So, about that T10 4piece change.

Haven’t heard about it?

Well, the most recent PTR build has a change for Healy Priests’ T10 4 piece tier bonus. The current, live version, is this:

Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

I always thought that was rather confusing, but then let’s be fair. I’m slow. I had decided to forego that particular tier bonus for two reasons:

1) By a strange twist of awesomeness, whose details I am not at liberty to discuss, I miraculously acquired a free Leggings of Woven Death. Since I now have those, I figured what the hell, and went and purchased Meteor Chaser’s Raiment, because Dwarves look oh so hot in a turtleneck. Cough. This essentially killed my opportunity for the 4 piece bonus anyway.

2) Did I mention I’m slow? I don’t even want to see the stats on how many times I would miss the reset cooldown on my Penance. It would likely just throw off my tank-healing rotation, and confuse me.

Now, there was a lot of outcry about the crappy set bonuses for Disc Priests, because it just looked like Blizz was completely out of touch with what Disc Priests actually do most of the time. In 10 mans they may tank heal (and both tier bonuses for Disc Priests are very much directed towards tank healing IMO), but in 25s it is much more common for them to be raid healing – Pallies are just that much better in 25s. The tier bonuses don’t really do much for shield spamming – but to be fair, gear itemization in general does not do much for shield spamming Disc Priests. It’s a bit of a mess. Borrowed Time means you don’t need haste. Shields can’t crit, so you don’t need crit. You don’t need mana regen. So basically, everything that’s not Spellpower or at least Intellect is just *yawn*.

Okay so let’s take a look-see at what the PTR may have in store for us in terms of a new T10 4pc bonus:

Priest Tier-10 4-Piece Healing Set Bonus: Redesigned. This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster's Power Word: Shield and Renew spells by 5%.

I feel very ANH about this bonus, but it is definitely superior to the previous set bonus for shield spammers. It’s pretty irritating to change the bonus so late in the game though – quite a few people have already made their badge choices for tier or non-tier gear.

For Holy priests, I think it’s utter crap – and my main reasoning for that is coming directly from something Zusterke (for whom I have the utmost respect and admiration - who doesn't?) pointed out on the PlusHeal forums:

I'm confused by the idea that we get a FHeal bonus in the 2P and a Renew bonus in 4P when those spells seem to be competitors as filler spells.

I see Renew being touted more and more as a replacement for Flash Heal in many ways for Holy Priests, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about that. As someone who always ran with a lot of Druids, I hated it. Druids are better at HoTs, so it's better for me to focus on more burstiness while they deal with ... uhm, health pool softening. If you aren't druid-heavy, then yes, Renew is great.

In a raid, I do not heal in a vacuum - I heal as part of a team, and therefore, I consider the strengths of others in my team when making my own gear and talent choices. When I'm holy and healing next to a Druid, I rarely use Renew.

In conclusion though, if the PTR changes go through to live, it won’t really affect me personally, though I am sad for all those who saved up the emblems to get the bonus and will not like the change – Holy and Disc alike. If you had a good way to keep track of the free Penance or Circle of Healing proc, and if you were a tank healing Disc Priest, I would have thought it was pretty good.

As a side note… every time I read comments about Dawn Moore (the Healy priest column writer at WoW.com) I breathe yet another sigh of relief that I did not get that job. I may not always agree with her evaluations of things but… I know for a fact I would not handle that much criticism very well. Yes, yes… I’m a wimp.

If you cannot access the full text of the incoming stat changes for Cataclysm that was posted on the forums today, mosey on over to BigBearButt where he has kindly provided the full text of the announcement.

(If you can't access it from work, add http://thebigbearbutt.com/ to your feedreader)

You'll hear a lot of people talk about how Paladins or Discipline Priests are tank healers, or how other classes are subpar tank healers. I mean, everyone knows that Druids and Holy Priests are raid healers, and Shammies are Chain Healers, right?

