The End of the Shadow Era

It’s every shadow priest’s worst nightmare – when it comes to the point where you are asked to be… (No, Ephii, say it ain’t so! Don’t say the H word!) … a healer. Now, it’s not so bad if you enjoy healing and every priest always carries that thought in the back of his/her mind (Be honest – if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have rolled a priest.).

Catalyst has run into the unfortunate situation of running low on healers (we’ve lost more than half in the last 2 weeks due to schedules and RL). They just dropped like flies. On a small server like Shattered Halls, you can only hope to either acquire 70 healers from other guilds (we are really uncomfortable approaching guilded players) or check your guild panel to see if you have any up-and-coming 70 healers (nothing from the farm for us). So what needs to be done until our healers come back and/or some outside healers approach us? Classes who are currently DPS but able to heal are now holy/resto (some anyway), me being one of them. ;_;

I always imagined I would end up healing. In fact, I rolled a priest initially so that Gaar and Runic would always have a healer for groups while leveling. I healed all dungeons from 1-70 until we found ourselves a full-time holy pally for 5-mans (best discovery EVER). I stayed shadow for raids, however, because I’ve been the guild’s only/most regular spriest raider since Kara progression. WTS mana battery and I love robbin’ that warlock gear!

“But what kind of priest doesn’t heal?!”

Well, I had a 12″ PowerBook w/ the integrated video card so I was getting less than 5 FPS and thus, I was overhealing and wasting mana up the wazoo just because I couldn’t tell when other people’s heals were going to land before mine! But I upgraded to the MacBook Pro over the weekend, complete with 2 GBs of RAM + 256 MB dedicated vid card! Now, I can heal in style! And only the tree beat me in least overhealing done. Blah~ Now that I’m holy, I noticed quite a few things about our guild’s healing situation. And perhaps, the most important and worst problem of all:

Our healers don’t trust each other.

I noticed this in Gruul’s last night, followed by a short run into ZA before I had to log to sleep. Even though each person had their healing assignments, I saw healers throwing heals EVERYWHERE. Now, it’s good to know that our healers are aware but we have assignments for a reason. Who’s healing the tanks if every one’s just going to throw off their assignments?! And as such, our MT went down last night. I’m not saying I’m not guilty of this fault once last night as well but for a good 5 seconds, our MT didn’t get any heals during Gruul and thus, went down unnecessarily. Luckily for us, we downed him anyway.

During Akil’zon in ZA, I was down to about 1.5-2k in health and was tossing the tank a quick Binding Heal, hoping the tree was gonna get to me in due time with Lifebloom spams to make up the rest. Little did I know, our main/tank heal was throwing me a big, fat, whopping Holy Light, and at which time, our tank went down before I even got my heal off. In that situation, our tank wasn’t getting any heals for at least 2 seconds while he was getting crushed multiple times (which is also an oddity, as he has ~514 defense rating).

Don’t know how we will remedy this. I don’t want to say anything, as I just joined the healing circle and don’t want to criticize on my 2nd time healing a 25-man but… this has got to be fixed.

But I definitely do like healing, all in all.