Everything I learned about Healing I learned in Kindergarden

I was a lost little tree, until my guild master sat me down, yes I was on a little carpet square, and taught me how to be a better healer. (Look down for the whole story!) This is basically what he taught me. This is mostly for my reference, but if you find it useful great! I know I have NO readers.

So your a tree! Your role in a raid is to heal pretty much everyone that is not the tanks. And to help out the tank healer(s) as needed. Your spells tend to be Heal Over Times (HoTs) but you have a few just plain heals and other useful buffs and debuffs.

Spells you have:

Rejuvenation:  A HoT that lasts for 18 seconds, ticks every 3 sec, and (for me) heals about 2000 every tick.  Instant cast.
Regrowth: A HoT that has an instant heal attached to the begining. It casts in about 1.5 seconds for me (with a buttload of haste) and the instant heal heals for ~5k (can crit for about 8-9k) and ticks for 1kish.
Lifebloom: A HoT that lasts for about 8 seconds, stacks to three stacks, has an instant heal at the end, and gives you back mana when it expires. Yes it's that confusing. But useful.
Nourish: A just plain heal that (when glyphed) heals more if you have more HoTs on your target. It casts in ~1 second (again with a buttload of haste) and I've seen it crit for about 10k.
Wild Growth: A HoT that can affect 5 targets within 15 yards of each other. Ticks every second, but the amount healed starts off at about 1k, then decreases with every tick.
Swiftmend: An instant cast just plain heal that can only be cast if you have a regrowth or rejuv on the target, and the glyph keeps you from consuming the HoT when you cast swiftmend. Oh SPOON! button.

I'm not going to bother with healing touch, because it's huge it's slow, and you are not a Holy Pally. And because I somehow speced out of having Nature's Swiftness.

Spec:
This spec is what my GM and I came up with. It dosen't include Celestial Focus, due to having enough haste on gear, and Nature's Swiftness got left out due to being the lesser used Oh SPOON! button.

Rotation Priority List:
As a hunter I was told "you don't really have a shot rotation, you have a shot Priority List." You basically go by what the conditions are, what's off cooldown, and "are you having to move?"

So this is the Tree Druid Priority List as of this point:
One or two people taking damage:
Regrowth--> Rejuvenation --> Nourish (repeat as needed) --> Swiftmend
Don't use Nourish unless a Regrowth is on someone. 

If mutiple (more than 3) people are taking damage (ie a decimate):
Wild Growth ---> Regrowth (person 1)--> Rejuvenation (person 2) --> Regrowth (person 3)---> etc etc. -->Nourish and Swiftmend as needed

Special cases:
- Just use Rejuvenation if someone is taking just a little damage, but kind of regullarly (ie the little lasers in HoS)
-Lifebloom is great for when you can anticipate a lot of damage is going to come in at a certain time (ie decimate, pound), get it stacked and let it expire after the damage is done.

You also may want to put Fairy Fire on the boss (after the tank pulls!) if there is no other druids in your group.

Vuhdo: (My favorite addon EVER)
Set it up so it looks how you like it, I like class colors, HoT icons instead of just little colored blocks, and I have the swiftmend showing.

I got the great piece of advice to put only your instant cast spells on just plain mouse buttons (with no modifier) so you can heal and run, or jump around like a tard. When you press a modifier key to cast your spell (ie Regrowth is Alt+left click) you don't have to hold down your modifier key until the cast is done. Really! You DON'T!

Also keep in mind your vent push to talk key when deciding on your modifier keys. Clicking into vent everytime you have to decurse gets annoying after a bit.

That is basically it.

Raid Healer Kindergarden was not as embarassing as it could have been

*Brushes dust off of blog* Yeah, between work, actually playing the game and my other hobbies, my blog has been neglected a bit.

So, since I last posted, I've changed guilds twice. The first change came when several of my in game friends and I went from our RP/maybe raiding/Where'd the GM go? guild to a guild that at the time was trying to casually progress through content. Not long, maybe 3 weeks, after we joined that guild they decided that they wanted to be more hardcore, and recruited a lot. There were some issues and it basically turned into a hardcore progression guild with loot issues, personalities that some of us didn't get along with, and some other things we just didn't agree with. So several people who had joined with the "casual, friendly and most of all fun" progression in mind split off and founded a different guild. It was an amicable split.

