Miss Medicina has come up with a healing questionnaire on her blog to get some cross-promotion going among smaller healing bloggers. She also has an extremely pretty blog design, but that’s another thing entirely. Anyway, here are my answers.

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Elisse, human priest. I’m holy for PVE and disc for PVP.
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) A bit of everything, really. I’m not officially raiding, so I do 10s and 25s PUGs, the occasional heroic, and I love my battlegrounds.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. You project. Laser beams. On your allies. And those laser beams make little bubbles. It does not get any better than that. Aside from looking pretty, I love the fact that it’s channeled, so that some of the healing always goes through in that clutch moment even if you get interrupted.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Binding Heal. I know, it’s a shame. A priest of three years, I just never got into the habit of using it, and now it’s ended up just not being a spell I think of when I need to heal both myself and someone.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Being able to have many niches! We’re great raid healers when specced for it, great tank healers when specced for it, and we’re very viable in PVP.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Being so squishy. I can’t help but feel I’m a liability in fights where there is physical damage going around – like the melee hits from Gormok’s snobolds, or being in the arena on Thorim. Tanks can only help so much when I get healing aggro instantly.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Raid healing. I do keep a POM on the tanks all the time though, and my finger hovers over my GS macro for the oh shit moments.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Holy paladins. If I’m disc, I mitigate, they heal. If I’m holy, I take over the raid healing and they do the tank healing, which I’m incapable of doing effectively. Plus, they have delicious raidwide and personal cooldowns. Win-win all around.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Other holy priests. It’s no secret that priests are notoriously bad to stack, and two or more holy priests have never been a good healing team for any raid of appropriate size.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? I’d say overhealing, but it’s by and large irrelevant right now in the raiding game. Paying too much attention to the meters, I guess. Even though I’m fully aware that they aren’t a true reflection of a healer’s performance, a lot of people tend to evaluate healers solely based on the meters, especially in PUGs. This pressure in turn makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong if I’m not all the way up there.
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? “Heal me” and “healer fail”. If anyone died, healers are acutely aware of their fail, thank you. It’s not like we see damage and consciously choose not to heal it.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes. We’re jack of all trades when it comes to healing – when appropriately specced, we can do anything. Having two viable healing trees is quite the luxury. Other healing classes aren’t as lucky.
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? First – is my assignment dead? If my assignment is dead, no matter how high on the meters I am, I’ve failed fairly hard. Second – am I in an appropriate place on the meters with regards to my assignment? If other healers assigned to the same role have healed twice as much as me, we have a problem. Otherwise, brag brag. If I’m out of mana, I make sure I check the overhealing meter as well.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? “Disc is an unacceptable spec for PvE” (no really, I’ve been kicked from groups/asked to go shadow on my backend Horde server for being disc), closely followed by “hey u priest y are u so low on meters u slackin” when I’m disc.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Using spells appropriately. Priests have a massive toolbox to deal with damage, but most new priests tend to use only a few spells, and then run around like a headless chicken when something out of the ordinary happens. We’re not only about CoH/PoM/Flash Heal (Or about Penance/Bubble/PoM for that matter).
• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? High overhealing, high healing done. Overhealing doesn’t really matter in the content I tend to do, and I overgear most of it, so I spam freely. I’m in the top three in pretty much every 25-man I do, which I feel is where raid healers should be.
• Haste or Crit and why? After 20% crit, I go for haste all out. I primarily keep a bit of crit because it’s good regen and burst via SoL. In contrast, haste is a must have, because Serendipity is always down when you need it most.
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Well, I’ve played all four healing classes. I actively research all four classes. There’s none of them I feel I understand least.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Grid and Clique are love. I have mouseover macros for most of my spells to use with Grid. I also have a Guardian Spirit macro which cancels whatever spell I’m casting and casts GS on my target immediately – I’ve found it to be extremely handy, as it often takes a split second to stop the spell you’re casting and GS a tank, which might mean the tank’s death.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I definitely try for balance – that’s because I do a bit of everything.

