life, the universe, and donna

Another one of those boring Warcraft posts, but I’m proud, so… suck it.

So, now that I have a computer that doesn’t weep tears of shame any time someone looks at me funny, I can actually raid properly! On my old computer, I could … kind of do 10 mans. My laptop could handle 10 mans okay, but 25 mans… yegods. (And quite frankly, having not raided in vanilla WoW, I have NO idea how anybody could EVER do a 40 man… jesus bob. I had a hard enough time keeping track of 25 and still being able to stay out of the goddamn fire.)

Recent achievements:
Heroic: Besting the Black Dragonflight: Defeat Sartharion the Onyx Guardian on Heroic Difficulty.
Heroic: Archavon the Stone Watcher: Defeat Archavon the Stone Watcher on Heroic Difficulty.
Archavon the Stone Watcher: Defeat Archavon the Stone Watcher on Normal Difficulty.
Molten Core: Defeat Ragnaros.

Ok, so that last one is a little out of place, but I’d never been there before…

Turns out: Archavon is a bloody easy fight to heal. Spam heals. Avoid spikes. Avoid white cloud stuff. Blah blah blah. Sartharion isn’t really that much harder, except for the flame walls. The trickiest part with those, I found, was that with 25 people on the screen — plus totems, pets, raid icons, idiots, and add-ons… the screen is REALLY crowded. Especially when I judge light on the boss, and every time one of the other 24 people hit the boss, a green +580 pops up above their head. And some of them are hitting him a lot. So now I’ve got a screen full of people, totems, pets, raid icons, idiots, addons, and numbers. Jesus christ. And I thought some 10-mans got crazy.

And with all that stuff going on… where the fuck do the flame walls go? The key being: Avoid the flame walls. If you don’t, not only do you take massive damage and probably die, but you spawn an add. Great. We wiped the first couple of times because half of us had never been in there before (and, duh, wait for the tank to pick up the boss AND POSITION HIM before you unload on him, eh? Nick’s a damn good tank, but there’s only so much he can do if you’re basically saying “NO NO LEAVE THE TASTY DEATH KNIGHT THAT YOU’VE BARELY TOUCHED AS HE TRIES TO LEAD YOU INTO THE CORNER FOR SOME QUIET ALONE TIME, I’M SO MUCH MORE WORTHWHILE, OVER HERE WITH MY CLOSEST 23 FRIENDS!”)

On the upside, once you’ve missed the first flame wall, it becomes pretty easy to figure out where you should be for subsequent flamewalls. So, good news, when we did finally take it down… I was still alive. The way I see it, as a healer I have three goals, in this order (especially in a raid with multiple healers): One, don’t let the tank die. Two, don’t let ME die. Three, don’t let anybody else die. (In a solo-heal situation, not letting me die is really more on par with not letting the tank die. Unless there’s someone else who can pick up healing if I go down, my dying is pretty much the same as the tank dying.) Anyway, so while there were 4 people dead at the end of our kill, I wasn’t one of them, and neither was the tank. Win.

I also really, really get how strong a paladin healer can be in a raid now.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty familiar with holy paladins at this point, and how awesome we are. I’ve always known, theoretically and somewhat logically that paladins are primarily excellent single target healers. But man, seeing it in action in a 25 man… wow. Yeah, we are really, really excellent at single target healing.

My group was pretty self sufficient, and we didn’t really have a lot of direction for healing, so I took it upon myself to backup-heal the main tank & add tank (the healer in their group was also a pally healer) and spot heal around the rest of the raid. (Incidentally: Healbot is AWESOME. Even if I had to get used to a 25 man interface, vs my regular interface.)

Anyway. Overall? It rocked.

Note: I wrote this on the 31st… and now it’s Jan 2nd. I’ve since also main healed Obsidian Sanctum on 10 man, and it was cake, especially now that I get the flame walls a lot better. Nobody died, we only got a few adds, and what it comes down to is that we rock hard. So hard that yesterday, we ran Violet Hold, Nexus, Utgarde Keep, Utgarde Pinnacle, Gundrak, Halls of Lightning, and Obsidian Sanctum. We are heroic instance MACHINES.