Mend Pet

It was a holiday yesterday up here in the North, and I decided to take the day and see how far I could get my beloved Paladin.  He was all set with his Charger at level 61, ready to head to Northrend to slay demons and red Orcs.

After about 10 hours of playing yesterday, I managed to go from 61 to 64.  That’s practically halfway done Outlands!  In a day!  Hah!

I even picked up dual specs, he’s my very first character to specialize.  I made up a prot spec for his secondary talents and tried to learn what it’s like to tank as a paladin.  I haven’t had a chance to try yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

I did want to try some instancing though.  So I jumped into LFG while questing, and hoped for the best.  I get a few “u healz?” whispers, which I promptly answered no to.  Then I got an invite.

Ramps PUG attempt #1: 2 Death Knights, a Rogue, a 64 feral Druid, and me (62 Ret/Prot).

Group Leader DK asks me if I’m a healer.  I say no, I’m ret/prot.  Druid pipes up and says she can heal, she is our most viable option for healing and doesn’t mind doing it even though it’s not her main spec.  Sounds good to me!  “Who’s tanking?”  I ask.  “I’m not, DUH, I’m BLOOD I don’t tank” says Group Leader DK (this is the same guy who insists on a ret paladin healing).  I volunteer, since it’s my second spec.  “Ghugh you are HEALING.” he says.  /facepalm.  The druid and I both say that she’s volunteered and is a better option to heal.

We run to the instance.  We zone in, I Bless everyone.  “OK so Ghugh you are healing let’s go” says Group Leader DK.  I say, “Uhh… why me?”

You have been removed from the group.

…

OKAY!  Well, it probably wouldn’t have gone well anyway. A little while later, I get another group invite

Ramps PUG Attempt #2: 3 Death Knights, a DPS Warrior and me.

“We need a healer” says DPS warrior.  I tell them it’s not my spec, but I put my healing gear on and seem to heal effectively enough for a Ramps run, and the tank is 64 so that should help.  We start running off towards Ramps.  A couple of us fail to make a jump and end up splattered on the ground underneath Ramps.  We all have a good laugh, blame Crusader Aura and start the run back to our bodies.

DK #1 has left the group.

DPS Warrior has left the group.

…

OKAY!  Looks like we’re done here.  Back to questing.  I get a whisper from a healer.  He invites me to a ramps group as DPS, says he has a tank already.  That’s a good sign!  We pull a group together quickly.

Ramps PUG Attempt #3: 1 Death Knight, 1 Feral Druid, 1 Holy Priest, 1 Elemental Shaman and me.

We made it into the instance.  This is a good sign.  We pull the first group – this is the furthest any of my PUGs have gotten.  Good sign!

We make it through the run with no Deaths.  Huzzah!  Success!  I can’t say it was a perfect run, but it was something.  We all agree to go again.  This is where the problems started.  I believe the healer and tank began to get a bit cocky.  “Just chain pull” says the level 59 healer.  “Just pull the entire room” hears the 61 DK tank.

I started noticing a strange behavior.  The DK was just… standing there.  Tanking.  He used some abilities, but he was NOT auto-attacking.  I target his target – it seems he’s always got whatever mob is BEHIND him targeted.  Man, DKs must be so easy to play if you can tank without even facing your target!  Things got worse and worse – after a wipe, he pulls before the healer is even into the zone.  He pulls when no one has mana.   He facepulls and lets the ele shaman and I try to pull the adds off of the healer.

We get to Nazan… make it through the Rider’s phase pretty smoothly, but then everyone forgets the “don’t stand in the flames” rule.  Priest gos down, Shaman goes down, Druid goes down.  It’s just me, the DK and the Dragon now.  My eyes look towards the very close instance exit and I contemplate making a run for it.  But no – I’m at nearly full health and mana, I can do this!  Holy Light!  Judgement of Wisdom!  Holy Light!  Judgement of Wisdom!  Luckily I’m regenning enough mana with my Judgements to afford my big heals.  It’s a long fight, but we take him down.  Just the two of us.

Ramps PUG Attempt #3: SUCCESS!

Today’s lesson: 

There is an inverse correlation between the number of Death Knights in a PUG and the success of the PUG.

This one is spanning two weeks because I didn’t bother with one last week.  I’m going to focus on great 3.1 guide posts, mainly Argent Tournament and Ulduar!

The Argent Tournament Tourist Guide @ Banana Shoulders
Siha has a 3 part (only 2 parts are published so far) series explaining the ins and outs of the Argent Tournament.  It certainly helped me when I found myself lost and getting my Aspirant butt kicked!