Yesterday was our first guild outing. We tried to do ToGC 10. That raid is HARD. We bashed our head into the beasts and got Gormuk the Impaler down one time, but couldn't get the worms down. There was even "Yeah, I died.... 'cause I stood in the fire like an idiot" coming from me. We ended up running out switching it to normal and roflstomping normal 10. It was fun. We even managed to get the speed kill achievement on the twins. I don't think I can ever do Anub right though. It was messy, but we got through it.

Afterwords, we tried to get a group together to do the weekly, but couldn't because about the guild was saved, and when you have about 13 people, that's not enough people to go kill Dragon in SPACE! A few people were going to go grab some level 70 alts (some people stayed on their mains) and go stomp Kara for the benefit of Paladin on dial up. I was about ready to say "Ooooh! Take me take me!" when our GM, who is a Boomchicken/Tree asked if I could hang around and talk for a bit. He then proceded to look at my spec, gear, and glyphs to figure out why I was not healing to my full potential. I knew I wasn't, and I had been reading and researching, and just not being able to figure out what I was doing wrong on my own, but too embarassed to ask.

Diversion story! My little sister has a friend that is home schooled. She is in a musical group with this friend. When the musical group has performances at school events or other such venues, I tend to notice something. This friend can't seem to wait in line, and could use a lesson in cafeteria etiquette. She is very smart and plays her musical instrument quite well.  She's just a little behind socially.

That is how I feel as a healer. I basically "home schooled" myself as a tree. I read blogs, I read forums, I dungeon leveled, but in a raid, I am behind on social healing. I kinda made my "rotation" up out of thin air. It was basically Rejuv, Nourish, Nourish, Nourish, Swiftmend if things get hairy, and Wild Growth to top off the melee. I had the Rapid Rejuvination glyph, so I was casting rejuvination a LOT because I have a ton of haste. I'm gonna put his advice in another post so as to make this one longer (TOO LATE!), but I feel I have a better grip on what I'm doing now. My spec and glyphs and style now compliment each other instead of me trying to work around them. I rearanged everything in Vuhdo, so I'm still trying to use my old key combos and getting a "there is nothing to dispel!" or "That spell is not ready yet" far too often.

I think I'm going to try to pug the weekly to test everything out. It's Malygos this week, and the last time I went people had no idea how not to get one shotted coming out of the tornado thing. Should be fun.

Tales of Fail #1

I figured I need to get some of my really bad PuG stories down in writing before I forget about them. Both of these are from Baby Druid's leveling experience. When I leveled my hunter, I did a total of 8 5 man dungeons before she hit level 80. So, to get my druid some healing experience, I dungeon leveled her.

Tale the First- BRD
BRD is a looooong complicated and kind of confusing instance that lists the appropriate level range as 49-58. I ran it on Milli 3 different times before I finally got the achievement for it. The first time, we started with a DK tank, me healing, a warlock, a warrior and I think a rogue for DPS. We got through the ring event, of course someone got locked in the room with the boss, and were on the way down to the fire elemental boss. Someone has to go afk for a minute and the rest of us stand around and twiddle our thumbs and play with mini pets and tree dance. Suddenly the person that is afk is getting eaten by one of the giant patrolling iron things. I try to heal them, I get eaten, and we wipe. Person comes back from being afk, and we run back and move on. We get to the boss and the tank and two of the DPS die very quickly, and as far as I remember due to their own stupidity. The warlock and I keep each other going long enough to kill it. At about that point the DK tank had had enough and leaves. We look for a new tank and find a level 49 paladin. She's polite and generally competent even if she is a bit squishy due to being 4 levels lower than the mobs we're fighting. After a few minutes the warrior dps leaves and we get, another warrior! This one is competent and polite and dosen't try to off tank. We make our way to the bar, eventually. At the begining of the run, the warlock and I are getting along great, but by this point, we're going "Rrrr" at each other. We wipe due to pulling the entire bar and the boss all at once, but we run back and eventually get it right. We end up calling it after the next pull when we wipe yet again.

The next time I went, I went with my acquired paladin. I did a ZF run with this paladin who went afk at the bottom of the stairs as we started the stair event... Three wipes later he's been kicked and we proceed to 4 man the rest of the instance with the tank that figured that I wasn't too squishy and he didn't need to get adds off me. But the paladin actually turned out to be okay and kinda nice. I ended up running a lot of instances with him through the later part of old world and Outland. But on this run I get brought in half way through since their previous healer d/c'd. There was a DK dps that had deathgripitis and kept trying to tank. That group disolved rather quickly when the paladin rage quit.

