Heroic Adventures in Healing

Sheven, my tree druid, is now 85 and this week I was running quite a lot of heroics as a healer. Also, it turns out that skipping Mount Hyjal wasn’t the best idea for a healer, because even though the head enchants are now Bind on Account, they still require revered reputation with a faction to use, making the BoA part totally pointless. At least my boomkin spec gets hit rating from all the spirit, so I can quest through there pretty fast.

I’ve also had to quest through the entire Harrison Jones questline in Uldum to get a proper helmet (unlike most other dungeons, Halls of Origination quests are not availaible at the start of the instance), which I then replaced with a drop from the first heroic run I did. Yay for spending 400 gold in gems just for one run. I also still don’t have any decent bracers – anything good for this slot is awfully painful to get in this expansion. I had the same problem on Vrethir (was running with the pvp ones for a while), and I’ve seen the same problem on a paladin as well. I’m using the pvp ones right now, because they’re better than some quest green I have otherwise.

Healing on a druid is pretty cool now – if people don’t break CC and follow the tactics, I hardly run out of mana thanks to all the Clearcasting procs. Most boss fights in heroics I finish with very low mana though, but I usually won’t get OOM unless something goes wrong and I have to spam heal people to save them. Or unless I forget that I shouldn’t spam everyone with Rejuvenation all the time.

What makes my healing adventures feel like a really heroic journey though, are the tanks. Elune save me, there are so many BAD tanks out there. I never imagined.

I’ve had one guy, a death knight. We join Stonecore as a random dungeon and the remains of the group are on Ozruk – apparently their last tank sucked, as we get a new one as well. So one of the dps asks the new tank if he knows what to do on this boss. He answers something like “first time hc tanking” and runs at the boss before any of us can say anything. And promptly gets oneshot by a Ground Slam just a few seconds later. Why am I not surprised? Okay, we run back, buff up, explain the fight for him… He manages to somehow avoid the Ground Slam this time, but dies to the Shatter afterwards. Honestly, if you don’t know the fight just say so, we will explain it to you. In fact, we were in the middle of doing so when you decided to facepull the boss…

Then I had a Lost City of the Tol’vir run. Same deal – the previous tank sucked so we get a new one with us, and they’re before the first boss. The new tank apparently has an awesome tactic for running this boss – without a word of explanation what he’s going to do he starts kiting him around the whole room, while I lose range and line of sight and I’m totally unable to heal him. Eventually I die to some mines after trying to run after the tank and he’s asking me why didn’t I release and run back to heal him. Well no thanks, you suck and kite the boss out of my range and LoS, so just don’t do that and lets kill him.

Apparently for Polish players from Burning Legion this is the proper tactic to do this boss though, because he and one other Burning Legion DPSer tell me “bad healer nub dont know tactic” and leave the group. I breathe with relief. See, that’s why I play on Deathwing, not on Burning Legion, and never admit to being Polish when in a group with someone from there. I couldn’t be bothered to deal with these kind of morons on a daily basis. I know I’m kind of unfair to some of them which are decent players, but yeah.

Unfortunately the next guy did the same thing, but only for the second half of the fight. I have no idea why. We finished that instance with him with some mistakes like pulling the extra pack on Barim or not taunting the crocs off me on Lockmaw.

Speaking of Lockmaw, I have no idea why people insist on standing on the statues. The crocs are tauntable, just run to your tank and let him take them off you while the group burns them down. It’s not hard at all, I do it all the time when I’m tanking this boss. It boggles my mind that the same community that despised Exodus for evading the mobs on Yogg+0 actually suggests exploiting a fight when they have to do it themselves. It’s nothing new, though – I remember the tactic for Prince Malchezzar in Karazhan as well, the one that avoided all the infernals by having your raid stand on some kind of rubble near the door on his platform.

I also noticed that you don’t see a lot of druid tanks in the dungeons for some reason. I suspect that might be their AoE threat (or rather the almost complete lack of it), but that’s only an observation after I could easily pull mobs with healing aggro off the two bears I encountered.

Oh, and recently I’ve had a very weird experience in Halls of Origination. We get it as a random dungeon – I think cool, there are still upgrades for me there (I even won two items in that run). Apparently the tank doesn’t think so, because the first one leaves instantly the moment the instance loads. I wasn’t even able to see what class he was. Then we get a second one, a death knight – and incidentally, this is a moment that one of our CC has to quickly go away due to a phone call. We stand there for a minute or so, and then the death knight just leaves without saying anything. So we get a third one, a warrior. He gets in, runs in a small circle a bit, sits down looking at the first trash pack… and leaves without saying anything. WHAT THE FUCK MAN.

So we get another tank, and this deserves a name and an armory link, because I doubt you’ll believe me otherwise. I present you Nogon of Sunstrider-EU. Yes, this is a tank that wants to tank heroics. With a surprising 116k health unbuffed, half the avoidance that he should have, level 80 epics, quest greens, pvp items, lack of enchants and dps items. I don’t know how he even got into a heroic in the first place.

Anyway, as I’m too annoyed and already went through 3 tanks earlier, I decide not to vote kick him until he gets splattered by some random trash mobs. He does suprisingly well as we have a lot of CC availaible, though I have to sit drink after every pack. What kills him though are the elemental adds before one of the last bosses, Isiset I think. They do a lot of damage and it’s just not possible to heal him through it. He finally leaves and again I breathe with relief.

Another moronic example from a different Halls of Origination – one tank repeatedly was running out of my range ignoring the fact that I’m drinking and even started to argue with me that it’s not his fault and not his responsibility to watch healer’s mana, as he has stuff to tank and has to protect the party and tank. Well, you don’t have to do any of these after the trash is dead, do you? I can’t sit and drink while I’m still in combat.

Needless to say, all of this crap doesn’t really make me want to run any dungeons at all.