Mentored Healing Attempts

26 June, 2013. 939 words.

I queued for healing twice with my mage last night. I ticked the “Mentor” checkbox and a Random Normal dungeon, because I’m a chicken, and wanted to see if I remembered anything at all about Chloromancer.

So first I got into Storm Breaker Protocol, one of the SL dungeons. First I hit as healer, then someone refused, then I hit as a DPS. When I arrived, the group had just gotten beyond the mech suits. The other four guys were all guildies, and I assume they were all talking on some kind of Ventrillo thing because they were otherwise silent.

I’m a pretty tolerant player, especially in Normal dungeons, but this group was just bad. Like all four of them had just bought their accounts on eBay and jumped into a level 54 dungeon right away. It took them forever just to get up the hill past the trash mobs and into position to take on the bug boss. Why they didn’t just kill the trash mobs on the hill I’ll never know - it would have been fifty times faster than sneaking around them. I understand why experts skip them, but these guys were clearly not experts.

They finally attacked the bug boss after what I assume was a long conversation among themselves about strategy. Maybe they were role-playing or something. I knew it was going to be bad, but oh lord. I was in my Harbinger build because I wanted to try melee DPS, so I ran up and started pounding on the boss’s back. I was doing plenty of DPS for this group. I have no idea what the healer and support guys were doing, because I watched as the waves of adds crept up the hill and wiped us because we couldn’t kill the bug boss fast enough. As I’d only done Storm Breaker in experts, I had never seen the adds creeping up the hill before - because the boss usually goes down pretty fast - so I didn’t know what to do about them.

That whole process took about a half hour. I left and took the half-hour abandonment penalty. They probably now think I’m one of those spoiled guys that quits after every wipe, but I don’t care. There’s a minimum competence line, and they were way short of it. At a bare minimum, I expect PUGs in a level 50+ normal dungeon queue to understand that it’s not cool to keep people waiting too much. They had four people for god’s sake, if they wanted to go at their own glacial exploration pace, they should have done it without pulling someone in from the queue. (Though I can see why they needed more DPS - on that one boss, 3 out of 5 basically had zero.)

(Now when I go into RotF at level 16, I fully expect there to be people who don’t know what to do, or who maybe have never been in a dungeon before and don’t know any etiquette. That’s understandable. But come on, Storm Breaker Protocol is like the 10th dungeon. Can they really have gotten through 10 dungeons without learning any PUG etiquette?)

After that debacle I leveled my Bahmi warrior for a while, then came back for another try at heals. This time I got into Abyssal Precipice as a healer. Ah AP, a blast from the past!

I was quite rusty, it turned out, so I’m glad I started on normal. This group was better than the first, but they were definitely not pros either. They were probably all returning players trying to remember how to play. Like me.

It took me a while to remember that healers are supposed to cleanse, too. We wiped on the second boss when the tank went charging in, pulling two water elementals and a horde of the little skitterers at the same time. We might have survived that, but I forgot to cleanse that Burning Blood debuff or whatever. When we all rezzed for the second try and I remembered to cleanse, the rest of the fight went easily.

Then I started to notice I wasn’t healing enough, and once or twice the support guy healed the tank. I finally realized I had forgotten to cast Synthesize on the tank after the wipe. Ugh! So embarrassing. At least I discovered it myself. After that the heals went smoothly.

At least until the end, when me and a DPS died. The boss does a huge party-wide damage that takes everyone down to 25% which I was unable to recover from. I hit my party heal but it only restored people to maybe 50%. In retrospect, I should have switched to Lifegiving Veil from Lifebound Veil and thrown a big-damage Ruin or something, but I didn’t have it setup on my bars.

Next time I do normals, I need to remember to change my wardrobe into something a little more casual. All of the guys in AP were wearing costumes instead of regular leveling gear. I stood out like a sore thumb in my cape and 60 expert dungeon gear as someone who was mentoring down.

I noticed what might be a bug in the raid frames. I thought that whenever an icon showed up on the frames, it was a debuff that I was supposed to cleanse. But many times I saw things that didn’t cleanse, or at least didn’t go away after I cleansed. Maybe I have a setting wrong. Or maybe it’s a side effect of the King Boss mod I use (which has minimal usefulness outside of actual raids). Anyway it was pretty annoying.

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