I’ve mostly stopped running random dungeons with Namthe now, except once daily to get my emblems of Frost. On the druid, however, I’ve got plenty of gearing up still to do. And there have been a couple of abusive idiots.

The first, a Moonkin (from my own server, no less, though it makes no real difference) didn’t know what he was doing against Forgemaster Garfrost. Standing out in the AoE, he got killed in fairly short order and then unleashed a slew of curses at me for failing in my duty to keep him up (I should note as well that the tank was relatively undergeared – around 30k HP).

My respose? “You wouldn’t have needed so much healing if you’d LoSed the AoE even once”. The tank backed me up and the guy immediately quit the group. Score One for common sense.

Second fun group member was very shortly afterward. Zone into Halls of Lightning. Buff up. And the hunter immediately lays into our pallytank.

“What the f*** do you paladins think you’re doing, always give me wisdom? Stop being such a f***ing idiot and give me Kings, you c***!”

Charming. And it carried on in that vein for a while. At that point I decided that I’d like to kick the guy. Unfortunately the dungeon timer was still up so we were stuck. So I did the next best thing. I deliberately didn’t heal him. To his credit he lasted a while, but when he finally bit the dust, our warlock asked:

“Res the hunter?”

“Nah,” both the annoyed tank and I replied in unison. A few minutes after that, we kicked him. Good riddance.

Moral of the story? Don’t swear at the people playing your support classes. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.

Here endeth the lesson.

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.

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.

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.

And of my first experiences of heroics, how have I found things? Let’s examine each in turn.

• Utgarde Pinnacle. Yes, my first heroic was one that I was expecting to be hard. We had a reasonably geared tank, and DPS who knew how to behave correctly (even if they ignored the expected tactics on occasion). A couple of wipes on the gauntlet, mostly due to no-one noticing the casters trying to take me out with shadowbolts, and the rest was pretty straightforward. All-in-all, a nice confidence booster.
• Caverns of Time: The Culling of Stratholme. Again, manageable once I’d got into the swing of things. Unfortunately Arthas bugged after the second boss so it was wait ages for a GM to reset or give up on it. Shame, because it was all going rather well.
• Utgarde Keep (attempt 1). Things began to fall apart here. The last pull before the first boss, with no issues up to then, I was unceremoniously booted from the group for someone’s better-geared friend. To say I was annoyed was an understatement.
• Gundrak. We opted for the kiting strategy and killed the second boss first. That wasn’t too bad except for the DPS who insisted on standing in purple goo. And then the kicker – the snake boss, which I remember being brutal back when I tanked it, was horrific. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I was getting verbal abuse from the DPS, especially the DK who thought he was a tank (he wasn’t supposed to be), pulling multiple packs at once then cussing me once he died. After a single wipe, he was off, a barrage of swear words his only goodbye, taking the other DPS with him. The tank, however, was extremely gracious in defeat and was very understanding when I told him I didn’t want to go on.

So, after taking several hours out to calm down, it was back in with:

• The Nexus. My faith in my fellow players was restored, big time. Despite having an obviously eBayed shadow priest with us (“What are Emblems of Heroism for?”) We made pretty short shrift of the place, even surviving after a bad fear on the first boss. Then, this morning:
• Utgarde Keep (attempt 2). Brought in as a subsitute healer (hey, I needed the badges) after the first boss, the place was fine, except for Ingvar the Plunderer, which we wiped on once (and almost a second time) because I didn’t know anything about tactics for the healer. I apologised, explained I’d never healed the place before, and they were very gracious about it.
• Azjol’Nerub. Almost a non-starter, we wiped a couple of times in the first boss’s packs thanks to things eating me, and we nearly called it. Again, everyone was polite and there was no insulting anyone. I’m glad we tried a third time, though, because after that we proceeded to one-shot everything.

So, then, out of seven runs, four-and-a-half were fine. 70% isn’t too bad at all for a first weekend’s healing, and it’s brought me to realise one thing - things go a lot more smoothly where there’s understanding between everyone in the run. The bad runs were directly accountable to one (or more people) who had no respect for other people and insisted on doing everything their own way. So some have found their way onto my ignore list (the abusive ones), while some of the others I’ve made a note to be cautious about. When I was struggling, and people noticed, but were polite about it, things went a lot better than when a barrage of “heal ffs” was the most polite thing said to me.

I’ve got my Idol of Lush Moss, though I haven’t been too lucky on other drops so far. Roll on next weekend, when I can get in more practice!

There comes a point in every character’s leveling career whereby instance levelling begins to get ever-more difficult. Not because the instances are too hard (they aren’t), but because the number of people willing to run those instances slows to the barest of trickles.

