Thursday, October 22, 2009

The sack is empty. And a lie.

Empty. Dried out. Nothings inside.

The "sack" refers to the wealth of knowledge I collect during PTR periods. As of right now, 3.3 has provided me with absolutely nothing of interest or worth. Oh cool, shamans get a weird AoE spell that I don't really care about. Look at that, haste affects HoT's which I have a total of one of. The ugly t10 gear previews just cements the fact that I will never make an alt to 80, and that I will most likely need to stock up on Noggenfogger Elixir's. The fights from Icecrown so far don't excite me, but in this regard I feel like once the PTR hits, I will find them fun and interesting.

Why healing isn't fun to face-roll.
One a completely different note, I finally discovered why I heal instead of DPS or tank (other than the fact I fail at both). Healing forces you to interact with your fellow players, plain and simple. There is no set rotation that you can macro to two keys and say "I win". You are forced to be aware, and more than that, flexible in how you interact. As a tank or dps, your job is to smack the bad guy till he dies, a task that lends itself to you sitting there and going down your keyboard to cast your spells. As a healer, I must, and I stress must be aware of where people are, what they are doing, and how much damage they are taking. This means that before a fight I might need to ask the tank to do a certain thing to decrease the damage he takes, a talent or trinket for instance. I might tell the dps to bunch up as much as is safe so my Chain Heal hits all of them. Healing is a reactive job, less so for druids and possibly priests but not by much. I need to know within a second whether to cast Healing Wave, or Lesser Healing Wave. I have to watch what player has Riptide so I can cast Chain Heal through him/her for a better effective number. If a boss fears or drops a poison, I need to drop my respective totems. All of these aspects make healing stressful, yet fun and incredibly rewarding. It doesn't matter how long you've been playing, or what gear you're in, when someone says to you, "Great job healing dude", you feel proud of yourself. If healing just involved going down a list of spells and hitting them when off cool down would I do it? Would you?

This informative post brought to you by: Mana Tide Totem-It's like the fountain of youth but you'll still grow old and die! And no one will care!

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