• No way to disable auto-self-cast. If you use a healing ability or a buff and you don’t have a friendly target selected, the ability gets used on you. Period. This is merely frustrating in solo play – for instance, when you’re trying to heal a tank companion – but it’s nearly game-breaking in groups, since of the many ways MMOs have given us to heal people, “1) manually select heal target. 2) cast healing spell.” is the least efficient and most clumsy.
• Very limited ways to see your target’s target. This is largely a tank-focused complaint; it’s very difficult to see what your target has selected as its target. (It’s true that there’s a circle on the ground under your target’s target, but that becomes almost impossible to locate when you have more than three participants in a fight.) Not being able to tell what your target is targeting makes it exponentially more difficult to make sure you’re keeping aggro on everything – again, especially in large melees, when you can’t necessarily tell which direction each mob is facing.
• No way to rearrange the user interface. Largely a matter of preference, yes, but this makes my list because by default, the chat box overlaps the left-hand action bar on a widescreen monitor. Ugh.
• Poor event-collision detection. Here’s what I mean: during combat, you see that your tank companion is handily dealing with all of the creatures attacking you, so – since the quest calls for you to search the corpse at your feet – you decide to get that done with while your tank is finishing off the rest of the NPCs. You right-click the corpse, wait for the “Gathering…” bar to complete, and then, when it finishes, you get an error message: “Cannot perform this action while fighting.” The game doesn’t check when you start the action; it doesn’t check during the action; it only checks at the end of the action. This means that it’s not only possible but easy to waste quite a bit of time mistakenly gathering during combat because the game won’t tell you you can’t until the gathering “cast” is over. But this leads into…
• Prohibiting user actions during combat. User actions like gathering from nodes, opening chests, or interacting with quest objects. This comes very close to actively encouraging griefing and node-stealing – because if you’re fighting the mobs around a node and someone else decides to come and gather it, there’s literally nothing you can do about it except ask them to please not. The game will not let you let the tank deal with the mobs so you can pick up the Dielectric Stem or open the Security Chest.
• An Auction House system that borders on actively hostile to players. Want to buy something from the auction house? I hope you can guess which broad category BioWare’s decided to place it in, and then what narrow category it goes in within the broad category – because you can’t even search by name until you’ve selected a primary and a secondary category. This not only makes buying difficult, it makes selling difficult, because it adds unnecessary extra steps to the process of finding out what the current average price is. (It’s especially difficult for selling because very often the seller’s reaction is “I don’t know what the hell kind of item it is, I just want to see what I can get for it!”.)
• And finally, no same-sex romance options. Really, BioWare? You thought this would fly?

A final note, by the way: I’ve seen people saying “well, you can’t expect SWTOR to have all the features in it at launch that WOW has seven years in.” While I disagree – the state of gaming is the state of gaming regardless of whether the game was released in 2004 or this year, and you don’t judge a car company’s new line against the Model T – I’m not comparing these features with WOW, to be honest.

I’m comparing them with Rift.

And Rift got them right at launch, nearly a year before SWTOR shipped. (Even the last one! Check out Kira Thanos and Uriel Chuluun. ♥) This stuff is ridiculous, BioWare. Fix it.

Anything I’ve missed or forgotten? Leave a comment and remind me!

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In no particular order:

