Boring. That’s probably not what the level 70 instances were intended to be, but that’s exactly how I started to feel about them. The first few times you run an instance everything is new and exciting, but after a while the boredom kicks in, as well as the autopilot.
But wait. Did I become such a fabulous healer? Did I pick up a lot of incredible new gear to make the healing easier? Did I learn new tricks and techniques to become more efficient? Far from it. As this - completely scientific - graph shows, there was in fact something else going on:
The difficulty curve of normal instances are tuned in such a way that at a certain point, healers are mostly there for compensation. This means that when something goes wrong I have a lot of work to do. But usually, the average pull in an average guild run is a perfectly timed and beautifully executed ballet of tanking, DPS’ing and Crowd Control. Our uncrittable tank takes only minimal amounts of damage, and the others don’t take any at all. So what’s left for me to do? I toss my totems and turn my attention back to the television. Or I sling some lightning bolts in a pathetic attempt of getting my name on the damage meters.
Sure, it’s nice to not have to corpse-run all the time. But do I really contribute to that?
Needless to say, I needed a new challenge. And patch 2.3 was the little push that we needed, as the addition of the daily heroic quests drew our attention to the easier of the heroic dungeons.
We tried Ramparts first. I was nervous, but we did surprisingly well. Then we did Underbog, and Slave Pens, and Underbog, and one more Underbog, and Slave Pens again.
It’s a completely different experience. We’re wiping again. What’s worse, we wipe on trash, on bad pulls, on resisted freeze traps, on totem aggro (oops), and on a whole lot more silly situations. I regularly run out of mana again. I have to be on my toes the whole time; if I slack for a second, the tank is dead.
So if it’s really that much more trouble, is it really worth it? The short and simple answer: absolutely. And this is why:
(the sharp incline at the left indicates how you won’t need any skills if the group doesn’t have them either: you’re better off disbanding and doing something more productive)
Maybe we wipe more than we used to, but so far we’ve always made it to the end. And as we all hearthstone out with our new badges (and maybe a primal nether), I’m proud in knowing that a large chunk of the effort involved was mine. It’s strangely flattering to learn that I am not, in fact, a dead weight to my group, but that I’m indeed capable of healing heroics – or at least the easy ones.
