DiscoDruid

What a crazy month it has been! I won’t bother apologizing for not posting as I’ve always viewed that as a fairly pointless endeavor anyway. I will tell you that my life outside and inside of WOW has been fairly full on as of late. With everything that has been going on I’ve had little time to stop for a moment and just write out my thoughts; AKA this blog. So just where have I been anyway?

To start things off, I’ve ended up leaving my guild of a little over two years now. Things had been going downhill for a few months to the point that we hadn’t been reliably raiding for quite some time. After most of the people that I enjoyed playing with went to bigger and better places, I decided to strike off on my own as well. Some people could no doubt shrug their shoulders and tilt their nose in the air while telling you it was no big deal. However, I feel I must be honest and say it is probably one of the toughest decisions I’ve made since I started playing. I loved the general culture and people in our guild, and it’s truly a tragedy to see things end the way they did. I chose to join a guild at similar progression over one already near/at the Lich Man himself. This new guild raids four days rather than three; add a fifth night for 10’s and my week is pretty well booked.

Outside of WOW I have been battling with the stress that is immigration here in New Zealand. I’m currently wading through the process for permanent residency and it is quite possibly one of the larger pains in the asses that I’ve experienced. To amplify matters I’m preparing forms for an extension to my work permit as well. Add to that the fact that my car died two weeks ago and I’ve been having to bus everywhere suddenly means that my free time when I’m not working is usually spent raiding or sleeping.

So what does it all mean!?! It means that I’m still here. It means that I’ve haven’t given up on this blog and joined the masses of “One Week Wonder” blogs out there that have died before they’ve even begun. Most importantly it means to bear with me while my life settles down and I can get back into a regular posting routine. I know that this will make two explanation posts in a row rather than the things I would like to write about here; I decided that I owed you that at the very least.

It has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that the name of this blog is somewhat misleading considering it’s intended content. They usually understand the reason behind the name; but may argue that the rather blunt use of the word Druid suggests that the site should be druid focused. In the end if I was intending to write about a priest I should have tried to come up with some witty priest focused name…right?

When I decided to write this blog I asked myself a few very important questions. The most important of which was exactly what I would be writing about. My passion is with healing, and seeing as I love playing a druid logic would suggest that I write about my journeys as a resto druid right? My problem with this was that there are already so many great druid blogs out there that are adept at covering most anything I could hope to tell you about.

I love telling a story; and I saw writing about my exploits as a Discipline Priest to be a fantastic potential outlet for that. Admittedly, my priest was already level twenty before I even decided to start the blog. The instances I had run to that point had been fun, and each one held its own little story that acquaintances got a chuckle about when I found time to share. That’s when I realized that the basis for a blog I had been looking for was right there in front of my eyes.

An important thing to remember is that a druid is my main; I level a priest in my spare time when I’m not doing what I can to optimize Avoran for 25 man raid healing. Unfortunately, I’m not always going to have something to write about on my priest. In the last week alone I’ve found very little spare time to devote to her as I’ve left my guild of nearly two years due to increasing problems with attendance. DiscoDruid.com is my domain; it’s a domain that I chose in order to be flexible with what I wanted to write about. Had I named the blog something such as “The Pugging Priest” my plausible posting subjects would have been severely limited. This wasn’t something that I was willing to risk for an alt.

So what does this all mean? Simply put, I enjoy writing here and want the opportunity to write about more than I have been. It means that not only can you expect to see a large number of posts about leveling a priest through the eyes of a restoration druid; but also general posts about my life as a healer in WOW. I’ve read many of the useful tips and advice for the writers out there starting new blogs; unfortunately I read them after I had already started here. So as DiscoDruid.com continues to evolve I hope that the sparse few of you that have started following me don’t turn away in frustration. I hope to keep writing about things I enjoy here, and you know what? That’s healing.

As you all will likely know by this stage, I’m by no means a priest expert. Thus I’ve been pretty much winging it up to this point and thought I’d share my findings. The first thing that comes to mind is my talent build; you’ve read before that I was going discipline but may be curious how I’m going about it exactly. Well here it is.

The first tier was pretty self explanatory honestly, 5/5 points into twin discipline made much more sense for a dungeon running character than obvious pvp talents. This is the general approach I’ve taken with all of my points to this point and it’s seemed pretty straight forward. Improved Power Word: Shield and Reflective Shield seemed worthwhile considering the sheer number of bubble spamming I’m doing now that I’ve taken Soul Warding. I am considering putting some points into Improved Renew as it’s a integral part of my healing at this point. I may very well be missing some key factors; for example I’ve no clue what the hell I should be using Inner Focus for at this stage. So I’ve been using it as it’s off CD just to extend my mana that little bit further.

So what for spells? Well when I first started out my healing pretty much consisted of spamming renew on people while keeping the tank bubbled until I oomed. Now that I’m in the 30’s level bracket I’m bubbling/renewing/flash healing and doing pretty well in the way of mana efficiency. So what does it all mean? Absolutely nothing at this level; at this stage my groups usually consist of everyone, going everywhere, and attacking everything so it’s all fairly redundant. In fact, I think I’ll call that the 3 E’s of Instancing from now on.

