I had a bad time the other day in TOC. Maybe other healers have had the experience of everything just going down the drain when you have no idea how or why. It’s supremely frustrating! Nothing makes you feel more like a fail healer than watching your tank wilt and die over and over again, and not knowing what is going wrong.
Here’s what happened: Myself and Naelian went to TOC the other night to farm. Myrhani was 78 at the time, but I’d been healing regular TOC without issue for a level and a half, and it had become very very routine. I’d never had a wipe while whacking the old loot pinata before, though I had had isolated DPS deaths, I’d never lost the tank. Nael had also tanked it on his pally (now 80) upwards of 15 times, again without issue.
The group formed, myself and Nael, a rogue we’d pugged it with before, a second rogue, and a mage. Should be an okay group, a little heavy on melee, but with all the DKs floating around it’s hardly unusual to have a mostly melee group. The faction champs came out: Lana the Poisoner-wench, Marshal Jacob the bladestorm-maniac, and Jaelyne the boring. Or usually boring. Not a bad group really… no self-healing Colosos, no sheeping-gnomeguy. Should be fine.
But we wiped. Splat! All over the floor. Neither Nael nor I had the slightest idea what had gone wrong… just poof, suddenly I was dead, without any aggro problems or any forewarning from DBM. And while prot pallies are prodigious survivors, it’s really too much when faced with bladestorm, poison, and a night elf who does… something.
After that the two rogues bailed and we replaced them with a guild member’s twinked out rogue alt who was only 75 but whose gear is so overcompensatory and who is so skilled that he puts out obscene dps in 80 instances on a regular basis. He may be a low level, but we know from experience that Hits can be counted on to not suck. We also recruited an 80 hunter from LFG.
Wipe.
Wipe.
By this point, Nael and I are sniping at each other, as it seems only an epic fail on the part of either healer or tank could be causing this failfest. I knew I wasn’t doing anything different than usual, so it must have been him, right? RIGHT? (he didn’t share my opinion, to put it mildly).
Hits was determined to keep going, so we slogged along anyway, and when the hunter D/C’d we kicked him and replaced him with a druid. With the druid’s extra poison dispels in the mix we managed to scrape past the faction champs by the skin of our teeth. I think I was literally panting by the end of the fight from the sheer effort of trying to keep people alive. In the end, only the druid and Nael survived, as I went down from a stray arrow at the very end being oom to heal myself.
So we moved on to Eadric. Easy fight, right? WRONG! We wiped within seconds to Eadric’s trash.
By this point we’re armorying everyone in the party… checking gear, checking specs. We’re scrutinizing the recount reports under a figurative microscope. We don’t see any problems with dps, with gear, with spec… we don’t see a pattern of somebody consistently getting aggro, of someone dying too much, of spreading out the heals to the detriment of the tank… Nothing. No lag. No addon spam. No macro issues. Why do we keep dying?!
I’m at the end of my rope, so I whisper Hits to say, “your dps looks fine and you’re not dying any more than anyone else… but could it be you? I’ve never had a problem in here before, and the only difference I can see is that this time we brought a 75…” Hits of course, being Hits, is full of confidence and does not think it is him. He asks that we try just one more time and if we fail again we can drop back to Halls of Lightning or something which we’ve already run with him and know we can manage.
I grit my teeth together, because I KNOW we can manage this.
The druid, however, doesn’t seem to agree though, since he resses outside the instance and promptly disappears. With only the four of us left, the mage blinks a few times and decides he’s got to go too.
Being extremely helpful and obliging guildies, and honestly, being driven to the point of despair by our fail, fail, FAILfest, we decide to be stubborn and finish the $^&#@ing instance at the cost of our lives if necessary. We pop back into LFG, pick up a couple of random death knights…
And one shot the rest of the instance.
Whaaaat??
The only thing we could think of, the single connecting factor for every single wipe was the mage. He was present for every wipe, he was present ONLY for wipes, and as soon as he left we stopped wiping and farmed the instance smoothly for the rest of the evening. But we have no idea what the mage was doing that sabotaged us so very badly.
It was a bad evening, and I’m still trying to figure out what I can do to prevent its recurrence… oh, and just to be the cherry on the suckage sundae… the Black Heart trinket that Nael was farming for dropped at the end of our run… and one of the DPS DKs ninja’d it.
It was utter fail.