• Even though dungeons become available at level 15, tanks don’t get most of their good threat-generating abilities until later than that. If your tank is level 20 or below, she probably won’t be able to hold more than a few mobs at once, and will have difficulty pulling mobs off multiple people.
• Along the same lines: focused fire is your friend. Yes, AOE is awesome and boosts you up the DPS charts like single-target spells never will. But if you’re AOEing mobs, you’re competing with the tank on the threat meter for all of those mobs. And see above: low-level tanks don’t always have the AOE threat abilities that they will at higher levels, so you’re far more likely to peel a mob off the tank if the tank’s under level 20 or so.
• Your healer needs mana. Mana regeneration in heroic-level instances is so high that yes, it’s possible to blow through an entire instance without stopping to drink. In low-level instances, though, healers are often starved for mana – especially if they haven’t been running instances constantly and aren’t entirely in blues. The default party interface shows you your partymates’ mana levels. (If you have a custom interface that doesn’t show them, get rid of it or mod it so it does.) Pay attention to those levels. Don’t pull the boss when the healer’s at 25% mana, or you’ll end up with a dead group and an angry healer.
• Sometimes people want to do all the bosses. That’s okay. It means more XP for you. If you’re XP-locked, it means more chances at loot for you. Don’t whine about not going straight to Amennar the Coldbringer; you’ll get there eventually. Pouting and dropping group – or doing nothing and getting votekicked – and getting the deserter debuff would probably take as much time as just doing the damn bosses anyway.
• Nobody really cares how much DPS you’re doing as long as you’re taking the mobs and bosses down. Put your Recount back in your pants.
• Complaining that a member of the group really sucks is more likely to get you votekicked than them. Just saying.
• Remember that itemization kind of sucks pre-70. Yes, you really wanted that cloth caster belt for your warlock. But there isn’t anything better in leather for the shaman healer at that level, and she wanted it too. Just because there’s a “better” armor class that a character can wear doesn’t mean that the “lesser” armor class doesn’t have the better gear for her.
• You’re not expected to know the ins and outs of everybody’s class, but don’t assume that everybody has the same abilities as they would at 80. People asking the level 35 priest “lol if u shadow den y no shadowform”*: this means you.
• The Satchel of Helpful Goods that you get at the end of the instance does its best to adhere to your ideal armor class, but other than that, it’s not very good at giving you useful gear. We’ve been doing the Dungeon Finder for 20 levels now. We know the Satchel gear kind of sucks.

* Direct quote. From someone whose main was a “rading shadow preist”. Someone asked for an Armory link and he dropped group.

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Post tags: Groups, Instances, Leveling

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I’ve been spending a bunch of time lately on my baby resto druid. I’ve chosen to level her almost exclusively through the Dungeon Finder (I do quests largely when they come up in dungeons, when they’re dungeon quests that I happen to run across or that someone shares, or when I need only a few percent to reach an even-numbered level), and so I’ve done a lot of PUGging over the last few days. There have been some good PUGs and some bad PUGs, but I’ve always tried to keep the principles of Anyone Can Heal in mind. So I smile, take a lot of deep breaths, and do the best I can, even though healing as a druid is strange to me (even after 14 levels of instances, I can’t get used to not having Prayer of Mending or Power Word: Shield, but I love being able to root enemies that try to run in fear). Tonight, I had two PUG experiences that I wanted to share, in the spirit of Anyone Can Heal. (This is going to be kind of long, so please bear with me.)

The Hunter

In the first, I was brought in as a substitute healer. The first healer had bailed after he zoned into Gnomeregan and saw that the tank was 24 and none of the DPS was above 28; apparently he’d said something about “these noobs” not being ready for Gnomer. At level 27 myself, I didn’t see much of a problem with it. (In fact, we completed the instance without any character deaths.) As soon as I was finished buffing and drinking, the tank pulled Viscous Fallout, and when we killed him, the Acidic Walkers dropped. They’re not leather and the nature resistance is a little blah, but they were a significant upgrade over what I had (Barbaric Cloth Boots – resto druid itemization really sucks at early levels!), so I rolled Need on them.

So did the hunter. And he won.

I didn’t make any fuss about it – no use in getting upset over an item. But one of the DPS said “hey, you still haven’t explained why you’re rolling Need on items that aren’t good for you”. The hunter didn’t respond. We kept going. I started paying attention to what the hunter was doing, though. He was pulling when the tank had stopped for whatever reason (usually for me to drink. This was a very conscientious tank and, despite being 24, very good; I complimented him on it at the end). The hunter hadn’t disabled Growl on his pet. He wasn’t drinking when he ran out of mana, just standing and waiting for it to regenerate. When Electrocutioner Leg dropped, he rolled Need on that, too, and both the other DPS started grumbling. Someone said “don’t make me have to vote-kick you”, and at that point I whispered the tank and asked him to stop after the next pull. He very willingly obliged, and when all the mobs were dead I asked, in party chat: “[Hunter], I don’t mean to pass judgment with this question, I’m just asking: is this your first WOW character?”

