Holy Light Glyph Nerf

The Holy Light Glyph Nerf - or Why This Paladin is Cranky

Alright, so I can, after calmly reflecting, see why this was deemed "OP". I am, none the less, exceptiontionally cranky.

I'm remembering 5 mans in which I wanted to shriek and stab things, before I got my Naxx25 gear. I remember solo healing AoE happy fights and grimly facing the reality that I can only seem to keep 3 people up at a time in situations like that.

If 20 yards was too much, then 8 yards is too few. For the love of all that is holy, I just want to be able to cope with aoe damage somewhat without giving myself a heart attack in the process.

A raid example of this is last night's 10 man OS. Our new holy priest, bless her heart, just kept going splat. It was a combination of her being new to the group and our DK being relatively new to raid tanking-I don't think he'd tanked OS at all before, and he was having tab targeting issues to boot. So, who ended up the only living healer for a good chunk of time? And early on for one of the drakes to boot? Yup. Me.

Maybe I don't want to play frantic whack a mole, Blizzard. *Makes strangling motions with her hands*

Gwuh.

GTFO Mah Tank!

The Comcast backbone we're connected to spazzed mid raid last night, halting it entirely because you can't go very far when you're missing a healer, both tanks, and a rogue. It took forever to come back up. You're costing me Sapph practice time, Comcast! Rawr. But that's not what I'm here to bitch about.

Now, I like the synergy between the our three normal healers in the 10 man runs. It's me, a holy priest, and a resto shammy. I sometimes quibble with the holy priest, though, for one simple reason:

He tries to take my damned job.

After Anub, I whisper the GM about how I hate all my heals on the MT being overheals while the OT is threatening to splat (I beacon'd him but he was often out of range). It was as much a random whine to a friend as a legitimate complaint, though it's not the first time I've had the Priest say he's healing the tank and made the O.o face. Then we came to the Widow, and the Priest pipes up with healing asignments over vent.

"Okay, I'll take Mach, OtherPriest take Zoja, Amber you get the raid."

"Wait wait wait wait wait," I spluttered over vent. The holy priests get the tanks and I get the raid? Seriously?

Macharious cut me off. Wisely? Perhaps. "Amber gets Zoja, OtherPriest gets raid."

Now, Priest isn't a bad guy. He's actually a great, generous guildie. He's certainly not a bad healer. He just has NO CLUE about the other healers he's running with. I used to do healing assignments in ZA, and to start I flat out asked the shammys what they were best at because I had no clue. Raid heals? Kay. Raid heals it was. While I know that a holy priest can keep up a tank just fine, it's pretty silly to put the aoe healer on the tank and the single target healer on the raid.

While this situation makes me grouse, it also makes me want to go read up on resto druids and shamans, so that I better understand them. All I know is tree = HoTs (and aggro magnet, it seems like), and shaman = chainhealsomg! I had a very polite tree once ask me to not top off the DPS he's HoTed if they weren't in danger, as that wastes his mana. Oops! I try reeeeally hard not to do that anymore and have turned my UI's HoTs display on. I miss that tree. :(

This should probably be the goal of every raid healer. Learning about your other healers can help you work together better. Working well together = less death! Less death = yaaaaay!

Well. I had meant to write something useful today, but I actually had to work at work. Strange!

I promise less Amber QQ in the next post. Maybe I'll even be funny! I've heard rumors that I do that on occassion.

Why I Almost Quit My Paladin

I leveled my paladin to 80 first, mainly because 1) everyone always needs healers and she was my only healer at 70 and 2) as a healer, she's the perfect compliment to the boy's warrior tank. She's also nearly always been my main, except for a brief stint of "dual maining" where my paladin got played a bunch, but my hunter Jamethera was my raiding main on Earthen Ring. Alas, no one needs a hunter.

Now, I've always been holy. Always. I solo'd/instance'd my way to 60...over the period of a year. After that I raided seriously in a guild called Unified (Judgement, I miss you!) and duo'd with another warrior to 70. My paladin did not get the experience in BC that she did in vanilla WoW- vanilla, my healing skills were tempered in MC, BWL, AQ 20 and 40 (up to C'thun) and there were some tenative jabs into old Naxx. In BC, I got into the unfortunate rut of doing Kara until I wanted to vomit. I saw Gruul's four or five times on her, and Mags uh...twice. Arranging 25 mans seemed to be a bitch on ER. It wasn't until I moved her over to our friend Steve's guild BoO on Azgalor that she saw any real action. I moved her over as a tank, because at that point-after pushing the same two buttons I've been pushing for years, in the same gods be damned instance-I had had enough. Thus I got to OT in Kara, Gruul's, and SSC (!) a little bit. YAY FOR DIFFERENT BUTTONS.