Connor October 27, 2009 at 6:26 am
What happened to advice and strategies and stuff? It seems like all that's been here lately is complaining about guild stuff and other players…
=/
jay October 27, 2009 at 1:26 pm
When it gets to the stage that the game is no fun… it's time for a break.
Wingot October 27, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Hey Rhii,
Having played a mage, a bear and a tree I have been able to experience this from all three angles. As my reply was rather long I have instead placed it on my blog at http://eviantreebear.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/iss…
Rhii October 27, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Thanks for your reply… I spent my whole first time leveling on an arcane mage… so pulling threat is something I'm *intimately* familiar with. (lol) I never actually got to the point of finesse where I could use the strategies you outlined in your post to avoid wiping the group, because I switched over to my current healer shortly after Rhii dinged 80.
The thing that was different about this mage, was that even with me and the tank watching the threatmeters like hawks, we never saw him pull aggro.
Yet every single time he was with us ended in wipes, and there were no wipes before he came or after he left. It's still a mystery to me exactly what was causing it.
Wonzy October 29, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Champion Warrior + Champion Rogue = hard hard hard. The only way to make it more difficult is to replace the hunter with the shaman.
I'm not sure what DPS was, but IMO there isn't room for more than one player under level 80 in ToC unless the group is being carried by an overgeared healer or tank. If DPS isn't high enough, the fights just last too long to heal through.
Rhii October 30, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I was surprised how easy it was for me in there under 80. And I was doubly surprised how quickly we breezed through even with our level 75 dps once we replaced the problem mage.
I knew going in that it might be dicey with me at 79 and hits at 75, I didn't expect it to be unmitigated disaster… and it wasn't, once the rest of the groups composition was okay.
And you're right, I HATE the poisoner/warrior combo. But the hunter is usually so nonthreatening as to be practically inert, so it was nice having her in there.
DruidTree October 30, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I find that when healing this instance on my druid, that whenever the rogue shows its nasty ugly face the instance gets increasingly harder. The longer the fight lasts, with the rogue up at least, the harder it is to heal. I'm not saying its your fault, it could definitely have been the tank being undgeared for this particular instance. I can't see how a single mage had wiped your group, If reading your story was any indication. The dps could have been low drawing out the fight far longer than it needed to be, causing you to oom, having to heal other players aside from the tank and therefore having a higher chance for a crit hit to kill the tank.
DruidTree October 30, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Now how you died on Eadric I have no clue, he is so easy sauce unless the tank gets stunned by his flash of light, then he drops aggro and kills the next person with the highest threat, or at least thats what happened to my group once haha. Idk, I don't have a problem healing this instance on reg even with a rogue but on heroic it is a bit tougher, but if you are lucky enough not to have a rogue/shaman combo, then its a pretty easy fight. Plus as a druid healer my Abolish Poison is helpful in that it can keep removing posion effects for a few seconds allowing my to focus on healing and not removing that crippling poison.
srry i had to post two comments cuz it was too long
Rhii October 30, 2009 at 5:49 pm
No worries about posting the double comment! I'd rather get your whole point than have you cut it short to save space.
The rogue is probably my least favorite boss in there. She's just hard. Particularly as my AOE healing capability is nil, and I can't really spare the GCD on dispelling as often as I'd like to.
As for Eadric… it was actually his TRASH that did us in that time… and I suspect, though I wasn't able to confirm, that the mage's mirror images pulled all the groups of his trash at one time, which caught the tank by surprise and caused us to get munched. I know we were handling one group fine and then two more poured down on us from behind and it was a big collective squish.
Magey November 8, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I was very sad about your post
I had a similar experience on my mage. Except it was totally not my mage's fault–it was the healers. We were a guild group of all overgeared 80's who have done the instance more times than we can imagine. The fail-priest, who often fails at healing could not keep our tank up because of the combo we had at the start of the fight. Talk about frustrating. And DK's are OP. The end.
Rhii November 10, 2009 at 7:07 am
Well, I'm sorry you were sad about it…. but I don't think my story really applied to you at all, if that helps.
In this case, I suppose it could have been the fault of the group composition and not the mage, but normally trading out one caster for a melee dps makes it harder not easier on a pally healer… so I doubt it.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not down on mages in general. In fact, I love mages. My only recently retired first 80 is a mage, and I don't plan to leave her in mothballs forever, only until I can server transfer her.