I logged on yesterday out of obligation and commitment to earning 50 Emblems of Frost, which will allow me to replace my worn-out Wispcloak. Blizzard has me by the marbles in that respect. “If I don’t make it a point to do the random heroic at least once per day, then I miss out on two Frost Emblems. Oh, the humanity!”
I sighed, and entered the Random Heroic queue, silently praying that the gods would send me into AN, or UK, partnered with a 40k-health tank. The load screen revealed Halls of Lightning. Not great but at least it’s something different, I thought. If I have to see Utgarde Pinnacle or Old Kingdom again I’m going to hurl my laptop into the woods.
I inspected the party and saw that the “tank” was a DK who was sporting 27k health with both Kings and Fortitude buffs. To make things worse, she was wearing a lot of attack power gear, including the heirloom leveling shoulders. Nothing was gemmed or enchanted. “Why do I do this to myself?” I thought while eating buff food, trying to do whatever I can do compensate for the tank’s shortcomings.
The first few pulls revealed that it wasn’t going to be a cake-walk of a run like I had hoped. The spike damage was insane. The tank’s health frequently dropped from 100%-30%, then back to 90% before dropping to 20%. It felt like I was solo healing a Patchwork fight back in the day. She did maintain aggro, for the most part. When the ret paladin and/or the other DK would steal aggro it was actually helpful because the damage was split and the melee dps had almost as much HP as the tank.
For new tanks who may be reading this, 27k health is fine for most heroics (save H-ToC and the new Icecrown 5-mans), as long as you’re defense capped. If you’re not defense capped, General Bjarngrim will critically strike you for 12,000 and if he strings two in a row, it’s a wipe; not to mention the trash before Loken that hits hard and stuns the healer. I have great respect for tanks. You guys have the toughest job, in my opinion. But please don’t sacrifice those crucial +defense gems that would remove critical strikes from the attack table just to get another thousand HP. It’s not worth it.
The run went smooth and without a wipe. I died once because the warlock accidentally backed into another group of mobs while we were fighting. Fortunately I was soul-stoned so I was able to resurrect and save us a run from the graveyard.
Loken was interesting. The strategy to move out of the nova was not even discussed. “Just stand under his feet,” the tank said. That was it. Normally I’d mention that we should be moving away from him when he casts nova, since it’s a long cast and certainly avoidable, but I kept my mouth shut. A year ago, when casters averaged 16-17k health, I would have insisted upon getting the hell out of the nova but our entire party was over the 20k health mark so it was enough to survive a blast.
I wasn’t paying enough attention to the warlock’s health before the nova and he wound up dying. It would have helped if he was under the boss’s feet, instead of 25 yards away taking unnecessary damage from the aura, but oh well. We killed Loken and the run was complete. While looting, the tank said, “How did I do? This is my first time at tank.” I think I heard the gods chuckling at their practical joke.
I got HOL on my tree Druid earlier this week. At the end we stood right under him, I was prepared to do the little dance but my group didn’t seem interested in that and so I healed them on my PvP geared Druid. The tank is in my Druids guild so it honestly was cake. He’s a great tank.
Did you respond, when they asked how they did as a tank?
I really hate seeing people not ready to do heroics, at least meet the minimum before you try to roll up in there. I’ve had a few groups where DPS has either signed up as a tank or heals. Twice (before 80) when I sgined up as heals/DPS I got DPS. The ‘healers’ were higher levels than I so they got that role. No problems, it’s nice taking a break from Healing. but it was obvious that they signed up as heals just to make the queue go by faster. Guess who ended up healing? The last time the shaman made no attempt to heal. Guess who was booted out of that group? The Shaman. I stepped into the healing role (was doing that anyway) and we picked up another DPS.
I’ve had two groups where the DPS signed up as tanks and it was obvious they weren’t tanks. They got booted too. Personally, I think that is very selfish if you know you don’t meet the requirements to perform a role within an instance, don’t sign up for it.
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Yeah some people have no patience with the random dungeon finder, although my perspective is coloured by the fact that as a healer I can always find a group quickly. I’ve seen Holy Priests sign up as DPS… and everybody’s favourite: a DK trying to tank with absolutely no mitigation stats. Of course it’s MY fault as the healer that he gets one-shotted….
@Halzakzul
I had this happen with my Druid. I think she was 76 at the time, last boss in UK. OUr tank got DC’d, we picked up another tank. The DK tank got one-shotted. Initially I thought… well they aren’t used to the fight then I took a closer look at the DK’s gear. Let’s just say that explained everything!
@Hol – Sorry I didn’t reply sooner, but yes I did reply when the tank asked how she did. I said that she held aggro great and moved at a good pace, but she might want to work on her mitigation and get defense capped. I’m too nice to blast people to their faces. Instead I’ll write on a blog behind their backs. : )
@Halzakzul – I know what you mean about it always being the healer’s fault if the tank isn’t geared properly or the DPS stands in green stuff, but for some reason I still feel bad if I can’t pull the party out of the toilet against the odds. Ah, the conscience of a healer…
Hi Zejus,
First off great site. I have had an 80 alt doorf priest for some time now and started healing for the first time 3 weeks ago, so fine some of the thing you discuss very helpful.