It was. The hunter had just started playing within the last two weeks, although he was quick to point out that he’d been in instances before (“that’s where I got these pants!”). All of a sudden, the group’s attitude changed entirely – the universal response was now “oh, awesome – welcome to WOW!” And we sat down and spent ten minutes explaining WOW group etiquette and best practices – roll Need on the things you’re going to use right away and that have the right stats for you (and we explained what stats are best for hunters); turn off Growl so your pet won’t pull off the tank (and you turn off abilities by right-clicking on the pet bar); let the tank pull unless you and the tank are experienced with running together, so that he can control the positioning of the pull; and if you do get a mob attacking you, run to the tank so he can re-control it. And bring plenty of water and arrows – more than you think you’ll need, so you’ll be sure not to run out if something odd happens.

The rest of the instance went without a hitch, and the hunter gave nobody any more reason to grumble. At the end, I passed the hunter 5g so he didn’t have to feel poor or like he couldn’t afford water, arrows, or training – I don’t have any 80s on this server, so gold is harder to come by for my characters there than it might otherwise be, but I figured I could make 5g back pretty easily with gathering professions – and thanked him for coming along, and the rest of the players welcomed him to WOW again and wished him the best.

The Mage and the Paladins

My resto druid is level 29 now, so over the last few levels I’ve been in Gnomeregan a lot. This particular run, I came in at the beginning of the instance, and was the Dungeon Guide (my first time as a healer!). Apparently there’s a tactic for Horde groups in Gnomer that I’d never seen before: at the first turn, instead of running around the edge and going down the canonical pathway, you can instead go straight and jump off the ledge, landing on a giant gear at the base of the room. This takes off about 50% of your health if you hit the jump right. So we cleared the area at the top of the instance and jumped off.

Well, except for the paladin tank, whose connection glitched out during the jump. He remained running at the edge of the upper platform. We watched him run in place for a few minutes, and then he disappeared. His character icon was replaced by the “disconnected” lightning bolt, and the mage initiated a vote to kick. It passed (without my help), and we were without a tank. Meanwhile, the mage pulled Viscous Fallout: “ill tank lol”.

Mages are not very good at tanking, it turns out. I healed him to full, dropped Regrowth and Renew on myself, and swapped into bear form, stealing aggro from the mage and successfully tanking the boss (with the judicious application of a health potion and Lifebloom). The mage had some choice words for me about taking away his chance to tank, but we continued; I had a quest to turn in in the Clean Room (Grime-Encrusted Ring), so we headed that way. I HOT/pot tanked the troggs on the way, and in the middle of one group, another paladin tank appeared. He effortlessly pulled the troggs off me, and I went back to healing.

(We discovered, incidentally, why Horde groups prefer to jump down: the “safe room” is hostile to non-Allies. Good to know!)

Once we reached the clean room, the mage decided to express his displeasure with not being allowed to tank Viscous Fallout by running around and pulling every gnome in the room. I tossed a HOT on him and went back to the tank, who was picking up the gnomes as he could (one only has so many taunts) and tanking them centrally. The mage’s health was dropping, and he decided to start berating me for not healing him better: “heals” “HEALS” “GOD F$%^ING DAMMIT I TOLD U TO HEAL ME” “Y ARE U SUCH A FAIL HEALER, U NOT HEALING AT ALL”. When combat was over, he was unceremoniously vote-kicked. Again, I abstained, but only because the vote passed too quickly for me to do anything about it. We got a new mage in, who was quiet but knew her stuff – apparently Frost is the leveling spec now! – and we continued on.

