Cho’gall has me down. I can only chew so much glass in a row before I’m bored of it, because by the end of the second night the problem is nothing I can fix by continuing to chew. By then I’ve worked out the “OH GOD FIRE, MUST AVOID” portions and am down to staring glumly at the underlying problems:
- I’m not the right spec. Usually not a problem, but Cho’gall features AoEing, and god forbid we have mages in this raid group so I’m plinking away with my Multi-Shot with The Beast Within active and silently cursing every @#$%ing dev who said “nah, they don’t need Volley anymore.” In theory I could go respec to anything else for better AoE; in practice I’m cool with making the other DPSers, almost every single one of whom has good to fantastic AoE, pick up my slack. Speaking of,
- Our raid composition fellates donkeys. Our second Cho’gall attempt featured me, as a worst-AoE-possible-for-the-fight BM hunter, two rogues, a DK, and a warrior. Those of you who know the fight can have a few minutes to go laugh until you dryheave. For the rest: remember those slimes in Maraudon, that pulsed a massive aura of “DIE DIE DIE MELEE”? We have to AoE down their uncles. That we ever got anywhere near the finishing line on those attempts is a testament to… something. Oh, speaking of,
- Our PLAYER composition is making out with that donkey while it’s being fellated. I like the players, as people– but when we have the tank who shows up to end-of-raid bosses in worse- than-heroic-5man-gear, and half the raid can’t find their interrupt button, and everyone is standing in things all the time? Look, I know I didn’t join this guild for progression raiding. I mostly accept this. It just gives me flashbacks to Oniron wiping us for the
secondthirdnth week straight in Tempest Keep.
Some of this is probably me kidding myself– of course I’m not standing in things, I’m playing the most movement-happy class in the game right now— but yeah. I’ve basically plateaued for that fight, so when I show up I’m basically doing the exact same thing every time and hoping for different results. Obligatory reference to insanity here.
So let’s talk about healing, as if I know what I’m doing.
1. Priests Are Silly
I created a Tauren Priest for the guild’s Classy achievement. To date, she’s in the low 40s, looks fantastic— something about the gray and the low-sloping horns really does it for me– and has no discernible character. Shoot, at least Vok and… the fruit, that belf back in the day, THEY ended up with a little backstory and personality. This one? Generic bland wise ol’ lady. I can’t even use the standard-issue spiritual Tauren hooks because she’s not a shaman or anything else “mystical,” she’s a priest. She cavorts about in a sissy robe and does whatever quests she finds without complaint and agh. At best she’s wandering about the world trying to understand HOW to be a priest, because when in doubt adopting my confusion/conflict works surprisingly well, but in this case even that feels fake.
So I’ll probably just abuse heirlooms up to 85 (I bought a cloak and a HAT!), maybe gear her up enough to survive quests/dungeons, rep her to Honored with the guild, and then ditch her very hard. Because I can level priests, but when I’m done I don’t know what to do with them.
At least Smite-healing works wonderfully well at low levels. I picked up Evangelism, and then I grabbed Atonement, and I have been healing nearly every single dungeon run through the power of SMITING. And topping the charts sometimes, to boot. *preen*
2. Shamans Are Similarly Silly
Part of my problem, no doubt, is that right before I made that priest, I rolled a Tauren shaman. Besides convincing me that I have a Tauren problem, this means I have been doing the same narrow band of content in duplicate, nearly, with similar characters. This… this is kind of a problem. In theory, my plan was to use the heirloomed-to-the-teeth priest as a leveling valve– I can go as fast as I want on her, just focus on getting her to 85 and guild honored for the achievement, etc. The shaman, in contrast, was going to be a more long-term project. So that I’d, yannow, have a shaman again. (I deleted Dhoragrom. Goodbye, Dhora the Explorer, you were great while you lasted– but I can’t bear to play an orc shammy now.)
In practice, I hate the dungeons because I’m doing them at least twice much too close together, and I hate having to make the same miles-long runs for the same damn flight paths so close together, and I hate the heirlooms for making me level so fast but I hate the LACK of heirlooms because then I feel like I’m going too slow, and I’m trying to manage 3 playstyles here and glyphs and bags and deciding what mounts I like and do NOT get me started on tradeskills. And the priest is GORGEOUS, I honestly enjoy just staring at her, but the shaman’s more flavorful, but I’m not happy with how she looks, and the priest also got the good name (I am proud of Gomakua, damnit) while the shaman got the lousy name and the lousy look and the twinked professions and the more-fun playstyle, and aghhhhh.
So there’s some tension there. I think I might just put the priest on hold and fiddle with the shaman a bit, see if I can’t reignite the flames of passion. (Barbershop visit may be in order.)
That said: elemental is finally shaping up to be fun, moreso if I can ever escape the dungeons long enough to do it; restoration is “what?” talent-tree-wise but easy enough for dungeons. Mostly. I still can’t reach my heal buttons very fast, which is even more embarrassing because they’re in the exact same spot as all my other heal buttons on other characters, but mostly I only need to pound the interrupt and dispel buttons so we’re doing ok! Also I have learned that if you’re going to show up in non-heirlooms, be the healer. As long as nobody died you win; it’s infinitely less frustrating than trying to kill stuff and getting one attack off before it’s all dead courtesy the heirloomed-to-the-teeth DDers.