Go ahead, answer this questionnaire! How do you heal?

Well, I thought I’d contribute my bad PUG story of the week, and the raiding week has just started.

It all started when I saw an ad in trade advertising a TotC10 PUG. The guy doing the advertising was from one of the top guilds on the server, and supposedly, the group was 70% that guild – they just wanted 2 heals and a tank. Sounds like a good deal. I hopped on my priest, whispered the guy, and got invited.

The tank needed was eventually found, a DK from another top guild, and the original guild managed to dredge up a disc priest from their ranks, so we were ready to go.

We started. And promptly wiped on Beasts.

“What happened? TotC wipe, ugh!” cried the people from the uberleet guilds, most of whom were sporting Astral Walker titles. Turns out that not many people from the uberleet guilds were bothering to DPS down the snobolds, and both healers had one. The raid leader instructed them, and back we went.

And we wiped again – this time it was the paladin tank being clueless about the debuff management on Jormungars. There were more incredulous cries, and the other priest and DK left without a word.

The raid leader, making it clear how extremely disgusted he was that we had dared wipe in TotC, convinced the DK to come back, and they picked up yet another priest from their guild.

And then we wiped, and then we wiped some more. The paladin tank turning the worms towards the casters, no one caring about snobolds, people setting up camp in the fires, we had it all.

During one of the fights, my WoW crashed right at the start of the fight, and when I came back, my Grid was completely messed up, not giving accurate information, hell, not showing half the people at all. I hastily pulled out the standard raid frames, and tried to heal as best as I could. After we wiped, the disc priest piped up in the raid chat that I wasn’t pulling my weight – he was just below me on the meters and that wasn’t supposed to happen.

I whispered him and explained that my raid frames were messed up, it’ll be better next try, apologies.

He found it appropriate to keep going on. He isn’t a paladin with Beacon. It was so hard to solo heal everything. Blah blah blah, his epeen is so big.

I wanted to point out that it’s not really solo healing when I’ve still done more healing than he did – but you know, there’s that thing that happens when you feel in the wrong, especially against someone who’s clearly more experienced then you are. I knew that our healing numbers should not have been so close together, and I knew he was more experienced than I was, so I was pretty much intimidated into shutting up.

Next try, we go again. I think I’m really going to be on top of my game this time (I’m not even sure how that happens, since you don’t just see damage and consciously choose not to heal it as a healer, but yeah). I’m going to outheal that disc priest by miles and show him how it’s done.

Then I get snobolded, and proceed to spend the majority of the fight doing nothing but casting CoH and PoM on cooldown, sprinkling a bit of Renew, and using Surge procs to try to heal people up. It’s a wonder we didn’t lose anyone.

They finally bother to kill the snobold, and then we promptly wipe because the DK tank AMS’s out of Burning Bile just as four poisoned people are running towards him.

People leave in rage and disgust at this point, and we disband, having killed a grand total of 0 bosses.

This PUG was actually the embodiment of the reason why high-end guilds usually get a bad name – it’s not only that they’re stuck up, it’s that they’re both stuck up, and firmly convinced that the content they have had to PUG is so easy, they can just tear up the how-to-play book and throw it away. Oh, we don’t have to kill snobolds – someone else will. We don’t need to stay out of the fire, healers have enough mana to heal. No need to pay attention to basic things such as “don’t turn a mob that spews poison towards your casters” or “don’t hit it before the tank”. We don’t need a good group balance, it’s just x instance. It’s only their guild raids that are hard and important, and it’s inevitably someone else’s fault when they die on such easy content.

On the other hand, I had another TotC10 PUG Tuesday night – a ton of people from no-name guilds, some people guildless, mediocre performance. We wiped once, and that was on Anub.

So we’re rocking it again as rogue priest…

…and it’s so much more fun than I thought it would be. I just didn’t realise how much potential Wrath arenas have.

