I do believe I've mentioned on numerous occasions that I am very fond of maps. Maps are like graphs or charts in the fact that they display very useful information, but they are also more "user-friendly". There's that old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, if you throw a bunch of data into a map, it says both a thousand words and a thousand numbers in one easy to understand package. Maps display information in a way that just makes a lot more sense. You can look at a chart of data and it might mean nothing to you until you put it on a map - the spatial environment being pictured gives you a lot of context.

For instance: Let's say I told you that I decided to go back and try to clean up some achievements I'm missing, such as the old world dungeons. And then let's say (hypothetically of course) that I told you "I got a little lost". I count only five words there. Let's see if a map really does give it a bit more context, and if it's really worth a 995 more, shall we?



In my line of work, we also always include a section in our research called "Exclusions & Limitations" (which for those of you not in Academia, that's the section where you add all the shit that makes everything you just did completely moot and pointless), so here I shall tell you that does not include the 20 minutes I spent lost trying to find the damn graveyard because I went AFK and something 40 levels below me meleed me to death.

Next time on Miss Medicina... I venture into Upper Blackrock Spire!! As a little spoiler, remember how I told you I have a problem falling off of ledges in Oculus? UBRS has giant holes...

I wanted to get one of my fiance's toons through the ICC5 man questline, so several of us in our guild decided to run through the three ICC dungeons on heroic. Unfortunately, I'd already run the first two on heroic, so I was saved on my priest. You know what comes next.

I had no choice but to bring out the RETPALLYOFDOOM. Our resident shammy did the healing, and we pugged the fifth slot.

To the hunter who joined us, thank you for your patience. You must have thought we were awful. Of course, the four of us were chatting in guild chat and vent, but our pugged fifth had no idea we were all talking. At some point in the beginning of the run, I noticed the hunter was inspecting me, and I figured "oh here comes the schpeel." But she never said a thing.

And five minutes later, I looked at my own gear, and noticed I was wearing my holy set, not my ret set.

As per my typical Pally rotation (Judge -> Divine Storm -> Die) i spent a lot of time facedown on the floor. No, I did not get out of whirlwinds. Whenever there was bad stuff on the floor, I was most likely standing in it. Also, I was never attacking the right guy. Again, I just flailed my axe around wildly, thankful that Gordin is a Dwarf and therefore short, and hoping I hit something that was unfriendly. (Part of the reason why I'm so awful at melee is that I just can't make any sense of stuff that's happening right on top of me, i.e. in melee range - I need to be at a distance from it. That's my excuse anyway)

But the hunter never said a critical word. Her DPS was three times as high as mine, and I also kept forgetting to give her the proper Might buff, because I hadn't loaded PallyPower.

In fact, she even joined us in the next heroic, Pit of Saron. She wasn't especially talkative (but of course, neither were we in party chat, since we were talking in vent), but whenever she spoke, she was very friendly and polite.

The whole time I failed miserably, I wanted to shriek "No really! I'm not an awful player! I have a priest, and I swear she's really good! IM NOT A TOTAL FAILURE I SWEAR", but I resisted the urge.

We parted ways after the second instance so that I could jump on my priest, and we could do some other group changes, since GordinDwarfTank had to leave.

And as the hunter left the party, I thought to myself, "What a great pug." She likely had run through these heroics multiple times at a much higher speed, with much fewer deaths. She was possibly very frustrated with my failness. But she never said a critical word, and instead just went cheerfully about her business. Maybe somewhere right now she's writing a blog post about this truly awful ret pally she met in a pug the other day... and I wouldn't blame her.

So let me just take a moment to thank our Shammy who was healing, and hopefully laughing at my utter failure, and not cursing me. And also to you, anonymous pugged hunter. Thanks for your patience, and for not pointing out how much I suck. I will never forget your kindness - and I have no doubt you will earn your "The Patient" title!

My experience with the two-trick pony healer over the weekend left me pondering the nuances of a skilled healer.

Of course, much like the Pretentious Priest, it is possible to make your way through a lot of content by merely bashing your face against your keyboard in rhythm to Tchaikovsky, as long as you bind all your keys to Flash Heal or Circle of Healing/ Penance. I mean, let's face it - it's not actually that difficult to buy yourself some top notch gear these days, and especially for healers, once you outgear an instance, you end up healing yourself out of a job.

There's all this talk going around about how much harder healing is going to be in Icecrown. Health pools will be larger! Heals will be smaller! There's a debuff thingie that will make your tanks weep with pansy-fication!

Rubbish, say I.

Well okay, maybe not total rubbish, but I do remain skeptical. I remember all the hubbub about Ulduar as well - how it was actually going to be HARD on healers. How mana regen was going to be tricky, you would have to choose your heals wisely. You would need to coordinate better with your fellow healers. Sound familiar to anyone else?

It didn't take long before healing was no real challenge in the first half of Ulduar. And it was the gear that made it so easy.

I'm not standing up here on my soapbox to tell you all that zomg healing is soooooo easy, why are you struggling?! This is a cakewalk! I could solo heal this lol. Especially since I'll be the first to tell you, I'm a middle of the road raider. I haven't seen most of the hard modes, and I'm certainly not on the cutting edge of the raiding scene.

What troubles me is how quickly healers are made obsolete. How, the better we get, the more we improve our gear, the harder we fight to learn all the best ways to use our spells, the nuances within the trigger finger dynamic... what ends up happening is that we heal ourselves out of a job.

Suddenly those 6 slots that were set aside for healers become 5. Because if you don't do that, then your healers CAN get away with Easy-button face smashing to fulfill their duties. You might as well turn that 6th slot into a DPS, so that we can take down the bosses faster. I'm not complaining about this decision - it is a practical one, and I understand it.

When the content is new, and your gear is beginner level for the instance, it's fun. It's a challenge. You have to think, and you have to make real choices. This person needs healing NOW. Should I use Renew? Or Circle of Healing to give others around him a little boost? Should I bubble or is there no risk of more damage coming at him. Should I use GrittedTeeth or AngelWings?

It doesn't matter how much health you add to the bosses, or even to the tanks. You can nerf regen all to hell. Gear is so easy to get due to the way badges are handed out like candy. The gear gap is traversed so quickly that it's not worth blinking. It's not worth worrying over. Oh you want to ninja my epics? Meh. I've got 18 more in my back pocket. Yawn.

We are able to upgrade our gear so quickly, and so easily, that Blizz is shooting themselves in the foot - the easier new gear is to acquire, the shorter our attention span becomes. This is due not only to us finding ourselves with no desire for anything that drops in the instance, but also because we gear up so fast, the instance is quickly turned into a moot point. A challengeless chasm.

Don't you love when people criticize something but have no solution to the problem? >.>

I have hopes for ICC, despite my skepticism. I hear murmurs of a healer glory encounter. I hope there are more of those in the future - Incinerate Flesh is my favorite fight mechanic so far (though I'm not as fond when I'm running Disc). But I am again brought back to the question: How can Developers fix healing? It doesn't scale with gear and encounter difficulty properly. At least for DPS, if you outgear the place, you get it done faster.

This is a question I'm still pondering, but I leave this for you readers to think about as well. I'm thinking some creative solutions lie in the D&D world. I'd love to read some creative thoughts on how to address this problem. Or do you see no problem at all? Tell me all about it by clicking that little comment button down below XD