Sunday, May 9, 2010

[Druid] Not the Best First Crack at Heroic ICC

I was waiting to get our first crack at heroic ICC tonight, but when we reached Marrowgar there was something different about me. You see, I was a tree.

Our resto shaman couldn't make it tonight and our paladin healing lead really did not want me to bring my paladin since the role we were missing was our shaman's awesome raid healing. I argued that I'd probably heal better on my paladin, having healed as one since TBC, but the raid agreed to wait while I respecced and regeared myself.

You see, we're a small raid guild with only 11 regular raiders, and we hate benching. When our shaman is missing, we're down to our paladin and our shadow/disc priest who does the uber swapping mania. Two healers aren't enough so I often went on my pally if we needed a third.

But we're doing hard modes now so raid comp in all likelihood matters more, and if I can learn to play resto as adeptly as holy, then it would not hurt as much for a healer to be absent.

Since we picked up a ret pally with a prot off-spec who can fulfill the backup tank role I used Hana's off-spec for, I had offered to look into making a resto set. I built out what I needed in Rawr and read over Keeva's fantastic new resto druid guide.

The only thing is... since no one had responded to my offer on my guild forums, I didn't bother assembling anything because I figured people weren't interested. I'm known for sometimes going a mile farther than necessary, so I chalked it up as more than I had to do.

Until tonight. So I ran around Dal grabbing gear and gems while our raid was clearing trash. After they summoned me our JC/enchanter cut and enchanted the lot for me, and in I went, with jack squat but theoretical knowledge of how to play a resto druid.

HoT the raid, right?

Crap... my Grid's not set up for HoTs because paladins don't need them and as a moonkin I only bothered to add poisons and curses.

Wild Growth when three or more targets can be affected.

You know... that doesn't work so well when everyone's scattered around during a Bone Storm. It requires more heads up healing than I can manage as a nub tree. We eventually got people to be better about staying roughly in the middle of the room though so might not be so bad later.

Convenient keybindings are good.

It would have helped if Nourish wasn't the 7 key, Lifebloom wasn't 0, and my Nature's Swiftness/Healing Touch macro wasn't the 3. Things that didn't matter as a sometimes heal bar for a moonkin turned out to be horrible as a tree.

In a nutshell, I sucked. I didn't even do half the healing of our holy paladin and our disc priest.

It's a very different mentality healing as a druid than a paladin. I can't help wanting to top everyone off, like immediately.

Still, we managed to get Marrowgar to 50% despite the horrible healing on my part, and in the end decided to save him for later. We were making a lot of mistakes, and I think if our shaman had been there we would have been able to handle it better.

So I went back to moonkin and we pushed on to Heroic Deathwhisperer, which we heard could be 2-healed, and she was. She was a one-shot. So was Heroic Gunship. (I would have cried if we managed to wipe on that.)

We were a little skeptical about spending much time on Saurfang, given that most 10-man guilds seems to skip him and come back later, but we gave him a shot and found out that we really weren't doing too bad. We had a heart-breaking 10% wipe as our best attempt of the night.

But because we wanted to kill the Lich King for our eleventh, who sat out last Monday, we switched back to normal and killed him so we could continue with the rest of the instance on Monday.

I'm thinking I might ask our priest to stay shadow on Monday so I can get some tree form practice in on our farm fights.

Final note as a nub tree who assembled her gear too fast: As I was writing this I just realized I still have my feral glyphs in my off-spec. Way to go!

4 comments:

W-Crusher said...

One way that we do Marrowgar to limit the OMG SPREADING OUT problem is to make three groups. Put the two tanks together at the back along the blue wall, put a high survivability class (someone with I don't know, barkskin or something) near the door, and the rest of the raid in the middle between the two. This way, Marrowgar will go pinging between the door and back end of the room while still allowing those in the middle to heal and break spikes if needed. Basically, it limits the chance of the "Well, I'd love to heal you, but you're bonespiked in Texas" issue.

Hana said...

Hm... that's one way to control where he's going. But won't it be bad if Marrowgar is constantly running over the group in the middle as he pings between the tanks and the person out by the door?

W-Crusher said...

It's damage that you know is going to happen, and can plan accordingly for it. If you know where he's going to be, you know who to pre-heal.

Hana said...

True enough. I'll have to see if our heal team is up for it.