I normally run with guild alts and as such have a laugh as they know I’m still learning to heal, as such most runs go really well, even managed my first H FoS last night with the only death being me…….still keep forgetting to heal myself.
My problems come when I hit the LFG on my own, without the normal tank I run with and end up with sub par dps and a tank that only dinged that day
. Times like this make me think I have made a big mistake trying to heal, yet deep down I know its not me slacking its others not being prepared. I think the LFG system is great, especially for alts, but just wish people would get to a decent level before jumping straight in the HC’s and make me go grey quicker than I already am :p
Hey Slapster, I agree with you. A lot of players don’t prepare for heroics. They think of heroics as the first step to prepare for raids. Normal instances are viewed as a waste. “Why do regular Halls of Lightning when I could get carried through Heroic Halls of Lightning and earn valuable badges?” Part of it is lazy players, part of it is the way the system is set up.
Gearing is different than it was in BC and Vanilla. Blizzard stated that heroics were going to be much easier in Wrath, and they are. Every patch, a new batch of upgraded gear is released while the difficulty of the instances stays the same. We’ve had 4 or 5 different ‘classes’ of gear. This means that raiders are steamrolling heroics while new players are generally frowned upon because they aren’t geared enough to wipe their ass with the place. They have to drink after fights, use cooldowns, buff, possibly CC, you know, stuff that was standard before Wrath.
It also means that new players or alts know that they can join the Dungeon Finder queue and will most likely be grouped with players that can carry them along to get geared.
The older Wrath heroics were meant to be completed in blues and iLevel 200 epics. They are all do-able to decent players in 200 gear. It can be stressful at times, but that’s the ‘heroic’ part of it. The problem is that Trial of the Champion and the new Icecrown instances were introduced, which weren’t meant to be completed by fresh level 80’s. And with the random dungeon feature pooling them all together, and 3 or 4 heroics being significantly more difficult than the older dungeons, it truly is rolling the dice.
I am perfectly fine with running H-HoS with a group of iLevel 187-213 (blues and epics) players. It’ll be a challenge but that’s the point. Steamrolling and chain-pulling wasn’t the intended purpose but as gear got more and more powerful people got use to walking in and out of a dungeon with four badges in fifteen minutes. My issue is that there’s a chance that I’ll get stuck in a H-HoR run with an iLevel 200 party, which is next to impossible to overcome, in my opinion.
You can blame the players because they could opt to not use the random feature and just sign up for dungeons that are of appropriate difficulty. But then they miss out of Emblems of Frost or extra Emblems of Triumph. So is it a faulty system? Should there be some sort of mechanic that looks at gear quality and knows to not group a player for the more difficult instances?
Sorry for the rant. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t feel discouraged as a healer. Some parties will fail and there’s nothing you (or another healer) could have done about it. Sometimes you’ll pull the group out of jam after jam and feel great. Other times you’ll be irrelevant because the tank has 50k health and could solo the place. Don’t let one experience bring you down.
I am a super noob, so I spent countless hours reading up on how to not fail at being a lvl 80. I ran several regular 80 dungeons to gear up for heroics because I didn’t want to get a bad reputation as someone who likes to be carried. Not that it matters anyway, I think there’s like two people on my server who even vaguely recall me (I do a lot of random dungeon finder PUG things).
I still feel bad too when I can’t always heal people, and sometimes a dungeon is more fun when the rest of your group isn’t all that geared/skilled because it makes healing more hectic/likely to give me a heart attack. You feel pretty amazing when you can outheal insane amount of damage when something goes horribly wrong.
My experience has been quite different with the random dungeon finder. I don’t mind fresh level 80’s, people new to a given role, or a group that wants to make a mess of things. I consider these a welcome change from the mindnumbingly boring pull-aoe-pull-aoe-pull-aoe grind that heroics have become. Tank not quite def. capped… That was my alt last week, it happens he needs this to get better gear. Heal his ass off and you’ll be fine. Aggro going everywhere, I LOVE IT. A large majority of the tanks have so much raid gear their health doesn’t even move and I contemplate switching to shadow.
Now what I don’t like, are the arrogant assholes and general douchebags you get stuck with. I was booted from a heroic CoS run for pointing out the rogue (same guild as two of the other members) had been on autofollow the entire run and not contributing. If this was a single person you could use the kick feature however those 3 characters posed a majority that us other two people were stuck with. Blizzard needs to fix this.
Enki, [A] Alleria
You know, the more I play the more I agree with you. Having a newer tank or less experienced tank is a welcomed changed.
I want to clarify that I have no problem healing a new tank….I never have. 23k health is no problem for me, since that was the standard when Wrath was released. My problem is DPS in DPS gear spec’ed as a tank, and queuing as a tank to bypass queue times. The DK was a nice player but she was in attack power trinkets and gems. Even if she was not defense capped but wearing tank gear, I wouldn’t have mentioned it. But this was her first tank run and she didn’t bother hitting the AH for some of the half-decent crafted plate. It reeked of laziness to me. But again, nice person, not geared to tank, but made for an exciting run…