In the face of the mage’s abuse – I was not the only one he’d yelled at in party chat – I decided to compensate and make the rest of the run as pleasant as possible. I normally make a point of congratulating people on leveling up and on particularly impressive displays of skill, but for this run, I went out of my way to be reassuring and kind, and to make people feel like they were appreciated. I complimented good DPS, offered suggestions, and guided the group through the instance (apparently none of them had had a group hold together beyond Electrocutioner 6000 before). At Electrocutioner 6000, one of the DPS had to drop group, and we pulled in another character who ended up being a tank (the previous tank having queued for tank/DPS). He switched over and the new tank (also a paladin) picked up on the tanking handily. We didn’t have another problem the entire night, and since nobody but me had been through the instance, I directed the tank in how to proceed, and continued to be supportive and gentle.

At the end of the instance, after we’d defeated Mekgineer Thermaplugg and the group was disbanding, the paladin who’d come in to replace the first tank sent me a whisper. “That was a really great run,” he said – capitals and spelling and all. “When I logged in and saw the mage, I thought this was going to suck, but it was the best PUG I’ve been in since I started playing this toon. Thank you so much for being the dungeon guide.” Then he dropped group before I could respond.

The Upshot

If you take nothing else away from Anything Can Heal, take this away: you have the power to change the dynamic of any group you’re in. If the hunter is screwing up and ninjaing your loot – maybe he’s new. If the mage is berating and belittling everybody in the group – maybe you can turn it around. You have the power and the opportunity to make your dungeon runs great for everybody else. All it takes is a good attitude and a willingness to give people a break.

(A postscript: That hunter from earlier, I discovered, is actually on my server. We got to talking after the instance. He really is a brand new player, and although he has a guild leader who’s helping him out, apparently that GL is not always the friendliest person. We’ve friended each other, and I plan on making sure that he has guidance when he needs it. I won’t be a crutch, but I can’t say no to being a teacher.)

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In general, the idea is that if you can use the item, it’s an upgrade, and you’re going to equip it now or within a few levels or when you get it gemmed/enchanted, then you can roll Need. Otherwise, roll Greed or Disenchant. This post is about the latter situation.

There’s a lot of disagreement (if the groups I’ve been in have been any indication) about which to choose. A lot of people think that you always Disenchant if you have the option and you don’t need the item, but as my friend Jess (who has not started up her blog yet) points out, that’s not always the best way to go. Unless you’re the enchanter or are specifically saving up mats, the best thing for you to do is actually to find out what the going AH price is for enchanting mats and for items of the level you’re likely to be getting in the instances you’re running.

On our server we have a bit of an odd situation. We have an auction-house mogul (hi Otto!) who’s artificially inflating prices on green items Just Because He Can, assuming that anyone who’s buying greens is someone with an 80 and therefore loads of cash. (This pisses off those of us who don’t have 80s on that realm, because we don’t really have the cash influx that he’s assuming, and we’re the ones who need the gear.) At the same time, because there are so many people running so many instances, the price of low-level enchanting materials has crashed – Strange Dust can be had for 2 silver a stack, where the Huntsman’s Bracers of the Naked Mole Rat that would otherwise generate the Strange Dust is selling for 10-15g because of inflation.

In this situation, do you really want to Disenchant that green? Wouldn’t it be better to roll Greed and then sell it directly? Sure, the odds of a Huntsman’s Bracers of the Naked Mole Rat selling on the Auction House might be kind of low (I’m not sure what class needs +Strength/-Hair; maybe a tauren with a glandular problem), but if they do sell, you’re pocketing way more than you would with the enchanting mats. (Actually, in our situation there’s a third option: price the bracers really low. Otto trolls the AH looking for low-priced items that he can resell at a profit, and you’ll probably be able to hook him with a price around 1-2g. Lower price, but much better odds of selling.)

By the same token, if you know you won’t be able to sell an item – say, if it’s BOP – then go ahead and roll Disenchant, because at least the enchanting mats will sell for something!

TLDR: Don’t just hit Disenchant blindly on your loot rolls. Make sure you know what the market’s like before you assume that enchanting mats are always better than the greens they’re made from.

