Ok, so, you know that back story by now, in case you don't, I was originally a brewmaster on my monk, did a horrendous job, found the site Sunnier's Art of War (Happy 3 year Blogoversary Sunnier!!) and learned how to do it properly. Since then I have gone from strength to strength, tanking all of Siege of Orgrimmar 10m normal with minimal difficulties, simming my own gear and completing the gold tank challenge in proving grounds. A few months ago, my Husband (Who plays a resto druid in our guild's main progress group) was away for work, and the group replaced him with our own resto druid from the guilds second raid team. I was asked to fill in as a healer. At the time we were progressing on Garrosh and working on getting from Thok onwards on farm. With the help of various different people from the monk community, I managed to get myself a UI set up, a build I could follow and some really good tips on how to fistweave and mistweave. From there I managed to act as a second healer with our shaman to our group and successfully healed bosses 1-13 on normal, on my monk. I switched to my priest for Garrosh progress as it is easier for me to play and raid lead on, I was still learning monk healing at this point and it was too much for me to focus on and often I would find myself making bad calls which in turn affects the team.
Turns out, HARD. Healing heroics is the most challenging thing I have ever done. As a tank you can stick me in front of any boss with no tank swap required and I'll solo that thing, I find that sort of thing easy and fun. Stand me in front of Immersius heroic with my healing gear on and all of a sudden I've lost my voice and I need to change my trousers before we've even pulled it. My main concern was my output, my HPS is nowhere near as high as the other two healers, this is due to a combination of gear and skill (mostly skill). So I was massively worried I would look like more of a "3rd wheel" type of healer, and that I wouldn't really contribute much to the fight. Still, I tried my best and followed all the mechanics and healed my arse off and Immersius went down on the first night of Heroic progress for us. I of course finished up a gracious third on the healing charts, about 80k hps, with our shaman on 90 and our druid way up there on 135. Now, I am an advocate of numbers meaning little to nothing but I could NOT help feeling envious and wishing that I could pull numbers like that, Still, even with my modest healing, my over-healing was kept to a minimum, my buff uptimes were reasonable and the raid survived. So I was happy.
For anyone interested, for this fight, I took tigers lust, chi wave, Leg sweep, diffuse magic and RJW. My glyphs are the surging mist, renewing mist and detox. I spent most of the fight maintaining my renewing mists and using some fistweaving on the little adds that spawn while the boss is active. I found the RJW to be very useful for clearing them up and healing the melee at the same time.
For me, Immersius on heroic was pretty intense, but then moving to the fallen protectors brought a whole new meaning to the word "DAYUM", because let me tell you, as a healer, that fight is INSANE. There is SO much damage coming out from literally everywhere you need to have 2 pairs of eyes and 2 pairs of hands to cope with it all. The mechanics for the fight have changed a fair bit and getting the group to adapt to the fight was initially quite hard, as most of these fights are muscle memory, so having to unlearn and relearn is not easy. Especially when you are unlearning taking and learning healing! Fortunately as I have tanked that boss I am well aware of the abilities of both Rook and He, and I knew what to expect damage wise from both of them. For the first 20 or so pulls I was mistweaving, this was because I preferred the vision it gave me of what was going on. however after a while, the tactics clicked into place and we started hitting an enrage timer. Not enough damage. So, I wondered if I could possibly make a difference by changing my healing style. To be honest I didn't think I would have that much of an impact on the DPS charts but hey, why not give it a go? After 2 attempts with me fistweaving instead the boss went down with 12 seconds to spare on the enrage. My 70k dps had been enough to secure the kill. Not only that, but afterward when I was looking at logs, I was actually pulling 120k HPS to go with that, again with minimal over-healing.
I'm finally gaining in confidence in my abilities, I've managed to bag a heroic OH and trinket for my healer spec so far, I now have my normal 4 set apart from a flexible chest, but I can live with that. I am really enjoying having two jobs in our raids, for Norushen and Sha we are using two healers so I have once again returned to tanking. Norushen went down after about 6 pulls and we are working on Sha this week, which is going well enough, we are starting to see the end of the fight now, a little more fine tuning and hopefully it will go down on Sunday.
One thing I have discovered is that over the past two months I have come to think of myself as a healer, rather than "a tank that heals a bit". I'm really proud of how far I have come in such a short space of time, and I am looking forward to more challenges, whether they be healing or tanking ones!! (Never thought I'd say that!) If you want to see me healing Immersius you can check out my You Tube channel , Since this was made I have minimized my screen info quite a lot, I realized while watching these back it was FAR too full of things, some of which were not really necessary, so hopefully for the next healing video I make, the screen wont seem as cluttered!
So, thanks for reading, hopefully my ramblings have made some sense! I will try to get the next chapter of my monk story out this weekend, having had a fairly busy week I did not get enough time to dedicate to writing it properly, and I don't want to put a half-arsed version out!
Dark <3
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