I has healz too!

I was messing around on the druid alt last night and decided to run a few dungeons rather than questing for a bit of a change. I signed up as the usual DPS or Healer roll (which inevitably means healer) and we were off. I had a couple of hours going spare and the footy was on so didn't really fancy doing heroics so when we finished I asked if anyone fancied another, it'd been a reasonable run so a couple of the dps did, we picked up another DPS and a new Paladin tank almost instantly and we were off again. Now on the first run in SM the tank decided he couldn't possibly die and tried to aggro every mob in the instance at the same time, whilst this makes healing a bit more of a challenge, it gets a little too much after a while. I'm happy to push the speed along in these instances, but I'd quite like to enjoy them at the same time.

Something struck me with the second tank, he was pulling at a reasonable (but not silly) rate, which meant we progressed as quick, if not quicker as mobs went down faster, and he could actually tank – I mean really tank, not only did the rest of the party almost never take any damage, he healed himself enough to enable me to stand there and scratch my balls without casting a spell for pretty much the whole instance. Now whilst the first instance was too frantic this was… well, dull; it wasn't long before I was in cat form and wading into the fight, stopping occasionally to band the odd heal about, I was averaging about half the DPS of the others as I was restro spec but I noticed an improvement in kill speed. The whole group did another instance (SM again) and I carried on as a Restro-cat and cast no more than three heals in the whole place.

Come the end of the run, only me and the tank wanted to do another, so we stuck ourselves in dungeon finder and up pops the "select your class" dialogue box. "Bugger this for a game of soldiers" I thought, I whispered my tank asking if he minded me swapping to go DPS spec and still healing, but to shout if he thought I wasn't doing enough healing – he agreed we picked up 3 new DPS and off we went; only one of them was sharp, or confident, enough to point out that I was supposed to be healing and asked why I was doing DPS…. I nearly piped up with "what a healer?" but didn't have the heart, I explained and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. After another run, I decided that whilst my DPS as Balance was reasonable in comparison to others, I was better going Feral (yes yes, I know all of the guide sites say level as Feral, but I just don't get on with melee). So I bit the bullet and respecced, I ended up knocking out as much DPS as pretty much anyone else and doing half as much healing as my Paladin tank over the course of eight or nine instances, some are easier than others, but bugger me they're far too easy, I was averaging around 45 minutes a level and actually went for nearly three instances on the trot without casting a heal.

Over the time we spent in the dungeons I got chatting to the Paladin, it turns out he's a complete alt-o-holic and has pretty much every class under the sun up to level 85. In the time we played together we saw it all; friendly, chatty players who enquired as to the 'healing' setup, the pushy warrior who was obviously better than everyone else and needed to show it through the medium of abuse and CAPITALS. Oh and special mention to the level 38 rogue, wearing predominantly level 20's cloth with spirit and intellect who asked if we minded him rolling on pair of cloth healing trousers because "they're an upgrade to what I've currently got"?!?!?!!! now I'm as forgiving as the next person, but with a comment like this I instantly hit the inspect button – the guy had 2 pieces of leather, the rest cloth, two of which were heirlooms which mean that he's managed to level at least one character to the 80's and run enough instances to be able to buy heirlooms! How can someone possibly get that far through the game and still not have the first clue how to play?

*ahem* eBay *ahem*

Anyways, a thoroughly enjoyable night all round, a new friend made who I hope to play with again sometime soon, a new spec and a football match that I ended up paying very little attention to. I'm definitely of the opinion if you want to power level, all you need to do are instances, over and over again. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that so much so I'm back to questing again with the odd instance when I play the alt.