It made like half the raiders late, some were never able to log on, there were a lot of DC’s going on, so for about half an hour we were waiting around the entrance to Ulduar ganking horde, ahaha I would lay down alone on the ground, two rogues steatlhed near me, and sure enough horde would just come and attack me haha, they would get sapped and the guild would decend on the unsuspecting horde groups.  It is good fun for bored people haha.

Finally we gave up on Ulduar due to lack of people, and were dicussing what we should do, all sorts of old BC raids were popping up, we decided on the Sunwell, since it sounded all badass n what not.  I had never done it before, like most BC raids with the exclusion of Karahzan. 

I planned on goofing off a bit in the raid, so I brought my RP gear to heal in haha, always fun, and we set out, it was a pretty tough at first getting down the pulls n what not, because people were goofing off, I had to get into my real healing gear and keep people alive.  The fights were pretty easy with the gear levels we had and the dps we were putting out, it was just figuring out how to coordinate the fights, all the while people were DCing and some had been on before the patch was applied and then had to download it before being able to log back on.  I have to say though, that this raid really must have lived up to its fabled reputation as hella hard at 70.  We can only hope that Icecrown Citadel will be like sunwell and not like ToGC because then it would actualy be a challenge to kill the Liche King.

Crack that one down for the acheivment!  Woot!

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?

Innoue SoulStrider, the Great Dreamer, head of the SoulStrider family.

• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

Well mainly it is either 10 or 25man raids, though I try to do the daily Heroic for the extra emblems of Triumph, plus I like to get heirloom gear for my alts.

• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?

Hmm, I think it is a tossup between nourish and rejuvenation, or maybe a combo of the two, nourish because it does some nice heals and it is a really fast cast, and rejuv because with my sexy set 4 bonus on my tier 9, it crits, and I can rest assured that my targets will survive.

• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?

Easy one, healing touch, it is the slowest heal ever, and it’s funny, but my nourish either heals for as much or crits for more than what healing touch does in its nine hour cast, though I will admit I do have an insta cast macro, where when I click it, it casts nature’s swiftness and healing touch becomes an insta cast.  It is for those “Oh crap!!” emergencies.

• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?

Moar HoTs.  Haha, yeah, as a druid we love our HoTs (Heal over time) and it is a huge advantage because we don’t need any haste to keep up with the other healing classes, we load up the tank with HoT’s and throw in a nourish and bam, it’s easy peasy to keep people alive.  With our HoT’s we can even “pre-heal” our tanks so they are ready when they engage an enemy, they go in with the HoT’s loaded and are fine without heals for a few. 

• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?

As a jack of all trades we suffer from the “not the best at anything” syndrom, while we can really kick some ass and take names with our heals, it is true that we don’t have any major hella good heals for oh crap instances, except with a natures swiftness and healing touch combo, but its no lay on hands, or riptide ect.

• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?

Well this is a bit of a pickle of a question, because normally when I am healing in a raid they just assign me to raid heals because I am a tree, and I can use wild growth and HoT’s the raid crew, and this is true, it is really easy for me to raid heal, but I can also heal the MT and OT pretty good as well, when I was raiding with Zallu, I focused on the MT and he focused on the OF and we both did raid heals and it worked really well.  So I can’t really say if there is a specific place that is best for me and my class because we are so versatile.

• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?

Other druids or a shaman.  The funny thing is, I can’t say I have much experience healing with other classes, though aside from a few 25VoA’s for the longest time I only did 10man raids, now with my new guild I am working with 25mans and more classes, Priests and Paladins but in my old guild it was just me and Riseer, an epic shammy healer.  And now raiding with Zallu has opened my eyes to how much I like healing with another druid in the party haha.

• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?

Hmm, I’m not really sure haha, since my experience with other classes is limited, and I don’t want to rap on another class when I really don’t know much about them.  So I’ll just leave it at that.

• What is your worst habit as a healer?

Well there is this nifty program called Healbot, and since I have grown so attached to it I love my click a button on my mouse and the spell works, one of the problems that go with that is clicking when another healing isn’t needed.  My favorite thing to do is use rejuvenation when there is already a rejuvenation on the target, I am still not sure how or why this habit appeared, but I’m still working on mastering that.

• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?

People yelling out that they need heals, yes I can see your health is dropping, but hey, look at the tanks, his/hers is dropping as well, probably more so, and they are infinitely more important than you.  I will heal you the moment I can, so don’t go making a macro screaming help whenever you think you need it, because chances are, you don’t.

• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?

Yes, very much so actually.  Druid are very versatile and can basically perform any need to do with healing, we can heal multiple targets at once, help in those sticky situations where the tank needs a little extra boost, all sorts of things, we can help pick up main heals or raid heals, we work well with others, plus that battle rez is hella convenient. 

• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?

