Yes, I will murder those men in cold blood to avenge your son. For great justice.

I keep learning all of these utility things and I feel like such a paladin padawan. Like I learned Hand of Salvation. I know a ret pally will use this on themselves to make sure they don’t pull threat and then go splat. Is it typical for a pally healer to use it in a similar fashion to put on a DPS? Should I save it for myself in case I have a terrible tank and am pulling healing threat (not an unheard of situation, believe me).

Anyway, I keep logging on with Vid determined to look into these things beforehand, and end up saying, “Meh, I’ll figure it out” and just diving in. Today I managed to squeeze in three full instances; leveling handily from 23 some odd to 26. Incidentally – I’m referring to people by their classes instead of their names here to preserve at least some anonymity, not because I actually call people “Tank” or “Hey you person that smacks things.”

Stormwind Stockades – “Shaman didn’t pull shit!”
First up on the random menu, home to Stormwind’s nastiest criminals. No really, these guys are level twenty. One of them even has a BoP blue, they mean business.

I’m learning a few pug cues I never really paid attention to before. One: when your tank walks into Stocks and says “Which way?” you’re probably not in for a great run. Those of you who’ve never had the dubious ‘pleasure’ of enjoying this instance may not know what I mean… it’s a corridor, in essence. You start at the centre. You can go left, and then after you’ve cleared left, you’ll be going right. Or you can go right, and then you’ll be clearing left in due time.

It took us so long to go through this instance that by the time we were going right, we had re-spawns. I didn’t even know Stocks could HAVE respawns. The warrior tank didn’t exactly know what he was doing, but we muddled through regardless. Poor DPS at these levels is giving me ample opportunity to judge Wisdom and then flail ineffectually at things with my healing mace to try and get some mana back. I think it’s working somewhat.

At one point we had a group member drop, just as we were coming to the room with the ogre boss. Now, I’m a little vague on the details of what happened here. I’m pretty sure I saw the hunter’s wolf run into the room on the right. I’m tempted to say I saw the warrior tank sprint merrily into the room on the left. And I know for a fact that I followed the shaman into another room. The tank exclaimed gleefully while we were running back to our bodies, “I think I counted ten at one point!”

Did you know the graveyard you appear at when you die in Stocks is in Elwynn? Neither did I! On the long run back I coached my group members on the finer points of not aggroing half the damn instance. “Do you think we need a fifth?” the tank asks. “Nope, we’ll be fine if we don’t pull all three rooms. The hunter pulled a room, you pulled another, and the shaman ran into a third.” The shaman insisted he was only following the feared warrior tank (this is possible) with an emphatic, “Shaman didn’t pull shit!” I had to give him credit for his conviction, but being that I stood in the doorway of a room full of mobs into which he cast a lightning bolt… I remain dubious.

We go back in to try again, unfortunately we somehow lost Dextren Ward in the fray, and he won’t respawn, so we can’t chop his hand off. It’s during this confused trash clearing that I realize something. Every single green that drops, the Hunter is rolling Need on it. When he rolls need on Bright Mantle, I call foul.

Me: Hunter, why are you needing on everything?
Hunter: cuz I can use it and make my armor better
Hunter: do you know how hard it is not to die from melee as a hunter?
Shaman: You should play a lock priest or mage they wear cloth
Hunter: I need the best possible protection
Me: I hope Bright Mantle helps, lol
Hunter: I can use Cloth, Leather and when I hit 40 Mail.
Shaman: Cloth is for a damn caster type… you should only roll need on Leather
Me: I am sure he does, LMAO
Hunter: O chit I gotta go, sorry
Hunter: but cloth shoulders were the best 4 now
Me: Good luck with your melee problem!

I liked the Tourette’s shaman, he tried to get the hunter to give me the shoulders but I demurred. I left the group secure in the knowledge, at least, that the next time the tank should know which way to go (left or right), and the hunter… bless him, I’ll bet he never runs out of mana, he has such high spirit!

Blackfathom Deeps – Please light one candle at a time, guys
I actually made sure to collect the easily available quests for this instance in case I happened to get popped in line for it – and it pays off! I gained at least half a level from these instance quests; they were all red and orange to me. My second instance is everyone’s favourite murloc-ridden, Twilight Cultist dwelling cavern. I have a fond place in my heart for this instance, because it was the first one I stumbled through as a completely noob priest with no idea what I was doing, a year and a half ago. I hope I acquit myself better as a healer this time around and I can make up for past wrongs. I remember it because being my first character at the time, the other party members actually pointed out how bad my gear was – “lol you need better gear!” and I shamed them by saying that it was my first character and I couldn’t afford the AH prices to buy anything.

