Healing and PvP

"Damage wins the fame,
Healing wins the game".

Whilst browsing the official forums, i saw this signature and it made me wonder. Pre-TBC I farmed rank, or rather my boyfriend farmed rank on his warrior and i just trailed along in his wake spamming heals on him, but regardless back then healers in pvp were rare. Even healers in pve guilds often either respecced or smite spammed in pvp, my guildmates being the perfect example of this. We were the best guild on the server and yet my fellow priests either pvped on their rogue/mage alts or respecced shadow if they were battlegrounding for any length of time. The only time they were happy to go in as healers was when we were either premading ab/wsg or doing large groups of guildies in AV.

So then Blizzard introduced Arenas and now.... everyone is healing. Its rare to meet a feral druid these days, they are either boomkins, resto or a combination of the 2. Priests are for the most part Disc (myself included) and shamans seem to be resto with a warrior in tow.

This has good and bad effects. When 80 percent of your AB pug are healers, its going to be a slow loss. When every node you attack has one s3/4 warrior lovingly protected by a windfury dropping shaman its likely to be a fast one.

But more importantly, what changed. Are the majority of todays PvP healers doing it simply because of arenas? And if so, the class changes coming with WotLK will be interesting. If feral becomes as viable and good as resto currently is, does that mean all these resto druids bouncing around like jumping beans will suddenly return to being the mangle spammers they were in the early days of the current expansion. Personally i hope yes, they return to kittyness, mainly because i hate meeting them in arenas, warrior + druid means long games, the outcome of which is usually based on who manages to drink the most.

But if a majority are only doing it for the gear, why dont people enjoy healing? Personally having pvped and raid healed on all 4 healing classes in all dungeons and all battlegrounds currently ingame, i dont see what there is not to like about it.

Plus points of healing in PvE
No one can really check up on you. As long as the maintank/whoever you are assigned to heal isnt falling over dead every two seconds you have plenty of leeway. You can watch tv/listen to music, talk on vent whilst healing.
All the dps, especially hunters if you heal their pets and rogues love you for it.
Getting raid spots is easy as long as you are capable of writing a half decent application and showing up on time with consumbables.
Finally and most importantly, you can heal yourself, which means your life and ultimately your death is pretty much in your hands unless you manage to outaggro the tank.

Plus points of healing in PvP
You can heal yourself
You can choose who to heal. See that warrior over there who was bullying the nice warlock, let him die. That rogue who has been spamming "lose fast" since before the gates even opened, it will be snowing in Stranglethorn Vale before he gets a heal from me.

I guess that explains why i like to heal, im a control freak at heart.

The other great thing about being a healer in pvp is you escape all the abuse. My boyfriend across all his dps toons, hunter, warrior and rogue has had many a disgruntled opponent log to tell him how much he sucks, knows nothing about his class and should delete his characters before he embaresses himself any more. Not to mention all the whispers from people on IRC, "X says lol lol lol you suck" after he ganked the guy at Elemental Plateau.

Rabbits, rogues and more rabbitity rogues

Maybe its just me, but rogues seem to be multiplying like the proverbial rabbits these days. Every battleground seems to have at least 5 of the little devils sneaking around stabbing people in the back or hemoing their faces skillfully. Luckily the majority dont seem to have taken
Kick out of their spell book, let alone keybound it, but i still dont like them, especially the undead variety. I guess that harks back to the days of being a little pve priest (whilst my Robes of the Guardian Saint and Benediction looked great, they acted as a rogue magnet), also having less than 4k health probably didnt help either.

Although now my health has more than doubled, i still harbour a faint mistrust of all things roguesque, so some kind of cull would be nice. Maybe Blizzard could offer a reward for rogue hunting, something like bring 10 rogue heads to a NPC in Shattrah and receive a welfare epic in return. We could have a new set called "Rougestalker", red of course for killing large quantities of the sneaky little creatures and maybe a shiney new title. Mariposa the Rogue Slaughter has a much better ring to it than "of the Shattered Sun" or "Champion of Naaru".

Failing that, renaming the class to Rouge might help lower the numbers, or would at least make all the "Rougemaster", "Rougedk" etc sound smarter.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

So favourite things, what makes us play WoW? Ive tried to quit several times, my most successful quittage lasted all of eight days so what keeps me logging on?

Now I play with my boyfriend (cute but badtempered gnome rogue) so in part WoW wins out because its the only game we can play together. First person shooters ( the games he chooses to play when hes gaming but not wowing) give me motion sickness so are out of the question and nothing else seems to have the longetivy.