Healing Ulduar @ World of Matticus
They’ve posted up a few very helpful boss-specific guides to healing at WoM, as well as overall strategies.

Ulduar Boss Fight Videos @ The Angry Butterfly and Less QQ, More PewPew
Neg and Dro have both posted up videos of their boss fights so far in Ulduar.  I haven’t watched them all yet, but I really prefer to watch videos instead of just reading strategies.  I tend to forget what I read, but videos help to really understand what’s going on and answer more questions.

You can check out all the blogs I read on my list of Other Peoples’ Blogs!

Sorry about the lack of posts this weekend!  I was very busy slacking off.  Here’s a quick “This Week in Raiding” for last week:

Lots of lag.  Cut every raid early due to server issues.  Still managed to get new gear!

• [Valorous Cryptstalker's Spaulders]
• [The Undeath Carrier]
• [Torn Web Wrapping]
• [Ring of Invincibility]
• [Mirror of Truth]

WoW Word of the Week is taking a short hiatus.

I had a very interesting weekend in the World of Warcraft.  Of course, the Lunar Festival has started, so I spent a bit of time working on traveling around for that.  Don’t have my title yet – that’s gonna take me a while.

Decided I’m going to take a break from raiding this week.  I’ve gotten behind in housework, studying and have lost a little bit of interest in my hunter since her DPS is slightly sad.

But the big news this weekend is:

I FINALLY started leveling Ferguson!

I’ve been meaning to for quite some time, but I’ve been stuck on his spec.  I was supposed to be leveling with my boyfriend’s warlock, but he’s taking to long and I need my healer.  So I decided to go solo.  The problem was, at heart he is a holy priest, a healer.  But I don’t want it to take forever to get to 80.  So my options were:

1. Level holy, run lots of instances and take questing slow.  This is what I kind of did from 60-70.
2. Level shadow, quest quickly, then switch to holy at 79 or 80.  The problem with this, is I would be afraid that I wouldn’t know how to heal at 80.  I’d be out of practice, get thrown straight into heroics, and fail.

So I specced Holy and gave those handy Training Dummies a visit.  Is holy viable for solo leveling?

With a 70 Training Dummy, I was doing between 500 and 600 DPS.  It’s not amazing, but I deemed it as enough.

So now Ferguson is now making his way through Howling Fjord, much more quickly than I expected.

And within 5 minutes of getting to Northrend, I already had a group for Utgarde Keep.

Most of us had just stepped off the boat to HF, but it still went pretty well, especially since it’s been 3 or 4 months since I really healed anything.  I was very happy when no one died on the first boss fight.  However, we just couldn’t get the last boss down.  I still am not sure how to heal through that fight.  My DBM tells me STOP CASTING!  So, I stop casting.  However, it fails to ever give me the green light.  How long do I have to wait til I can start casting again?

Anyway, I was still happy with my ability to heal, and I don’t think questing will be that hard.  Since I’ll hopefully be running lots of instances, and I don’t care about achievements on this character, I don’t mind skipping some of the harder or more annoying quests and jumping around to new areas.

Yay, Mend Pet is once again about a Hunter AND a Priest!

Part-time Face Melter

That’s right – Our dear holiest of the holy priests converted to the Dark Side temporarily this past weekend to finish off some quest grinding to save up for that epic flying skill!

Ferguson is not only my healer, but he’s also my herb farmer.  But 375 Herbalism means nothing if you are riding a flying slug.  So, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I’d skipped two entire zones when leveling, and get some nice quest gold!  But unfortunately – it seems that holy spec’d priests aren’t so great when it comes to killing stuff.  Sure, I’ve managed to Smite my way through the SSO dailies for a few weeks, but some of these quest mobs are a bit tougher, and Smite just wasn’t doing the trick.

So I snuck over to Orgrimmar and paid a quick 15g to respec.  I just made up a talent spec – I know there are cookie cutter specs out there, but they are mostly for raiding.  A shadow priest that’s not grouping doesn’t need 25% reduced threat or even Vampiric Embrace.  So I just put the points where they seemed to make sense.

And the result?  Wow.  When I was leveling, I only had enough points put in the Shadow tree to get me Shadowform, but this time I poured almost all of my points in there, and boy can I kill things FAST.  I also no longer run out of mana… like, ever.  The new gear I’ve gotten has way more mana regen than the gear I was using to level.  It also has more +dmg, even though it’s healing gear.

I must admit – I’m enjoying playing as a Shadow priest.  However, I could never see myself raiding or even instancing as shadow – just not as much excitement as I’d like.