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Perhaps you’re familiar with this scenario: You’re a nervous level-15 restoration druid. You have three healing spells – Healing Touch (your Big Heal), Rejuvenation (your Heal-Over-Time), and Regrowth (a mid-sized spell that heals a bit up-front and a bit over time). You just got Regrowth, and you’re not quite sure how it plays yet. You’ve got a handful of green items that you picked up on quests (and a lucky drop or two), but some of your gear is white and grey.

You zone into Ragefire Chasm to join your very first random instance group… and everybody else is in Heirloom gear and greens, with enchantments and a few blues scattered here and there. They’ve got the very best potions and buff food; you have two Lesser Mana Potions and a few Herb-Baked Eggs. At least you remembered to bring Ice Cold Milk – no, wait, there’s new water at level 15 but you forgot to pick some up. You manage to toss up Mark of the Wild on everybody and Thorns on the tank, click your own Thorns off, and sit down to drink – and the tank asks “r?”, one of the dps responds “r”, and the tank takes off and pulls without waiting to see that you’re at half mana. You don’t even have time to /sigh as you run off after the tank…*

Relax.

Everybody remembers their first time in a given role, even if they don’t want to admit it. Everyone you’re running with was new to their role themselves. (Many of them, in fact, probably still are.) Unfortunately, to a lot of players, there’s a loss of face associated with admitting that you don’t know everything. In the best case scenario, they can blame everyone else. When it’s clear that what happened is their fault, it’s better to let everyone else assume that they suck than to let everyone know that they don’t have experience.

Don’t be that guy. Tell people, straight out at the beginning of an instance, “Guys, I’m new to healing as a resto druid [or whatever], so please cut me some slack and forgive me if I make mistakes.” Below is an all-purpose macro for it, so you don’t even have to type it out; just hit it at the beginning of every instance until you’re comfortable healing.

/script SendChatMessage(“Guys, I’m new to healing as a “..UnitClass(“player”)..”, so please cut me some slack and forgive me if I make mistakes.”,”PARTY”);

The truth is, people hate saying that they’re inexperienced because they feel like they’re the only ones. It’s hard to zone into an instance and see that everyone else is higher-level than you, with better gear and enchantments, and easy to assume that you’re the only one who doesn’t know what you’re doing. But in my experience, when you say “okay, I’m new at this so please cut me some slack”, the vast majority of the time, the rest of your party will say “it’s cool, we’ll throttle down” or “don’t worry, I haven’t tanked before either”. They will cut you some slack.

The only way to get experience is to get experience.

Tautologies aside, the point of this is to get you comfortable healing. By saying “I don’t really know what I’m doing” at the beginning, you give yourself some slack – the permission to not be perfect. Screw-ups happen; we just do our best to minimize them. And the more times you mess up, the less you’ll mess up in the future. Just breathe, don’t forget to smile, and pretty soon you’ll be comfortable enough that you can change your macro:

/script SendChatMessage(“Just for the record, I remember being a new “..UnitClass(“player”)..”. We’re all here to have fun, and we’ll cut you some slack if you make mistakes. Don’t worry; just do your best.”,”PARTY”);

And all of a sudden, you’re the confident one in the great gear who’s being the beacon of hope and the pillar of strength to everyone else in the party.

* This was me on Sunday night. Just for the record.

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It’s really tempting to judge the other players in your group, especially as a healer. It’s understandable, too. Everybody does dumb things; we just tend to exaggerate the dumb things of others and downplay our own, so eventually, in our minds, everyone else is a moron and we’re the only good players in the group. (There’s no shame in feeling like this – it happens to everybody. We even get pissed off at our friends when we’re grouped with them – and sometimes when we’re not – because we privately exaggerate their mistakes.) It’s even easier to feel like this when you’re in a bad mood, which can result from other people’s mistakes – or perceived mistakes. The tank misses a mob and you get healing aggro, or the DPS is late on interrupting a silence effect, and all of a sudden the group is horrible and the instance is a waste of time. You just want to get your badges and get the fuck out.