Aside: I’m not calling them DPSers anymore, because seconds have nothing to do with one’s ability to deal damage. “Damage Dealers” is a much better term, and we’re gonna shorten that to DDers or DDs or anything saner than DPSers.
So: Earth Shield and win, and actually NOT having heirlooms will probably win the day, because I honestly would like to explore a few zones in between getting exactly 1 run of each dungeon. I am totally tempted to steal the cloak off the priest, though.
3. I Still Have A Druid
And she’s still only a healer. 1 PvE spec, 1 PvP spec; courtesy the patient and determined efforts of my PvP friends, her PvP gear can only upgrade with Conquest Point epics now, woo! Similarly I’ve started trying to accrue Trollroics gear for her PvE set. Both are quite strong, and I’m a perfectly respectable member of whatever activity I want to do with her, thankyouverymuch. (Some people were confused. Some people thought I can only PvP with her. Some people are wrong.)
Also I got the dragonhawk hat. I turned helm graphics back on, and I have not stopped giggling yet.
4. So Healers Have Macros
In theory, I am vaguely aware that some healers use utility macros. You know the ones: combining a couple uncommonly-used abilities into a single button, pre-picking targets for other tricks, etc. I used to have a bumper crop of those on either of my favored DDs: hunters and warlocks both suffer some pretty serious bar bloat, and if you don’t start shoving multiple things into a singe spot you’re going to be casting all your utility spells directly out of your spellbook. And I am FAR too impatient to spend 5-10 seconds digging Ritual of Souls or Revive Pet out of that dusty tome when I want it. But my healers? Sure, I have utility buttons. I call them “Ressurect that idiot on the floor” and “drink a potion.” These require approximately 0 macroing to render them useful. So in THEORY I know there’s macros for healers, but in practice whenever I see eager, peppy discussions of healer macros I go “huh?”
Ok, there’s an exception. I am a devoted mouseover healer, which due to game constraints means every single heal on my bar IS a macro, and it looks like this:
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover][]Heal
Replace “Heal” with whatever the healing spell really is. That’s it. It is 99% identical to just dragging a heal out of my spellbook, only I wedge the “[@mouseover]” part in front so instead of trying to cast at the character I have targeted, it casts it at the character/unit frame my cursor is hovering over at the time. This is a completely different rhythm for healing, but suffice it to say that the technical expertise required is minimal. If someone asked me to write up a guide to healer macros, it’d be “this is how to make a spell cast at your mouseover target!” and then end with “don’t forget, it works with dispels too!”
The trouble, or what I’m going to call trouble for dramatic effect, is that not everybody likes healing this way. I frequently forget this, as the only time I have occasion to talk to people who heal about how they heal is usually when they throw out a “hey check this syntax for me” concerning their bevy of mouseover macros. If, heaven forfend, we stray beyond that topic, it’s usually to agree that we have no idea how we ever got on without mouseover heals, and aren’t they fantastically efficient, I wish they’d turn it into an interface option so it could be a blanket setting, etc. In short, lots of mutual massaging about our healing utensil of choice. But then some days I stumble across blogs about healing, and inevitably there will be a post about healer macros, and in the post the topic of mouseover WILL come up. Today’s “I am so bored I’ll read about classes I don’t care about” yielded a post about healing priest macros. As usual I tiredly skimmed it: I caught one useful macro I’d use, in the unlikely even I was that class and spec, but it didn’t really have wider applications for me, and everything else boiled down to “stick all your panic buttons in one button! here’s how to make sure you cast at YOURSELF!” which I already had the macro expertise to accomplish and didn’t want to do anyways. Eventually I made it to the end, which was about mouseover healing. It started off ok:
I occasionally receive questions from other priests asking about mouseover healing and macros. Unfortunately, I still can’t answer those questions, since I do not use mouseover healing.
Totally fair. I get the sense that mouseover is something a lot of more knowledgeable players mention in passing without ever explaining, so newbies eventually know OF it without knowing it– so they’d ask questions. Similarly, good for the blogger! If you don’t use something and don’t know much about it, no sense trying to tutor others. And, honestly, at the end of the day I don’t care if you heal by hopping a pogo stick across the keyboard. I care about results. If you don’t mouseover and you heal fine, good for you, keep it up. But then it veered into the weird.
I personally find the priest toolbox lends itself best to clicking targets, since its core is made up of both casted and instant-cast heals. Mouseover healing is extremely effective for players who are primarily using instant-cast spells (druid raid healers, for example), while clicking targets is preferred for casted healing, since it allows you to better utilize the time between your casts.