The third and final time I went to BRD, the warlock from the first run, he had a paladin at about the same level. We went in through the back door, took out the bar, the seven and got our achievement very quickly, then went back through the rest of the instance. I then decided I was never ever ever going back to BRD again, at least until next brewfest.

Tale the Second- Slave Pens
Baby Druid was level 67 and getting bored of questing in Outland and really ready to move on to Northrend. So I put her in lfg for healing Underbog and a few other assorted instances. When we get our group together the average level is a little better suited for Slave Pens rather than Underbog so we head over to that instance entrance and we're off. The paladin tank had a familiar looking weapon though. I do a quick inspect and see that it's the same caster mace I have. I also look at his talents and see reassuring points in the protection tree. I brush off the caster mace as a "it was probably an upgrade to a quest green he had in old world and he just hasn't found anything better yet." As we go, I'm finding the healing to be a little bit harder than I would expect it to be, but I'd been healing an overgeared and overleveled tank for the last few instances that I'd been doing, so I figured this was just him being several levels lower than me. We get to the second boss and the tank asks if he would be a good raid tank. I think "I'm not peeling aggro off of him, and squishyness can be fixed." I reply "You're doing okay on this." The mage, who is decked out in heirlooms, also says something to the effect of "You're doing fine enough." The tank then decides that after a smoke break (or tree dance break if you're me) that he's going to go "balls out" for the rest of the run and procedes to say "balls out" as often as possible. While we were stopped, I took the time to really inspect the tank. I look at his gear and every piece of it is spell power plate or spell power weapons and accessories.

Now, I will admit to having caused a wipe or two due to getting distracted by looting things or picking flowers, but that tends to only happen when you have a tired group and nobody is really paying any attention to what the others are doing. We wipe once on that trash that requires the tank to pick up stragglers before they get to the healer (ie all trash). In this group we also have a shaman and a balance druid. I start struggling with the pace the tank is setting, and I notice that the shaman is helping to pick up some of the slack, and healing herself as needed. I manage to get myself into a tight, yet fixable healing spot, because I got silenced or stunned or the tank was squishy and suddenly the balance druid shifts out of moonkin form and pops tranquility. After we're done and I'm getting ready to thank the balance druid, he starts bragging. "Thank goodness I'm here or we wouldn't have survived that!" That's a very good way to make me mad. There's back up healing and then there's that. We start the escort event that leads to the final boss and the balance druid is continuing to heal and jump about in range of the mobs. I stop healing him at that point. He gets rezed and we take out the boss. The tank and the balance druid ask if we'd like to do another dungeon or do this one again. The mage replies "oh I've gotta dash, I have a raid I have to get to." The paladin and druid both ask to go along on the raid. I'm quietly facepalming in the corner.

Baby Druid is scared of heroics

Patch 3.3 introduced the new looking for group interface. I've used it a few (times a day) to find dungeons for Milli. I've mostly been dungeon leveling her, since level 18, and I'm loving the new interface. I don't have to spam a channel and beg guildies and friends to run stuff with me, and then it teleports me straight there and back, and instances are often painless and quick.Well, the ones that aren't are a completely different story.

It does however tend to stick me in the same dungeon over and over and over. The other day I had managed to find a mildly competent paladin tank and we kept grouping since we could both put up with each other. We ran DTK three time in a row. And the system thinks that Gundrak and HoS are the only things I can heal at the moment. There are only so many rhinos a girl can stand.

But she's getting so close to 80, and random heroic groups.

I've also been poking about the WoW blogosphere and have found that a lot of groups tend to react badly when a new 80 is placed in their random heroic group. Tam's example about noobcow over at Rightous Orbs is what I'm afraid is going to happen to me when I get to the point of being able to heal heroics. I think I'm going to get kicked from any group I get into faster than a gnome that got lost in Thunder Bluff. Guess I need to get on my crafted epics shopping list.

In which DoHP makes a post about WoW, also introduction

In an effort to keep all my World of Warcraft stuff off the blog I share with my friends, I'm going to try to put it all here.

So, I've been playing almost a year, and have found a nice server in Wyrmrest Accord.

My healer is on her way to 80, and will always be my baby druid even when she's all grown up and outgears my main.