My mage alt has been 85 for about 2.5 weeks, and already I’ve had three people roll against me on gear for their off-spec:

• A restoration druid rolled against me for Cerith Spire Staff (+hit Intellect staff) and won it
• A retribution paladin rolled against me for Anthia’s Ring (+hit Intellect ring) and won it. This person was nice enough to trade it to me when I complained in party chat, but still.
• Just today, a retribution paladin rolled against me for Foul Gift of the Demon Lord (Intellect spell damage/healing trinket) and won it. I had mentioned in party chat prior to the boss kill that I was hoping for the trinket, and prior to that everyone in the party had been friendly and respectful about asking to roll on off-spec items, so I don’t know why this paladin suddenly decided to act like a tool when something dropped that I wanted.

Have I had seriously bad luck with my mage (or seriously good luck with my resto shaman)? Has the LFR system (where everyone seems to roll on everything and anything that they can hit “need” for) begun to breed similar bad manners in the LFG system? Or do people simply hate mages and think that we don’t deserve the same loot courtesy as other classes, even when we’re polite, make tables without being asked, buff appropriately, and play our parts on the mechanics for boss fights?

If any seasoned mages stumble across this post, please clue me in.

Got to Madness and shaman #2 left. I mentioned before we started how glad I was that he was gone since he’d been bumping me the entire raid.

The fight starts, wherein I learn that shaman #3 is also a bumper. The entire fight, shaman #3 is periodically bumping me and not even trying to shield the second tank.

We kill the boss, and Maw of the Dragonlord drops. I have the iLvl 403 version, so I don’t need it. But I roll need anyways, just to try and stop the other resto shaman from getting it. I win it.

I tell the other healers not to leave, then check their rolls and their healing numbers. The last place healer was supposed to win the mace, so I traded it to the #2 paladin healer who was generally doing a good job the entire raid.

The other shaman whispers me, and this is what I said:

I feel vindicated.

Now, my Power Auras is set up to give me two notifications: one for when there is no Earth Shield anywhere in the raid, and another for when I don’t have an Earth Shield up anywhere. Before we pulled the boss, I saw that there was another resto shaman, and I saw that only my personal “Missing Earth Shield” icon was up, meaning that the other resto shaman had Earth Shielded one of the two tanks. I looked at the tanks, found the one that lacked an Earth Shield, and hit him up. He rushed out and aggro’ed Hagara and the fight started.

A few seconds into the fight, Power Auras notified me that my Earth Shield was missing. The other resto shaman had switched to trying to Earth Shield my target (who happened to be the main tank on this one-tank fight).

Oh, no you didn’t, I thought, and put my ES right back on that tank. The other shaman bumped my ES off again. We started to go back and forth.

As we transitioned into the first lightning conductor phase, the other shaman yelled at me in raid chat to stop bumping his ES. I gave him the ultimate in Internet responses to such a situation:

He complained, “You just got here.” I was too busy doing twice his healing to explain to him that I had checked the tanks prior to the fight and selected the one without an ES, and I wasn’t going to stop ESing that target just because the complainant had decided to switch to ESing the main tank to pad his numbers. Unable to keep his ES on the main tank, the other shaman began taunting me in raid chat and calling me “fail.” Again, was too busy putting out twice his numbers to reply.

We finished the fight with the other shaman dead last on healing. I told him that he was terrible and he should worry more about good healing and less about beating another shaman to ES the main tank, and thus ended the raid.

Once upon a time, in a situation like this, I would have given in and just let the Earth-Shield-Bumper have his or her desired target. We both probably would have output better numbers if we hadn’t been fighting one another for half of the fight. There are two reasons I stopped giving in though:

• Because I’m really good at keeping an Earth Shield up on my target, and I don’t know that other shamans will be. There have been times when I gave in and selected a different target after having my ES bumped, only to notice at the end of the fight that the bumper never refreshed their ES. I don’t want the main tank going without ES for most of the fight just because the other resto shaman sucks.
• Because Earth-Shield-Bumping is kind of rude, and bumpers need to learn to communicate with their teammates, check their targets before applying the first ES, and stick with the target they pick. If you bump a bumper back, most of them get the point and back off.

Immediately after that, I ran LFR Fall of Deathwing. There was another resto shaman in the raid. She whispered me right at the start and asked which tank I would like to ES. We each selected a tank and didn’t get in each other’s way. Such a formal arrangement isn’t always necessary, but it isn’t exactly a bad idea, either.