The biggest mistake a healing lead can make, especially in a ten man raid when you only have 2 or 3 healers, is to pigeon-hole your healers based on their perceived niche. The larger the group, the more healers you have. The more healers you have, the more each healer can be specialized based on their niche. Thus we find ourselves in a situation where healers often have very specific roles in 25 man, but require a bit more flexibility in 10 mans. And too many people equate the strengths of each healing class in a 25 man to what their abilities will mean in a 10 man scenario.

Yes, some healers are better at certain tasks than others. However, never fail to recognize individual player style in combination with the flexibility of their class. A very important thing to remember is that all healing classes are balanced with abilities to heal single targets in addition to group heals. They absolutely have to be designed this way so that they can solo heal 5 man dungeons. Therefore, all healing classes can potentially do a stellar job with a tank healing assignment.

In order to break this down, we need to systematically break down the descriptions of single target healers and tank healers, and we also need to learn to differentiate between raid healers and AoE healers. Today I’m going to discuss single target healing.

Single Target Healing is an ability. It’s a niche that some healers, by design, excel at better than others. Tank Healing is an assignment. Got it? Wondering what the difference is? Well, it’s a subtle difference, I’ll give you that. The two classes most often referred to when discussing Single Target Healers are Disc Priests and Holy Pallies.

Last week Kurn had a post that discussed this conundrum with Holy Pallies, and it really got me thinking. Here’s a snippet of what Kurn said, but you can also read the whole interesting post yourself:

Single-target healing is our focus. True, this will generally be a tank, but that’s not always the case. Tank healing does not equal single-target healing. Apart from anything else, calling us “tank healers” completely ignores paladins who like to engage in PVP and arenas. There’s no way a mage, for example, can properly be called a “tank”, unless they’re tanking Krosh Firehand in Gruul’s Lair… Tank-healing is a subset of single-target healing.

I agree completely with Kurn (though I would probably flip that 3rd sentence and say that while tank healing IS single target healing, single target healing is not necessarily tank healing). And I will take that one step farther with Disc Priests.

When I was in charge of healing assignments in 25 mans, we had far too many Holy Pallies, and not enough raid healers. Therefore, when we had a Disc Priest, it was a challenge for me to come up with a specific assignment for them at first… and then I realized that most encounters have a situation in which a single player aside from the tank will start to take considerable damage.

Slag Pot. (Ulduar - Ignis)
Stone Grip. (Ulduar - Kologarn)
Bone Spike Graveyard. (ICC - Lord Marrowgar)
Mark of the Fallen Champion. (ICC - Saurfang)
Mutated Infection. (ICC - Rotface)
Penetrating Cold. (ToC - Anub'arak)
Legion Flame. (ToC - Jaraxxus)
Incinerate Flesh. (ToC - Jaraxxus)

Our resident Disc Priest could easily focus on these individual targets and allow the tank healers to continue doing their job and the raid healers to continue with theirs. It worked out fabulously – that is the strength of single target healing, and it does not necessarily need to be tank healing. I'll bet Kurn would agree that Holy Pallies would also do an excellent job at taking on these single-target non-tank healing assignments.

The Discipline Priest versus the Holy Paladin

There have been a lot of discussions lately about Disc Priests simply not being up to par as tank healers. Personally, I do not see a particular problem with tank healing as a Disc Priest in 10 man ICC (though I’m not a Hard Moder), but I can definitely see the argument in a 25 man raid.

The issue is actually less to do with single target healing ability, and more to do with the fact that most fights are two-tank fights to some degree – and Grace in effect punishes Disc Priests by 9% when we switch healing targets to try and heal two instead of just one. That is a significant gimp on our throughput. Pallies, on the other hand, can simultaneously heal the Main Tank AND the Off Tank through Beacon of Light (though they may not always choose to do this – see Saunder’s post).

