Heal or Kill

So since 3.1 came out I have been up to a bit of fun. Edy has been doing her Edy best to let Snuggles feast on as many hides as she can be it raiding, dailies, or teaching a dk that some of us DO still play BM specced. Ty, on the other hand, has been plunged head first into healing and its been quite the ride for her.

Since my runs of the reg 80 stuff my guild has seen fit to push me along the fast track of healing. I am asked to heal my first herioc by another tank in training and step foot for the first time as heals in heroic Gun Drak. We started out rocky again with me being a little too close when poison nova went off so I hit the ground like a drunk frat boy on a sunday morning and we wipe pretty fast. That out of the way everything went nice and smooth till the last boss when he decided non-shall pass and raped up royally. We got through that night because my friend was with us on his dk and went frost after the tank dropped which was just long enough to down him though the second time we did this run we had to call it after about 5 wipes just cause I couldn't keep up with the armor reduction that he puts on the tank and he would drop before I could get any sort of big heal or LoH off. I will get use to it in time I just need more practice and I have 2 great healers to which I am padawan and I know can give me tips on these types of things.

Last big test was an OS 10 man run where it started out with just me and our fearless GM healing and due to what I think was a glitch we wiped about 3 times on the first drake (I say glitch because the dps that went in the portal was hit so hard with the portal aoe they dropped as soon as they zoned and that didnt happen when I ran OS earlier that week on Edy). We get in a PUG druid to help but it might as well have just been me and Ru still because mostly the guy just overhealed the hell out of our MT and just kinda left raid healing in the air. In fact 3 drake I was pretty much solo healing the raid in the portal because the druid apparently thought the MT was way more important that the dps killing the drake even though it was apparent that he WASN'T going to drop. All in all it was a huge confidence boost to be able to keep up with real healers in that and definately made me happy.

On Edy's end I am still observing where I stand in a raid environment as a beast mastery hunter in a survival is king world. What I see as my answer is "pretty damn well". I haven't really had anybody try and preach to me the evils of BM in raiding since that lovely fellow of a lock in that Maly run but I still see people that swear by SV for raiding and I seen the numbers that "should" happen when you play SV. Armed with the knowledge of these numbers and a better concept of sv rotation I decided to give it another shot. I try it on the dummy and all works like its suppose to and I am indeed out dpsing my BM spec so I decide to give it a shot in H Oculus. Surprise, surprise same result as when I was in Maly. Damage was way sub-par to my BM damage and again I switch, leave my meter alone and just watch my dps catch the others in the run with just a few pulls. Sunday sealed the deal for me when my boyfriend asks me to run 25 Naxx with his guild and there is an SV hunter in much better gear than my own and I am not far behind him in the damage. So your girl stayed true to her BM tree and in turn Blizzard has worked out some of the kinks for her and she is onces again in a stable place. Is the spec perfect? No and Blizz is still working on some of the issues with pets and hunter mechanics in general. It is a set up from that depression BM entered with 3.0.8. That right there is all I need.

Flex that Ret!

So this past weekend my guild decides to run some BC raid content to get in some practice, get some gear for some lower members, and see how well we raid together as we are trying to move into the end game with more force. So my misadventure begins with Karazhan, which surprisingly we had more people sign up for than we actually had the room for. There was a small problem however. We had no tank. Now we HAD a tank signed up but due to circumstances beyond his control his connection crapped out which left us tank-less. Now many of us are thinking "no way this is gonna happen without a tank" my fearless guild leader (that I am sure was more determined to get his hunter some kara gear than anything else really ;)) suggests myself and one of our dks tank this thing. Now I am thinking oh crud cause
A) I have tanked very little
B) am currently specced ret which I love and
C) I have absolutely NO tank gear
In the end I ended up MTing nearly the whole raid without too much problem as I had 2 lovely 80 healers on my ass, ret holds a lot of aggro when in Righteous Fury, and most of us there knew the run well enough we didn't have too many problems. Now I DID have a few things happened that urked me a bit like certain raid members not listening because they "knew the run". Now I am sorry but I dont give a fart HOW well you think you know the run. You listen to the raid leader and you sure as hell never run ahead of the tank, especially when its somebody that is by no means a true tank and is not used to tanking as is. This led to more deaths than necessary and at least one stressed out healer ready to call it. Though it did stress me out I have to admit I had fun tanking though its not something I wanna make a habit of. Though I have to admit I am starting to look at ret a little differently than I did before.

My guild wasn't done testing my abilities to do things a retadin wasn't exactly designed to do and the next day after a late start to getting the raid together I was informed I would be not only healing but solo healing Zul Aman. HELLO panic mode. I completely lose it when they tell me this. Now I did have a healing off set I had been working on but it was in no way ready for me to heal anything but thank god my pally is a chanter and black smith and I managed to squeeze 1479 sp and 12k mana pool out of my gear. The larger problem for me was the fact I had never healed anything before. What a way to have your healing cherry popped. Over all I think it went ok we made it through some clearing and the eagle boss Akil'zon with just me healing but it became very clear I wasn't gonna be able to keep that up when we got to the bear, Nalorakk. Our tank was just getting hit way to hard for me to keep him up and the rest of the raid as well which about half of the raid was 74 or lower I believe and we were a bit undermaned. Luckily our priest Zoulkhan logs on and comes to save the day....well thats what I wanna say, unfortunatly what really happened was he saved the day on the bear but his connection issues got in the way again. Nothing like the tank rushing into the lynx bastard of a boss Halazzi and me wondering why everybody's health is getting so low he logs back in just as I oom saving the day. One more bout of solo healing on the Hexx Lord after a few wipes and Zou getting knocked cold we get thru Zul'jin with like nil issues. It was hard fought and I was shaking through most of the fights while going into a low buddhist chant of profanities at my situation it was fun. I think I really like healing but I will be damned if I make it habit of doing that while ret spec. It can be done but I wouldnt suggest it personally.

I end up tanking one more time that weekend in Magister's Terrace as a for fun run and it started out with a plan but quickly degraded into a free for all slug fest with the chief and his cat really keeping me on my toes. This time I was more just a retadin just holding aggro than a real tank which is fine with me. I dont really like tanking all that much but I could probably learn to. Healing on the other hand I think I could learn to love. I am trying to hold out for dual spec but with our currernt shortage of healers I might have to speed up my decision to make Tytanya heals or not. I love ret with all my heart and I dont wanna give it up. That said and with these past runs to go by I wouldn't be surprised if I dont get called to test the limits of the retadin again in the tank or healer role. Do I want to? Not really. Would I? Hell yes.