This is something that happened to me a while back so the details are pretty foggy, but for some reason I never blogged this and it deserves to be blogged, so:

I was playing my delightful Tauren Tree, the second resto druid in my arsenal (because I luff them), and I was… 62, 63?… at the time so I was in Slave Pens. Pretty standard run, things were going just fine and we were at that point between the second and final boss… you know what I’m talking about, right? All those billions of packs of Naga adds right as you get to that tunnel-ramp-thing that gets you to the druid who gives you the buff and all of that.

So anyway we get there and this segment was always a little tough, especially back in the day on heroic. Who remembers that?

*cane-waving*

Anywho, our pally tank picks up one too many packs and I get feared or something or other and the tank dies. We still manage to survive, but apparently said pally tank was too impatient to wait the ten seconds to get a rez in what had otherwise been a flawless run and wordlessly leaves the group.

This is followed by one of the DPS leaving the group as well.

So there we are, Me the Tree, an arms warrior DPS, and some other DPS whose class I can’t remember. He was a blood elf and I wanna say some sort of caster, but it’s not really all that important.

We re-queue and we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

…it’s been thirty minutes. No joke, cause I moused over the little icon and it said we’d been waiting for thirty minutes.

I was expecting the group to dissolve in a pile of “Well thanks anyway”s any minute now when the arms warrior, a lovely female orc, strapped on a shield and a one-handed sword. “Let’s clear trash while we wait,” she said.

So we did. Cleared trash. It was slow going and pretty healing intensive but we survived.

We got up to that final room with the druid and the last boss. We successfully freed the druid from his cage, killed the mobs that spawn when you do that, and got his buff.

We waited around for a few more minutes. Still no bites from the queue. The last boss in Slave Pens, who throws poisons and crap around and has always been a toughie, was looming in front of us.

I’m not sure how we came to the decision that we would give it a shot anyway, but we did. Arms warrior in Defensive Stance rushes in…

…

The first minute or so of the fight, I spent Tree-Tanking. Seriously. The boss was on me. I was Barkskin’d and spamming heals every cooldown.

Finally the warrior snags aggro. I couldn’t let down my guard; the warrior was squishy and this boss hits HARD and he hits EVERYONE with his AoE. I was out of mana so I popped Innervate. At this point the boss was maybe down to, oh, about 66% of his health or so. Yeah, this was gonna be a long fight.

Still we continue. I’m still healing on every single cooldown. It’s not long before I’m out of mana again (Tree druid mana efficiency sucks at this level) so I use a potion. I know, though, that Innervate isn’t gonna be ready next time I run out of mana, and the fight is still just as tough…

The boss is down to about 33%. I’m almost out of mana again. In fact, I’m down to my last two or three spells before I go OOM. I quickly plotted out in my head who best to use my final heals on and executed them… one last Regrowth on our pseudo-tank…

…I wince cause I know we’re gonna wipe now…

…

…

And suddenly something weird happens with the party frames and I blink, not really comprehending what happened, and suddenly the boss is down.

A few seconds later I realize that the party frames had jumped from three to five. The queue had finally popped and thrown our new party members right into the fray of the boss fight.

*blink blink*

…easy Goodie Bag for those two, eh?

Arms warrior sends me a whisper. “Sorry about you having aggro, I didn’t realize that my one-handed sword skill was still 1.”

All’s well that ends well.

I’ve actually been playing my healer a lot lately. Mostly because she’s been sitting around in this patchwork mixture of blues, Naxx10 my-first-epics, and super OP new-badge-stuff, and I’d like to even that out a little and that way potentially be a help to my guild in the future if an extra healer is needed. (I know you’re about to warn me “Don’t do it Pike, once they start taking your healer you’ll never get to DPS again!” but my guild is actually unusual and informs me that “TAWYN IS 4 FITE”, so I don’t have too many worries about having to scrap DPS forever.)

Not to mention, ever since Tawyn got that trinket, DPS’ing heroics has turned into “Hey check it out, I can pound on random buttons and get 4k DPS”, so I’d might as well play something that can use the badges a little more, eh?

I’ve also started to enjoy my Tree more ever since I started using Lifebloom again. I stopped using it at the advice of a Very Good Tree who told me you could do just fine with Regrowth/Rejuv/Nourish, and I tried that style for a while, and it was effective and you got less overheal, but I didn’t like the style. Druid Healing, to me, has always been like Disc Priest: it’s about damage prevention and anticipating when people are going to take damage, and pre-healing. But with a Regrowth/Nourish heavy style, I was back to Whack-a-Mole, and it just wasn’t as fun. So I’ve gone back to my tactic of triple-stacking Lifebloom on the tank, and letting it bloom (for your instant heal + mana back), and using my other heals as needed for AoE damage or an extra buffer or preventative stuff. It is just a lot more fun to me and I don’t have any mana problems with it.

Anyways, I’ll stick my Tree in LFG for heroics that I know are Super Easy to Heal. Heroics that are Super Easy to Heal = Nexus, UK, Drak’theron Keep, and VH. Maybe CoS if I’m feeling adventurous. Some of the others are pretty easy too but they’ll have some aspect to them that I don’t like or something– for example, the Chain Lightning crap in Halls of Stone, or the stupid fish in the water in Gundrak. I have actually now successfully healed HToC as well, and it was a very smooth run, but I’ve convinced myself that it was a fluke and am still scared to go in there, for the most part, so it is also off of the list.

For some reason I keep getting invited to Nexus, and for some reason I keep going, despite the fact that Heroic Nexus is shaping up to be where all the bad PuGs happen.

First Special Group:
Consisted of a Fury Warrior who was doing a spectacular and amazing 417 DPS, and a Paladin tank who was running out of mana about 10 seconds into every pull, and blaming it on me not healing him enough. And for those of you who are about to say that he was overgeared: he was in Blues and getting upgrades from this Heroic.

After defeating Anomalus the whole group (sans-me) bravely leapt off the edge into that hole– you know the one I’m talking about– the Hole of Death From Which There Is No Rez’ing.

One guy had to abruptly leave because apparently his wife was yelling at him or something, and our brave, mana-thirsty Paladin Tank decided we could four-man it! Of course, he wasn’t aware of the fact that I was outDPSing the Fury Warrior with Moonfires and Starfires between heals, but hey. We actually somehow finished the Heroic. I was shocked.

Second Special Group:
This group actually wasn’t as bad, and the tank was way overgeared. When you’ve got a way overgeared tank and a healer who has at least a small idea of what is going on, you can brute force your way through most heroics even if none of the DPS is doing over 1.2k (as was in this group). As such, this heroic went overall smoothly, it just took three times as long as it should’ve.

I’ll admit to making a mistake here, namely, all the DPS jumped down, sans-tank, after fighting the Ormorok the Tree Shaper Guy. Now for those who do not know, there are baddies roaming around down there. In a moment of hubris I figured I could keep the DPS up and save the day, since two of them were plate wearers, so I hopped down as well, but it turns out that Arms Warriors and Ret Paladins are about as squishy as a mage. Byebye Tree. Hey, I tried, right?

As I was flying away from that run, I got a whisper asking me to heal H. Nexus. I was very relieved to inform them that I’d just finished it and was saved.

I don’t think I’m going to put myself in LFG for Nexus again for a while…