When I started a druid I never knew how much I would come to enjoy playing it. I had dabbled in other DPS classes and leveled a hunter to nearly level 70, but none of them gave me the enjoy of playing my druid.
Like all feral druids, my friends would joke about the fact I should be picking up healing gear, and in some cases it was thrust on me if the healers had no need of it. Granted, I quietly collected it, but I had no interest in healing. I was about mid-way through level sixty when the dreaded words were spoke.
“Bearess, we need a healer. Get your gear and we’re running Underbog.”
Mind you, I don’t tend to tolerate being told what to do, but these are close personal friends (hey I went to high school with them), and I decided to try it. So as I respeced I starting doing fast Google searches on what I was suppose to do. Needless to say that it was an “Epic Failure.” The short version was I didn’t understand how HoTs worked, my gear was horrible, and due to the lateness of the hour my brain refused to focus as well as it should. We barely made it to the second boss before it was called. I spent part of the next day reading more in-depth articles about healing and realized I had missed spells (Swiftmend being the major one) in my hurried attempt to build a rotation. I also didn’t fully grok that lifebloom stacked, and that casting the same HoT didn’t speed up healing until that point.
After that, I went back to being an off-tank/dps. I did a decent job and ended up clearing Karazhan, Zul’Adman, and some of of the 10-man content before Wraith of the Lichking came out. Then I proceeded to become our main tank since I was leaving slightly faster than the rest. I’ll never claim to be the best tank or best DPS person. I’m an average tank/off-tank and a tolerable DPS.
Fast forward to the start of December ‘08, We started our Naxxarama run and I ended up sitting out of the first run because I drew the short straw since we had one too many DPS and my healing set wasn’t up to par. While they ran Naxx I decided to try for “With a Little Helper from My Friends” achievement. Knowing that as a feral druid it would be impossible I respected to resto, and spent the whole weekend moving all my healing spells around on my bar attempting to get a grasp as to the basics of HoT healing.
I’ll state for the record that I’m not a PvP person. I’ve always been on the bottom of the FPS kill charts in my group, and after a while I get tired of it. However, I mostly enjoyed that weekend. Sure I was targeted and killed a lot, but I was able to keep others up that helped the cause. That weekend also netted me improvements to my gear in the form of PvP healing gear. However, outside of PvP I found running a resto to be extremely painful and slow. At that time I was grinding rep for Sons of Hodir and I spent almost five times longer doing the same two quests as I did in feral. So I gave up and respeced for the week back to Feral for rep grinding and herbing.
The next weekend came and on that Friday night I ran Naxx as a DPS and was weak, but more due to the fact I was still off-tank spec and not pure feral DPS. However, on Saturday we were short healers and the dreaded were spoke again.
“So, how is that healing set? You stated you were able to get some PvP pieces.”
I cringed and related the figured both unbuffed and general buffed (food, pots and Mark of the Wild). And thus I was told to respec and I’d be the 3rd healer for the run. It was a typical “head bashing and learning” run. There was no real fault of any single person, but I finally started learning rotations and how to deal with massive amounts of people, and thankfully there was two other healers (A very well-geared Paladin and a tolerable geared Druid). I was last on the over all heal charts, but it was a combination of lack of mana and information overload in trying to keep an eye on ten people with a focus on the two tanks.
I must have done something right. On Sunday I was messaged a few times by non-guildies about joining Heroics as a healer. All of them I turned down because I was well aware of my gearing, and I wasn’t mentally prepared. However, when asked by someone in my own guild I decided to join them. Call it vanity.… If I’m going to fall flat on my face I’d rather do it with guild mates that I talk with every day then with mostly strangers. =) And I did partly fall on my face. We were running a Heroic Violet Hold (against my general comfort level), and we had issues clearing the first two bosses (the voidwalker and the puppy dog). I just couldn’t keep the tank up. I would throw everything I could and if the tank dropped below 50% health it was over. Nothing in my rotation would come close to recovering that much health.
A day later I ended up in a Heroic Culling of Stratholme (first time ever in it) as a healer, and it was at this point I started making massive shifts in my rotation and button placement. Of course, this was much to the dismay of our group with a wipe every few major pulls. And the common words from me that night was “Sorry, I moved some of my spells around again.” With their half-joking retort as “Well, stop doing that.” (I have to make a public statement right now. I’d like to thank my guild/friends of Experience on Earthen Ring for tolerating me during that run. I needed the Heroics to work out my rotation and button placement, but it is a painful for them. =)
Then the real horror began. I was whispered by a guild mate that he was getting into a 25-man raid and they would accept me as a healer if I wanted. I was massively stunned. My mana pool was still very shallow and buffed I barely reached 1300 SP after layering as much spell enchantments as I could get my rough skinned branches on. I thought for sure I was going to be last on the list of six healers. Well, two things came out of the run.
The first was I wasn’t the worse healer in the group. I was in the middle of the pack. I didn’t expect this, and it gave me a boost to my broken, bruised and frustrated ego. The second thing that came out was that I needed to get a better control over information management. Handling group heals in a 25-man raid while still throwing heals to the tanks while watching Deadly Boss Mods to know when massive attacks were coming up or when I had to dance wasn’t easy for someone who barely started healing. As a result, I’d panic and burn my mana refreshing HoTs that didn’t need to be refreshed. I came out of the raid with a nice level 213 neckless and experience in 25-man healing.
It would be mellow dramatic to state that I threw away my tank/dps gear and have never looked back. But I will admit I recently put away my tanking gear and now only keep my healing and feral DPS gear on me. Not that I expect to pick up much feral gear in the future because in 3.1 the next change for me will be move to a boomkin for my DPS gear (that will make our guild warlock very happy).
However, as of today (nearly 2 months later) I’m proud to say I’m nearly to 2000 SP unbuffed. Very comfortable in healing 10-man nax with myself and a Paladin healer. Actually being on the top of the healing charts (*cough* Not by much), and branching out in my healing rotation.