I like to think that I’m pretty patient when it comes to healing in pugs. When I somehow take agro I walk the mob over the tank while calmly awaiting him/her to pick it up off of me, I heal through all the DPS out there who think that since they wear plate it must mean they can tank, and I’ll even accept the odd AFKer now and again. So as you can imagine, it really frustrates me when someone does something surely and positively stupid and then attempts to blame me for their death. What am I going on about you ask? This story centers around a tank named Goku; that isn’t his exact name unfortunately as it has a few special characters in it that I couldn’t hope to remember.

This will represent Goku as I didn’t get a picture of him.

The run started out pretty averagely to be fair; the queue hit and I found myself in Scarlet Monastery: Graveyard. We’re fighting through without a peep in party and doing quite well, this Goku character seems half competent at keeping the mobs off of me which is always a plus. We get into the Graveyard itself and continue to fight a small group of mobs out in front of the crypt. In the midst of our fighting I see the dreaded words pop up warning me that the half dead tank is out of my LOS;  the tank had left the fight and run down into the crypt on his own! I quickly run down into the crypt to heal the tank, throw a bubble on him and start casting a flash heal when he does what? You guessed it…he run’s back out of the crypt and out of my LOS again only to die horribly….

I love MS Paint.

“WTF Priest? Do you not know how to heal you noob?”

Seriously? No…he’s joking right?

I quip back defensively informing him of what he had done to cause his own death and rezzed him just as any good healer would. However, once he was alive again he informs us all that he will be leaving the group and we can sit and wait for another tank since the priest thinks he know so much. Is this guy serious? Does he actually think he’s ruining our entire night from the loss of one tank that doesn’t even know the value of keeping LOS with his healer?

At this point something miraculous happened, the vote to kick box comes up on my screen asking me if I would like to kick the tank. If you use your imagination you can no doubt guess which button I clicked and to my glee the tank was kicked from the group…before…he could leave on his own. Ha! The party leader had clearly had enough as well and I even received an apology from one of the party members of  the same realm as Goku. Needless to say we cleared the rest of the instance without a hitch using the hunter’s bear as a tank while I died a little on the inside after remembering my comment in a previous post about hunter’s pets and tanking dungeons.

Instance Complete…and not a tank in site. (Except the bear)

How many tanks have you come accross that try to use their status as “the tank” as leverage against your group? Did it work? This may just be me, but I’d rather sit in the queue for another hour before I’ll deal with arrogance.

Generally speaking I’ve never been a huge fan of any of the holiday events around Christmas, Easter, etc that are hosted every year within WOW. This could be linked to the fact that I’ve never been much for the achievement system either but that’s a completely different story. However, as I’m sure you are aware, unless you are a tank you will sometimes have some pretty long waits in between dungeon queues. So during one of said waits I decided I’d have a look at the quests (oh the horror) for the “Love is in the air” event. I went through a few of the quests involving running around and spraying perfume on random NPC’s as well as getting turned into a a marathon Goblin and running parcels just outside of Stormwind. Soon enough the chain requested that I head out to Hillsbrad foothills which I don’t have the flight path for so honestly, I couldn’t be stuffed. So after some exploring I discovered the little boat rides taking place in the Stormwind canals and trotted over to have a look.

As you can no doubt see, this turned out to be a bit of a depressing flop as I discovered that one really is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. Even more annoying was the fact that I experienced some sort of bug in which I wasn’t even able to get out of said boat of loneliness for it’s entire duration until it kicked me out. Luckily around this time two friends mentioned that they were having a gander at the event shenanigans in Darnassus so I decided I might as well make the journey over that way and have a look. Bon Vouyage!

So I headed off to Darnassus to join up with my two friends, one of which is a curious little Gnome who we call Salim. Salim is quite the oddity in that you never quite know what he’s going to say or do next; silliness and randomness is his game and he is truly a master of it. However, even with this in mind I still found myself started by the spectacle in which I was about to encounter. Ladies and gentlemen; I give you Salim.

Outfit complete with bunny ears and a stunning black dress he was certainly dressed to kill; and better yet he had found himself a local Night Elf girl to serenade. I must admit though, the boats and general atmosphere in Darnassus were certainly a cut above the ones in Stormwind. Just maybe this gnome had a chance!

Things were centainly going well for the him at this point, a waterside picnic under the moon and love was surely in the air. Things were going well, almost too well to be honest. Surely this wasn’t to be some sappy ending one might read from those cheap romance novels was it?

That’s when it happened; the mood was just right and Salim was getting comfortable. So comfortable in fact that the Dwarven influence kicked in and the alcohol began to flow. Slow down fella! Remember that moderation is the key!

And trajedy struck…

I hope this post doesn’t seem to horribly off topic; but I can say that goofing off with your friends has always been the greatest factor in my continuing to play WOW. Regardless of what Blizzard chooses to throw at us I will always find things simply too boring when going solo. Questing, leveling, or even farming for gold can always be more enjoyable when you throw people with similar interests into the equation. You joke around, you have fun, you enjoy the game and that’s really what it’s about isn’t it? It’s one of the driving factors behind why I can keep queuing up in the dungeon finder and meeting new people; noobs or otherwise. That contact with all sorts of different people is truly what makes MMO’s worth playing. But then again, that’s just me.

