadly flying geods doesnt really deserve to move on in the instance.  There wasnt even a word about who should do what.  in any case, we figured most of it out for the second pull, which happened about 4 minutes later due to waiting for another tank.  the short wait continues to prove my point that queuing while already in a dungeon is faster than queuing after you leave the group. but people still leave group whenever a tank would leave.  too bad for them.

in any case, now that we know the shaman and priest (the other two dps) will not be assed to help with the geod shards, my gf decided to blood boil them on her own.  any stray ones left will not pose much of a challenge to me.  our second try was successful with a new warrior tank.  people stayed out of the rumble/dust on the ground and adds were picked up pronto.

Anyway, moving on to the next trash pull.  No one knows how to jump, aparently.  Well i guess no one really knows that earthquak sucks.  but then the priest got reminded that he can levitate people and so damage on the second rock dude was a bit less.  still, the melee still took a lot of damage.  but this wasnt due to the earthquakes as much as it was due to the shards.  it looks as if these guys are able to summon one shard at a time, which blows up and kills people.  but alas, the ranged dps, both of then, werent keen on this and we ended up getting hit by those shards several times.  i actually spammed moonfire to get rid of two. 

The dragon boss was easy peasy.  everyone know crystal storm.  everyone knew to get out of lava.  everyone knew to stay away from the stupid shadows that shows you where the stalagmites will drop.  and somehow, most of the people i was healing were in my LOS!  a smooth fight, to say the least. 

And then we get on to wiping on trash before Ozruk.  I know ozruk.  he's no softy. but the trash before him is pretty annoying.  sentinels, omg they suck.  so the first pull ended up being a two-group pull.  how often does this happen?  like every time i go there.  someone always figures there's plenty of time to kill the sentinels.  well one was able to get away and call for help.  So two groups and two dead dps.  not sure who anymore, but i knew there were some casualties.  Oh and THAT pull forced me to finally pull out my tree form.  Wow, the ugliness. You know my first post on this site ever?  i take it back.  I dont wanna be any kinda tree, ever.

So anyway, we get to Ozruk and the tank proceeds to "learn" the fight.  obviously, only the tank was learning the fight.  the other two ranged dps (magic dps right??) were not learning jack.  they were paralized the whole duration of paralysis, which caused them 50k damage each time.  and how often does he cast that? before every shatter, right?  so each fight had a LOT of damage.  the dps would suck below 5k dps because of the duration of the paralyze and the melee having to run out of shatter.  so this was going to be a long fight no matter.  what's very interesting is that each time i did a moonfire to get a dot on me, it didnt work.  What i found out was that warriors' shield slam is able to dispell the spell reflect from Ozruk.  well that was probably what caused the wipes all five times.  Then i said im done and left.

At the end, the tank did learn to tank Ozruk well.  The healer, well he figured he'd read up on why we failed (and found out).  And the ranged dps who kept getting paralized?  well i hope they find better groups where the healer and tank werent clueless to the mechanics. 

I remember now why i stopped healing (and tanking) for a while.  The job is almost a chore.  i do like tanking and i do like healing.  but when it comes to relaxing every night after work, i'd like to relax.  and even if i die several times in an instance as dps, it's not as stressful of a death since, more likely than not, my existence in a group is trivialized by 67% anyway.  and if you count total DPS, probably 80%.