My issue used to be that I wanted to be able to stay alive. I didn’t want games where “zerg the priest” was a foolproof strategy 100%. It still isn’t quite balanced in that aspect (you, in fact, can zerg the priest to success no matter how hard Calissa tries to peel). But I imagine it’s better than how it used to be in previous seasons.

The best part of the whole “whoa son, you got WOTLK’d” deal is that it feels to me that very few teams are true countercomps. You always have a chance. There’s always the possibility that you will gib that unprepared healer, even through HoTs and shields, while the partner is in a CC chain.

I remember when warrior/druid used to be hard counter to rogue/priest, so much so that if we won a single one it was a cause for major celebration. Now when we go out against one, I feel we have a chance. It doesn’t have to be an autoloss because they can abolish Wound and DPS on leather. It’s easier to force cooldowns due to higher damage, which ultimately means we have more of a chance of putting them in a CC chain before I get worn out from spam healing.

I also love being able to spare the mana for more offense, because in most of the cases something will die before everyone is out of mana. The amount of damage people are able to dish out assures that. You might as well spend it while you have it to force a cooldown. Out of 70+ matches we played over three days, there were only 2 I can remember in which it came down to mana (and we won one and lost one). This is also why I ditched my beloved PWS glyph to glyph Smite, and so far, lovin’ it.

“They have both trinkets down.”
“Gib during next Blind yah?”
“Yeah Blinding in 3, 2, 1, gogogoog”
/receive Tricks
/cast Power Infusion
/cast Holy Fire
/spam Smite

I love having Perception and being able to get the opener. We do it quite a bit of the time. And you have no idea how many times mindless Holy Nova spam has denied someone the opener.

I also seem to be better than I was in TBC when I comes to SWD’ing sheeps, which has immensely helped with our win rate against mage/rogue.

We also see great variety in comps – used to be that you saw maybe ten different comps in a whole season of playing 2s and that was it. Now there’s everything ranging from double DK to ele shaman/moonkin.

I quite like the new rating system, too. First off, there’s a much greater sense of progress about it. You start from zero, so there’s nowhere to go but up. If you go 50/50 at the lower ratings, you’re still going to move up on the ladder, which didn’t happen in TBC. The fact that losing doesn’t carry a massive penalty keeps people playing, especially if you’re new, or like us, just haven’t played for a few seasons. Add to this the fact that there are few countercomps (and even if there are, you just don’t meet them to start off with since comps are so varied), and you have a recipe for success.

I’ve just been playing for a few days, with a win rate barely higher than 50%,  yet I’m rated high enough to afford four Furious pieces, and two Relentless offpieces. I like this in a way, because if you’re mediocre, which I admittedly very much am, you still have a chance to get rated stuff. On the other hand, if you’re new to arena, it will still take you quite a while to get someplace, so I’m still in two minds about the system.

I quite like the MMR aspect – there have been few fights where I felt I got outplayed by some guy going for glad. Point for point, in most matches I felt like I played with people skill equal or close to my own.

Probably due for more matches tonight, so we’ll wait and see. It would be amazing indeed if one day, I could land the T1 Relentless weapon… oh well, a girl can dream.

Wow, I’ve been missing for about two months now.

Two main things that have happened are: I’ve leveled a human priest to 80, and our raiding alliance fell apart.

On the raiding alliance front, we’ve had a visible attitude change ever since a paladin alt from one of the server’s top guilds joined us. Going from “we don’t have the greatest group makeup, but we can damn well do this, and we will” to expecting people to switch their roles so that we’d have that elusive ideal makeup (which said paladin insisted we absolutely need) didn’t sit well with some of us. This plus getting introduced to elitism, snarked over small mistakes, each player getting too princessy, and such problems spelled the end of the group.

While I feel sad that the group fell apart, the real source of my disappointment is the realisation that this group I considered myself friends with were never my real friends.  We genuinely liked and respected these people. It was really sad to see they didn’t feel the same way.

As for my human priest – meet Elisse (I wanted a name similar to, but not the exact same, as my beloved priest). She’s been disc since she got her first talent point, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the spec.