The trouble is, your mood determines your performance. If you’re pissed off, you’re going to make mistakes, and you’re not going to heal as well as you could. You’ll target the wrong person with Greater Heal, and all of a sudden the tank’s at 20% and the rogue just got a face full of healing he didn’t need. You’ll hit Flash Heal instead of Penance, and your target won’t get enough healing. Worse, perhaps, is that you’ll start ignoring people who piss you off. DPS didn’t interrupt that silence in time? Fine, he gets no healing until he learns. Tank failed to grab a mob? We’ll see how he feels when you won’t heal him above 50%. Your healing gets worse, and everybody’s mood gets worse, and at the end of the instance – assuming nobody’s quit the group out of frustration – you disband the group and vow never to run with any of those people again. Maybe part of you realizes that they’re saying the same thing about you, but honestly, you’re probably telling yourself that you were the only good player in the group, and wondering how the other players even managed to level their characters.

All because someone made a mistake.

Herein lies the first lesson of being a good healer:

Smile.

You know that being in a bad mood can hurt your healing ability. It stands to reason (and psychology backs it up) that being in a good mood will improve your healing. When you’re happy, you make fewer mistakes, and you’re more forgiving and less resentful. What may not be self-evident is that, as scientists are finding, smiling actually improves your mood. A smile isn’t just a reflection of your current happiness; the act of smiling actually reduces tension, improves your mood (because you feel like you should be happy if you’re smiling), and – according to research – releases endorphins into your bloodstream. Endorphins relieve pain and cause a sense of well-being, so by smiling, you’re actively making yourself feel better.

And we know that the better you feel, the better you’ll heal.

Smile every time you get a chance, but make a specific effort at these times:

• At the beginning of the instance, while people are buffing up
• Any time you sit to drink
• Before each boss pull
• After the last boss pull

It’s easy: just put a smile on your face (you’re looking at the screen, nobody can see you!), breathe deeply – in through the nose, out through the mouth, if you can – and count to ten. Then go back to the game. You’ll be a happier healer, and a happier healer is a better healer.

Thoughts? Questions? Leave them in the comments section below!

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1. Smile
2. Practice, Man, Practice

Anyone Can Heal

If you are like me – and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be like me?* – you have seen Ratatouille, and remember the critic Anton Ego’s final review of Gusteau’s restaurant:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

I am here today to tell you that, in fact, the former is true, at least as far as playing WOW is concerned. Perhaps not everyone can become a great chef, but anyone can become a great healer.

You will say to me, “but Chris, I cannot heal to save my life.” (I am, incidentally, reminded of a MAD magazine cartoon from many, many years ago: “If you never hear ‘Fix this crankshaft or we’ll shoot you in the head’, why do people say ‘I couldn’t fix a crankshaft to save my life’?”) But the truth is, I believe you can heal. You just don’t know how to heal well or effectively. Maybe your DPS ways are too ingrained in you; maybe you don’t have the attention span to focus on such a small chunk of screen (if you happen to be using Grid or unit frames); maybe you don’t really understand how your healing class works. The bottom line is that it’s not a matter of inability. It’s a matter of lack of skill.

Betty Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, gives an example regarding being “talented” at art: suppose reading were treated the same way as art. Teachers would just give young students a book and step back, not instructing so as not to interfere with the students’ “creative reading”, and at the end, maybe three or four out of a class of 20 would have learned how to associate the words they spoke with the letters on the page and to read successfully. (Remember: no actual teaching at all, just leaving the kids alone with the books.) Parents of the kids who’d learned could say “oh yes, Mary has a family history of reading, her aunt Lisa was quite a reader”, and those who hadn’t could say “well, she just doesn’t have the talent for reading; she’ll find something else she is good at”.

The idea, of course, is that art is a skill that can be learned rather than a talent that must be innately possessed. The same is true of healing. Those players who are excellent healers from the outset have no special talent, no innate gift that allows them to heal better than anyone else. It’s just that their brains happen to have been tuned to the way healing works when they first started, so they were able to pick up the skill much more quickly than those whose brains were tuned to other activities (such as DPS, tanking, or shuffleboard).

