This is good to believe, but if you’re thin-skinned or easily annoyed by people shouting and complaining at you about how you’re doing things wrong, I would not recommend healing heroics. We’re getting to the point now where you’ll sometimes get a random group that outgears an instance sufficiently to bring it closer to Lich King levels, but for every time I’ve been third on the DPS chart at 10K, there’s a time I’ve been first on the DPS chart with 8K. CC is definitely critical, but everybody in the group needs to be on the same page with what’s to be done about it (i.e. nobody routinely breaking CC).
It’s rough but doable. I just refuse to heal PUGs because I don’t like feeling like it’s my fault we’re losing, and regardless of whether it is or not, it always feels like it’s my fault that we’re losing when I’m healing. DPS in heroics is much more comfortable for me personally (not in the least because there’s really not that many ways to do DPS as a Priest, so it’s hard to do it “wrong”).
Eh, I’ve been healing PUGs for a long time, though haven’t done heroic pugs (I did do BC heroics, but in a guild context).
I’m not too worried about people blaming the healer. Comes with the territory, really.
The better I know a given encounter, the better I can determine whether a given wipe is my fault or not. When I’m not sure what’s going on, I do tend to default to thinking I must have screwed up somehow.
mk56
5683
Yes, and there are always going to be bad groups destined to fail. But that brings you to the best part of being a healer of randoms (in my opinion anyway): short queue times!
sluggo
5684
People typically love to complain about stuff that doesn’t work, so today I’d like to go the other direction and call out something cool added in Cataclysm: cauldrons.
At the moment, flasks (high-level potions that persist through death) are pretty expensive to make. YMMV depending on the server, but on Moonrunner, flasks cost about 120-150g each. So flasking a 10-man raid for an hour will cost at least 1000g per hour, probably a bit more. That’s a lot of money if you’re doing 2-3 hour raids a few nights a week.
Enter cauldrons. For the price of 4 flasks, you can make a cauldron, which you can place like a feast and will give 10 appropriate flask buffs for a fraction of the cost. And not only is it cheaper, it also solves the hassle of raid leaders having to bring along stacks of flasks and distribute them – now you just outfit one alchemist with cauldrons and you’re set. (There’s also a 25-man version you get later that costs 12 flasks to make.)
Inevitably, I know someone will nitpick some aspect of the cauldrons they don’t like or point out how Game X did it better 3 years ago. Whatever. My point is I think it’s a nice improvement over how flasks were traditionally managed and makes for an excellent guild perk.
Yeah, we just got the perk that increases the output of cauldrons by 50%. It is awesome.
Ranulf
5686
Druid healing like usual just requires preventive maintenence (rolling hots) and more mana management. Lifebloom should always be on the tank, let it bloom if he’s getting low and re stack it. Its your most efficient heal. Nourish if you feel the need to top a tank off without spending much mana but nourish (and the other “slow-efficient” spells for the healer classes) is mostly a waste of time.
DPS will die in heroics until you get i346 type gear, its just inevitable due to aoe damage. After that they’ll just die from their own idiocy unless you feel like saving them. If tanks don’t use cooldowns on trash they’ll die too.
sinnick
5687
The one disadvantage you have as the healer is that the fight mechanics are mostly hidden from you. I don’t mean obvious things, like jumping down to hit the switches on Anhuur, but smaller, simpler things that require targeting a certain mob (which I can’t easily do while healing). Like the name of the spell you need to interrupt, or watching the buffs / debuffs carefully.
The other day I was in BRC, and our group kept dying from adds on Karsh Steelbender. I was the only one in the group who had been there before, but I had no idea how to prevent the adds from coming, despite the fact that I’ve run this dungeon hundreds of times (with good tanks, apparently). I had to go read up.
As a Druid tank, as a recommendation:
Lifebloomx3 on the tank.
Rejuve on the tank.
OOC turns into Regrowth on the tank.
Heal the group with Wild Growth and the occasional reujve; if people are taking more damage than that, they’re probably doing it wrong.
Nellie
5689
Nourish is a waste of time, largely, on non tanks, but it’s very handy for tank healing along with healing touch for the simple reason they refresh the lifebloom stack. With 3 Rejuves ticking and a reasonable amount of haste it’s not a bad, cheap, spam heal either.