I like the playstyle – there is no rest to it, no stopping to cheat the FSR, no big heals that take years to cast. It’s all very fast paced, and the most crucial casts are either instants or very short time ones. Borrowed Time is up for the majority of the time. Penance into PWS, then a GHeal, is a massive burst that typically takes around 4-5 seconds to deliver (currently 5.5k absorption, then a 9-10k Penance, then a 8k GHeal with my gear). I’ve also never had any problems AOE healing at any point.

People seem to think that I’ve only chosen disc because I’m a fresh 80, and that when I have better gear I’ll be legging it over to the, eh, light side. That’s not true – I find holy right now pretty /yawn, even if it scales better. It’s always relied on long casts and cheating the FSR, although the new Serendipity fixed that a bit. I’m quite bored of that playstyle after three years of it, so disc suits me best.

Your classic lowbie BG, with all the twinks going “FFS if you are under 37 and not twinked you should be banned from battlegrounds”, demanding heals, demanding buffs, demanding that every support class should cater to them, and basically bickering in /bg about how terribly leet they are and how bad everyone else is.

BG ending:

(Link for the whole image here because it breaks the layout and won’t display.)

Kielle: 38 very untwinked Night Elf priest, all my gear is either AHed greens (to upgrade my terribad bracers and helm), PvP rewards, or instance/quest stuff. 10 flag returns, top of neither damage done, nor healing done, nor HKs, nor killing blows.

Souma: 32 untwinked hunter, owner of 2 of our 3 caps. No special stuff in damage/healing done or HKs.

Breaney: 35 untwinked rogue, owner of our last cap. Again, no special stuff in damage/healing done or HKs.

Conclusion: Twinks (and come to think of it, everyone else who thinks topping anything but Flags Capped/Flags Returned/Bases Assaulted/Bases Defended etc makes you awesome), you’re doing it wrong.

Please trade your leet enchants and gear for some L2P, and make some serious contribution towards wins instead of epeen stroking.

Thanks,

The untwinked mortals who can’t afford your gear but have just won a WSG for you.

So Blizz has just given the two week notice for S4, and I’m glad my druid is all ready for it, near-capped honor, marks to get most things she pleases… problem is, my priest isn’t.

I love my priest. She’s my first love. She’s my best geared PvP character by far. I’m not stopping playing Elysiane, no way. Thing is, her stuff isn’t up to date, being that I have been focusing hard on my druid for the past few months. I always slacked getting S3 nonset epics for her because she had the S2 ones, and let’s face it, the difference isn’t vast.

She does need new things though now that S4 is incoming – I definitely plan to land her the new necklace and belt, and the S3 boots and bracers for now. Thank God I don’t need ring upgrades, but I WILL need a mainhand upgrade, Light’s Justice is so one year ago.

It all comes out to about 90k honor, and all the primals for the enchants… add to this the fact that I actually said screw it and splurged on the S3 gloves just yesterday, you can imagine how “ugh” I feel right now.

One positive thing is though, I could resilience cap or come very close with new gems and mainhand, so that will hopefully be some motivation. I’ve been getting rid of stamina in favor of resilience lately, and it seems to work better than the other way around.

On another note, I was playing my priest today and thinking how playing different healing classes with different strengths has taught me things that ended up making me a MUCH better priest. My druid taught me how to sneak drink breaks at the most convenient times. My paladin taught me how to never get caught in the open and how to LoS most effectively. My shaman taught me how make sense of chaos – dropping totems, healing, Bloodlusting, Purging, and doing all of those at appropriate moments. I feel that all of those combined have made me a much better priest, and in a way, I’m glad I spent most of this season not on my priest but on my druid and paladin instead. I feel amazed how most everything has become second nature to me by now, things that I spent entire S2 in ignorance of (S1 was just pathetic, I played as 20/41/0 on a rogue priest priest 3v3 =P).

Now to go grind that honor… /die

…of the fact that Elysiane now has 1089 shadow damage in her shadow gear.