Therefore, anytime there is a two tank fight, Pallies have an advantage over Disc Priests. In a 25 man environment, Disc Priests make better support healers for tanks, whereas Pallies can really do the brunt of the throughput healing. In 10 man, the problem is less extreme – Binding Heal, a Power Word: Shield, a Renew or a Prayer of Mending along with a splash heals from the raid healer will often be enough to keep up the OT until an actual tank swap occurs.

So, fine, Disc Priests are weak compared to Holy Pallies in terms of Tank Healing, at least in 25 man. Even Ghostcrawler has admitted this, albeit somewhat cautiously and grudgingly.

Personally, I suspect that it’s not so much that Disc Priests aren’t very good at it, it’s that we just can’t compete with Holy Pallies. For a vast portion of the healing public, that competition factor doesn’t really come into play – but for those who are in progressive raiding guilds, it does.
Therefore, the problem with Disc Priests as tank healers is that we are quite possibly the perfect example of a Single Target healer – whereas Holy Pallies are dual target healers. And current fights are usually designed around dual- tanking.

Other Classes as Tank Healers

As I mentioned before, all healers can adequately tank heal when necessary. I’ll repeat myself here – it is a requirement of designing healers that they be able to maintain the tank and group because healers are not just designed around raid encounters. They also need to be able to do their jobs well in a 5 man scenario in which they are the only healer. This was the most important thing I learned from the Circle of Healers survey – most responders who were not of the “tank healer” category commented that too many people don’t understand that they CAN tank heal.

Of course they can. There were plenty of times when, as a Holy Priest, I had to tank heal. This is one of the strengths of the Holy Priest, for the record – the ability to slip into ANY healing role at a moment’s notice without any significant gear or talent changes. If the tank healer goes down, the Holy Priest can slip right in to the role quite easily. Yes, a Holy Priest can definitely keep the tank alive and do a damn good job at it – they’ve got the burst and the single target throughput abilities to do it. They have a solid, and yet simple, rotation – as well as some “health pool softening” talents with Renew (side note: how do you like the word I chose to describe HoTs? Health pool softening – yay? Nay?).

For most raiding purposes, what sets the role of Tank Healing apart from other roles is that of sustainability.

Holy Priests can slip in and do an admirable job. However, they are not usually the best permanent choice for the role because of sustainability. In many situations, a Holy Priest will really struggle with their mana if forced to heal a single target for the entirety of a boss fight. It’s much better than it used to be, of course – now that we don’t have to pop in and out of the five second rule to stretch our mana, we can do a better job of it. But even still, Holy Priests just don't generally have the mana regen capabilities of a Disc Priest or Holy Pally unless they really go out on a limb to gear specifically for it.

I regret that I’m not as well versed in the styles of Shammies and Druids, but I suspect that in order to perform at their best as a tank healer, it requires a specific talent and gear selection. I rather like Druids as tank support healers, but burst is not the strength of a Druid. In my opinion, the best tank healers are the ones that have a reliable burst throughput and sustainability.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this though – especially from you Shammies and Druids. How do you feel your tank healing abilities compare?

Later this week we will discuss raid and AoE healing.

I might just do a whole buncha posts today!

First things first though... Wednesday night I did an interview with Exanna at OMGpriest! for her podcast, and it was pretty fun. I sound so tired and goofy, so all of you haters will want to listen to it and give me hell for it!

In all seriousness, it's a fairly short interview just talking about some of the basics of Discipline priesting... things you might want to know if you're switching from Holy to Disc. Listening to it now, I keep thinking of all these other things I should have said, but alas, hind sight is always 20/20. It can be rough making the switch, but Exanna and I went over some of the basics that a fresh Disc Priest may need to know.

Check it out on her page: OMGpriest!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

And speaking of newbie Disc Priests, I want to leave you with a lesson I learned in a ToC25 pug tonight - It is far better to do nothing but cast Power Word: Shield as a Disc Priest than it is to go through entire fights without casting it once.

