Last night after tinkering with my Arcane spec on my mage for a bit and reforging my stupid 28% hit to an awesome 355 Mastery, a tank in the guild announced he was going to queue for a Heroic, and did anybody want to join him.As a DPS I jumped at the chance, cause come on...skip the 15 minute DPS queue time? Sure! Well we got Halls of Lightning, one of the harder instances in early Wrath. Well we had wiped before the first boss. Everybody said no biggie, we ended up pugging the heals, the rest of the run was guild. We gave the healer the benefit of the doubt, since it is a new spec, and things were just generally wonky.
Well by the 3rd wipe on General Bjarngrim we were like WTF? Heals just were not happening. The healer was kind of dickish, and then dropped group.
I volunteered to switch over to Skraps and heal. I logged on, set my talents bought my skills that were new or missing and ported into the dungeon. Soon as I ported into the dungeon I found why the original healer had such a problem. Healbot is broken, and I am betting the healer never healed before there were healing ad-ons to make healing simple a whack-a-mole game.
Admittedly it has been a few years since I healed without an ad-on, and I think I would stroke out if I had to heal a raid without some kind of unit frame/cast click interface. But healing is perfectly doable with some smart key bindings, and focus-casting macros. Oh and you have to turn off auto self cast, unless you are just going to stand in melee and chain-heal yourself and let it bounce to the rest of the group, not the most efficient way to heal.
In the end, with only one more death, and some really ginormous fails on my part we completed the dungeon and got our justice points and a bit of experience for the five Natural Order folks with our new specs.
I am a healbot healer myself but have everything (except my instants) macroed as a mouse over.
ReplyDeleteHealing without healbot is a bit different and I need to make macros for some other stuff but with mouse overs it is really easy to do it without an addon. I would suggest that for everyone that heals just in case their addon dies on them.
I think I am a few days away from having the guts to heal in a PuG yet however, even if I had my healbot back.
@Grumpy
ReplyDeleteHealbot works if you download the healbot cataclysm beta. I got it Tuesday night and it was working quite well. I want to stress I was not bagging on the first healer as a "healbot" healer, since I use and love healbot. I just suspect the person never had to heal without an ad-on. Something that isn't terribly easy without a lot of practice.