Really not too shabby for a priest who spends most of her time as holy/disc, is it?

I might get her that blue PvP set just to try out shadow – already have enough honor to buy the nonset epic boots, and I have the bracers already, so I could scrounge up 300 resilience in PvP gear easily. Thing is I just spent 400g on gemming and enchanting said shadow gear so do I want to spend another 50 on a respec that might only last a few days, and buy the blue set + gem it, that’s another thing already. I could do dailies (failies!) and get my gold up, but I’m way too busy grinding honor on Kaliah and leveling Starlet my little cow to bother with all the failies every day.

I want to get Spellstrike Pants crafted for her, she’s wearing the epic drop from SL heroic at the moment with 7 spelldamage gems. And hopefully get Fel-tinged Mantle from heroic MST to drop (all I’ve seen from Vexallus so far is that damn dagger over and over again when Elysiane goes, and the staff, of course, when Rochalie goes, it’s like a joke, Roch has been coveting the breastplate and Ely the mantle for ages). That should put me over 1100 easy.

Hm, I wish we didn’t need a paladin tank for ZA so I could bring Ely as shadow every once in a while – I feel way too responsible for the success of our raids though, I would feel guilty if I didn’t put my best effort into it.

Dear warrior who popped Recklessness just to kill a priest,

L2P.

Love,
Elysiane.

Dear druid who decided to gank Starlet twice while she was engaged with mobs and never otherwise,

I hope you enjoyed the two corpseruns when Zilli swooped in on his mount.

Love,
The cute cow.

Dear Blizzard,

Please fix the damn queues, because I’m sick of auto-losing due to Horde always starting at least 5 people short.

Love,
Elysiane.

Dear Horde,

Grow brains.

Love,
Elysiane.

Massive drop in rating, not sure what to chalk it up to – horrible play, unfavorable matchups, not working well as a team, everything. DPS felt abysmal tonight, it was as if no matter what we did, things weren’t going down. Last season we had a mage who I would call overall less skilled as a whole, yet we did so much better.

I believe the issue lies simply in the lack of coordination and communication, first of all – match starts, I’ll start brainstorming on targets, if I miscall a target no one says anything, match ends, suddenly “we should have done this and that”. Anyone has a better idea, I want to hear it then, not have to have a complete change of strategy halfway through a match.

Another point is that as a team we simply have different ways of thinking, I will be thinking “what poses the most target to us as a whole” ie thinking defensively, while my mage is thinking “what can we burst down fastest” ie offensively. As a result, if the expected burst doesn’t happen and we need to go on the defensive, we fall apart due to lacking the mana efficiency and not really having planned ahead to coordinate the crowd control.

Case in point: Warrior, resto druid, disc priest. I vote we go for the priest and CC the warrior to keep him off me, negating the threat of mana burns – also, the druid will be busy healing the priest (so no cyclone), they will be forced to go on the defensive as a whole, and it’s not terribly hard to keep a priest stunlocked and CSed to deliver the DPS. My mage votes we drag the warrior out of the healers’ LoS, pin him down, and nuke him before heals come in. The approaches are very different, and depending on our individual playstyle and the options available to us at any given moment, both might work, only one might work, and none might work (we used one of the above approaches, which ended up not working).

We’re simply not clicking as we did with the setup last season, and risking QQing a bit, me feeling horribly inferior doesn’t make things any better. I have a lot to improve as far as my game is concerned, and I’m aware I’m still not quite there yet – pre-TBC I hardly ever did organized PvP for ranks (still sporting Stone Guard, that’s Horde rank 6 for you Alliance folks), and playing alongside two Conqueror titled people who were PvPing when Elysiane was in short pants, one of whom runs 2k+ teams on his main, doesn’t help my nervousness. I feel like I always fall short of some invisible standard, and that our losses in some way can be chalked up to that.