I've run into this a lot lately in pugs - other priests healing tanks with me, and me feeling that I needed to shield their tanks because they just weren't doing it themselves. Yes, Penance is an awesome spell - and you could argue that Penance is a bigger staple of the Disc Priest diet than even Power Word: Shield. But the foundation of Disc Priesting is mitigation - SO USE YOUR SHIELDS OR I WILL CRINGE.

And then I'll blog about it.

But at least I don't name names. I'd like to think that if you are a Disc Priest, and you read this blog... you know better.

There have been a couple of pretty interesting discussions over on the WoW Healing forums over the past week that have received some response from Ghostcrawler.

The first I want to touch on is a post titled "Role of Disc priest???? Is there one?"

If that title doesn't make you cringe a bit, then you obviously have a lot more patience than I do. Regardless, the discussion that followed was "interesting" enough to garner a few responses from Ghostcrawler, which I think were more in response to people misunderstanding exactly what Disc Priests DO.

I had to laugh a bit as his initial response, as it sounded a bit like he was trying to give Disc Priests a textbook definition... which, come to think of it, maybe he was.

Discipline priests specialize in single-target heals and damage prevention. They are nonetheless fairly well rounded and have some fun tools, such as Power Infusion and Pain Suppression.

Later he added a clarification:

Perhaps I should have said "single-target HEALING" since unglyphed PW:S isn't technically a heal. But any Disc priest who is trying to heal multiple people at once is probably doing it wrong. You can raid heal effectively by targeting one person at a time, and that's what Disc priests do. Shaman and Holy priests can heal several people simultaneously.

I think a lot of people didn't particularly like this definition. Paolo seems more than a little skeptical at least. For my part, I actually agree with Ghostcrawler completely.

I'm planning on talking more about this topic next week, but let's clear this up now - Single Target Healing does not necessarily equate to Tank Healing. Disc Priests can be a single target raid healer (no, that's not an oxymoron). It is no surprise that Holy Paladins have the ability to be better tank healers in general than disc priests, because disc priests still have a stronger ability to raid heal. Therefore, if Disc Priests were just as strong as Pally healers in the tank healing realm, they would be imbalanced.

I was going to draw you all a very lovely diagram to show where each healing class falls on the spectrum, but I decided that would just be asking for an argument. Any healer can be a tank healer, and any healer can be a raid healer. This is absolutely required so that each healing class can effectively heal in a 5 man environment. That having been said, of course some classes will be stronger at one type of healing than the other.

One of the constant complaints from priests is the perceived lack of a definitive niche. The trouble with that argument, however, is that our niche is, in fact, the flexibility that simultaneously leads to accusations of lacking a niche. Capisce niche?

But, with two healing specs in one class, what you do have is a "leaning". Both Disc and Holy have the ability to do some powerful single target healing. Both can do some nice group healing. Disc, however, leans much farther in the single target category, with Grace, Penance, and individual bubbles guiding the way. Holy is stronger in multi-target healing, with Circle of Healing and hasted Prayer of Healing. Yet they both still retain the intrinsic flexibility that defines the Priest class. A Disc Priest can still use Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing. A Holy Priest can still use a Power Word: Shield, and a hasted Greater Heal.

It is an error to disregard the features of your class you do not regularly use when considering balance issues. If all I ever chose to do as a Disc Priest was tank heal, then maybe I would feel a bit miffed about my inferiority to a Holy Pally. However, I switch up the roles depending on the fight - sometimes a shammy or a druid will do better healing the tank on this fight, while the other features of my ever-flexible class allow me to handle some fight mechanic better than another healer (Saurfang pre-BP change, Rotface). If you pigeon-hole yourself, you will always be disappointed when Blizz tries to maintain a balance amongst the healing classes.

How Does Ghostcrawler Heal?

In a separate thread about Priests, GC gave us some interesting insight into how he plays his priest.

Disc: PoM on cooldown. PW:S as much as you can (esp. on the Arcane mage until 3.3.3). Use Penance often when you need burst. Resort to PoH if a lot of people need healing at once, especially in 10-player raids where you don’t have a lot of other healers to pick up the slack. Keep Pain Suppression and Divine Hymn for emergencies. Use Power Infusion on a mage or lock if you don’t need it.

