Good fortune and may the elements embrace you. I hope you will not mind a small amount of reminiscing on my part… But as the wind likes to carry with it tales from other places so do I and I hope, somewhere, someone is listening as I do to that sweet susurrus. My journey is new but, I hope, not short.

These posts will happen from time to time – I love my alts and each and every one has presented new aspects of the game to me which I want to record and share for all.My usual answer to most “wtb healer for heroic x” in guild is “Would love too but Ava’s healing is still too weak”. That is, not just his gear but my experience too. Most of the guild had reccomended getting 1.4-1.5k +healing before hitting a heroic and I only had 1.3k-ish and 167 mana regen with water shield up and some rather dubious ‘healing‘ gear. I’ve only healed five or six instances and all but one of those was a guild run.

My little resto-shammie Avarix is, in my mind, still a ‘baby’ character who needs geared up before doing such scary things. I have this problem with all of my characters – the ‘fear’ of underperforming really eats at me to the point where I don’t like to join groups for things I’d really like to do due to feeling under-geared or skilled.

Last night, however, one of the rogues in the guild (who kindly helps me on Aurik when I have silly rogue questions) asked if I wanted to have a go anyway since they couldn’t find any other healers that late in the evening. Well, I thought, it is only Slave Pens after all and it’s one of the easiest heroics, supposedly, so why not? And, hey, I always like to help a guildie. It started out as a PuG group with myself and the rogue with three others then became a mostly guild group when one person ‘disconnected’ before we even got to the instance and didn’t come back. Cue one of the guild admins coming on her mage. Yay.

Our rogue and mage were very well geared and the tank had over 13k hp and some nice gear from what little I know about warrior tank gear. The other warrior was a little lacklustre and MS specced but nevermind, we figured, it’s not like we’re low on dps.

An hour or two later I completed my first heroic on my little healbot! Only two wipes the whole time – one caused by a large pack adding due to fear and the other due to the second warrior not knowing to spread out a bit on the last boss and thus all melee getting hit by Acid Geyser quickly followed by cleave before the tank could pull back aggro.

I didn’t feel taxed at all really except on that self-same last boss and even then chain-heal did its miraculous work and kept everyone up insanely well. To be fair I did use foodbuffs and a +healing pot of which I have a pile from levelling alchemy but, with the exception of the second boss, I didn’t have my +healing totem up due to having such a melee heavy party (windfury ftw).

Cue self-cheering at not having caused multiple wipes and getting a few badges to work towards my Essence of the Martyr trinket. I also was lucky and picked up the Pauldrons of Wild Magic for my grinding kit. Felt kind of cheeky to be walking away from the heroic with a purple when I only went to help out but it seems my luck always works like that. I never get anything I want when I go for it – only when I go to help out.

So tonight, after Tempest Keep, (yay first silly tries on Kael after clearing up Lootreaver and Solarian) the same rogue asked for a group for the daily heroic. “What is it?” “Durnholde” “Oh.. that’s one of the worst ones, no way my gear is good enough..” “Want to try anyway?” “Uhm… ok!”. So we went and we wiped. A lot. The reason for this? Bad pulls (not the tanks fault, simply that our positioning was terrible and we kept getting those godawful patrollers adding). I’d never been to Durnholde heroic on any character before and my god is that place a pain in the rear end.

Once our rather uncommunicative warlock had left, though, and we got in another guildie mage things started to look up. Healing was a bit more exciting than it’s ever been before (that is, the tank was taking far bigger spike damage as was the rogue and sometimes the casters too due to the hunter type mobs) and I was having to heal a lot more in each fight but I really did enjoy it once we got past the first boss.

The Thrall escort section, which I’d found rather hard on normal way back when I did it to get BM entry, was a lot less difficult than I’d imagined it would be on heroic (with a bit of help from some +mp5 food) and the rest was almost sickeningly easy once we got past that. My only problem was on the second boss – the mages stayed in the consecrate and thus died – one before and one just after the boss went down. They didn’t hold it against me, thankfully! Of course it helped that our tank was very well geared and had 15khp and, again, I was high on pots, foodbuffs and oil.