Anyway… after a weekend in Shadowmoon Valley and selling everything I could spare on the Auction House, I managed to conjure up the 5200g required to net myself a shiny Swift Purple Windrider!

Will I stay shadow?  Well, for the rest of the week maybe.  Finish off some more quests, I won’t be raiding much this week due to a big move happening.  It’ll give me something to do.  But I’m sure it won’t be long before I miss healing, and I’ll be back at it before you can say “pugnacious!” (Yeah, I’m not reeeally using it in a sentence.  But at least it’s there!)

Just a few short (or rather, long) levels ago, Ferguson was running a Blood Furnace PUG.  In my group, was an “extra special” hunter, whose pet kept taking extraordinary amounts of damage.  True enough, there is a lot of AoE in the Furnace, so I did what I could to keep it healed up, but it was eating away at my mana.  I flip my Recount around to the healing meters to see that I’m the only one who’s been doing any healing.  I don’t mind helping a hunter out when the damage is just too much for the Mend Pet HoT, but I figured, it simply is not the healer’s job to look after the pet.  When I questioned this hunter about why he hadn’t healed his pet at all, his response was “He’s not taking any damage… he hasn’t even died once!”

I suppose, in the end, it was partially my own fault that he wasn’t healing his pet.  The group was doing well otherwise, and I’d been pretty good about keeping his pet healed up.  Maybe he didn’t realize that during a boss fight, I simply can’t focus on it.

This got me thinking – are there other hunters out there that rely too much on their healers?  What about healers who refuse to pay any attention to pets?

What if the two were to collide?!

… Anyway, I’d like to discuss this issue that affects me doubly – under what circumstances should healers heal hunter pets?  I decided that I need to get some input on this issue, since if I’ve learned one thing through PUG-ing, it’s that everyone has different strategies and expectations when it comes to healing.

I e-mailed a few Hunter and Healer bloggers, and they were all kind enough to respond with lengthy discussions on the topic.  All were very insightful, but it seems that we all unanimously agree on what seem to be two basic logical points:

A Hunter should be responsible for their pet.

A Healer should not be completely ignorant of pets.

From a Healer standpoint, pets take the lowest priority.  It is irresponsible of a healer to let a player die while they are trying to save a pet.  However, in my opinion, it is against the principle of being a healer if pets are completely ignored.  Even if it means watching them die as you wait for a chance to toss a Renew on them, it’s imperative that you at least know what is going on and keep them in the back of your mind.  Hunters should understand if you don’t get to heal their pets, but on the other hand – if you are sitting around twiddling your thumbs while the pet is at low health, show the pet some lovin’.  Lassirra of The Hunter’s Mark discovered the same thing as me while leveling up a priest after a hunter: there are more opportunities for this than I had thought there were.

Ego from the Egotistical Priest, told me about how she has a separate group in her raid UI (using XPerl) for pets.  It is less prominent than the regular raid groups, but when she has a couple seconds of free time and mana, she can quickly have a look and give a hunter a hand.

As for hunters, pet management is key here.  Proper pet management means knowing when to toss a mend pet, and when to recall your pet to your side.  It also means not really having to worry about the issue of getting heals from the healer!  If you are keeping good control of him, your pet should not need heals!  Unfortunately, especially when still leveling, some hunter’s haven’t really taken the time to learn how much is too much for their pet, Bremere of Healing Anonymous has had similar problems with hunters in lower level instances.

But there are situations, like when a pet is off- or even main-tanking.  At that point, Mend Pet shows itself for what it truly is, an ersatz Renew.  You wouldn’t expect a tank to survive on just Renew, especially if it’s a cute little kitty-cat?  This is one of those times when the healer priority list needs to be fumbled up.  Yet still, some healers somehow forget to help a hunter out even in this situation, much to Pike’s frustration (Apect of the Hare).

Matticus of World of Matticus brought up an excellent point about PvP.  Since obviously, I’m not a big participant in the arenas, I really hadn’t thought about the value of a pet in that situation.  Those things can be deadly to a caster – and if you can keep them up a little longer, it’ll probably do you some good.

In the end, it depends on a number of factors like group composition, amount of group damage taken, spare time and spare mana.  Hunters should do what they can to take care of their pets – but when its appropriate, heals are always welcome!

I’d like to quote something Jez from DPS: We Deliver said to me:  “It’s kind of like getting a mage table in BGs – you can’t expect it, but it sure is nice when it happens ”

Thanks to all those who gave me input to help me write this post!