Normally in the Warcrafts I’m just a DPS junkie; Yoshi, Leslie and Rei bring the damage and big yellow numbers float away. To quote FFX2!Rikku in Warrior mode, “I cut things and we win? I can handle that.”
And then there is old man Phil, the old man of awesomesauce. (Previously in MMO-land, Kopii Yoshi filled the healer role, and still does, but she does so now in the capacity of a villain.) Much like his CoH incarnation, he’s all about the heals and the buffing… and how he is NOT some indicator that I have daddy issues (I don’t, he just makes up for how I really don’t have as-recent-as-possible pictures of father readily available… or at all, actually). I struggled with healing at first– I’d run out of mana stupidly fast, and I didn’t have an efficient rotation. Several months of heroic 5-mans, the installation of Healbot and prodding from boss and Robert later and I’ve mostly been able to resolve the “running out of mana mid-fight” part with gear and mp5 gems, and I am actually kind of awesome at healing 5-man dungeons. Yay!
Recently it became time to fling everyone into raids because I was at the limit of what I could get with Triumph emblems and boss drops, and the intake of Frost emblems via the Random Dungeon was too slow by itself. Yoshi, Leslie and Rei haven’t had issues getting into ICC and other raids, but Phil… er…
…first off, let’s just say that the disaster that was healing 10-man Trial of the Crusader NEVER HAPPENED, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly mistaken. (Though, in my defense and in hindsight, it failed not only because I sucked and was sliiiiightly undergeared for it, but also because the raid leader thought it would be a good idea to make me solo-heal it because he couldn’t be arsed to find a second healer yet wasted, like, 20 minutes finding a shammy ’cause he wanted heroism. Boo this man.)
Nonetheless, after that, I kinda developed this stupidly irrational and COMPLETELY unfounded phobia of raid healing. I was convinced that if I ever threw Phil into a raid as a healer that I would suck horribly and cause wipefest-palooza and totally ruin 9 people’s day. Never mind that I have roughly an 85% success rate in the hardest 5-man dungeon (Halls of Reflection) and that if I sucked as badly as I thought I do, ALL my attempts to heal would crash and burn, or that boss, Robert, Maddy and other guildies have taken notice of my not-fail… nope, surely I would fail horribly if I joined a raid as a healer. >_>
Put another way, the thought of raid healing gave me the same “oh shit I can’t do this” feeling as the first time I drove a car (specifically, the moment that laid bare the fact that I had grown up on Mario Kart, and that everything I thought I knew about driving was the OPPOSITE of what it actually entailed).
How did I pile up additional Frost emblems, if I could not raid as a healer? I cheated by going into the weekly raids and VoA runs in Shadow Priest mode (but still wearing my healer gear for the mana regen, even if it meant taking a hit to my DPS). This is also when I broke heads on Vent when others realized that old man in their raid was neither old nor a man. (Reverse trap!) It worked thanks to things being too chaotic for anyone to bother inspecting my gear…
…until today… er… yesterday.
I was 4 frost emblems away from getting a healer trinket (Purified Lunar Dust), I’d already used up my weekly raid and daily random, and there weren’t any VoA teams because the Alliance didn’t have Wintergrasp. That left… 10-man ICC teams calling for DPS (and heals… and tanks… but raids ALWAYS need those). Pulling the “Shadow Priest Cardboard Box” trick would be a stretch here, ICC raid leaders are easy to catch onto those things, but dammit I wanted that trinket and if I could at least make it through two boss battles before getting caught and booted, that would be enough, right?
I threw in Phil in his Shadow Priest cardboard box. Marrowgar and Deathwhisper go down, and nobody makes a peep about Phil’s rather low DPS because things have gone rather smoothly across the board. Even the Gunship goes off without anyone batting an eye. But before the Saurfang fight, I get a tell from the main tank (and de facto raid leader since the actual one wasn’t big on actually leading): “You’re really a holy priest, aren’t you?”
Busted.
DPS and gear gave me away, but he didn’t say anything because, again, the raid had been going well otherwise. Since there was no point in making excuses, I laid it bare, that I had only healed 5-mans, that I had this ridiculous fear of botching a raid and getting added to a bunch of people’s shit lists but I needed more frost emblems to get a better heal trinket (so that if I were to raid heal and fail at it, at least it wouldn’t be because I had crap gear). Thankfully, this dood was really understanding and let me stay as is, with the caveat that I’d switch back to Holy if we lost a healer or the other two healers aren’t able to keep up.
I got tapped to do just that for Rotface/Festergut because the other two healers (a shammy and… a holy pally, I think) couldn’t heal both the tanks AND the raid effectively and the tank thought me being a third-wheel healer would be more helpful than my piddly shadow DPS. Cue the equivalent of “first time behind the wheel” gut fear. “It’s okay,” the tank-dood says. “Just raid heal your pants off. Worst thing that could happen is that we die, and we’re already saved so they can’t blame you for that.”
(hurr durr, no-pants Phil… ahem.)
Surely this would be asking for trouble, throwing me in as heals at Festergut– constant raid damage-over-time due to gas, among other things. This was going to bomb. I would run out of mana, we’d wipe…
…or not…
First off, I have never loved Healbot as much as I did before this raid since it spares me from having to individually target and cast. I went up and down the raid roster, throwing Renew/Flash Heals and bubbles, and popped Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend when I was low on mana. Man, Robert wasn’t kidding when he said this was like whack-a-mole. o_o; Oh hey, Festergut is down, and nobody in the raid died! Cool! Rinse and repeat for Rotface. We would have gotten Putricide too, but that one WAS a disaster– not because of me, but because some smarmy huntard thought he could shake slime aggro via Feign Death and kept wiping everyone.
So while once again I leave a crumbled ICC raid without a Plagueworks completion achievement (the new “you must be this tall to ride” for the higher-tier ICC teams), I did get two armor upgrades, more Frost emblems than I needed to get my trinket, and a bucketload of rep… and one huge truth: that I in fact do not suck at raid healing, and thus I can throw Phil in as a healer for future raids… provided they are 10-mans, because 25-mans make Blastoise lag just a little bit. Tolerable if I’m going in as DPS, but I wouldn’t dare chance healing through that kind of lag. :P
Dare I say it, this is the healer version of Rydia’s “but loli haet fire” moment in FF4.
No more shadow priest cardboard box, henceforth. Old man Phil will be all up in your raids, spewing HP in your general direction. :D
Oh! You know what else is hilarious? He got “Sister’s Handshrouds.” Putting aside that they are in fact awesome, there is something very wrong-but-funny about Phil getting that to drop… namely, that if Yoshi had gotten them instead, Sister’s Handshrouds would be LAUGHABLY fitting since in my perversion of RP, Yoshi and Kiros are siblings too.
And with that, time for sleep.