I’m considering a major UI overhaul as part of improving my game, probably going to work on that soon. UI is my one weakness as I’m a creature of habit and it takes me a while just to get used to the simplest of addons. I’m still using the Blizz default UI with Proximo, Grid and the usual Enemy Cast Bar addons for arena. But I think I need something better organized (it’s all a massive mess atm) that basically rubs in my face what the hell is happening at any point at any time in a match.

Other than that, Sareya got a lot of new goodies as a result of our last Karazhan badge run, which I’m really happy about – Curator finally coughed up his ring, Chess gave me the boots (which I am banking for the moment), nabbed the leather leggings no one wanted from Netherspite for the +agi over my old ones. And after the run, had enough badges to get the amazing Gauntlets of Sniping. At this moment, sitting pretty at 1640 AP, 25% crit, and 580ish agi, all unbuffed, not even Hawk. Also one single hit rating short of the cap.

Although the one bummer came when I neatly gemmed everything blowing hundreds of gold after the raid, put them on, admired my new stats…

…and realised hey, my metagem isn’t working anymore.

/facepalm

Go grab two Nightseyes, resocket gloves, resocket leggings.

Proceed to really be pissed off at self for wasting the gold. That two blue requirement is really a killer for PvE, where all I currently want is red and yellow gems.

I was thinking that if I ever get Ring of a Thousand Marks, I would socket and use Fiend Slayer to make up for the lost hit over my Violet Signet, and if I stick in agi/stam gems those give me the requirement for the meta. Which means I can resocket the gloves and leggings… yet again.

Think I might just skip that.

Anyway, I think that at the moment, as far as PvE gear goes, Sareya has about hit her ceiling. There are no upgrades I need from Karazhan (save for Ring of a Thousand Marks, which I see as more of a sidegrade than an upgrade), and the only immediate “upgrade” I can think of is the badge bracers, giving her a marginal amount of +AP and some armor penetration. And I can regem my helm if I ever really start bugging myself about that one single hit rating needed to be capped. All in all I consider her ready for 25-mans and Zul’Aman, except our circle of friends isn’t going anywhere with that stuff, and I don’t want to apply to a raiding guild with Sareya as my main.

But that’s another woe entirely.

And boy oh boy, does that feel nice. Almost 100 rating, well done, We Cap SH Graveyard (blame the %!$&ing AV grind for our team names).

We did a lot better against our own setup this run, yesterday’s advice of “poly rogue, blind priest, and give the mage all you got, Icy Veins, Power Infusion, trinkets and all” seems to be working well. After the priest trinkets the blind and dispels the rogue, the priest gets sheeped, and if I can fear the rogue (who usually is on me anyway) before he manages to use Cloak of Shadows, the mage is pretty much done for, Ice Block or not. If we go for the priest, we’ve found that gives their mage and rogue to use their CC potential and retaliate full force against me, and that doesn’t really end well.

Highlights from today include:

1. “Catch me if you can”

Warrior, ret paladin, resto shaman. Normally this lineup scares me, with Bloodlust it means I’ll be going squish so fast, I might as well pop PS before Bloodlust, unless we get some CC in really fast.

…they decided to go after Strat, our mage.

Sight to behold, I tell you, he tried every trick in the book and kited them around for minues, Bloodlust or not. I kept absolutely spamhealing, running around, being Purged, Earth Shocked, stunned, while they chased Strat with scary singlemindedness. Oh how he ran. Ice Blocked, blinked around, Frost Nova, LoSed, even LoSed me at times, I was having heart attacks. Meanwhile, Andersson my lovely rogue is working on the warrior. The shaman is really confident that Strat’s going down soon (he spent a good minute under 30%) and gets carried away with harassing me and purging everyone in sight, Strat goes down with warrior at 4%, and the shaman is not prepared.

It’s a very oom retri paladin and an almost OOM resto shaman, vs my lovely rogue and me. Considering that an OOM retri paladin does equivalent DPS to an AFK warrior, that ended rather quickly.

Strat tests my limits every match.