Uh, I guess I just got recount recently, not that I use it much, usually I forget about it until it asks me if I want to reset the data, and I’m like, oh yeah, that thing.  Usually I get told that I am doing well or that I’m sucking it up, I go off the fact that if a lot of raid members are dying and I’m raid heals, then I am doing poorly.  If I am tank and the tank dies, I am doing poorly, but if I am tank heals and there are raid member dying, I am still doing poorly because I know I can main tank heal and help out with raid heals as well.  I was joking with Zallu the other day about ToGC10man, where we fight the faction champs, I was like, I bet you could solo heal this one, and he says, “On regular I could, but not Heroic.”  Funny thing is, I really bet he could, druids just rock that hard

• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?

That since we have wild growth we are only good for raid heals, and that we can’t heal the main tank or off tank.  And that if the tank dies while I am healing raid it is somehow my fault for not throwing in that last heal that would have saved us all.  And rightfully so, I’m sure I could have tossed in my instant cast macro and given him that little boost, but when I get consistently thrown as raid heals and underestimated in pugs, then I feel a little less inclined to help out that arrogant priest who thinks he can do it all.  (nothing against priests, just arrogant buttheads who think they are the best)

• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?

How to use swiftmend and nature’s swiftness effectively, and which HoT spells to use when.  I know for the longest time I never used rejuvenation because I just didn’t think it was very good, only later, and to my embarrassment, Rejuv is one of the best HoT’s because it has a low mana cost and you can use swiftmend to get a nice instant cast, can you guess that I never used swiftmend either?  Haha.  I’m still learning things about my class that I am surprised I never knew, things that make me feel foolish for not knowing, yet a better healer once learned.  I think it is only through trial and error that you can fine tune your skills as a druid healer.

• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?

There is a bit of over heal, which is too bad, since I have been trying to cut down on that, though it is a bit competitive when I am healing the tank and raids, haha, I might cast a heal only to see someone else topped off that particular dps’s health.  Either way, I am usually third from the top on healing when in 25’s and second on 10mans because we two heal them haha, and Zallu is way OP.

• Haste or Crit and why?

Err crit I guess, since as a druid we don’t really need haste, my HoT’s are lovely, and nourish is a really fast cast, so I do love to see high numbers when my heals go off, though spell power and spirit are my main factors.  Spell power and spirit are a druids bread and butter, or so I have been told haha.

• What healing class do you feel you understand least?

I would have to say, Disc Priests, they are the weirdest spec I have ever seen, haha, I love being a druid because we have a few heals and spells that are simple to use and effective.  It seems like Disc Priests have a heck of a lot of things to use, all sorts of spells to remember, and all those bubbles and shields, idk, I haven’t gotten my priest up very high yet, but I want to do a Disc spec just to try and figure things out haha.

• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?

Healbot, that’s it.  I love the one click aspect of it, all I have to do is click a certain button on my mouse key and boom, my spell is cast, I can pay attention to people’s health via the health bars arranged by healbot and I can see debuffs, like poisons, or curses that I can either remove or abolish!  I love it

• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

Again, spirit and spell power are a druids bread and butter, though I do enjoy crit for those lovely high numbers.  I usually am pretty balanced when it comes to stacking my stats, I feel that I can be a better healer overall that way, instead of say, just focusing on crits, so that I have huge crit heals, but run out of mana too fast or something like that.

We start er up, and I see that we have the 50something attempts, bringing back what I had heard, that if you screw up too much you fail the raid.  It got me pretty nervous, so much so that I screwed us up on the first beast of the monsters, I walked to close to the boss who, I never knew this until now, has an AoE that hurts all sorts of nasty.  I know!!  I am an idiot, my GL(Druk) even asked if anyone had any questions, it didn’t even occur to me that such a thing was possible.

So after that fail run, in which I felt entirely foolish, we tried again, this time I stayed away from the boss and made sure not to get cornered by stupid flame bombs (or whatever they are called).  The Impaler himself was impaled, just as two lovely Jormungers came out to say hello, this fight has always drove me crazy because I hate the flame buff/debuff and I hate the poison one even more, but we passed through this phase easily enough.  Then came Icehowl, the terrible frozen terror, blah blah blah, yeah made me a little nervous when I found out there was no speed boost, but we were competent enough not to get hit, so that was nice.  He too fell to our hungry blades.

Then came Jarraxus, I’m sure that isn’t spelled right, but who cares, he is a demon, therefore his opinions are null and void ;P  We managed to die on this one spectacularly, our offtank, bless his cute little gnome soul, thought that the fel inferno guys had aggro and needed to be tanked, while he had the sister n what not, well he was beaten and burned to death, and we then felt the fury of the Demon Lord.  What a jerk.

