Lethal Shots

Maintainence today, possibly even a patch even (conflicting sources, unable to verify either). Either way, another week has gone by. My thoughts on it:

• Not much raiding over the last week. Just the weekly three times and one venture into ICC as a healer, which did not end well. Two of the three healers on the run were alts (mine and another Hunter) and neither of us were really prepared for how healing intensive the Marrowgar encounter is.
• Randoms every day. Honestly I’m getting a little tired of them. It has gotten a little better since I cut back to one random a day per 80 (unless a guildie needs help of course).
• I jumped back into leveling my Paladin over the weekend. Decided to re-spec him to Prot, picked up a shield and one-hander off the AH, and jumped into the queue for low level randoms. So far it’s going pretty well. The XP is nice and I’ve already picked up several blues that are more suited to tanking.
• While my gear says I can heal in ICC, the above mentioned experience tells me otherwise. I need to work on my technique and maybe rework some gems and enchants. Some research will help with itemization problems, but the technique is going to be more difficult. Outside of raids, the best practice is going to be Heroic Halls of Reflection.
• I’ve been tanking heroics for about a month now and feel I have developed a pretty solid grasp on it. Now I want to move on to raids. I know it will be much more difficult, but I need to do it for the challenge.
• Back in real life, the wife and I took the kids out on a local Geocaching adventure yesterday. While the baby didn’t get much out of it (he slept the whole time), my four year old had the time of his life. It is definitely something we are going to have to do more often.
• Been playing with specs on my Hunter lately. Been specced Survival so long I can play it in my sleep. Now I’m trying to wrap my head around Marks.

That’s all I got, now give me yours.

In a few previous posts I have mentioned my Shaman that I am slowly leveling. So far I have gotten him up to 70 (almost 71). It has largely been a solo effort, meaning he has been specced Enhancement from level 10. My long term goal has always been to take this guy Resto once he hit level cap. Well, last night I got my first taste of healing.

I was plugging around the Fjorde when i got a friend of mine whispered me asking if I wanted to join in on a Shadow Labs run. Since my Shaman is only 70 he would still get XP from it so I jumped on board. Ended up with a Warrior, a Hunter, two Paladins, and me. We had tanking covered, but none of us were specced as a healer. They asked me if I could heal, so I decided to give it a try. No re-spec. I just threw on the caster gear I had been collecting and dove in.

Now first off, healing on an Enhance Shaman is very simple. You have three heals, Earthliving Weapon, and totems. For totems I ran with the standard compliment of Mana Tide, Windfury, Flametounge, and Strength of earth (might be the wrong name on that one, I can’t remember what it is called for sure). I enchanted both my weapons with Earthliving, and then hammered out heals to keep people topped off.

And you know who died the most? Me. I was so focused on keeping other people topped off that I kept forgetting to heal myself. But, I would rather that I caused my own death than someone else’s.

Except for a few deaths, the run went real well. Everyone said I did a pretty good job healing, especially considering it was my first time and I wasn’t specced for it. And you know what?

I liked it.

Healing offered a completely different way of playing than I have ever done. Target mobs? Nope. As a DPS 90% of the time I assist the tank and fire away. Sure, there are the few times where I need to CC or to pull some fancy moves to save a healer, but not that often these days. As a healer things felt more dynamic. The tank was no longer my boss, telling me who to target and when. I controlled the flow of the group instead of being pulled along. It was great.

Now don’t misunderstand. I love being a Hunter and will more than likely always play one as my main. But seeing the game from a different perspective opens up a completely new way to play and have fun in WoW. One that I intend to take full advantage of.