I’d like to apologize to anyone who might have been reading up to this point, the website has been in a status of constant flux since it’s announcement. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to jump into things head first before taking a moment to plan things out at all. Never-the-less, the website is finally getting to a point that I’m happy with so things should start to calm down now as far as the layout goes. I’ve actually been spending all of my free time trying to sort out the website and haven’t even been on WOW except for my dailies. So nothing new to to post at this point. However, I have completed the About section of the website so feel free to have a read and find a little bit about the blog as well as myself.

Razorfen Kraul holds a special place in my soul that only a select few may relate to. It’s not until you’ve run your twink friends through it a few hundred times trying to get some bow that’ drops off a rare spawn that you’ll truly understand those feelings either. Those of you who have been there will probably know the sinking feeling I felt when I saw the RFK screen loading after accepting my random group invite. However, it’s only fair to point out that playing through a dungeon at the suggested level range is a completely different experience.

Once the loading screen had finally disappeared I took a moment as usual to survey my group. Two hunters, a warlock, and a warrior named Simplybrute stood around me who were no doubt eager to begin. You’ll notice that I noted the warriors name in particular; the reason being that he is the subject for this entry. This rather ordinary looking warrior started the group by honestly pointing out that he had been told that he wasn’t a very good tank but would do his best. At this stage of course little warning bells went off, but things are quite different at our levels so I thought nothing more of it and we began the run.

It’s a continual source of annoyance for me that many hunters believe that their pets are dungeon tanking extraordinaire. The two in this group were no different. Every pull would consist of the two hunters sending their pets in ahead of Simplybrute, the pets doing their silly run kiting shenanigans, and me having to heal through three unnecessary pulls at a time. The situation was only worsened by the tanks complete lack of…well…tanking. He was usually found focusing on one pig men while ignoring all of the others that were abusing me like some kind of giant horned piñata.

After the hunters had died a couple of times they made some agitated comments to the tank before leaving the group. This continued through three more sets of DPS joining and then leaving before sanity struck and I asked the tank what was up. The response? “This is my first character! ”

At this point I know many people, me included normally, would have called it there. Left the group and given up on any hope of ever partaking in the slaughter of pig men again. However, the entire reason for my leveling this character was to be a learning experience for me as well; it wasn’t that long ago that I had been vote kicked from a group for my own stupidity. So we took a couple of minutes before any more pulls for me to explain to the warrior the basics of the tanking role. We discussed things like the various skills he had and what would be good for keeping agro, why letting things attack the healer was bad, and finally…why 90% of the hunter population seem to be idiots. With two out of three points figured out, we gave it another go.

Simplybrute was a born again tank now, thunder clapping for initial group agro and even picking up the odd stray with surprising efficiency. The rest of the run went perfectly smooth with the exception of one terrible hunter who rolled need on everything that dropped including my ring. The whole ordeal really made me think twice about the way I approach “downies” as they are now lovingly referred to. Granted at level 80 I have much less sympathy for people who have spent that much time leveling their class and still haven’t a clue. At lower levels it’s simply a case of taking the time to explain the basics of the game to them. I think you’ll be surprised with the results; I know I was.

Thanks for reading!

I’ll start by telling you something very important; I hate questing. After leveling two characters to 70 and one to 80, I hate it with such a passion I would just assume schedule a trip to the dentist to have my teeth pulled. (That was an over exaggeration; you’ll find lots of that along with sarcasm here) Regardless of my intentions with how to level this priest though I would be having to get it to at least 15 on my own. So the reason I chose a Draenei? I haven’t done the starting quests there. The reason I chose a female? If I’m going to play as a giant space goat it might as well be a decent looking one. =p

The fated moment finally came; Ierá dinged level 15 and quests were abandoned. I hit the queue  as a healer for a random and within moments was invited to Ragefire Chasm. How intriguing! Being a long time alliance player this would be my first trek into the instance. Alright…the tank is taking damage so just cast some rejuv and…wait…how the hell do I heal with this thing? -PANIC- but too late, the tank has died and the party is dead. What kind of idiot doesn’t even set up his grid or clique before joining a group? (Yes I’m a click healer..shame…noob…lolfail…whatever :p)

I quickly try to explain myself to my band of merry level 15s and 16s but to no avail, I’m vote kicked from my first instance on my priest. Shame…

Right, I pick myself up and dust my pants off before setting up grid and sorting out clique correctly. Bubbles and Weakened Soul now show up as well as my renew and I’ve now got everything assigned to clique; let’s get some instances done.

Things went pretty well after that; but at this point healing consisted of casting renews and bubbles on everyone. That’s everyone because it seems like even the clothies are tanking at this level range; but it’s still early on in the healing game! I really like the concept of the bubbles at this stage; it’s probably the turning point in my character development where I knew for sure I wanted to go discipline regardless of what the FOTM builds are for priests right now. It just seems to “fit” really. Until next time!