Over the next week or so (it’s indefinite because of the imminent holidays), I’ll be erecting a series of posts on the skills needed to heal, how to acquire them, and how to retune your brain so that the skills come more easily and more naturally. Hopefully, at the end of it, we’ll have a whole bunch of people who have renewed faith in their ability to get a group safely to the end of an instance.

I’ll borrow a bit from Havi here, since even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing all the time, she does a damn good job of making everyone think she does.

What I’d like in the comments:

• Your opinions on what skills make a good healer.
• Your experience with learning how to be a skilled healer.
• Funny stories about having not been a skilled healer.

What I don’t want:

• Shoes.

Happy Christmas Eve, and I’ll see you all soon with the first post in the series!

* </facetious>

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Post tags: Anyone Can Heal, Community, Groups, Healing, Instances, Priest

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SUCK IT, NOOBS.

Love,
Theande, Disc Healer

(Thanks to @Nibuca for the tip.)

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Post tags: Groups, Healing, Instances, Priest, Shield

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Patch 3.3 revamped the LFG system and introduced cross-server PUGs, and thank the Light, they’ve finally got it right. PUGs are quick and painless – even when they don’t work out you tend to know in advance, like the Halls of Reflection group I had last night where the tank started out by saying “so, can anyone else tank?” – and it’s easy to rack up a few dozen emblems in an evening’s play. Even alts are getting in on the action – the gear-matching system is pretty good at ensuring that they don’t get into an instance they can’t handle.

That said, it’s not all peaches and cream – there are still a lot of things that can trip a group up. The advantage of the LFG system is that most of those stumbling blocks are player-induced, and there are things you can do to remove them. Here are some guidelines for making sure your PUGs go as smoothly as possible when you’re healing:

• Stock up on reagents before you get in the queue.

Every time. I know healers who join the queue from beside a reagent vendor so that they’ll be able to stock up again when they get out. I carry 60 Sacred Candles on me, but this weekend I decided to chain-queue from the Borean Tundra, and managed to get down to 3 candles before I gave up and went back to Dalaran. The sad truth about PUGs is that sometimes, you’re going to wipe – people don’t know the fight, don’t have the gear to complete the fight, or just plain screw up, and you want to make sure that you can keep buffing the group no matter how many times the Godfather of Souls eats yours.

• Tell the rest of the players up-front if you’ve never successfully completed the instance.

This is a matter of some debate among players – some say you should just not say anything to avoid being kicked for a more experienced healer, some say you should ask for the strategy just before the first boss because they’ll be invested in getting the boss down and won’t want to have to wait for another healer. Honestly, that just seems like dishonesty to me. It’s better to tell the group up-front that you haven’t been through the instance. You’ll sometimes get the odd jerk who kicks you from the group for being inexperienced, but I’ve found that most players are so eager to get going that they’ll gladly explain the fights to a new player, just so they don’t have to wait in the queue again. Of course, it’s easier to get them to go along with you if you’re appropriately geared (and don’t try to heal the first half of Old Kingdom in your fishing pole and hat…).

• Discuss loot rules in advance.

Nothing in World of Warcraft causes more drama and personal offense than loot. It’s far better to take fifteen seconds at the beginning of the run to figure out what everyone else thinks is fair. Remember, too, that you can’t roll Need on items of a different armor class than yours, even if you can wear them and they’re an upgrade. If you’re a druid, shaman, or paladin healer, and you know that something you want but that’s not in your armor class drops, you might also want to talk to the group and see if someone of the lower armor class would be willing to Need the item for you and then trade it to you – and if you’re a shaman, druid, or priest healer, consider offering to be the Need monkey.

Oh, and everyone Needs on Frozen Orbs unless they really don’t care to whom the Orb goes. It’s just common sense – no, you don’t need it, but “Need” doesn’t actually mean “need” here, it means “roll at the highest priority in a tiered system”.

• Talk with the tank about speed-pulling.

