/Seldovia restro druid hat on
While perusing some of the other blogs out on the web in an effort to take a mental break from my job, I came across the topic of healing and addons. Now, from
the egotistical priest, the world of matticus and /hug came a whole slew of information, thoughts and ideas. Now, as someone who has run the gamut of no addons, addons, healbot, grid etc, in an effort not to completely rehash all the arguments listed above, I think a lot of the use or non use of addons comes from game exposure, length of time with toon, personal setup and knowledge of their character’s healing ability. Here’s why:
The longer you play a class, the more you know about your specific talents (or you should…). The more you have seen in game from quests, 5 mans, heroic 5 mans, 10 man raids, 25 man raids, increases your exposure to different situations you find yourself in. The more time you are trying new things and experimenting with your class you tend to find things that work best for you and layouts you like (stay with me, i’m getting to the add ons bit).
When I first started healing I was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of choices. Now I originally started on a priest back in BC so I was like wait, what are all these healing spells? As my guild was strapped for healers they basically said, great! you can heal now! we’re going to do heroics, you can heal, come along. Here comes my whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
With inexperience can come panic. I have found that HealBot can be a great starter tool for learning to heal. It helps you learn your spells, learn how much a 6k heal really is, lets you basically configure the setup and then play whack a mole to keep people alive. As was stated in some of the other blogs bove, it’s not just the add on that makes the healer. it is the player as well. If you take the time to learn the spells, you then start to move out of your norm and can experiment with other ideas and ways to heal.
Next little story to illustrate point. I leveled my druid to 80 originally as feral and then as boomkin while dual boxing with my death knight. I always had healbot up as the druid was assisting the DK and while in boomkin form I’m not using heals. If the DK or druid’s health is getting to low, its much easier to just click a quick rejuvenation and then pop back to boomkin and continue on with my questing. I dual boxed a few instances as Unholy DK/Boomkin and was fine.
Thursday i hit 80 on both toons. Let the celebration begin. Friday, one of the raid leaders says… uh Vuur, I know we asked you to keep Sel boomkin but we’re short on healers for Naxx on monday if we do a 25 man. Can you make her restro?
Here come’s the OMG phase. I have 3 days to turn a fresh level 80 boomkin into a restro druid for a 25 man naxx run on monday. Knowing full well that I do not know how to play Restro, I start reading forums, I go through Restro4life’s gearing guide and I start running regular instances as a healer. I’m using healbot to teach myself how to play, learning how everything works, watching the numbers on my recount scroll up and checking overheals to see why I’m OOM all the time. I start on heroics over the weekend and I’m slowly getting the hang of healing. I know I’m getting better because people are not dying as much and I’m starting to get frustrated with Healbot with the slow response time for the HoTs I am trying to cast.
As I learn my class and I learn to heal and how to best use my spells, I’m changing the way I look at my interface and how I want it to work for me. Monday comes, we don’t have enough people online for a 25 man naxx so we pug a few people and do Vault and Sartharion.
Now I really hate healbot. I can’t find anyone, people are all over the place and my dots are taking forever to cast. I do more research and decide Grid is the way to go. before I get grid really configured I end up switching guilds and getting pulled into a 10 man naxx run. Luckily there is another druid healer there and I have someone to bounce ideas off of and get some ideas on how to be better as well (it also didn’t help at this point in time I still had boomkin glyphs on).
Over the next few days, I took my tree self down to crystalsong forest, smacked a wolf, let it beat on me and practiced how I wanted to set up my heals. I use pitbull as well, but Grid keeps everything very compact. I turned all my heals into mouseovers bound to keys and chained trinkets and made a couple OMG HE’S GONNA DIE – HEAL HIM NOW macros. What I do like about Grid is I can put my tanks in one spot, healers in another and DPS in a 3rd. I can color my party members so it is easier to find people by class. I can see the length of time it takes for my lifeblooms to bloom, I can find poisons and abolish them and everything is all in one place, point mouse, hit button, move on.
The beautiful thing is yes, if tomorrow, everything blew up and I had no addons, I would still be able to function. My healing mouseover macros will work on blizzard frames and they will work on grid. However, my learning curve of getting to there was greatly eased by the fact someone took the time to write an addon to help me do my job.
The addons don’t make the game, but they can help when you know the limitations of how far they can take you. At the end of the day, a good hhealer is only as good as the person behind the keyboard.
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