But we were not to be denied, with a fury of ten hero’s angry and well aware of their limited attempts, we slew the foolish Eredar Lord and his little minions along with him, boor Wilfred Fizzlebang, the lone gnome who didn’t survive, the memory of his bravery will be remembered for ages to come, at least I think it will.  But yeah, we rocked it out, gnome death aside, we taught that nasty demon a lesson, and we were more than ready to kick some horde butt because thats what the Alliance does!!  (no offense to you horde, whos butt we kick ;P)

And as we were jokingly (over vent) predicting the worst possible combos to have for enemies, we watched in shock and horror as our enemies dropped to the arena floor.  Oh god, no its not, it is!!  D;  A tree and a healy shaman, what could be worse?  Eegads is that a motherF*&#^$&# spell locking warlock?  A fearing/silencing shadow preist???  A warrior and ret pally?  OMFG, why not throw the bloody rogue in there to make sure no possible way of winning.  Yes this was our terra bad combo of enemies, its like, omg, how the heck are we supposed to beat this?  When I am consistantly, being:

• Spell locked
• Feared for 10 fricken seconds
• Scienced

Ok, this was really really sad, since we were doing pretty well before this, only a total of two wipes before these douche bags happened to come along and ruin everything   Zallu reported having the same problems of being silenced, feared and spell locked, not to mention having that ret pally come in and stun us, and then rape us while we are dazed.  So we thought, lets have our shammy switch from dps to heals, to help keep us all up, and loe and behold, it doesn’t help, not even a little, since the shammy was butt raped like the rest of us healers.

We couldn’t seem to CC the druid and the shaman enough for us to burst down the warrior, or when we finially manged to, the ret pally would have finished off the last of the healers, it was rediculous, we brought in a preist to do mass dispels and had the shammy go back to dps, it didn’t help, after depleting our attempts to 30, we said to hell with it and gave up for the night, we were all very tired, and very frustrated at that point, and that is when the game is no fun at all. 

So hopefully tonight we will be able to see a solution to this nasty predicament, since it sucks all kinds of balls,  or we will just let it reset and try again some other time, maybe we can do the Ulduar Hard Modes tonight, it seems a hella lot easier, and cheaper (repair costs) than attempting those faction champions again.

It was a surprisingly easy fight once we were able to get everyone coordinated, I found the twins to be harder just because of all those nasty orbs that fly around, yikes!  But the third phase was a bit more tricky due to the fact that I was spamming Wild growth and nourish constantly until we got a heroism and downed the sucker haha.  Though come to think of it, I wasn’t at my best here with heals, idk what was up, but I’m usually third on the charts, Zallu is our sick other druid healer who pwns us all, haha.  I need to take tips from him.  Overall a very successful attempt at ToC.

Also on a side note, we killed Onyxia right before ToC and I got her head, woot,  I’m sporting a new ring haha.

Now to just be there when they down 25 Yogg!!!

What “inspired” me to make a blog about being a druid tree in WoW was reading some of the blogs of other healers on various servers, and I thought, what the heck, lets try it out.

My character’s name is Innoue, on the Ravenholdt server, and she is my main character, and only 80 since I absolutely hate leveling until I hit Northrend, which takes me a while on the alts.  Come on over and say hi to me   For a long time I was with a guild called Silent Symphony, and it is probably the best guild ever for builing in game friendships and meeting other players.  It is a partial RP/Raid guild though the raiding came to a standstill, and since I wanted to be ready for end game raiding content, I left, with much sorrow, though all my alts still reside there.  I am now a proud member of The Dark Passion, a really great raiding guild with friendly folks.

I enjoy RP and sooner or later I will have a blog with my character’s background history and storyline as well as her personality traits.

I started off as a boomkin and really enjoyed the DPS part of the game.  Pre Wrath I ended up taking a break from WoW and started again when the expansion came out, though I still ended up taking another three month long break from WoW before hitting 80.  I left because I was playing too much and my social life had been devoured haha.  It’s a shame really.  But once I felt I had things under control I eased myself back into the game.  Upon returning I found that my guild was doing Naxx raids, and being excited about this, I cruised to 80 pretty quickly.  My guildmates were more than happy to help me in Heroics to get decently geared for Naxx, but the more we raided the more we had too many dps and had to ask friends to heal.  It was then that I made the leap.  It was more of a decision that I would occasionaly heal for the guild, but in the end it became almost completly healing.  And then I was all geared out as a healer and my boom gear stank. 

Tragic as it was, I gave up being a boomkin and turned full heal spec.  Though the more I think about it, the more I find I really like being a healer, its challenging and keeps me interested in the raids, I have to pay attention and not just spam attacks.

Eventually we hit Ulduar and were finally able to get to General Vez(something or other) and we couldn’t take him down.  Still we were feeling pretty accomplished.  It was then that there was a huge decline in our raiding, members didn’t show up or were not wanting to raid.  After several weeks of no raiding I felt it was time to say goodbye to my guildfriends and seek a new guild that was more raiding focused.  I kept my alts in SS so that I can always visit and joke with my pals in the guild. 

So now I am a full healer in a raiding guild, and I guess I will be posting my experiences here and other fun tidbits that I encounter during the game.  Until my next post, c yah!