The View From Down Here

Tunnel Vision

One of the first things that I was good at, way back in my pre-warrior days, was learning not to stand in fire. Or poison clouds. Or any other sort of AoE effect that did Bad Things to my health. One of the first things you need as a tankis situational awareness, and I had bucketloads. Once I switched to my warrior, I had at least that down before I even started about the other stuff, like keeping aggro, and worrying about when and how to use my cooldowns.

Now, I’ve noticed something interesting happen. While tanking, my abilities at staying out of stuff that might hurt me remain unparalleled; however when healing, things are a different kettle of void zones altogether.

Let’s take The Nexus as an example. I’ve run it in heroic mode a few times, and it’s not been too bad – except for the fact that I forget to jump to clear the debuff too often, straining my own healing even further.

And then there’s the Four Horsemen. I won’t say I was an unmitigated failure at the back of the room, but I seemed to be far too slow to react when a void zone appeared beneath me, even when I wasn’t casting, as well as seemingly having lost every ounce of sense as to where to stand so that I was only in range of one of the bosses.

And there’s the thing. When you’re spending 90% of your time staring at a little black box which contains pretty much all the information you’ll need about the entire raid, it’s easy to miss things that happen outside it. It’s a matter of where the focus lies, and while it can improve with practice, there’s always going to be an inherent delay while things like casts finish.

So, when you wonder why your healers seem to spend longer getting out of AoE, it’s not because they’re inferior. It’s merely that they have a different frame of reference, which encourages tunnel vision. Sure, it can be broken, but it’s always there. Give them a break – they’re staring at their unit frames so intently so you don’t have to.