The epic loot was, sadly, disenchanted as it was melee dps mail and there’s no chance of me speccing enhancement. However, I picked up the Dazzling Chrysoprase which dropped since no one wanted it and I don’t have the recipe for it’s blue-quality equivalent Dazzling Talasite on Aurik. Plus it’s handy to have a yellow-gem-slot gem in case I need one for a bonus somewhere and is also preferable to pure +int. Epoch Hunter also dropped the Sparking Arcanite Ring – which again no one wanted – and that is now another small boost to my dps gear. It would have been nice to get some healing gear but, to be honest, actually getting gear was nice since every single other item was of no use to anyone and, susequently, sharded. First time I’d sharded a purple, too.

I reiterate the oft-said phrase – Kara is easier than heroics! I had taken Avarix there for the first time last week with a pug and was almost bored. We only got to Opera, however, so I guess the harder healing was still to come.

I’ve always enjoyed healing as Avarix but I wasn’t sure i’d ever really hit heroics with him. Kara maybe and certainly pvp but… pvp gets boring after a while (for me anyway). Shamans are an awesome class and I really like the customisability and range of cool stuff you can bring to a party – melee dps? drop a WF or Grace of Air and boost their dmg, Wrath of Air if you’ve got a pile of casters. Mana tide totem is lovely for ‘gauntlet’ battles like Epoch Hunter as you want to stack that +healing but need the mana regen. Heroism (when I remember to do it /bonk) and Fire Elemental Totem are pretty powerful in 5-mans too and Earth Shield is a really nice buffer for a healing class which doesn’t have any hots (unless you’re a draenei).

One other thing I picked up recently (in that one pug instance group) was Auslese’s Light Channeler. This trinket has me a little uncomfortable as, despite knowing it’s probably better than at least one of my other ones, I fear using it because of the ‘oddness’ of the on use effect. I’m used to, as a rogue and on my druid, having either passive proc trinkets or direct damage enhancing ones. Nothing has prepared me for ones which do odd things like reducing the mana cost of my next spell… If anyone could tell me the best way I could put this to use I’d much appreciate it!

As for Dryn – my little hunter has made his way to level 51! I got so terribly bored with the late 40’s that I spent almost a week avoiding him. This had the wonderful side effect, though, of piling up a nice wad of rest xp which, in turn, helped to burn away the last few miserable levels faster. I’m now in Searing Gorge. That surely isn’t much better, you’d think. Well… no. It’s not. But it’s at least a case of ‘kill everything here and you’ll complete all quests you’ve got eventually’. I can switch off and watch the tv or watch / listen to boss tactic videos (heading to Kael soon!) or even read a book. I’ve found this so much easier with a hunter – they really are the kings of afk grinding.

As I level with him, though, I look to the future and what secondary pet I’ll pick up. I have my beautiful Strider Clutchmother, Aoi, who is a nice tank and does reasonable damage but won’t really cut it when it comes to dps in instances or pvp – I probably won’t do a lot of these as Dryn’s a gatherbot but I want to be able to without potentially harming my party by being low on dps. I feel, too, that grinding some mobs would be easier with a high dps pet (low armour mobs or casters etc.) and so I’ve been trawling Petopia in search of a candidate.I’ve looked at kitties and for a while thought about Sian Rotam but a lot of people have him and when there are so many options my individuality-sense comes kicking in. I don’t really like the purple or green frostsabers, either and they, too, are rather overused now.

Raptors were my first love on most of my hunters especially Takk the Leaper (who I had the bad habit of calling Takk the Leper by mistake) but he’s awfully low level and would take a while to train up. The Outlands raptors? Meh… not so keen on the look of them but they’re a possibility.

Ravagers? Just… no. Like a lot of people I’m just really not keen on how they look and their lower health is a definate turn-off.

One pet which has taken my fancy, though, is the rather beautiful Scalewing Serpent (I really love the colours of the Feralfen Spirit, but it’s untamable and a summon from a horde-only quest besides). I’m not sure how well these do for general pet-use, though. If anyone happens to read this who can fill me in I’d be much obliged. Are they better suited as instance-only pets? Are they decent enough general-purpose pets? Do they have any annoying bugs / habits which make them bad as pets? It’ll be a while until I get one but I like to prepare in advance!

Roll on level 58 – can’t wait to hit Outlands with my little hunter.