Playing With Family/The Closer You Get

Well my druid got shipped to Bloodhoof Alliance side, to play with my sister and her boyfriend. Who doesn't want to play a game with their sibling right? I ended up doing a few heroics solo, later on her boyfriend logged in and we fired another out.
This morning however I got to do a slew of heroics with them. One of them being the most challenging imo of all the heroics out for WOTLK. From a healers aspect, there's an emense amount of multi target healing, along with decursing the whole way. I really feel that the Druid is the go to healer to have there. I was really having to spread Rejuv, Lifebloom and Wildgrowth among the 5 of us, along with some nourish spam on the tank, and sometimes myself if an add wasn't picked up immediately.
This differs from the Pit Of Saron pulls after the second boss going up the hill. I learned very quickly that you cannot be idle on that particular string of pulls. Once the mobs start hellfiring you really have to crank out heals. Once it starts I find myself laying a Rejuv, then Nourish on every target taking damage. I lay a rejuv and start railing them with heals. Hit the next person, rejuv and rail with heals. After the initial round of Rejuv+Nourish, I can then slap a wildgrowth on the group and just continue to heal with Nourish bombs alone. I really feel that clicking your spells on those strings of pulls really would set you back in comparison to using your keyboard or mouseovers, where you can really page through group members, fire and move on very rapidly.
 Indeed HOR, is alot different, where you have to blanket many heals onto people. The bosses are a big part of that since you're taking damage throughout the fear.
 The Lich King portion of the instance also provides its own unique challenges. Heal too early and too much, and you'll find yourself  with aggro getting kicked in the face. Most times because the tank is already negotiating a handful of mobs and overzealous dps is already on the verge of ripping aggro.
 Nick (my sisters boyfriend), had expressed that his guild needed people for Saturday morning raids, which was one of the reasons I wanted to move over there, it wasn't anything like ICC raiding, however I do find myself just a mere 300 Gearscore points away from 5k, which would open the door of thought of "I could find myself doing toc10/25, and from there possibly ICC, depending on my luck and fortunes on picking loot up in TOC. From doing a Naxx, Ulduar and most recently a 25VOA, I've grown more comfortable with raid healing. With my paladin I had resigned to the fact that I just couldn't blanket everyone with a heal in a short time, so I would always find myself just healing whomever had taken the most damage, and hope that the other healers would pick up the other people. However, the reputation Druids carry of being incredible raid healers gives itself it's own expectations. I found it a bit intimidating seeing all these people that I could heal in such a short time span, but I simply didn't have the knowledge of how to heal them all on a big scale that a raid requires. Switching to keybinds certainly helped that. The only thing I had to accept at that point was that if people were adamant about shoving themselves into the way far corner, out of my range, well they were just fucked. Accept it for what it is,
  "they're simply out of range, and if I don't have a second or two to get into closer proximity, they should have the presence of mind to move in closer. If they die, don't even say shit until the boss is down, and just simply let their ignorant asses know that they shouldn't have crammed themselves way off somewhere in the corner."
In my VOA I was very easily the least geared of all the healers. And I DID come last out of the healers on the meters, but I wasn't that far off from the person just above me. So I didn't think too much of it in any sort of negative way, I just looked at it as "I did pretty damn good, with a bit more gear I'll be up on those meters."

All in all it wasn't bad whatsoever, I enjoyed it even! lol. I'm at the point now where triumph badges have little use for me. I'm sitting on almost a full set of T9, just missing the chest piece via my own decision as I felt the chest out of H.HOR is much better with its stats over the t9 chest. It's now left up to drops. My staff I'm using now is quite adequate, however there's an offhand that drops off Lich King that would complement my dagger I picked up from H.POS, to really crank my Haste up.
 I recently made my first Frost Badge purchase with a cloak, not doing ICC raids limits myself to aquiring them via VOA, Heroics and the Weekly Raid, so it'll be a bit of time before I pick up my next item, the trinket.  Boots will be a cloth upgrade but an upgrade none the less. Along with some other minor upgrades, that perhaps might do the trick of shoving me to 5k, or near it.
We'll see what happens from there :)

Growing

So I'm at the point where I'm sitting with just one piece of Blue quality gear. My boots to be specific, which are proving to be something that I'll either need to find a competent Naxx25,TOC10 Group if I want to eliminate the option of buying some crafted gear. In the end sure, the crafted leather boots will end up being a better piece for me. However,when you consider that the character is a 3rd alt, it becomes a bit more understandable as to why I don't want to shell the cash out for something like that,at least until I get a bit further in some sort of progression. In other words, no need to buy 10,000 Gold boots when the character isn't going to see content that needs something like that.
 The other option is to get some cloth boots, the unfortunate problem with this is the fact that in Random Heroics, I can't roll need on Cloth armor, I have to simply hit greed like the rest of the group. So it forces me to ask the other members of the group to pass for me, or trade the item to me. Then just pray that they'll be the sort that's friendly enough to do so. Not that shards are a huge commodity anymore!

How has everything else been? I've found that in many Random Heroics, my Que springs up quite often with 2/3 bosses dead, or 1/3 bosses dead or so on. A lot of times I get into a run thats already in progress, most of the times they've only pulled one or two packs, nothing to be concerned about. It's not that I don't mind missing out on a badge or two, but that extra badge or two doesn't hurt either.

