Is Friday again and I've talked my way into two weeks of vacation starting in an hour (huzzah).

I hope everything is going swimmingly for you as well.

And then I was a bear
I was hoping that, since we have several people who've declared themselves tanks, that the guild would be more active in terms of heroics at the moment. There's a few problems with the plan, though. Only 2-3 level 85 healers. And only 2-3 of the people identifying as tanks are running heroics as tanks. The others seem more like dps who want a short queue (which isn't bad, only it means they will opt to run with you as a dps rather than start their own groups).

I was really worried about heroics. What it came down to was changing my mindset into something closer to progression raiding. Wipes happen while you learn. There was a lot of concern about tank threat coming into heroics, but I find that it feels comfortably between BC and LK in terms of execution - Bear tanking takes a lot of effort, but it will reward you if you do it right. I think that's good.

So far I've only done 4 heroics as a tank, being stonecore, dm, sfk, and throne of tides. My favorite of the bunch of stonecore, my least sfk. Most of the boss fights in all these places were interesting and in a few cases, made me feel like my skill made a huge difference in success (3rd boss in stonecore, in particular, is nearly 100% tank positioning and made me feel pro once I figured it out). SFK earned 'least liked' because the interior design is 5 years old, and made before I think Blizz really understood what a player needs to perform well - The ceilings are too low and the spaces too cramped. It's very difficult to see what you're doing and how to move. I don't know if they could have changed that without a lot more work, but I really wish they could have.

It is worth doing, I think, under the condition that you go strictly for the game play. If you go for rewards, you might be a little underwhelmed that you spent 45 minutes for a blue something. It's a very good blue something, but it feels out of proportion.

You're encouraged to be good to your healer. Healing is rough. I have the benefit of my pocket healer being my boyfriend, but it still took us some adjusting. There is trial and error while strategies and specs were worked out. I was very pleased with our second night of heroics, as it was so much smoother than the first. Be nice!

GOGOOGOOGOGOOGOGOOGOGOOOMG
So we're a little over a week into this expansion and suddenly my guild had decided it wants to start raiding.

I'm not sure what I think about it. Whether or not I want to go I'm excluded because I didn't see the post fast enough. Really, the whole thing is supposed to be a new experience but it really feels like more of the same. We don't have enough healers to support one group, let alone two, at the moment. This has been the case for a loooong time and lead to a lot of begging and pleading on my part in ICC. Here there's a huge bottleneck from several sources.

-Currently, only two of our previous healers is 85 are still a healer, though only one may be raid ready, and only one of our previous dps went healybeams
-Healing in general is a huge huge burden at the moment. I haven't tried it myself, but I recognize just from watching heroics that the game has changed, and many people may not find it fun anymore
-We don't seem to be actively recruiting. This is sort of a catch-22. We're not recruiting because we don't have enough to do raids, but we don't do raids because we can't recruit.
-We only seem to have two tanks in guild, myself and the organizer of the group trying blackwing decent this weekend, who are currently doing heroics. We have other people with tank specs but they all have either opted to stay in normals or tag along as dps in my groups. What this means is that we're gearing up slower. I can't force anyone to tank any more than I can force them to heal.

What will be interesting is to see how fast the ball gets rolling. It's possible that next week there will be a bigger pool of 85s available, and with word that we're starting raids, more healers could appear. Possibly. I don't know.

I was considering starting my own ten man, and then the realization came that 10 and 25 share a lockout. Anything that I build now will have to be rebuilt as an alt and 'absent for 25s' group - which isn't bad, and that's what my ICC group originally started as, but there it is just the same.

(can you tell I really dislike the idea of handing decision making over to someone else, despite all the bitching I did about how much it sucks?)

Really I should just not worry about it. The expansion, she is young. I have the next two years to be angry.

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