Earth-Shield-Bumpers, you suck. Please don’t do it.

So with Mastery, I was the top healer on five out of nine kills. On another fight (N-Warlord Zon’ozz) I was just barely below the top healer, a discipline priest. The only kill for which I was the bottom healer was N-Ultraxion, and I blame that on the fact that I didn’t understand very well how Ysera’s buff works. [Note: We've since found that it's best to assign me to the Kalecgos buff, wherein I can spam Chain Heal endlessly at the end of the fight when the raid is most likely to be taking heavy damage and we'll be getting the most out of my Mastery.] During Firelands, the only fights where I had a fighting chance of being top healer were Beth’tilac or Rhyolith. Everything else was largely single-target spread healing and I grew accustomed to looking for my name at the bottom of the meters.

As the weeks went on and the raid accumulated gear and got better at avoiding or mitigating damage, I found it harder and harder to make it to the top spot on the meters. Below are the kill parses for last week’s raid. Yor’sahj and Hagara are excluded because I was DPS for those fights:

The only fight that I topped the meters on was Spine of Deathwing. I’m convinced that shamans have a huge advantage in that fight because, when players get stuck at low health levels with the Searing Plasma debuff, our Mastery allows us to keep hitting that target with abnormally large heals until the debuff goes away.

I was close to the top on Madness, but ultimately beaten by our druid. And I took second on Ultraxion. For the remaining three fights, I was essentially last on the meters. (Yes, I beat the paladin on H-Morchok, but that person is normally one of our main tanks.)

This week, I decided to spec deep into haste. I changed my orange gems from Artful Ember Topazes to Reckless Ember Topazes and reforged all of my Mastery and Crit so that my secondary stats had a Haste > Crit > Mastery priority. I held onto the +65 Mastery on my gloves because I’m too cheap to re-do enchants, and I left most of the Spirit because I figured I would need it, but everything else was oriented towards Haste then Crit, putting me over the second Haste cap of 2005. For trinkets, I used Seal of the Seven Signs and Petrified Pickled Egg, shelving my Jaws of Defeat. Note that my preference for trinkets with this set-up would be Windward Heart + Seal of the Seven Signs, but I do not own any version of the former.

These were the results with the exact same six boss fights:

Out of six boss fights then, I was the top healer on two (Spine and Madness), I was never the bottom healer*, and of the four fights where I placed second, I was ridiculously close to the leader on two of them. There was only one fight where I placed second by more than 1k HPS, N-Ultraxion.

I can’t attribute all of this improvement to changing from Mastery to Haste. I made two significant changes in my gear due to the drops I won last week:

1. I changed from 4-piece Tier 12 to 4-piece Tier 13. I had decided not to let go of my Tier 12 set bonuses until I could use my 4-piece Tier 13 set bonus, so I had a few pieces of Tier 13 sitting in the bank, waiting for me to finish the set. I was finally able to do that this week. The 2-piece Tier 13 set bonus just wasn’t worth losing the 4-piece Tier 12 set bonus, especially when the current raid tier has so many fights where Chain Heal is important.
2. I picked up Maw of the Dragonlord at last week’s Madness kill, trading in my Scalpel of Unrelenting Agony for it. The proc on Maw of the Dragonlord is amazing and will be discussed in another post.

That said, I still think that switching from Mastery to Haste at this point in our progression was the right step towards improving my numbers. I’ll likely go back to Mastery when we begin working on Heroic Warlord Zon’ozz.

——

* We decided to complete the Taste the Rainbow achievement on N-Yor’sahj this week, so I was asked to heal for that even though we’ve reached a point where I’m normally asked to play enhancement on that fight. We wound up killing the red ooze a lot and never stacking, and surviving red and green debuffs simultaneously was a place where a heavy Mastery spec probably would have paid off. So I was indeed last on healing that fight. I did not include it since I did not have a Mastery parse from the previous week to compare it to, and I felt like the distorted mechanics for completing the achievement made it an outlier.

Oh, the stories I have to tell of guild leader / raid leader asshattery! Since my first and last post in March, I’ve had four different raiding guild tags over my head. That guild I joined in March lasted about six months, then I went in and out of two other guilds for 1-2 months each. I’ve only been in my current guild for about a month, but I feel like it could be the place where I stay.

