MMO GurL

I must be a glutton for punishment or perhaps I just like a challenge, but for better or worse, I’m a healer.

I started out long ago as a tank – in fact I tanked for all of Vanilla WOW. Come BC, I didn’t want much at all to do with tanking. Tanking dungeons on a warrior was a nightmare and I soon moved onto a DPS role. I spent most of BC playing that role until I decided to level a shaman with which I intended to help my guild out with heals. We were always missing a healer for raid nights and so I figured I’d roll one. I really enjoyed shaman healing for both raids and pvp and I spent all of Season 3 partaking in much pillar humping in arena on that same shaman.

Since then, I have played the healer role as a druid, paladin, and finally now as a priest. I played through WotLK mainly on my resto druid, but towards the end I switched to my paladin for raids as my druid took more of a PVP turn.

Suffice it to say, I never had too much of a problem healing in heroics or dungeons. Every once in a while a tank would come into random pugged heroic, and have some low health, but even than it was pretty easy. They would have to be horrible for me to actually leave the heroic in frustration. In fact, most tanks that I got paired with weren’t horrible at all, but were amazingly overpowered and could probably have survived on their own with the exception of some boss fights.

In those days, the tanks carried the group. There is no question in my mind.

Things have changed immensely with Cataclysm though and now it is hard to pick out who, if anyone, carries the group. I can tell you who suffers the most stressful part of the experience though, and that my friends, is the healer.

We are now engaged in heroics that are actually difficult. There is no more face rolling through these instances with the tank carrying everyone. You have to bring DPS that can actually do good damage. You need a well geared tank with mitigation and you need an awesome healer. In fact, I’d say if I had to pick anyone to carry the team, it is the healer. And when nobody else brings what they’re supposed to bring to the table – it is the healer who suffers.

PUG tanks are still in a rush – they expect you to never run out of mana and even though you just went through your whole 90k mana pool on one trash pool because the DPS was so bad and nobody bothered to use crowd control – they keep running on ahead. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “If he pulls – he can die.” I am not the best geared as I just hit 85 not too long ago, but I have a 350 item level which isn’t quite chopped liver and I consider myself a damn good healer.

If I can’t keep up with these people, than something is wrong.

What’s wrong is that DPS is still expecting a carry. As soon as they hit 85 they will buy or craft some PVP blues and get their ONLY 329 prerequisite for joining a heroic. They come in not realizing or not caring that they need to be doing at least 8-10k dps to even make a dent in the heroic. If those mobs don’t die fast or aren’t Cced – than my mana pool will simply not last and we will all die.

Let me describe to you what my last heroic PUG was like. I queued with my husband, who is a mage, and also newly 85. His gear is not the greatest, but he can still push 10k, and honestly that is all that matters to me. We got sent to the Vortex Pinnacle and were paired with a warrior tank, a warlock, and a feral druid. The tank told my husband to sheep which is kind of funny considering mages can’t sheep elementals. So the tank ignores this and just pulls anyway. The pulls were so taxing on my mana that I was having to sit and drink after almost every single one. On top of that, the other dps were standing in unnecessary spells like the lightning cloud AOE.

I didn’t realize we had the lock at first and was caught up in having to play 150% to keep up. When I did, I asked him to banish one of the elementals. As soon as I did this, he left the party. Just left! God forbid he should help CC!! He was replaced with a DK who did piss poor DPS – about 6k to be specific and who also kept AFKing in the middle of fights. Somebody ended up voting to kick him, and he was replaced with yet ANOTHER DK who did 4k DPS instead of 6. This new DK spent most of the dungeon dying and in Orgrimmar (yes, he was actually just sitting in town while we did all the work). The tank ended up kicking the feral druid was at least doing 8k DPS and that guy got replaced with a bad hunter.

SOMEHOW, I made it through this nightmare and we got to the last boss with 2 DPS – 1 sitting in town – and we wiped to Assad as the hunter died at the first Supremacy of the Storm and we just couldn’t do it with 1 DPS so I eventually went OOM.

While it was a nightmare for me, it made me realize all of the flaws of the new system and how it effects healers the most. I also feel that only requiring an item level that doesn’t take into account how much actual damage the player can do is horrendously silly. Things have gone back to the way they were before random heroics where you just queue with your guild mates because they are the only ones you trust to not fail horribly.

I just wish that there were some way that these DPS could not waste everyone’s time. There is no such thing as an easy carry anymore, somebody is always going to suffer for it. I’ll be damned if that person is going to be me because I am simply not going to bash my head against the wall anymore for people I don’t know and that can’t even grant me the simple courtesy of coming to a heroic prepared (IE with some kind of concept of how to play their class and do decent DPS). There are regulars available to under-geared players and I took part in them for quite some time before I even queued for heroics!

I do like the concept of meeting new people and I’m not saying that everyone should be perfect, but they should at least be able to bring the needed DPS to clear it without overwhelming difficulty.

So is this the end of random heroics for the majority or is there some way that Blizzard can fix this?

Photo taken from one of Cynicalbrit’s wipe-a-thon videos.