Holy: PoM on cooldown. CoH on cooldown if there is any raid damage. Renew to handle the rest of the raid damage. Flash Heal if someone is still low after all of that. Save GS and Divine Hymn for emergencies or timed boss cooldowns. I tend to use Binding Heal a lot more than most priests because it makes me feel smart, especially when globals are in question.

What I like: Feeling smart when I mix the right tool with the right problem. Saving lives when someone thought they were dead. Sitting there at full mana halfway through a fight because I didn’t heal when I didn’t need to. Penance in general. Body and Soul. Borrowed Time. Serendipity.

What I don’t like: Using CoH so much. Dealing with Weakened Soul (esp. as Holy). Lightwell. Seeing priests die. (In all honesty I don’t die a lot, but I see Spirits of Redemption constantly. I guess as a sweeping generalization, priests have the stare-at-Grid syndrome worse than other healers.) Blowing 3 candles every wipe. Looking like a mage if I pick the wrong gear.

I found this an enjoyable read, and there's a lot more where that came from. Ghostcrawler was very chatty yesterday with Priests. I usually prefer to link directly to the forums, but since I really can't copy and paste all the interesting things he told us about his healing experiences here, I'm going to link to the MMO-Champion summary that shows each of his responses. It's a pain to try and sift through the whole thread at times.

Remember how you were taught to eat certain foods from every food group? You probably learned young that while you may be able to survive off of nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the rest of your life, it was far from ideal. Health wise, you'd definitely be gimping yourself.

The same principle applies to raids. You could do an entire raid with nothing but Druids, I'm sure. You'd survive, with a bajillion combat rezes. Hell, you'd even be covering the basic 4 food groups of a raid: Healer, Tank, Ranged DPS and Melee DPS. You could go with all pallies as well, though you'd be lacking on the ranged dps.

The point is, you don't necessarily have to have optimum raid synergy or diversification to succeed. Blizzard has really pushed the "bring the player, not the class" mindset since the release of Wrath, though there have been multiple exceptions. None of us healing priests have forgotten the nightmares of trying to Mind Control for the first time on Razuvious. *shudder*

However, the main way that Blizz has worked in this philosophy of raid makeup is by merging various kinds of buffs. They started this in BC, and I really think a big reason for that was the true takeoff of 10 man raiding that was coming in Wrath. Instead of utilizing Shadow Priests as mana batteries, they introduced the Replenishment buff that could be provided by several classes (Frost Mages, Ret Pallies, Survival Hunters, Shadow Priests, Destro Locks - learn it, live it, memorize it!). The tradeoff to opening up that mana return ability to multiple classes? You really needed to have it. Lots of folks didn't like this, as it went away from the BtPNtC attitude.

What do I mean when I say a certain buff is "required"? I use the word loosely. Shadow Priests were definitively required for Instructor Razuvious in 25 man, and that is certainly a different degree of requirement than Replenishment. However, there are certain buffs around which encounters and dungeons were designed. When Ulduar was designed, and when it was first released, it was done around the assumption that parties going in would have a Replenishment buff just as much as a typical tank/healer/dps setup. The same goes for Icecrown.

Blizz recently added Runescroll of Fortitude to the game, as well as Drums of Forgotten Kings and Drums of the Wild, admitting that they consider these buffs as somewhat "required" for raids (and therefore allowing you to have a slightly inferior version of the buffs without the particular class in your group) - i.e. the encounters are designed around the assumption you have that buff. Does that mean that you can't take down a boss without a Stamina, Kings, and Gift of the Wild buff? Not at all - it just means that you will have to work that much harder, or be geared just slightly better than the suggested iLvl.

