My Priest is still 72, and has been since week 2 of Wrath being released.

Someday I will start leveling the Priest, but I’m really getting tired of leveling in Northrend. In the meantime, I’ve got no Priestly idea how they work at end game these days.

First off, don’t feel bad about your performance in terms of how your group responded. The first rule of the Pit of Saron guantlet is, you go at the pace the tank feels comfortable with in order to grab all the aggro. It is truly, 100% the tanks responsibility to grab aggro on all mobs, including the small skeletons that get spawned along the way.

If the tank does not have the gear in terms of health/avoidance to survive to the steel disc half way up, or from that point to the end with minimal heals, then the tank needs to pause early and wait for heals, making sure things are kept off of you.

As a healer, it is your responsibility to let the tank grab aggro, but when it’s necessary, throw the heals. If you start healing because the tank is about to die, and you get swarmed from the aggro, guess what; it’s not all your fault.

Yes, it is always good to wait on heals until you’re sure the tank has established threat on all mobs to overtake potential heal aggro. WHEN YOU HAVE THE LUXURY.

If the tank is dropping like a stone and hasn’t got aggro yet, you’re presented with two choices; don’t heal and let him die and the group wipes, or heal and glow like a little Sun to the ungrabbed enemies and die when they come for you and then the tank, who was dropping like a stone, dies anyway.

Does this sound like a situation where it’s all the healer’s fault?

When groups were first gearing up, most of the ones I saw had to take the guantlet in stages. Only when tanks got geared well enough did it become the standard to just dash to the center, and then dash to the end.

Sounds to me like you’re still starting and getting there, but so is the tank, and in this situation rather than adjusting tactics based on group capability, the tank mindlessly zerged as he’d seen everyone do before.

Prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance. He didn’t have a proper plan in place prior to the pull, and so his piss poor paws got pounded.

Cheer up! Trees are OP when you get a little better gear. Trust me.

If you find you need a fast big heal as an oh shit button, you might want to think about speccing into Nature’s Swiftness, and then setting up a practised sequence of Nature’s Swiftness/Healing Touch for a super fast instant cast oh shit big heal.

I don’t do that on my Druid, personally, because I am geared anough not to need it on heroics, in fact I havebn’t cast Healing Touch in like 4 months. But I do have Nature’s Swiftness and Healing Wave set up for my Shaman, as I learn, and I use that instant big heal all the damn time. Less now that I passed 2k +healing, and Chain and Lesser and Riptide are taking the slack, but it’s nice to have it right there if someone (like a clothie) pulls aggro and drops to 200 health in one shot.

I play a healer. I have a resto druid and a holy priest; I restarted playing the game in late January, and my priest just dinged 80 about a week ago. I’d been holding off on trying a heroic until two days ago, because I was nervous that my gear wouldn’t be good enough, and I’d never done any heroics in BC, so I didn’t know what to expect. Sunday, I queue up, I get through h Nexus, and then h Old Kingdom, no sweat. According to the “hardest heroics” poll, OK is supposed to be quite tough, so I decide heroics aren’t so bad after all, but I still want to go back to the regular ICC 5-mans a couple times.

Yesterday I’m online, and a new dps from my guild sends out a gchat asking for a healer for the final boss of PoS. I say I’ll go. So after a couple minutes the group summons me, and lo and behold, it’s not regular PoS, it’s heroic PoS. I don’t say anything, admittedly mostly because I don’t want to get yelled at, and because I’ve run it twice on normal and never had a problem with the instance. So I cross my fingers, and we run to the hill before the gauntlet, and I follow two dps towards the left to go around the trash mobs. A minute later the tank comes barreling up the hill on his mount, straight into all 6 mobs. Before I can even dismount, he’s dead. DPS is cranky, tank says he’s used to killing them, we go back, kill them, and start the gauntlet. On the first leg, the tank, who has 32K health, gets smashed by icicles, and mobs, and his health is falling fast. I throw a shield, a renew and a PoM to try to keep him up till the circle, but he hasn’t gotten all the mobs’ aggro, so they all come for me, and we wipe. More complaining, and one of the dps says, no heals on the run until we get to the circle and the tank can get aggro, ok? So everyone agrees, and we make it through the first circle, I get the tank up to 100% and shield him for the last leg, but then we wipe at the top because the tank has about 3% health once he makes it to the circle and I’m panicking, my instant cast spells aren’t enough of a band-aid to keep him up until I can get a real one off and before I remember DH he’s dead. Everyone yells at me, and asks where the heals were, I try to explain that they said no heals and that I can’t run and get off a big heal simultaneously, that’s for druids, or disc priests, the tank /facepalms and I get booted from the group. They go on to complete the run with a different healer.

So, clearly I was doing something wrong. They were able to get through with a different healer, and while I’ve never gotten any complaints about my healing before, that seems implies that I have some more learning to do or there’s some strategy I’m not grasping. I checked online (wowhead, wowwiki) … Is there something I’m missing about that gauntlet run? That I should have been doing, but wasn’t? Maybe I’m just not geared well enough for that heroic? My gs is 1928 according to wow-heroes, and I have over 18500 mana and +1750 healing. I love healing, and I’ve never had terrible pug experience before, but how’s a healer supposed to learn what she’s doing wrong if no one takes the extra 2 minutes to explain their expectations.

