ToC PUG

Well, I was the PUG anyway - the usual 25 man raid fell through last night and instead, I found myself healing for a friend of a friend. A guild Rogue's friend (once in our guild, now in another guild) needed a few people, and my guild obliged with three of us.

They had a Holy Priest and a Resto Druid (the druid was using her secondary spec to heal). The Holy Priest... well, I have absolutely no idea whether he was a main or an alt. But by the end of the night, the Disc Priest was managing to do a ton of healing.

I joined them from the second boss onward. Lord Jaraxxus was interesting. They, as a guild, did things very differently. Typically my guild tanks Jaraxxus in the center, and has everyone fan out evenly around him. People with Legion Flame hobble around and drop their green flames in a small area, they choose whether to make it a straight line or an L or a dotted line (I prefer the L method, keeps me from rushing into someone else's safe area); people with Incinerate Flesh stay put or move closer to the center in order for all of the healers to be able to reach them, to heal the debuff off.

They tanked him against the wall and had people with Incinerate Flesh run to the far side of the room to explode on themselves... I presume with the idea that the spell effect at the end makes it appear that there's a limited range on the DoT it throws on the rest of the raid. So far as I'm aware, it'll hit the entire raid regardless of where you're standing, and my experiences last night lead me to believe that this is an accurate assesment of the situation because people were exploding on us from across the room pretty regularly (you know, when they ran out of range to heal).

This caused a couple of problems for us, since it meant DPS was running far away and not actually hitting anything, and anyone who did run would be out of range to heals GUARANTEEING that the raid would be hit by the DoT unless the Druid had gotten off enough HoTs on them before they'd gotten out of range. Adds were staying up longer, Jaraxxus was not taking enough damage, and it was just ugly. And the first round, both of the other healers stood in their Legion Flames. That was pretty cool. The fires of hell ate them and stuff. Which, that first round, was EXTREMELY discouraging, but it was good to hear that they knew better, they'd both just been busy getting that Legion Flames death out of the way early.

It took another couple of rounds before we got him down after that, because the first round things were just so outrageously foreign to me that I didn't even notice the Incinerate Flesh thing. As soon as the Incinerate Flesh thing was worked out, we got him down, so that was good.

And then we got to play with the Faction Champions.

I don't like the Faction Champions with my own guild. I did not expect to like them any better with someone else's guild.

Honestly, it turns out that my expectation was about right.

I was mostly working on dispels (my usual gig) and threw around a few heals if someone was taking damage slowly enough that the heal could finish casting. The first round or two, however, I died pretty quickly. Enhancement Shaman is evil. EVIL. So are the Hunter and Paladin. So they smeared me on the floor several times, just for dispelling. Stupid NPCs.

My healing was pretty much nothing for that fight, and we did eventually take them out without anyone dying through the entire encounter. I healed more on the last fight, and the Holy Priest seemed to be doing more dispelling, himself. I think Mass Dispel.

So we got through that. My healing up until this point was so-so. The druid was, of course, outhealing both Priests, the Holy Priest was outhealing me, and I was doing the least overhealing of the bunch of us. Significantly less, which made me feel better about what spells I was getting off.

We hit the Twin Valkyrs, and that took a few rounds. Most of them hadn't fought them before, so it would be a learning experience for those involved. One ranged DPS insisted on standing way at the back near the portal of the color she already was: this was a bad idea from the perspective of a healer, as well as from the perspective of someone who wanted max DPS done to the proper targets with alacrity. Spending time running forward to click the other portal and then switch targets is a waste of about half of the time available to pop a bubble, or enough time for a Vortex to obliterate you. It could go either way, really.

Both mages died pretty consistently, actually.

About that time I was noticing that the group I was in was needing significantly less healing. I'm not entirely certain why - granted, we did have two healers, but the Druid was standing in the center of the room and I assumed that they were healing both groups about equally with their HoTs (I'm still not really sure whether that's the case...). That said, I wound up trying to stand between the tanks so I could reach both groups and bubble/PoM/Penance everyone at once.