Putting Diversification into Practice

When I first assembled the roster list for my babyicc10man group, I agonized over the buffs and whom to invite. Trust me, Fulguralis gave me hell for it. At the time, there were only 5 people in my guild, and therefore I had to reach out into my various networks to figure out the best way to fill out my group. I also had to consider the various group makeup requirements of each of the fights that had already been released when we started (I'm looking at you, Deathwhisper).

• Prot Warrior - Tank
• Prot Paladin - Tank
• Disc Priest - Healer
• Resto Druid - Healer
• Elemental Shaman - Ranged DPS (designated Third Healer)
• Arcane Mage - Ranged DPS
• Affliction Warlock - Ranged DPS
• BM Hunter - Ranged/Melee DPS (The Hunter may be ranged, but the pet is melee - for BM hunters, their pet is worth quite a bit of dps!)
• Rogue - Melee DPS -> Later replaced with an Enhancement Shaman - Melee DPS
  
• Retribution Paladin - Melee DPS

Since its conception, I had to change the raid night, and in doing so had some roster swaps. Having a second shaman made me cringe a bit, but in actuality, it has worked out marvelously. Besides, nothing wrong with have two sets of totems.

The value of this raid lies not just in the ability of each individual player, though I am insanely proud of them. I've watched the DPSers go from a struggling 4k when we first started, to pushing 7k on Festergut - and I know it's not just gear upgrades. The diversification scheme also helps a lot. They each contribute to one another's abilities. I base my personal gear choices around the assumption that I will have replenishment and blessing of kings. Even Fulguralis finally acquiesced that having a diverse mix of class combos also helps on the gear front (and trust me, he and I have argued about the raid mix question for months, so even a tiny acquiescence is like a gigantic victory for me!).

But it's not just about the individual buffs that each class brings to the table. Having a diverse group that covers every type of damage mechanic means that the same 10 people can go through the entirety of Icecrown Citadel without having to swap people out for certain fights. This was incredibly important to me - I wanted my group to be cohesive and comfortable with one another. If we kept swapping people in and out, we would constantly be battling the challenge of learning how a new player works. I could have simply ignored raid synergy, and brought only the highest DPS possible. I could have chosen only those with the best gear.

I chose not to do either of those things, because I wanted this group to go into ICC from the start, and grow as a group through the entirety of this raid sequence - together. Spending all the extra time and effort into building a solid and diverse mix of classes for the team from the beginning means that I don't have to worry later about whether or not we can take on a certain fight without our makeup - we can. We have multiple forms of rezzing, buffs, crowd control, healing, damage, you name it.

I'm incredibly proud of my group.

From a healer's perspective, there's a lot of fancy schmancy terminology in WoW. You've got people discussing throughput, mana management, mitigation, effective health, AoEability, clustering, stacking, proactive, reflexive, reactionary, etc etc etc. Sometimes when I want to feel good about myself, I just start throwing around these words like how I used Foucaultian terms in grad school. Makes people think you're smart or something.

Inevitably, these terms will get confused and misused. People will use one term when they mean another, or perhaps not understand the difference between two terms. And that's fine – after all, knowledge is relative. What one word means to you is not necessarily what it means to me. But I won't bore you with critical theory and philosophy today (I always get especially philosophical at 6 am, I have no idea why).

Let's look at a primary example of a word that is often misused or misunderstood conceptually. Fulguralis calls me a word nerd for a very good reason!

Mitigation.

-verb

1. to lessen in force or intensity, as wrath, grief, harshness, or pain; moderate

2. to make less severe: to mitigate a punishment.

3. to make (a person, one's state of mind, disposition, etc) milder or more gentle; mollify; appease.

4. to become milder; lessen in severity.

Disc Priests are the king of damage mitigation amongst the healing classes, and I don't think there's any argument about that. However, I often hear of Druids being referred to as damage mitigators as well, and this grates on my word nerdiness, and does not accurately reflect the power of the HoT. If you say that Druids are damage mitigators, then it could be interpreted that a Disc Priest + Resto Druid is a poor healing combo for a ten man raid. This is absolutely untrue – Disc Priest & Resto Druid is a fantastic ten man healing combo.