2. “My heart is beating like a %!&*%er”

Fire mage, fire mage, and resto druid. We went on the druid and he went down fairly fast, but so did Strat, after a coordinated nukeage. Andersson took down one of the mages but in doing so he got too low on health, LoSed me at a crucial moment, and down he went.

Fire mage on 20% mana and 50% HP, vs me at about 40% mana. I could mana burn and win that…

…first thing he does is Poly me and Evocate.

Ohshi.

Strat’s yelling encouragement and tactics on Vent -” don’t panic Ely, you can do it Ely, it’s easy Ely just keep mana burning”. I’m absolutely shaking and panicking at this point, oh please don’t let me screw this up, pleasepleaseplepalsplelspl. I get re-polyed and he loads up a pyroblast, but luckily I’ve managed to shield before the second poly, the poly brings me to full and along with the shield I take fairly little damage.

Impact chain-procs after that though and he gets in a few Scorches and a Fireball. Nothing a heal or two won’t take care of… son of a %!&*%, counterspell. I’m spamming my fear button, starting to really panic, he needs to give me breathing room, NOW. Fear finally goes off, I throw a heal and start chain mana burning. Stay calm, stay calm, just don’t panic oh god don’t screw it up. Both his WotF and trinket are on cooldown, so he can’t break it and I get 2-3 mana burns in. So far, so good.

He runs back after his Fear, and starts spamscorching as if that will help something (really don’t know what he was thinking there, with my kind of resilience he will have something of a hard time critting). I’ve abandoned all pretense of healing, sicced my Shadowfiend on him, and am just mana burning with a shield up while praying to all the PvP gods. Impact procs once, but I have high HP due to his chainsheeps, and he isn’t really hurting me there. We’re practically standing face to face, furiously casting. He exhausts himself in seconds, and now’s my time to move in.

Strat’s yelling on vent “SWP, Devouring Plague, he’s running off to drink, keep him in combat he has shit mana regen, mount up, run, run, run” as I get sheeped and he runs back to the starting area to drink, luckily my trinket cooldown is up again at this point. I run in and SWP/DP after he takes a few sips, but it’s a non-issue at this point, because he’s hurt himself enough on my reflective shield and mana burns that all the mana in the world won’t save him. (On hindsight I could have ressed Andersson while he was drinking, but I didn’t want to risk something going wrong and getting my res interrupted by a mage at full mana.)

He runs for his life, I give chase with my hands shaking, spamming every button I can find, not even risking stopping for a smite. Down he goes after a couple of seconds, and on Vent a breathless, meek voice is heard.

“..oh. My. God.”

Don’t think the adrenaline rush went away for the next couple of matches there.

3. “Whoops, wrong buff”

Mage, shadow priest, resto druid. Druid stealthed, mage invis’d, the strategy we decided on was to CC the mage for as long as we could, screw the SP, we’d get the druid.

I stepped out from behind the column to act as bait and maybe get a couple of offensive dispels on the SP. He spotted this and began spamdispelling me as well, before I eventually ended the dispel chain by returning behind the column. He gave chase, got hit by Strat’s poly, trinketed it and ran to me again (dispelling IS addictive, I swear – there is something sadistically fun about seeing all those buffs fade). Little did he realise at that moment that he was running away from the fray, running to right where I wanted him to be.

He hit dispel again as soon as I was in LoS, then ran in to fear. My finger was literally hovering over the WotF button just for this moment…

…when “Immune” flashed over my portrait.

Despite his dispel spam, he had failed to somehow remove Fear Ward.

He stood very still, first puzzled, then the realisation of impending doom kicking in, for about two seconds before I stopped laughing enough to hit my own fear. If I could read his thoughts, I was sure I would see a little “ohshiiiii” bubble right over his head.

No WotF (that was a troll priest), no trinket since he used it up seconds ago on Poly, and for some obscure reason, his own Fear Ward was on the druid instead. He was forced to eat a full duration Psychic Scream while we chain sheeped/blinded/CSed the mage and worked on the druid, it was gg from there.

I can still imagine the “lolwhut” expression on his little, blue troll face.