I like the variety, pre-TBC, when i wasnt raiding i spent most of my time hanging out in Felwood or Un'goro picking herbs and just talking to guildmates/friends. Now when im not pvping i still enjoy exploring the zones, just wandering around picking flowers or leveling alts.

Although there are only 4 battlegrounds, each one is unique in the sense that each game you play whilst utilising the same terrain pits you against different and adapting opponents. That i think is in part what keeps the game fresh for me. Whilst its a long time ago since i made my very first toon, a gnome mage called "Cutiepie" on my boyfriends account (we needed to see if it would make me feel sick before he would get 2 accounts), the game still doesnt feel stale.

Arathi Basin

Now its time for some of the "whining" of the title. Since i stopped hardcore raiding in april, ive been focusing mainly on pvp. Now that unfortunately means PuGs which are painful. From my experience pvping on both factions, ive noticed the following things which seem to hold true across the board.

1.a) No one wants to defend. So the game starts, everyone streams out to nodes, the alliance tags the Stables, the LM and the GM. Now the guy who tags the Stables heads straight off to the Farm. So we end up with the alliance tagging the farm and the horde tagging the stables, thus games which should be fairly fast end up taking at least 30 minutes as we play musical chairs with the nodes.
b) On the odd chance someone does want to defend, its usually a healer. Which then leads to the rest of the map complaining about the lack of healing. Although i have to admit, im usually found shadowmelded at the Lumber Mill, lurking waiting for some little hordling to wander into my lair.

2. Why oh why oh why would anyone with less than 6k health at lv 70 choose to enter pvp combat. Now im not being particularly elitest, its just common sense from where im sitting. Why do something which must be so painful and frustating when pretty much everyone can 2 shot you. The side with the largest number of undergeared people, and its usually mages and druids will lose, its as simple as that so if you enter wearing completely scrub (sorry, but i love that word) gear you are letting the rest of your team down. Doesnt matter how good a player you are, although given the blue pvp sets easily available from reputation vendors, stam/res gems and enchants etc, i find it hard to believe good players choose to enter as free kills.

3. Communication. Now there are 2 types of battlegrounders. Those that keep giving updates, announce if nodes are under attack, inform people about the enemy strength at target nodes and so on and then we have those that dont say anything. You only discover if their location is underattack either when its capped by the other side or if you happen to be using something like Grid and you can see their health going down.

You can tell a lot about a PuG before the gates even open, does the mage make a table?, do the priests/druids/mages/paladins buff everyone? Is anyone talking in Battleground chat? If the answers to all those are yes, you have a good chance of winning.

In summary, communicate, defend (Nightelfs make great defenders, nothing beats shadowmeld) and communicate some more. Whether games are won or lost has nothing to do with racials, factions or Blizzard imbalance, but everything to do with the players taking part so if YOU lose all the time, maybe you need to fix something in your playstyle.

MuckBreath

Next to priests, my 2nd favourite thing ingame is minipets. So when a guildmate mentioned the fact that the fishing daily was [Crocolisks in the City], i went rushing off to Terrokar to collect the quest. Now unfortunately for me, out of the 4 70s than i currently play only 2 have a decent fishing skill and by decent i mean over 100, (Fishing isnt my idea of fun, but when there is mini pets involved.... ) so i completed on the quest on my paladin (nothing but junk), shaman (eye of the sea) and then was at a bit of a loss. Do you need a decent level of fishing to complete the fishing quest?
So i logged my druid (34 fishing skill) and went off to try my luck. Luckily the quest was available, unfortunately no baby croc for my little kitten. That left me with my priestie, my favourite toon, but my only character with no fishing skill whatsoever. Off to Stormwind i ran, quickly learnt fishing, got to 4 skill, hearthstoned to Shattrah, collected the quest, returned to SW and crossed my fingers as i fished. Didnt take many casts to get my Baby Crocolisk quest item and so i returned to Old Man Barlo. The fates smiled on me, or something to that effect and now to the envy of my guildmates im the owner of a cute little Muckbreath with a massive 10 out of 375 fishing skill. For once, random loot being random was a good thing.

A Brief Introduction

So, ive been playing WoW and reading other people's blogs for a while now, just never quite managed to take that first step. Til now. Then one of my guildmates, Seph of Guild Mum decided she was going to jump into the blogging waters. After reading some of her posts, i decided it was time that i gave it shot.

I currently have 5 70 characters, 2 of which are priests, hence the "holy nova", one of my favourite spells. The other 3 are the other 3 healing classes, paladin, druid and shaman.

I also have a bad tempered and generally grumpy gnomeling in tow, otherwise known as the boyfriend. He can usually be found stabbing people in the back or lurking polishing his daggers, awaiting victims.