I have been unable to find a term that adequately describes the purpose and power of the Druid HoT. The word for Disc Priest is, of course, mitigation, but I cannot conceive of a proper alternative for Druids. I understand, therefore, why people often refer to them as mitigative (lawl I will not be put off by that squiggly red line!).

The power of mitigation healing is that it reduces the impact of a big burst of damage, smoothing the incoming damage out a bit, taking off the peaks of pain. HoTs have this same power, but in a different way. Mitigation smooths out the incoming damage. HoTs smooth out the health pool. They result in similar effects, but go about it in different ways. Both Disc Priests and Resto Druids are "smoothers" if you will – but they are inherently different in their processes, and misunderstanding the difference can be fatal.

The fundamental difference between the two is best described in an example.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you have a tank with 35k health. This tank takes a hit of 37k damage, and consequently dies. A Disc Priest can actively prevent this by using one of their many mitigative abilities – be it Power Word: Shield, Pain Suppression, or perhaps a well timed Divine Aegis proc. These "mitigation" abilities are, in effect, temporary hit points that will be absorbed before any of the actual damage. If I pop a 5k shield on the tank, I have effectively increased their health to 40k, albeit temporarily. This is enough to allow them to survive that hit.

A resto druid cannot give that tank temporary hitpoints. However, if my Penance is on cooldown, a Resto Druid can do something that I cannot. What if, right after that tank takes that 37k hit, and is down to 3k health, he continues to take melee damage? With his health so low, and all my cooldowns blown, he could die before I get my Flash Heal cast off. But if he has HoTs on him, he will have health trickling in that may be enough to keep him alive between the time that he took his giant hit and the time that my Flash Heal or Greater Heal lands. THIS is the power of a Resto Druid.

Of course, in the effort to find the right word for teh HOTNESS that is a resto druid, the Twitterati came out and threw me a variety of potential words to meet my demands. None of them were perfect enough for me, but some of them were pretty epic.

Cadistra and Angelya suggested "lifestream".

Angelya again: Trickling?

Me: Trickle top-offing?

Sheqeri: Increased effective health?

Dristanel: Flailing? Foundation HoTs?

Matticus: Health gappiness?

Nibuca: Hottification? Pre-cognitive burst smoothing? Bursty effective armor displacement stamina throughput druid mob tree? (I get this strange sensation as if she were almost teasing me...)

Wonderful suggestions, eh? But I do believe that Deyndor takes the prize for the best suggestion of all time: Colander Heals. (I made sure I spelled it right this time! Ever notice that my spelling errors are mostly limited to double consonant words?) Do you have a difficult time conceptualizing Colander Heals? Well, LET ME DRAW YOU A PICTURE

If you're reading this, you may be under the misconception that I am a nice person.

As of last night, know that you are officially wrong. I am a horrible, mean, cruel individual.

I wasn't always like this. I have always strived to be kind and courteous, generally warm and helpful. But something happened last night that opened my eyes to the fact that I'm not nearly as nice as I thought I was.

Up until the Naxx raid Ful threw together last night, my worst epic mistell story was the time I was talking back and forth with a friend of mine about song lyrics. I was singing Meatloaf to him... in caps. Because, you know, that's what I do. Somewhere in between "I'D RUN RIGHT INTO HELL AND BACK" and "OH YEAH I WOULD DO ANYTHING", my GM whispered me to ask me a question. I was not paying attention. He got the last few lines of the chorus. "..."

See, now, that's a slightly embarassing, but generally fairly hilarious mistell. You can't tell me you wouldn't find that funny, because I absolutely won't believe you.

Now, let's move to last night. After a humiliating, horrendous, and exhausting class at the YMCA in which we were required to work out in the middle of the main hall with all the kids from all the classes gawking at our jiggly selves, I came home, and Fulguralis was putting together a group of his guildies for the weekly raid quest, which was Anub in Naxx. Easy sauce. He asked if I wanted to join, so I said sure, he said invite your guildies, so I did, and suddenly we had 11 people. So he figured, what the hey, and decided to do it on 25 man with as many random friends we could throw together, even if it wasnt a full 25. It's just Naxx. None of us really cared about raid comp.