Both are inferior in terms of healing than the bloom, but it’s a trade off between slightly less instant heal versus not having to cast three lifeblooms.
Heroic healing is fine if the DPS don’t take much damage when you first start out simply because of the mana cost of throwing out Rejuves or wildgrowth, though that at least isn’t the utter wet noodle it was when cata first launched.
Don’t fixate in healing DPS guys back to 100% health, except specific fights that require it when I use tree if life I don’t spam anything on DPS. If they’re at >50% health and not taking damage they aren’t a priority.
ShivaX
5690
Most of the time its the DPS’s job to not get themselves killed.
Depends on the fight though, sometimes they’re going to take unavoidable damage and need healing.
sluggo
5691
Blizzard is in the midst of unveiling a revamped system for daily heroics, which is morphing to a weekly system. The major point is if you’re away for a few days, you can still catch up on VP, which will be good news to a lot of people. But the system sounds convoluted as hell:
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There is a hard cap of 1250 VP a week, regardless of source.
-
There will be a soft cap of 980 VP a week from heroics.
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The first 7 Cata heroics you run a week will net you 70 each, for a total of 490.
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The first 7 Zandalar heroics (the revamped ZG/ZA stuff) you run will give 140 VP each, which would let you hit the heroic cap of 980 VP.
For a lot of regular players, what this means is that if you’re capping out on heroics each week, you’ll only need to drop 4 raid bosses a week to hit the 1250 VP cap. And getting Valor gear should go a lot faster now.
rei
5692
I haven’t logged in for 2-3 weeks after hitting ilevel 353 in both off/main specs and have been playing DA2. I think after 6 years (last hiatus was 9 months before coming back last October) I’ve scratched the itch to upgrade matching gear continually.
Wow, so you can queue for ZA/ZG seperately as a random? That seems like it’s going to put a pretty big strain on the queues for the other heroics if they’re giving out twice as much VP.
Made the “we’ll be gone for a while, maybe permanently” post to the guild today. I’ve been subscribed since February 2005.
I’ve been out a couple months now, but I’ve surprised myself by lacking any desire to get back in. I figured I would miss it & show up again, but not even a glimmer so far. I decided it is because I loved the pre-Cata leveling game most of all, and that is gone, so I feel like they shut off the servers. I would probably still be playing if they had not changed that part of the game so much.
I’ve given some thought to Rift, but right now I don’t have the time to build up a new character empire like I would want. I wish someone would let me convert some of my WoW stuff over to a new game, it seems a shame to let all of that rot.
It’s very much a solo-player game now with a subscription model.
Now? The questing part of the game has always been that way, aside from a lot of the former group quests being converted to not require a group. Otherwise, you’ve always been able to solo through the whole thing if you wanted. If anything, the LFD system has created a ton more grouping while leveling than there used to be.
Has there been any word on subscriber numbers since Cataclysm? I was amongst the last of the very long term players in my guild to quit, and my guild was down to about 25% of our pre-Cata numbers by the time I did. People were not going to new guilds, they were quitting completely. Some of it was likely post-Lich King burnout, but I’m curious if Blizzard has landed new subs to replace us.
In other news: OMG they deprecated my Easter Dress! Now my poor bank toon will be shirtless in limbo, missing a big part of his Unobtainium outfit!
I’ve been a bit blah about the game myself lately. I still enjoy raiding a lot and the guild I’m in is full of great people, but I just can’t find much of a reason to log in otherwise. Part of it is because Rift has all these new toys to play with.
Ranulf
5700
Its gotten rather quiet in my guild even on weeknights. Its tough to get a raid going and we have excess dps wanting to go (was actually short dps one night the other week). Raid difficulty isn’t helping either but the main problem is having to scrape together a coherent group that you don’t have to re-teach each fight to.
The real casual, non raiding folks have stopped logging on much, now that they’ve hit 85. Heroics just aren’t fun when you can’t get a good tank/healer easily. I know some left a month ago to go back to EQ2 or something, a few others are playing alts casually on other servers. I’ve watched two guilds die from a lack of raiders in the last 2-3 weeks. Several in the guild are getting excited over Old Republic now that they opened up Guild creation for that game. I know of one guy who was raiding but quit to play Rift full time.
My gut says it doesn’t look good for WoW. I’m getting really burned out, such that I don’t even want to goof around with alts much anymore. Heroics are a chore for the most part.