Well I got a DK tank. No biggie my gear is good enough to heal that. She doesn’t take much damage. I did the switches on Hadronox. I was kinda bored. Everything even bosses die really fast these days in regular heroics. So we get the chicken boss. I comment, since I am bored and have time to type, as a paladin healer, on a boss fight, that her tanking skills are really good. We finish the fight and she tells me she just dinged 80 yesterday. She said she was in mostly blues, so I inspect, and sure enough. I said she will be a great tank. She asked if I want to do another she needs the gear.

Sure says I.

We get H PoS she is ready to back out. I said no I got this. She made it through the first boss fine, but she dies twice on the second boss. Well we had an elemental shaman with some heal gear and a resto spec. I asked if anyone else could heal. And I magically became the tank. Now my tank gear is ICC ToC stuff. My Dodge is like 30%, health over 40k unbuffed, that sort of thing. She is impressed. I said look if the tank gear drops it is your’s I don’t need it.

I proceed to do the last 2 bosses and the pull the ramp without the exploit, because you know the battered hilt would pay for the Pillars of Might. She got some nice upgrades. She appreciated the help. I let her tank the fights first. I healed her through the tunnel fight, and she tried both Ick and Tyrannus. I don’t care that I had a few wipes. Everyone was glad to help the new person out. There was also a slightly undergeared mage there, who got nice upgrades as well.

So Peannut the gnome DK on the Scilla server good luck and I hope you meet some more nice people. I said then, and I will say it again. I would heal for people like you anytime.
.-= Arkaneena´s last blog ..Tier Piece or Nontier Piece That is the Question =-.

However, I still would like a “friends” list that would work as others have suggested: preferentially queue me with people on it. THAT would be sweet!

One of our guildies (rogue) hit 80 yesterday. I promised to run her through at least one heroic. We were able to fill the group except for no guild tanks were online at that moment. We queued into a random within 30 seconds. The rogue was having somewhat of a hard time… but our ‘guest’ tank (druid) realized what was going on and was extremely patient. While he could not provide advice for the rogue… he certainly made the fights easier. The ultimate display of patience came when he took us through two more runs and then wished the new 80 the best of luck.

What I wish is that there was a cross-server friends list, where if you find yourself grouped with some really nice folks, you could exchange friends lists.
You put them on your list, they put you on theirs, and if the random generator sees two people who BOTH are on each other’s friends list, it matches them up together by preference, if possible.

Anyone cares to throw a post at te official forums under “Sugestions”?
I can do it at the Europe forums.

BBB, i read your blog all the time and i love it, what i love mostly is the way you treat “asshats” and funny enough i wanted to send you an email today about an accident that happened with me in gundrak heroic last night.

i queued for daily and it was gundrak , i enter there with 3 newly dinged dpsers, and a shammy with an ego as big as his ass it seems, he shouted when he entered : OMG WHY I ALWAYS GET NOOBS !!!! so i nicely told him to leave if he doesn’t want to do the instance with us, he replied with : pull today ? which made me focus my warrior’s rage on him as he was very rude so i replied saying : i will pull tomorrow and sat down, ofc he pulled the mobs and i reacted and tanked them. although my warrior is fairly geared with 4 t9 and mostly ilvl 232 items, i was topping the meter but i didn’t care tbh, it was just gundrak not HOR, plus it was nice seeing my warrior topping the meter as thank as that is something i can only get on my druid :P

Anyway we kill the boss and the druid moonkin ask me something so i stop pulling to reply to him, the shaman meanwhile says: damn noobs i ll solo this, and pulls more mobs, i let him die and don’t tank them until he dies, so after this pull i asked him to leave as we like to continue the run on our own, he said with pleasure, he hearth out and dont leave teh group .

Now, what followed was one of the things i hate in the new vote to kick option, we were not able to do that to him and kept getting this message:” players can not be vote to kick in combat or shortly after combat” so we were waiting there in gundrak while he was doing dailies!!! we ask him again to leave and he refuses! so i said that i am willing to go make coffee irl and chat with u guys until the option to vote to kick is available, funny enough they all replied to it and we started asking about what happened with us during the day, work, school and such , which pissed off the shammy too much until he said : omg nabs !!! so then I madly said : i have 6 lvl 80s and this is my newest alt !! so i am not a noob ! -the Spirest and Moonkin agrees as they too have many alts- if you just grew hair on your chin and think u are on top of the world because u have a high gearscore then you really must go outside your room a little!

vote to kick was available after that, and we went to do 4 more heroics with different healers without any problems :)

TL:DR; so moral of that day to me was :

1- nice ppl will always exist in WOW even if there are rude ppl as well
2- the vote to kick option has to be changed or improved .

thx for reading :)