The thing about not having healing assignments is that it's very hard to figure out who's not carrying their own weight, and who's messing around doing the wrong thing. AddOns like Recount can help with DPS meters, but Healing meters are really rather hard to pin down in terms of how useful they can be. Healing meters never tell the whole story, even if you're meshing Healing Done with Overhealing and coming out with some sort of secondary guesswork. Overhealing is "wasted" as well as "preventative," but it works better on Druids than it does with direct heals because it can and will switch back and forth on a single HoT between an active heal and a heal that doesn't actually help in topping someone off (because they were already topped off). Direct heals either fix a boo-boo, or they just sparkle, look pretty, and use up mana and casting time and a global cooldown.

I'm a Disc Priest. I don't cast Prayer of Healing very quickly, I don't have improved range on it, and I don't have Circle of Healing. I bubble people and I Flash Heal spam and I toss Renew around (less so since my Grid stopped showing me who has Renew properly), and I fling around Penance whenever I can because it's so very pretty and works nicely for me. I'm not the ideal "OMG there's random people hurting!" healer, especially when there's consistent raid wide damage.

That said, I was out healing a certain Holy Priest and doing less overhealing as well. I'm not sure what spells he was casting on who, really. His Mage tended to die before mine until the final attempt. His group setup was such that he should have been able to abuse Prayer of Healing pretty liberally without doing much overhealing and without needing to spam the spell (the incremental raid damage is small enough that you can toss PoH out as a push on a whole group as well as throw around some single target heals to bring up those people who are taking damage at what seems like an accelerated rate).

I used to be Holy. I can't think of any reason a Disc Priest should be able to outheal a Holy Priest unless said Holy Priest has been assigned to heal only one target, and the Disc Priest has been assigned to heal the raid at large. Holy has so many more options than the Disc Priest for healing multiple targets - I don't mean spell wise (since really they've only got one AE heal spell that Disc doesn't) so much as the talent tree making their multiple target healing spells more attractive, more efficient, and just plain better options than sticking to Flash Heals, Renews, PoMs and really really slow Prayers of Healing.

Perhaps the Resto Druid was ignoring the other group. I can't tell. But I wound up healing both groups almost equally, aside from the tank in my group.

Which felt odd. But it worked.

We did down the Twins, and there were no mages alive when we did so.

I suppose that counts as a huge success.

And then we played with Anub. Which, if people were unfamiliar with the Twins, then they were generally also unfamiliar with Anub. Even so, it took a few tries before he was downed as well. Pro Tip: You don't need both mages to work on bringing down ice patches.

When Anub was dead, two Priests, one Druid and two Rogues were left standing. Everyone else was bleeding silently into the cold, hard dirt. That both tanks were dead I felt somewhat responsible for, but at the same time, I'm not sure what else I could have done. You can't take Anub down before his enrage timer without DPS, and it felt like one of the healers wasn't actually healing anyone that needed healing. Perhaps their gear was really poor, perhaps they gave up early, perhaps they were taking a bio break... I dunno. It felt awkward, like there were only two healers present rather than the three. Which would be alright if I'd been healing with the mindset of "Ok, only two healers, I'm responsible for XX and they're responsible for YY, and we'll lend a hand either way if things look really iffy but these are our primary focuses," but that wasn't the case.

I think by the end of the night I'd out healed the Holy Priest. With no healing assignments, I don't think I was stepping on anyone's toes. I assume that anyone involved in breaking through a "new" raid instance will be passably geared - a look at their Armory and they're wearing stuff that puts them at Heroic difficulty Coliseum level. To which all I can say is, "..." I'm not really sure what else there IS to say. (In comparison, my gear is a little bit better, but not so much to explain the difference between a Disc Priest climbing so high over a Holy Priest)

You can have fantastic gear, you can spec to be the most amazing group or area healer your class is capable of, and you can still wind up being the guy who does nearly 40% of the over healing and just 20% of the total heals. (24/26 for me, and about 1/2 a million in guessed absorbs... whatever that winds up meaning)

Do you remember what I said a few days ago? This is the sort of thing that makes me say that.

No, seriously.

Wow. That's a really long QQ post. I'm sorry.