I… what? Ok, yeah, druid healer main, I use a lot of hots. But my spells with a cast time are mouseover too, and personally if you tried to make me cast them via “normal” targeting I would end you. The only spells I don’t want to mouseover are the ones that don’t have a target, like Tranquility, as there’s no aiming involved so why try to add some. And I’ve done casted healing, I’ve done it on and off since Vanilla, and I have discovered that I can’t do it without mouseover macros. Well, not if I want to respond in under 5 seconds to each heal. One time I tried to have Earth Shield– Earth Shield, the spell a resto shammy taps once every 30 seconds for crying out loud– sit on my bars without a mouseover macro. HOOBOY. That got changed as soon as I found a 20-second break in the trash pulls to bang out the macro. It didn’t end disastrously for my party, but from my perspective I haven’t had that kind of Benny Hill-worthy fiasco since downranking Healing Touch was what got us through Molten Core. Not only did fumbling Earth Shield repeatedly recast it when it didn’t need it/stick it on the wrong target/etc, the time spent correcting THOSE mistakes was time I was not applying my other heals. Which, yannow, everyone needed. In short: nobody died, but it was not enjoyable on my end.
Anyways, the blogger pulled a quick defensive parry– this is my personal take, this is not gospel, if anyone has a good mouseover guide please pipe up in the comments for the benefit of others– but of course it was much too late. My reaction was negative inasmuch as now I was going “what is this person talking about?” with a side of “that’s not how it is for me at all, SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET” so I skimmed down to the comments to see if the author elaborated enough that I could make sense of what they were saying. Luckily, the first comment was a more useful version of my “buh huh wha?” and the author promptly replied. The first half of the comment actually answered my question: basically, it’s a rhythm thing. Some people orient themselves better when they have a move-click-heal, move-click-heal motion going, and the author is one of them. Ok, cool. I hadn’t thought of that, and I hadn’t realized it was such a big deal, but with a little reflection it makes perfect sense to me: a lot of my willingness to play a class/spec lives and dies on whether the rhythm is something I like. Survival hunter during WotLK was a great beat for me, but Marks at that time just brought everything to a crashing halt. Similarly I prefer BM hunter these days, and am unwilling to try other specs in no small part because I suspect the rhythm will be something different, which would almost certainly be something I wouldn’t like. So, ok, sense is made.
Then I read the other half of the reply.
Tangent’ing off… Mouseover healing also poses a bit of an issue for movement which I don’t care for. All the mouseover healers I’ve known were great throughput healers but were terrible at staying alive. I’m sure there are mouseover healers out there who stay alive just fine, granted, but it is something most healers should consider when going down that road. What do you gain, what do you lose? If mouseover was all pluses, no minuses, every top healer in the world would use it. They don’t, and there’s a reason for that.
I seem to recall mentally screeching “WHAAAAAAAAT?!” at that. Oooooh, them’s fighting words. So because you know mouseover healers who stand in fire, you give a token “I’m sure there’s exceptions” then plow forward warning people to think hard about mouseover healing because there’s a danger that it will make them stand in fire? (The emotion I cannot quite identify really got going when I read that. I cannot explain said emotion any better than to say it is equivalent to having a small yappy dog barking its head off somewhere down around one’s pancreas. It’s unpleasant, and when it rears its yappy little head I like to assume it’s about as meaningful as a small yappy dog.)
Anyways, my specific counter is that I am a mouseover healer, and I’m pretty @#$%ing good at not standing in fire. I consider this one of my winning attributes: I absolutely cannot put out the chart-topping damage, I can only do somewhere between “okay” and “pretty nice” damage. My healing talent is similarly only around 80-90%: I’m competent, if things get a little hairy I can probably pull through, but I am not a revered healer that ends up with a legendary reputation for turning water to wine, so to speak. But if you stick me in a group, and there’s fire or poison or void zones or whatever on the ground, by golly I am not going to stand in them. In my little corner of existence, it’s the opposite problem that shows up: the mouseover healers I know are the ones with the PvP skillset, the ones with quick reflexes and trigger fingers and blazing “get out of the fire” speeds. All the terrible, awful, no good, very bad healers with a penchant for standing in fire are the ones who don’t use mouseover macros or Clique, as they frequently tunnel vision clicking the next guy to heal instead of going “oh, look, fire. Perhaps I should not stand in it?”
Now that I have ranted, of course I know I have just as bad a sample bias, if not worse. I talk to almost nobody about healing methods, and to this day I don’t even know what Healbot does. Healing is not the primary thing I do, so I don’t invest a lot of time in finding out what other people do, and how well their utensils work, or other such stuff– so my sense of the world, as it were, is pretty much a “here be dragons” on a blank map in this area. And I suspect this particular blogger was not TRYING to offend me the ways they did– if I ignore the small yappy dog for a minute, I get the sense that they were just lazy about smothering all their claims with “this is how it is for me, YMMV, find out what works for you.”
That said, I definitely skimmed the comments until I spotted the followup, which did a good job of smothering my indignation.
This is why I will never write more than one macro article per year. Everyone wants to argue about how their way of doing things is the absolute superior way of doing things instead of actually offering up useful macros to other people. There is no such thing as an absolute best way to play that works for everyone. It all comes down to what works for you, and anyone who tries to tell someone his way is better always comes off as an ass. These types of arguments bring out the worst in people ._______.
Amen.