Ysera's Daughter

Hi, I’m Karegina, your friendly neighborhood tree.  I’d like to bring something to your attention that you might not know about, distance.

Distance can be many things.  It can be emotional, it can be spatial.  It can have a maximum and it can have a minimum.  But one thing that you always need to be aware of is that it exists.

Some encounters in World of Warcraft require that you be aware of distance.  And there are even helpful add-ons that will show you the ‘safe’ zone around you for various fights.  THESE ADD-ONS WILL EVEN AUTO ADJUST THE SIZE OF DISTANCE YOU NEED TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT!

Why then, do I find 90% of players pretend they don’t know what distance is?  When I’m in any sort of raid, I am constantly being crowded by ranged, healers and sometimes even melee.  I do know that I have beautiful leaves and that I’m pretty but if you stand on me then I will wilt and die.  Trees need their breathing room too.

The only times I want to hug you is when the game mechanic calls for it.  At that time, please come and stand under my leafy branches.  I will use them to protect and nurture you.  However, when I am done with you, go away.  I am fickle like a cat (which is one of my shapeshifting forms) so only come to me when I want you.

So, for the love of the Earthmother, think about where you stand.  Don’t group up on people when you should be spreading out.  You are just spreading the bad around more so it makes you harder to heal.  And don’t you love your healers?  Don’t you want them to flourish and be happy?  We want you to prosper but you can’t prosper if we are dead.  Remember that.

This has been a PSA on behalf of Karegina’s limited sanity.

Some days I believe that I have played this game for too long.  I started sometime in August after launch, so 2005, and have played (with no real breaks) since.  (Taking a few days here or there to go on a vacation does not count.)  I have not raided all this time, but I do know that raiding is what has kept me playing the game.

Due to various medication & brain chemistry related things, I have a very bad memory.  If you were to ask me what I was doing a year ago, I could give you a general idea (I know I was raiding DS) but I can’t remember the things that are important to me, like who was on my raid team.

However, I have trained myself to do raid encounters with my poor memory skills.  When Blizzard first came up with the idea for achievements and then, later, for heroics raids, I was so mad.  Poor little me, with a bad memory, how was I supposed to remember the differences between the encounters?

I had always used Deadly Boss Mods, but I tried not to rely on it because add-ons always end up breaking at some point and the last thing I wanted to do is rely on something, only to have it break in the middle of a boss fight.  Eventually, I would achieve some kind of ‘muscle memory’ for the boss fights.  In fact, if you dropped me back into Naxx at level 80, I could probably do the fights using my ‘raid reflexes’.

I have come to the conclusion that not all people have ‘raid reflexes’.  I have a feeling that because I am aware of the difficulty in which my mind retains game mechanics, I work harder at it then most people.  A 12 (or 25, if you choose to look at heroics + extra boss as separate instances) boss raid means that I will spend hours going over the fights on YouTube and on any kind of strategy guides.

I hated MSV, HoF and ToES because of all the different mechanics I had to learn.  (I’m STILL not clear on the Protectors fight in ToES, if you have me do it any other way then Elite, I get so confused.)  However, I believe that my fellow raiders would tell you that I appear to pick up on mechanics rather quickly.

I know that I’ve mentioned before my dislike of LFR and how people try to strong-arm mechanics instead of working with them.  Blizzard put the mechanics in the game for you to use as part of the fun (if you want to call it that) of raiding.  Overpowering the encounter and simply using your dps to blast through things doesn’t equate to a raid to me.  While it was frustrating, I enjoyed that Lei Shi in ToES was hard for us as healers all the way through when 5.2 dropped.  It was a crap shoot if a tank would die on that last round of water elementals.  The tanks had to chain their abilities just so, the healers had to do the same and sometimes the dps wouldn’t get a CC off.  All kinds of things could go wrong and despite the fact that we were pretty well geared (not heroic level but at least decently), it was still hard.

I also loved working on Spirit Kings heroic in MSV.  If you screwed up the mechanics on that one, you’d just wipe the raid.  Yes, we didn’t get it down before 5.2 and we put in a LOT of attempts but it was a mechanic heavy fight that you couldn’t just throw more healers at to heal the damage.  You had to work WITH the mechanics and dispel or stun as required.

When I do the mechanics correctly, I feel like my character is doing an elaborate dance with the boss.  Step here, heal here, move here, cooldown here.  Learning that dance makes me feel graceful, despite being a giant moocow thing.  When I dodge out of a line of fire or a rock fall (that then hits my fellow raiders), I feel good about myself.  That I have good raid awareness, despite keeping track of 10 people’s health bars.

So, those are my thoughts on raid mechanics.  This was sparked off a post that Restokin did, if you haven’t read it, I suggest you head over there and check it out.

