Pounding Through the Heroics

I am a lucky healer.

I play with an excellent tank and dps (one is druid the other paladin, they switch roles from time to time) and my strengths and weaknesses as a Discipline Priest are well known to them both. And because we all like to challenge ourselves, even as we run UK for the umpteenth time, we've gotten in the habit of "power-pulling".

The tank never stops. I never drink. Pain Suppression, Shield and Aegis and the awesome power of Penance keeps us ploughing through no matter how many adds we seem to pull. The druid innervates me if I'm down to half mana; Shadowfiend and a Borrowed Time Hymn of Hope keep me going if for some odd reason I'm running low. We just keep going and going and going, pulling 2-3 packs at a time and AoEing everything down. We've done AN in 7 minutes. We did a PuG UK in 9:48 the other day. Most everything except the ICC heroics is cleared in 15 or less, regardless of the DPS that joins us. 2k DPS means we'll only have 5 minutes left on the CoS timer instead of 10.

But I wonder how it must appear to all those joining our group. Because the complaints I hear all over the place are about the demand for speed, and all we ever hear is the unfortunate mage shouting, "I need mana!" Well sit down and drink then. You'll catch up. Two DPS can handle a heroic trash pull, and the only person who needs to have mana for every single pull is me, and I'm just fine...

I want the tank to pull fast. I want to run after him with arms flailing as I try to keep him alive through the initial onslaught. I want the dps to go nuts and pound out everything they can. The tank gets bored if the DPS don't give him something to fight for. I get bored if the tank isn't taking damage. Who wants to play a boring game?

If you want to take it slow, to experience the content, to do achievements, to marvel at the wonderful lore and environment Blizzard have created, I encourage you to do so. Just not in my group. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking it slow and learning the ropes with other people who also want to do it. You don't want to group with them because you might end up wiping quite a bit as you learn? You should relish the fact that they also have no clue what they're doing. And if you don't, if you prefer the players who want to go fast to go slowly, just so that you have an easier time going slowly, aren't you really just hoping to leach off other people?

I use Gear Score and check my DPSers. Low Gear Score isn't the end of the world -I've seen some mighty impressive dps (comparatively, of course) coming from skilled players who just dinged. But it's also a useful tool. It tells me who is likely to take aggro. They have a shield before the mob even targets them. It tells me who won't survive until a flash heal lands. It also tells me that the 5.4k GS hunter who's just barely pulling 3k dps is definitely going to pull the trash pack we skipped, because he's asleep on the job. Little pieces of information can tell you a lot in a short amount of time, and knowledge is power when you're supposed to look after everybody.

Sometimes my tank pulls before I'm ready and dies. Sometimes I get distracted by shiny things and don't notice him running (in cat form, sprinting ahead) into massive groups of mobs. Sometimes I'm just not able to keep up with the splurge of damage. But without those pulls, I'd grow lazy and stale, and I wouldn't know truly where my limits are. Those frantic, fast-paced, stressful heroics are where you learn to reflexively use every spell in your arsenal to keep from wiping, and that may not be what you're after every single time, but doing it consistently will make you a better healer, guaranteed.