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%. 

I wanna [heal] with no pants on

Blah blah blah.... or have the tank tank with no pants on. lol

becaues, your love, your love, your love, my drug...


wait... wrong song.

so i got back on my druid the other night because i was trying to get Akeelah, my lock, some emblems. she just dinged 80 and i was hoping to get enough emblems for one last piece of armor before i logged. well, she got into a heroic nexus run with some folks. then the unexpected happened... the healer dropped group. what?? okay so that's not sooo bad. but we wouldnt queue because one of my friends had the deserter debuff. it wasnt like we could move on. we were missing a healer. so here i was, in a bit of a hurry, wanting to get things over with, thinking about whether i should just hop on to my druid and heal. understand that probably no one cared that i did switch, nor did anyone thank me for saving them 13 minutes of wait time without a healer. but i did it anyway.

and we went off and killed everything. and you know what? it was boring as hell. yes. it was rightclick, rightclick, rightclick... etc. and every once in a while, nourish.

thats it. boring as hell.


so my solution is this. im going to take off my pants.

and im going to ask the tank to take off his pants.

and we're going to dance. and sing. and play kesha songs on youtube while playing wow.
that would be bomb. mai thais optional.



-----------------------
sorry for the short post. last weekend was busy and i was doing RL things mostly. you know. that nasty stuff you do between gaming sessions. but i'll hope to blog more about crazy dps hunters and stuff next week!

Treeform on cooldown...

I really do not like this idea. Actually, I hate it. Just saying. Controversial? Sure. Hated? Yes.


I'd rather have an on-cool-down, Super-Living-Forest Form where 20-40 little trees sprout up out of the ground to give me extra healing powers. That would rock. Or... give me Super-Arcane-Infused-Nature-Tree Form. Let it turn me into a mini version of those beautiful crystalline trees you find in Crystalsong Forest. Give it a 20 second duration with a 3 minute cooldown. Superfy my healing powers with some arcane energies while activated. When its over, bring me back to my normal tree form. These two ideas are insanely better than the planned tree form on cooldown.

Edit:
I wrote the above early this morning before settling into my coffee-induced state of auto-pilotness. Let me explain a little about why i really do not like the change, instead of just looking like a QQ with some suggestions to "improve" TOL form. I totally enjoy TOL form even with its many limitations (bad graphics, bad look overall, inability to cast spells from other schools in TOL and, i think, movement limitations). Hell, even my sit/eat animation sucks. But what's the deal with TOL that i do like? It's DIFFERENT. yes folks, different.

One of the major gripes about TOL is that we cannot cast certain spells in that form. One spell i do like to see in TOL is cyclone. Especially in pvp, switching to caster form just to cast a cyclone can result in one of two outcomes: pulling off a CC, or dying from a one-hit, non-crit auto attack. Entangling roots? as a tree? should be the most natural thing for a tree since they have, you know, roots. but for now, the only way i can pull that spell off is when they hit me (melee, i think) first.

I personally do not care if i cant see my tier gear. I really only see shoulderpads anyway. who cares? (please be reminded that you're reading my opinion) That point is moot.

My next concern is survivability in general. So no tree of life form = less armor. what does that really mean? Almost nothing really. Does it matter if we're wearing leather armor and a priest can have their robes plus PW:S? or a shaman with mail armor? or a pally with his plate gear? If a boss decides to pound on us, we're dead anyway. but what about 5-mans? Get aggro? toss in PW:S and run to tank asap. add a psychic scream there for good measure (if safe). shaman? drop grounding totems, run to tank. pala? lol tank the adds?

as a druid with no TOL:
cyclone takes a sec = dead.
entangling roots take a sec = dead.
nature's grasp requiers 1 hit, so get hit, enemy gets entangle, pray to god you can take another 2 hits before you move completely out of their range = dead.
teleport to moonglade = dead. (joke, really).
some will say, bearform man! i say, well how the hell do i heal in bearform, man?
this goes for the next idea also: NS+HT... on myself, then Swiftmend. well, i'd rather be able to take a hit while healing someone else. NS+HT will heal me, but will keep me occupied enough to forget about the others who should have hots on them anyway. But i'd have used two somewhat emergency spells just on myself.

As you can see, my mind is a bit jumbled with thoughts of what this change can mean to my gameplay as well as in comparison to other healers. but other than that, i find that i lose out on the most important thing about being a druid healer. they trees. yes. they are.

I dont want to be a priest with more armor and no shield. if i wanted to heal in people form, i'd roll a priest, shaman, or pala. if i wanted to dps while bored, i'd drop TOL and do so. or i'd roll a priest, shaman, or pala. i WANT to be different. i want a 100% uptime TOL, i want incredible HOTs instead of an energy shield, i want my armor, in TOL to be 400% of normal, or whatever the multiplier is, and have to decide if its safe to switch out to do something else, and i'd like to be able to do the twist. I do not want to be a resto druid if all it will mean in the future is that we'll be like everyone else. what's the point of that?

Anyway, nothing is really final and they may actually make non-tol form actually cool. we'll see.