Get it? It's the line from Midnight Cowboy. I didn't know how to quite capture a New Yorker accent in terms of spelling...
Yes, I've been furiously leveling a healer for our little 4-man party of me, my husband and 2 RL friends. I started out with a druid who mainly just sat around most of the time except for healing a dungeon once a week. Recently our friend the tank decided to go DPS so my husband took up the responsibility and leveled a warrior. I told him when we started, "pick a hybrid in case one of them wants to switch". I mean, that's why I rolled a druid and lugged around 2 completely different sets of gear...but no, he just had to play a hunter. Well, now he was rolling a warrior. A little goblin warrior at that.
Partly to keep him company and to keep him motivated on his grueling sojourn, I rolled a new priest alt. Our friends were well into 40s, almost pushing 50s when we started our alts. And I'm amazed that we actually made it to our goal - level 50 in a week. It was a goal that we joked about as we donned every heirloom we could get and began our trek, him starting out in Kezan and working his way through Kalimdor and me tackling on the Eastern Kingdoms from Silverpine to Hillsbrad to Hinterlands. Level 10, 20, 30, and 40 rolled by in a matter of hours as I chain-completed quests and dungeons.
One thing I noticed about playing a shadow priest is that it's a lot like my warlock. My lock rotation was usually: curse, bane, life drain x 2-3 until dead, and shadow bolt when it procs. With the Spriest, it's the same deal: devouring plague, shadow word, mind flay x 2-3 until dead and mind blast when you proc shadow orbs. My damage output was very good except for the fact that I was going oom. Constantly. When leveling I was sitting down to drink pretty often which was alright, but in dungeons it was a problem. Sometimes my que would pop as DPS and I would spend the whole dungeon struggling to get mana regen, resorting even to wanding to sustain at least some semblance of DPS. Finally I figured out I can get mana back by using shadow word: death and that vastly improved matters.
Last night I healed Zul Farrak and about half of Blackrock Depth, which was a lot of fun. ZF was pretty easy and I actually healed part of it in shadow spec because there was hardly any incoming damage. The mobs in BRD was the perfect difficulty level for our 4 man group. The tank was taking enough damage where I wasn't just sitting around twiddling my thumbs, but not so much that I was struggling to keep up.
I do have to say that threat generation seems to be a constant problem. I don't know if it's a problem with the DPS or with the tank, but sometimes it felt like literally healing 3 tanks. The DPS were constantly getting bashed by mobs and eating a lot of damage. It was fine with the pally DPS, what with wearing plate and all, but when a rogue is trying to tank, it makes for a headache. Luckily we had no serious problems, and it actually kept me busy without draining my mana too much.
I can definitely start to see the side of healing everyone gripes about, which is that it's more or less a thankless job. Everyone's too focused on DPS meters to realize that while they're off killing something, the healer is sometimes sweating bullets pumping out heals. People end up pulling an entire room and say "oh we're doing fine" and that's kind of a big weight on your shoulders as a healer. And when people die you feel like you didn't do a good job. It's definitely stressful, though in my opinion tanking is more stressful when you're dealing with DPS who like to pull threat. Unless you're a pally who can drop consecration every time, aoe threat is pretty difficult especially at low levels.
All in all, I'm enjoying healing and BRD was quite fun. That place is freaking huge though! There's no way any group can get that done in less than 3 hours. Split that shit up!
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