An Ex-Gnome Tank's World

Namthe’s catalogue of fail, Druziraa’s catalogue of success

August 19th, 2009 Posted in General, Healing, Rants

In pugging, there seem to be two different archetypes of group – really good, and really bad. In my quest over the past few days to isolate the still-elusive Black Heart on Namthe, and to find lots of gear upgrades for Druziraa.

On Namthe, as mentioned before, I’ve had:

  • Many, many players with sub-1k DPS output
  • Healers who couldn’t keep me up and blamed it on me
  • People who didn’t see a problem that the tank was doing more damage than anyone else

On Dru, I’ve had:

  • Countless heroic, and pugged, runs where *nobody died at all*
  • A fast, relaxed and effortless Naxx-10 pug (that regrettably I had to leave early)
  • An Obsidian Sanctum pug that went equally smoothly (and got me a title)
  • invitations to several raids on the back of healing a heroic 5-man

Funny how things turn out, every pug I heal seems to be fantastic, and every pug I tank turns to pain. Given my tanking gear is likely to be at the top end of pug tanks (Some I’ve healed in the last week have had less than 25k HP), and my healing gear is at best average, I do wonder why this is. I do know that I’m not about to declare healing my calling in raids – tanking’s still my main love – but I do wonder about why things always seem to go so much better when healing compared to tanking.

  1. 2 Responses to “Namthe’s catalogue of fail, Druziraa’s catalogue of success”

  2. By Rurjaos on Aug 24, 2009

    My thoughts on this:

    A healer who knows his business, can keep an normal and even an undergeared group alive, but even a superb tank has a high risc of dying over time, because a weak group can’t keep him alive. I healed my tank through a achievement fail try on svala, after all dd died…
    That didn’t saved me from dying several times on the “summoned memory fight” in TotC NORMAL as healer, where I never died as tank or dd… 500-1k dps are way to less for this fight…

  3. By Anna on Sep 2, 2009

    As a long term healer of multiple flavors (paladin, priest, shaman) I think you’re running up against the general difficulty that comes with finding good healers.

    I very very rarely have to PuG anything. Good healers get snapped up by guilds and put on friend lists (much like I do with good tanks on the occasion that I do PuG things). And a lot of times when people reroll a healer, they do so without having any experience with (or knowledge of) the kind of awareness and focus that it takes to do a healing job well – especially with a group that’s not used to running together. They just know that “everyone needs more healers” so they roll one, thinking it will be like DPS.

    Add to that the fact that, at least from my experience, healers have a huge ability to affect a group’s sink or soar chances on a very basic level, and you run into some pretty dismal PuGs!

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