Be careful what you wish for
July 21st, 2009 Posted in Dungeons, HealingAs has been the custom for a while now, I’ve beeen spending the occasional hour on my druid healing heroics, doing the odd 10-man Naxx and so on. I noticed something, though – once I got above about 1500 spell power, things got drastically easier, to the point at which I never have to drink through the entire instance, and the tank never comes within even a slight chance of dying.
On top of that, there’s what’s going on when tanking. We’ve been working on Yogg-Saron for a couple of weeks in 25-man, and on Sunday he went down, on only the third attempt. I don’t particularly rate the Yogg fight – all it takes is being organised, and once we’d organised ourselves properly, it just fell into place. Unlike other first kills, the third phase just felt like it was a dull grind. Again, the content just feels easier than perhaps I had a right to expect it to be.
So, with most of a raid night left, we headed to see Sartharion, and attempt three drakes. Unfortunately our regular Feral tank is on holiday (and we have no DK tank), so I ended up taking him. Even with 4 pieces of 25-man Tier 8 and cooldown spec, he was still breathing fire at times for more hit points than I had. So, difficult, but impossibly so. Not what I was after, and we went down to Sarth +2, which was predictably easy.
Enter last night – for the first time I took Druziraa into a 25-man raid, and was instantly shocked. Most of the raid lighting up with poisons to cleanse, curses to remove, and that’s not even counting the far-increased complexity of keeping hots up on multiple tanks at once. There’s the challenge that I’m looking for – and because I was somewhat undergeared, it was even more of a struggle to keep up with the other healers. After the cockiness that was accompanying my 5-man runs, this was something else entirely, something to put me in my place and say “You ain’t all that…. yet.”
It’s good to be brought back down to earth sometimes.
4 Responses to “Be careful what you wish for”
By Veneretio on Jul 21, 2009
Ya, it’s amazing how switching roles can dramatically change game play. Personally for me as the raid leader, it’s more frustrating than fun. (It is fun when I’m not leading the raid though)
The flip from Protection to a noticeably easier Fury rotation was near impossible as my fingers awkwardly poked at hopefully the right keys while I desperately attempted to interrupt stuff on the General encounter while calling out things.
Very quickly, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t going to be calling out near as much stuff as I was used to while tanking as I simply didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about what abilities I was using.
Being forced to delegate is quite humbling. “You ain’t all that… yet.” Indeed.
By Fnordrick on Jul 24, 2009
I love the “yet” in that quote. Playing with characters who are working hard at getting better is a whole different experience than playing with your average noob. Best luck in all your future raids!
By logtar on Jul 24, 2009
I have actually been challenged lately because we have a brand new set of 80s very new to heroics and some new to dungeons in general. I have been getting a little confident by my main healers telling me that I have become a lot easier to heal, however that does not apply when someone does not have a huge mana pool or their SP is pretty low.
It felt good to do H VH and come close to finishing it with me being second on DPS, and it both humbling and a learning experience when we wiped.
By logtar on Jul 24, 2009
http://logtar.com/wow is my actual WoW blog
I put the main blog on the comment