I’ve also done a fair share of switching my primary spec. First I was restoration, then I was enhancement, then I was restoration again, then enhancement, and now I’m restoration once more. My latest guild is heavy in the melee department and unlikely to ask me to switch anytime soon, though I do tend to be the healer that they ask to switch to DPS off-spec for two-healer fights, and I’m glad. I truly enjoy both specs and will play whatever gets me a raid slot.

In other news, restoration shamans are the worst PvE healing class in the game! We aren’t just the worst PvE healing class in the game; we’re obviously, laughably the worst PvE healing class in the game, and have been for this entire expansion. In spite of this, I still ♥ playing a restoration shaman and am not going to quit. That’s all I have to say on that for now.

Welcome back to HealShock!, and I hope you enjoy your stay.

It was 3 AM and I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to attempt my daily random heroic. My queue came up rather quickly and I saw that I was entering Grim Batol.

I sighed. Grim Batol was the only heroic that I hadn’t finished yet, on account of the fact that the third and final bosses are sort of hard to complete if your DPS is either sucky, or bad at switching to DPS’ing adds, or both. As luck would have it, the random dungeon finder seems to have a knack for sticking me with sucky DPS.

(I’m sure somewhere out there is a really fantastic DPS who’s blogging about all of the sucky healers s/he has been grouped with through the Dungeon Finder. Maybe someday, we’ll complete one another.)

I entered the dungeon and found that the party (which consisted of a DK-Tank, DK-DPS, Mage and Rogue) was at that awful third boss. And sighed again.

Then I noticed that all four of the other players were in the same guild, and let out my final sigh. It’s generally not fun to be one of the non-guild players in a partial guild PUG. Some of the problems that often occur with partial guild PUGs:

• 1-2 semi-competent players are carrying 1-2 terribads who can’t play
• They blame the non-guild player(s) for anything and everything that goes wrong, even when it’s the terribad guildies who are clearly at fault
• They roll on gear and orbs they don’t need for themselves so that they can pass it to said guildies in the party
• They don’t communicate with you because they’re using their guild Vent to talk and they forget that you’re not on it
• They kick you at random to make room for guildie(s) who just logged on

So if this group had lost their healer at the third boss in Grim Batol, it probably meant that their healer had ditched them because they were terrible and/or rude.

I give every group I queue with at least one chance though, so I tossed an Earth Shield on the tank to indicate that I was ready to pull, and we were off.

I was soon pleasantly surprised by how well the fight was going. This group clearly knew the encounter, their DPS was decent, and they were pro at killing Drahga’s Invocations of Flame. I began to relax and enjoy myself, relieved to have finally found a decent PUG.

And then, in his attempts to move the boss away from the Invocations and keep him faced away from the rest of the party, the tank backed up into a pack of trash. Two elite dragonkin and two elite ogres that weren’t supposed to be part of the encounter rushed in on us.

I kept healing. I knew it was a wipe, but I figured, why not see how long we could go? Apparently, the rest of the group had that attitude as well, because they kept fighting, and it felt like we lasted a long time. I had to spam my fast and expensive heals to keep everyone up though, and eventually my empty mana bar ended our attempt. Two of the four trash adds that had aggro’ed were dead, and we had come very close to finishing the boss.

I released to the graveyard, wondering if this was the part where the guild group blamed the non-guildie for the wipe (ha-ha). Instead, I got a comment about how wonderful my healing had been. “Thanks, I can’t believe how long we lasted with the adds,” I offered.

The tank began asking me about my current guild and raiding. I said that my current guild was a tiny roleplay guild that didn’t raid, that I was an old Vanilla raider who had recently returned to WoW, and that I’d like to start raiding, but hadn’t found a raiding guild that would take me yet. My gear and lack of Cata raiding experience had always been a concern.

“Transfer. Raid with us,” he said.

I was surprised when I realized he was serious.Yeah! We just wiped together, and it was so much fun, let’s do it again and again and again, only with 5 more people!

I was even more surprised to learn that their raid times worked for my inflexible schedule and yes, they would take in my Death Knight husband as well.

Once my husband woke up the next morning and we learned more about the guild, he was even more eager to transfer than I was. We were downing Valiona and Theralion in Bastion of Twilight with them later that night.

And that, friends, is how I met my guild.