Vidyala, on the other hand, practically glows when she walks she’s so laden with antiques, so nobody tells her she needs better gear. I join the instance in progress, they’ve already downed the turtle boss, and a mage joins at the same time as I do. We head down the tunnels as the mage begins attacking neutral crabs or something. I tell him we don’t need to kill those, we’re trying to get to the group. As it turns out, the group comes to us, as we reach the first true boss: platform jumping.

I can only assume that the current generation of young WoW players missed out on Mario or something, because we spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for this poor mage to manage three jumps in a row to make it across the water. I remember there’s a cheat you can run along the wall and skip it, but instead I watch as the shaman coaches the mage by showing him where to jump. Amid “lol wut r u guys doing,” everyone comes back to find us. “I’m helping this mage!” The funniest thing is, this is probably the hardest part of the whole dungeon.

Eventually he gets it and we move on – I have to tell the party “to please stop attacking random crustaceans,” and they manage to restrain themselves for the most part. We had a hard time keeping this party together and at one point I thought we wouldn’t finish it – the mage dropped early on, the shaman not long after. Eventually they’re replaced by a hunter and another rogue. It dawns on me, as we’re moving through the Twilight Cultist section and the hunter’s pet tanks a mob off in the corner and dies – my healing UI is not set up to display warlock or hunter pets. I must remember to fix that before I run another instance.

I really haven’t met many tanks I particularly like or trust doing this. I wonder if that will change or improve as I reach higher levels? They’ve been mostly bumbling and blissfully unaware of the fact that the healer can’t heal them if they run on ahead out of range, or if the healer is completely out of mana since they pulled an entire room of murlocs with their face.

By some miracle though we get this one done, too. I even get a piece of loot at the end! Moss Cinch is better than what I’ve been wearing and we only have cloth-wearing casters, so I need roll on it. Cuz I need it to make my armour better. Do you know how hard it is to avoid being killed in melee as a holy paladin? At 40 I can wear plate and I’ll roll Need on that, too!

Razorfen Kraul – Would anyone actually eat the meat that drops from these mobs?
I need to start taking into account that these classic instances…they’re often LONG. These aren’t “I can knock out a quick instance in 20 minutes” kinds of places. They’re more like “Let’s venture into a tangle of thorns and pigs and see how many times we can get lost, mmkay?”

I’m going to be frank here and admit that I recall very little of this actual instance. The tank was pretty decent, except for the expected oblivious understanding of my mana restrictions as he chain pulled while I gasped along behind. Mana, btw, is lasting a goodly long while now. Flash of Light is helping me a great deal to not just spam massive heals; if we have many melee I can cast Holy Light on the tank and see if the little heal from the glyph will top them all off, and spot heal FoL where necessary. A few pulls in here got pretty hairy, and actually the last boss (some big pig lady?) was interesting, she was casting a chain of lightning sort of effect the whole time. I’m not sure what the range on the jump for it was, since she was tanked in a little hut at the top of the stairs.

Anyway, at that point I realized how intense pally healing can get at this level, when you have a lot of AoE damage going out. If you aren’t constantly casting, you’re doing it wrong. This place had a lot of annoying debuffs I couldn’t dispell just yet. Magic effects, curses. No poisons of course, because those I could dispel.

At some point the tank, hunter and I got hopelessly, uselessly lost on the other side of the instance from the druid.

Tank: “Crap guys, I really have no idea where we are.”
Hunter (as we pull a pair of quilboar) “Why don’t you ask these guys for directions?”
Me: “He won’t, guys never do.”

(You know it’s true). At the end of the instance time is getting really tight for me since I haven’t eaten and we’re raiding in about an hour. Once we finally manage to find the rest of the group I tell them I’ve got five minutes, tops, so let’s get this done. A few minutes later they’re still messing around and I say, “Less talk, more killing!” I mention this only because it prompts the warrior to say, “I’m the one doing all the killing here!” and I tell him, “Well, I’m keeping you alive while you do it, so we’ll call it even.” The feral druid is mightily offended by this, and he interjects, “I disagree! Everyone knows it is us who are doing the damaging, you tank things but we will damage them.”

I glance over at the damage meter. Of course he’s right…kinda. In practice, the feral druid has done less than half the damage the tank has, and none of the DPS are even close to the tank. I point out that he put me on follow and went AFK to eat supper for half the instance, although his theory is sound. The tank links the damage meter. I’m actually a little ashamed to be running a damage meter in an instance at this level. So far the hottest DPS I’ve come across is doing a whopping 50 damage per second! Quilboar don’t have that much HP, y’know.