This is one of the drawbacks of PUGs being so quick and painless: lots of people want to get as many instances in as possible, and that means pulling as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that also means that tanks are paying attention to their health, not your mana bar (even though they should be). At the beginning of the instance, talk to the tank and agree on a signal for her to look for that indicates that you need to wait before the next pull. Otherwise you’ll find yourself going in with 3k mana – and inevitably that’s when the unexpected patrol comes around the corner.

• Make sure the group knows what you’re capable of.

This is especially important for priests. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who still don’t know that Discipline is a viable healing spec and wonder what Guardian Spirit does. Tell the group at the beginning “I’m a Discipline priest – that means you’ll be seeing a lot of shielding and fast single-target heals, but not a whole lot of AOE healing. Don’t worry, I know you’re taking damage, but I have to prioritize, and you might get a shield where a Holy priest would just drop Circle of Healing.”

• Even though you’re playing with players from different servers, you can still get a reputation.

Sure, you’re now pulling from ten times as many players and it’s easier to disappear into the crowd – especially since the odds are that the players won’t be from your server and won’t be able to badmouth you there. The bad news is that there are only ten or so realms per battlegroup – and word spreads fast. Don’t be surprised to find someone else from that server saying “man, I heard you were a total bitch, I’m not running with you.” Be a good player and a good human being – it might not get you more groups, but it certainly will keep you from getting fewer. Besides which, it’s just good practice to be a good person.

• Know your limits.

This one should be obvious. If you’ve tried this fight three times and can’t keep everybody up, it might not just be that the DPS is standing in the fire. Maybe you’re having a bad night, or maybe you’re just not geared enough for the group. You need to be willing to say “I’m sorry, guys, I can’t heal this fight, you should find someone else.” It’ll cost you some badges and loot – but you can always go in later and do it when you’re better-geared or more confident.

This should, thankfully, be pretty rare because of the gear-matching system, but it happens sometimes and the Good Player way to handle it is to bow out gracefully and allow someone else to take your place.

• Explain the fights if you’ve been there before.

In an ideal world, anyone who’s been through a fight before could explain it. Sadly, we don’t live in the ideal world. The DPS are focusing on the boss and on moving out of poisons, and don’t really care what the healer or other DPS are doing – and are paying attention to the tank roughly enough to make sure she’s still at the top of the threat meter. The tank is mainly worried about maintaining threat and the state of her own health bar. As the healer, you’re the one who’s standing back, paying attention to positioning (so you know when people are out of range and when someone’s about to step in a puddle. More than any other role, it’s the healer who’s concerned about everybody else’s tactics, and who has a broad perspective on the fight (literally – we need to be able to see everyone to hit them with heals). So if you’ve done the fight before, offer to explain it. Give suggestions if you can, and offer unique abilities that you have that can give the group an advantage (“Everyone stay within 20 yards of the tank so I can Mass Dispel the freeze effect” on Keristrasza, for example).

• Don’t be afraid to roll Need on upgrades.

There is a feeling among some healers – myself included – that we don’t really contribute as much to fights as everybody else. The elephant in the room here is damage meters – a lot of players believe that contribution to a fight is judged based on a player’s position on the damage meter, and since healers are almost universally at the bottom of the list, there’s a certain feeling that you’re not really contributing, and therefore don’t deserve as much of the loot. This feeling is amplified among strangers, since – as above – you want to be a good person, and you don’t want to get a bad rep.

I’ll put it plainly: that feeling needs to go away. You are contributing to the fight by keeping health bars up. If you weren’t there, the DPS wouldn’t be able to bring the boss down before the boss killed them. If you weren’t there, the tank would last about five seconds. You are just as much a part of the fight as anyone else, and you’re just as entitled to the spoils.

Even if the tank insists on referring to you as “healer” throughout the run. (Seriously, not even “priest”? You can’t even be bothered to figure out what class is healing you?)

Any others I’ve missed? Leave a comment!

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© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Groups, Healing, Instances, Priest, Raiding

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© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Groups, Instances, Loot

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