For the majority of my WoW life, I had a solid healing companion that I healed with.  Her and I were inseparable and we healed from Wrath’s version of Naxx to Dragon Soul.  She was a resto shaman who started playing in Burning Crusade, and while we did play together during BC, we didn’t always heal together all the time until about the last month or so of that expansion.

We started out Wrath with her and I facing down the health bars of our (not quite) 10 man team.  Around us, we built a 25 man raid healing team.  Healers would come and go, but our core would stay the same.  We’d pick up various priests and paladins, a shaman here or there and sometimes an extra druid.  (I was very jealous of my status as the only resto druid in our raid.)  But it always boiled down to her and I with the occasional healing help from our awesome shadow priest (who dabbled in disc healing on the side).

We would complain about our lack of a useable tank related cooldown together.  We grew to know each other’s healing styles and even in 25′s when assignments went out, we’d pick up the slack for the other healers as well as heal our own targets.  At the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, we had a few other healers in our guild that would come to things, but it was mostly her and I running in the 10 man.

In Cataclysm, it was expected that she and I would continue to two heal things as we switched from a 25 man raid guild to a 10 man raid guild.  But we did not understand just how different Cata would be from Wrath.  We went into Blackwing Descent and failed miserably.  There was a paladin healer in our guild at that time and we ended up pulling her in a desperate attempt to make things smoother.  It did make it smoother.  The mitigation that the paladin had access to made it so much easier to progress through the raids.

We ended up turning our two healing team into a three healing team and it felt awkward.  After healing for so long with 1 person, having a new dynamic was uncomfortable and unwelcome.  I was disgruntled and my shaman healing partner and I would have long talks about the ‘good ole days’ and how paladin healing is ‘too easy’.  We healed with the paladin through Firelands and I never was able to get comfortable with that dynamic.

I can’t remember, now, what ultimately happened but the paladin ended up leaving the guild and we found, I believe, another healer of some flavor to fill the blank spot.  By now, druids were scaling a bit better and I was able to pump out a lot of healing in a short amount of time.  I ended up leaving that guild during the beginning of Dragon Soul and went to another guild where I would three heal, again with a shaman but the other healer this time was a druid.

I liked the players of my co-healers and felt like we worked as a good team.  We’d take turns dpsing on the fights we only needed to two heal on and I was able to trust that they would heal the tanks and other raid members, which was something I was only able to trust my former shaman healing partner to do previously.  Then, of course, Mists dropped and my healing team was switched up once again.

My druid co-healer switched to her shaman, my shaman co-healer switched to a monk but due to real life obligations did not beginning raiding with us.  (He’s deployed and won’t be back until close to September.)  We picked up a paladin healer and the three of us (shaman, paladin and druid) started the hard task of learning how to heal again.  Or at least, I did.  Since every expansion druid healing gets messed up, it took me a month or two to figure out what to do.

I ended up getting either sat or asked to dps for a lot of Mogu’shan Vaults and Heart of Fear progression kills.  I ended up not feeling like a part of the healing team, which was unfortunate because in mid-November, the shaman had real life erupt and she had to stop raiding and step back from WoW completely.  I had a friendly relationship with the shaman but did not feel like I was respected by the paladin since I was not in on the progression kills and I’d been struggling at the beginning of the expansion.

Now, it’s me and the holy paladin.  I know that he can push numbers but I don’t have that trust in him that I had with all three of the shaman I’ve played with in the past.  It might be different for me then other healers but as I have to answer to the tank when someone dies (as the tank is sitting less than 3 feet from me), I need to be able to trust that if I run out of range to chase a dps, or a tank, the other healer(s) will pick up the slack.

However, we are a good raiding team.  He has the mitigation healing thing down and I have the ability to push some good numbers when needed.  Plus, I can heal better on the move then he can.  Though, I have had to slap him down before.  (He once told me he can’t trust my HoTs so he stomps them.  I told him he has HoTs too and he said “oh yeah huh.”)

I believe that being a good team involves respecting your fellow healers.  You don’t have to like them (though that makes it easier) and you don’t have to agree with their view points but respect is key.  I respect that the holy paladin in my guild knows his class.  I believe he has some things to learn about other classes (he’s been raiding as a monk for the last few weeks, so that’s something), but not everyone has to be completely up on every single healing class unless they have the drive.  (I try to keep up on healing classes, but I will admit I really suck at understanding monks.)

So, in over a 1100 words, I guess that’s all I have to say.  This has been rattling around in my head for the last few days, ever since I read Buru’s blog post about ‘Your Mileage May Vary’.  My mileage has varied with every team I’ve been in.  Right now, I’m not entirely happy with how druid things are, but I do have a good complement to my class in my holy paladin co-healer.  Even if I do want to smoosh his face into the floor every now and then for stomping my HoTs.