One Elemental specced shaman in a group I healed last night left a stinger in party chat...
 "That was close, they almost had me, please pick it up."
It felt like a slap in the face, I had to reply back, what with honor and all that in contention! "Relax, you have HOT's on you right now healing you. If I had really felt you'd die, I would have used a Natures Swiftness+Healing Touch macro I got on my bars."
Just to prove the point during the last fight in the place, I purposely let him dip low and just as he started to cast his heal, I slapped the "Love Bomb" macro'd heal on him. After the fight I had to put my 2 cents in. "I just wanted to show you I decided who lives or not."
 A bit assholish but whatever, he was chain pulling and so on at any rate!

Healing a naxx10 with my guild opened up realities on healing that I had felt before hand, or might have forgotten. I had always saw Druids working magic, seemingly able to cover an entire mass of people with HOT spells, and I'd think to myself that it had to be easy to just select new targets and just blanket them. But from actually doing it, there's a bit more skill and work to it than you'd imagine. However as there were only two healers, a Holy Priest and myself. I might not be getting the "Whole" experience. As I quite often found myself doing the Priest's job, despite her 5300 gear score or whatever it was (around that number.)
The tanks were a bit under geared as well so that lends a bit more difficulty or work to the fray.
 I've become more aware of how absent minded dps can really make life a whole lot harder for a healer. You have a lot of cases where you're healing a tank, and all of a sudden you have to switch targets in a split second and shoot him heals before he gets himself killed. This takes your heals off the Tank!
 Luckily for me, the HOT's can carry the tank's health for a little bit of time without nurturing them, however if it happens constantly you find your keyboard hand really flying to every crevice of the keyboard, and your other hand shoving the mouse in all sorts of directions violently to keep up.
 It's a pain in the ass, every person that heals, loves comfort, loves consistency and no surprises... EVER.
Healers develop a pattern after the first few seconds of a fight, when you're getting into the meat and potatos of a fight. An little timer in your head has this pattern going on, you have a fairly precise idea of how many seconds it takes for your tank to take some damage, and how much of it he takes. If your particularly good you have a grip on when your healing counterparts are landing heals.
 When things are going along like this, the healers are able to look around a bit more, they're better able to jump out of any "poo","gas","green shit","fire","laser","rabid cat" that might be tossed at them from the boss or environment. Thus keeping themselves safe and free from damage, so they can continue on with their jobs.

But even with dedicated "raid healers", you still find times where they or tank healers have to break off and do the other assignment, to make up for lost ground. If you have a bunch of dps taking tons of damage all of a sudden you scramble, and with today's game it might be folly to believe you can save everyone from a dirt nap, even if they do deserve it! At these moments other healers have to chip in, which breaks more of the pattern that's been established. This in turn causes scrambling, and while better than doing nothing, it certainly doesn't take "saving mana" into consideration. Healers firing off "giant bomb nuke heals"  all at once to make sure the precious tanks are alive.
 It ends up being a huge mess, and hopefully it doesn't take long for your healers to regain their poise, but never the less, that's precious time wasted, effort misspent, and in some cases the cause of healers running out of mana.

Healing again has provided thus far an insane amount of excitement, boredom,happiness,and peeked interest to say the least :)

Nourish

Way back when I spent most of my time if not nearly all of it healing as a paladin. The revelation of being able to be mobile when healing is still something I'm getting used to. The ability to lay a few hots on a tank thats rushing ahead, and then taking my time to loot mobs without a care is something I've welcomed.
 Often times when I've been healing with the paladin I felt I had to park my ass right onto the tank, since once I start healing, I don't move entirely much at all. So I had to make sure I was set and ready to heal.
 However with the Druid, it doesn't exactly matter. If I'm behind the tank, that's great, generally speaking I rather the rest of the group get smacked around than me.
 Tank runs ahead, I smack a hot on him and go about my business until I want to throw more onto him.
 If anything the advantage of a druid is the premptive heals you can shell out onto something, then move along and pick up whoever was also taking damage. Often times in pug heroics I find that almost always there's a nimrod dps that manages to take 3x the amount of damage the tank does. You can easily slap hots on the tank, slap a regrowth onto the dps that took the damage, and then sit there staring into space on most trash pulls.

 However there are the fights where aoe damage is going wild, and from now healing with a druid at 80, I can see why they really shine. If I had been on my pally (before beacon) I can totally see that sort of fight being really stressing. But with this class you have an aoe hot, and then can roll a series on every person.
 However my new love is Nourish. My first Heroic Pit Of Saron, on tyrannus the tank started taking heavy damage. I had rejuve and 2 stacks of lifebloom. I slapped a swiftmend, and then started railing Nourish into him. BAM BAM BAM BAM 9k 9k 9k 9k. I loved it. It was everything I loved about healing on a paladin, but rolled into a quick cast that benefits from hots. I can control how big of a Nourish Bomb I want to lay into someone, this is something that other classes suffer from, but where druids shine.

 It's something I definitely have taken a liking to, however as people who really know me understand, I hate requesting, regearing and so on. I was fortunate with my rogue in that I had constant humor and fun on vent to curb my distaste of heroic grinding. However at the moment healing especially with this class is holding my attention firm. I can't remember the last time that I wanted to shell out heroics just to get a single piece of gear!

Oh My

Still much to do in the way of editing the template :)