One of the girls who joined us is someone who may not be a very good player, but she is one of the sweetest, friendliest girls I've ever met, and she is in a friendly guild run by some very dear friends of mine. When I've run 5 mans with her in the past, we've had to be very careful to explain things clearly to her, and she seemed to really struggle on a lot of fights. A guild member had told me in a whisper once that he thinks she might be slower due to some medical issues, but I don't really know much about it. I don't think she'd ever been in Naxx, but none of us had any problem with carrying folks through, so I invited her to join us anyway while Ful got everyone settled and buffed and ready to go - she could probably get some loot upgrades, and it would be fun for her. I know she doesn't ever get to see any raiding content, and this was a good chance for her to do so in a low stress environment, where no one is giving her a hard time if her DPS is low.

I was the one who invited her in, but Fulguralis was leading the raid. I knew that most people would know the Anub fight, but she probably would not, and I wasnt sure if Ful planned on giving a boss explanation. It's not a hard fight, but it can be tricky and confusing if you dont know the fight at all, and I wanted to make sure she was at least told the basics. I was also in a ridiculously shitty mood.

So I sent Ful a tell that essentially said "Player x is borderline retarded, so make sure you explain the fight clearly to her".

Except it didn't go to Ful. I'll just let you guess who the whisper went to.


This is the part where some people might say "you know, there are add-ons that can help you avoid that." Or maybe you might suggest ways I could have played off what I said like a joke, to make it seem like I meant something else. Perhaps you may even be someone who will tell me exactly how shitty a thing that was to say, no matter who I said it to - and you are right, and I know it.

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, will change the fact that it actually doesn't matter who I said it to. It doesn't matter if it's even slightly true either (which I don't even know) - because I meant it in a mean way, and I said it like it was perfectly natural for me to do so. There are no excuses for it. Would I have considered what a horrible thing it was to say if I hadn't sent it to the very person I was trashing? Probably not.

What kills me is that I never say things like that. I may be snarky at times, or make cracks at other people's expense, but it's usually because they are being rude to others, or someone who will dish it right back to me. But the thing is, neither of those aspects apply to this girl. She has never been anything but friendly, goofy, kind and warm to me and everyone else. I genuinely do like her, and if I didn't, I would not have invited her to join Ful on the raid he was running. She has never done anything to deserve that. I would even prefer to try and pretend that I was whispering Ful to give him a heads up out of sympathy for her or something... except even THAT (which is still patronizing) is untrue. Plain and simple, I was being a bitch. Trying to pretty it up and make it sound less awful than it is is just further insult to her.

I wish she would have ripped me a new one. I wish she would have told me off, and put me on /ignore, and told the whole guild what an awful person I am. She would have been well within her rights. But what makes me especially ashamed... is that I think she hears that kind of crap all the time. Her response was "Hey now, it's not like I'm drooling all over my keyboard!" and she laughed it off. When I told her how unbelievably sorry I was, and that it was an awful thing for me to say, she tried to make ME feel better. Which of course means that I just feel worse. Good.

I listen to people all the time complain about some idiot in their heroic pug... someone who makes a stupid choice in talents, or cant hold threat, or any other myriad of poor player choices. I hear people insult them and call them names. And I think of her, in an heroic PuG, and the kind of crap people might say to her because she struggles sometimes to play this game that she still loves.

And then I think about the fact that I just became one of those people I hate.

I doubt she will ever see this post, or know just how dreadfully sorry I am for being that person. I doubt she will ever warmly greet me again, though I know she will never be rude. And no matter how many times she may struggle through a fight, I will be the one who lost most - because as a human being, she proved tonight to be much more superior to me than I thought I was to her.