I’ve hit that point with Druziraa – halfway through level 79, and there are four instances I want to run. Halls of Lightning, Oculus, Caverns of Time: Stratholme, and Utgarde Pinnacle. They give me XP, they give me loot that will be useful when I start to run heroics in half a level’s time. Unfortunately, this is where the demand for instance runs seems to peter out. Nobody wants to run the plain old 80 instances and I spend a lot more time in LFG advertising my presence than I did a couple of levels ago.

However, I’ve had enough practive to get the hang of click-casting now. I’m still not 100% there, but definitely good enough that I can keep everyone alive without too much hassle. For the odd thing (Innervate, maybe, though I really haven’t had much cause to use it) I’ll go back to the old ways. Soon my healing spells won’t even be on any action bars, removing the temptation altogether.

Healing, enjoyable as it is, isn’t what I enjoy the most though. I’m still very much a tank at heart, and as such a lesson learned while healing isn’t a good lesson unless I can apply it elsewhere. And in this case, while my unit frames are staying as they are on Namthe (Grid’s displays just tell me too much I don’t care about, and aren’t pretty enough), Clique has come with me, for two abilities in particular:

• Intervene
• Vigilance

Mousing over a raid-frame and shift-clicking to intervene to someone seems a lot easier than trying to find them to click in whatever’s going on on-screen, especially if they’re out of your current camera angle. Similarly, ctrl-click on a unit frame to change the Vigilance target on the fly during a fight works particularly well, for those times when your main vigilance target isn’t doing as much threat as your expected, or is dead. It feels a lot like the original design of the Vigilance talent (akin to Hand of Salvation) and isn’t nearly as disruptive as I’d thought it might be.

My raiding UI has changed somewhat since the last time I posted it over a year ago; sometime soon I might get around to a post discussing why it’s changed, and how it’s helped me.

Since patch 3.1 landed, I’ve had very little time to play with my Druid, preferring instead to devote my online time to keeping my gold supply high. Now, though, through minimal dailies, it’s hovering around the 2.5k mark. It could be much higher, but why farm when I don’t have to? What’s there is a more than adequate supply for a few weeks’ raids, especially now I don’t need to flask up for so much content – it’s back to the old favourite elixirs.

So recently I’ve found the time to play Druziraa again and, while some things never change – I’ve still not sorted a click-casting addon – some things do.

My first taste of failure came, as it no doubt did for so many others, in the Halls of Lightning. And with retrospect, the fact that I was expecting to fail doesn’t really come close to covering it. Our tank, a level 77 paladin, would be fine, right up until he got hit by a crushing blow. Then he’d be dead, as I failed to keep up. Two undergeared players in a dungeon slightly too high for them falls on the wrong side of fail. Of course, once we moved to Halls of Stone, I could more than cope.

But my real question is this – I had been vaguely pondering taking Inscription and Herbalism on Druziraa, in the hope of avoiding the Sons of Hodir grind. But are there better options? I’m already familiar with the benefits of Alchemy, and they don’t strike me as being that great. Engineering, great as it was in TBC (the good ol’ Tankatronic Goggles lasted me from Karazhan to Sunwell) really doesn’t have enough going for it these days. Jewelcrafting is about to get horrendously nerfed. The only things I don’t know much about are Tailoring and Leatherworking, but half of me wonders if they’ll be as equally disappointing as all the other professions. I don’t want to make money from them, I just want something that will help me. Trouble is, I don’t have the time to research it during lunch breaks these days and it’ll either be a stab in the dark (bad) or end up not picking anything at all (worse).

I wonder, where does Dru go from here?

First up was Draktharon Keep. Admittedly at 77 I’m probably a little high for the instance, but my gear sucked and I thought it best to start out with something easy-ish. And we ended up with a level 80 druid tank (though not one that was particularly well geared).  About the only time I struggled at all with the healing was when we had 3 groups pulled at once. I had a bit of problem decursing on the second boss but nothing too bad. A nice ego-boost, at least after I’d looked at the healing meters and verified that yes, it was all me.

Then, a much fairer challenge. Gundrak. This time the tank was an average-geared 76 paladin. Everyone was around an appropriate level. And here there was a sign of a little bit of a challenge. The first boss, in particular, we downed, but only just – I died before he did and only my HoTs were enough to keep the tank up. Other than that, a pretty short and successful run again. But what have I learned?

• I really, really need to get a click-casting mod and learn how to use it. There were a few times when I tried to heal the wrong person because I just wasn’t targeting fast enough
• Coupled with the above, I just wasn’t fast enough on decursing / poison cleansing as I should be.
• I need to pay more attention to my health. I was often too busy looking at everyone else’s health bars to notice my own sinking down.
• I wholeheartedly and unreservedly apologise to any healer for whom I’ve tanked and consistently run out of LoS, or pulled when there isn’t really enough mana.

Anyway, Ulduar appears to have finally materialised on my doorstep so it’s back to the plate for me. No doubt I’ll come back to the healing soon, but I’ve already learned a lot about tanking from this other side, and there’s no doubt more to go.