Before we'd transferred over-which is to say, before RP to PvP transfers were an option-the boy (alright, Josh) and I had rerolled to play with Steve. He had another baby warrior but I, in my disgust with Two Buttondom, had rolled a priest. It was my 6th priest or so, but dammit, I wanted one.

This was Lyrandre. And let me tell you (again) that I loved my Lyrandre.

Come 3.0, I agreed to go back to healing. Thus I was staring at green bars again for more SSC, and some playtime in BT and TK. It...wasn't terrible. It wasn't great, but the combination newer content and a couple of new buttons meant I plugged along while leveling my priest between raids.

Then came Wrath, and a new form of hatred for my paladin. Or rather, not for my paladin...but for the combination of encounter design and paladin healing limitations that resulted in me weeping in the corner. It seemed that Blizzard had in mind for some fights handy little things like...AoE heals. And sometimes shaman poison cleansing totems. I'm not sure how this fits in with "bring the player not the class" but I felt maligned for awhile. Fights went something like this:

Holy shit poisons everywhere I need to cleanse them but OH MY GOD THE TANK IS DYING heal the tank and OH MY GOD THE DPS IS DYING heal the DPS and OH MY GOD THE TANK IS DYING and there's more damn poison and I need to cl-OH MY GOD THE TANK AND EVERYONE ELSE IS DYING and and holy shit how did I end up dead?

See also: Loken's nova, whirlwinding mobs, Skadi's Hallway of Adds AND Whirlwind, Pools of Mojo, and many other things that made my single target healer self weep. Alright alright, so they gave us Beacon. Sweet, so I can heal TWO targets at once with a semi-expensive spell that only lasts a minute that I have no idea when it falls off unless I install another addon. AWESOME. Oh, and I have another somewhat expensive instant heal with cool down.

How many poeple are in a group, Blizz?

FIVE.

This resulted in 2 DPS dying on several boss fights until I got some sweet, sweet Naxx gear and learned some crazy coping methods. Three seemed to the most people I could keep alive in dicy situations, which, frankly, sucks balls. I take deaths personally, and that was a lot of guilty, failure-tinged feelings building up.

That fact that Josh and I ran Heroic UP over and over and over and over again, combined with multiple trips through Heroic VH (yet ANOTHER instance that made me emo) did not add to my sanity.

It wasn't until I got to raids where I had AoE healers to back me up that I didn't want stalk over to Blizzard and stab some dungeon developers in their sleep.

How I coped:
-Beacon. Depending on the fight, I would either beacon the tank and myself (^&!%^&!%@&! mojo pools), beacon the tank and the highest DPS and pray, or beacon the tank and the ret pally who was raping himself with martyr (I'm looking at you Steve!).
-Juggling judgements as best I could for a bit of haste...though frankly, there were fights where interrupting healing for anything was fatal. Judging Light took a bit of the sting out, though, in the melee heavy groups. I mean it's not as if I was too likely to whack the thing for mana back anyway.
-Holy shocking the DPS just enough to keep them limping along until such a time as I could be sure that the tank wouldn't die while I healed them. If I got a crit, the instant FoL would go to them too. Often related to the below:
-I'd Holy Light the tank to near full, hurridly FoL the DPS up a bit more, then rinse and repeat. This required having a good sense of incoming damage on the tank, and a tank that won't start to panic if he dips lower in health. HL is a gloriously huge heal (20k crit in Naxx once, zomg).
-Sacred Shielding the tank as often as possible where rage starvation wasn't an issue. It doesn't seem to be, by the way. Just bubble after he has aggro and some incoming rage and you're golden. Josh hasn't complained yet and trust me, he would if it was a problem! I also sacred shileding myself for the afore mentioned &!%*&!%*$%& mojo puddles, because moving and healing just didn't fly.
-Wings + Divine Plea = mana return with no healing nerf!

It also helps that I know my tank very, very well. I've been healing Josh's warrior ass since Molten Core. The 5 minute oh shit buttons help, too. Don't be shy about using those, guys!

I'm hoping that with the incoming "nerfs" to CoH and Wildgrowth, Blizzard will tone down the AoE damage some and make life a little easier on we HoT and AoE healing lacking paladins. At least Naxx makes me feel USEFUL-I'm queen of Patchwerk OT healing. /flex

tl;dr:
I almost quit my paladin because:
1) Blizzard threw in a lot of AoE damage and AoE poisons and shit.
2) Paladins don't cope well with the above.
3) I'm tired of pushing the same gods be damned buttons for four years. I'm still pushing the same two, I just have....3 more to push sometimes. Flexibility is notably lacking.

I coped by:
1) Madly flailing and pushing some buttons really really fast
2) Praying a lot
3) Bitching even more