To pull or not to pull... a healer's perspective.

Okay, I've been healing in this here game for years (since the beginning I suppose). I have a Druid and a Priest running heroics and a Pally waiting in the wings at 71 so I am familiar with most aspects of healing.

I mainly stick to random dungeon pickup groups. As you can guess, the latest changes have been a great benefit to me in many ways. As a casual player I rarely get time for raids. This post is applies to pickup groups as raids always have a mechanism for this type of thing.

I've come across all kinds of Tanks and all kinds of DPS. One thing I've never understood is the agreement on when to pull and when to wait. Sometimes, rarely, but every once and a while this will be agreed upon in the beginning. Some times there will be the simple "r?" in party chat, other times it's just pull, pull, pull until someone says something. Here are the 3 methods I've seen.

• An agreement before the first pull on who sets the pace of the run. This is ideal but slows things down a little bit.
• The generic "r?" in party chat. This is bad because nobody EVER waits for everyone to respond.
• Pull, pull, pull until something bad happens or someone says "Wait a sec...". This is bad because something bad usually happens before anything changes.

The other day in Utgarde Pinnacle I was running with a particularly eager DK Tank (I know, hard to believe) and he runs like two rooms ahead and charges into a large group. Now we were outgeared for this instance in general but he pulled the whole room, around 8-10 mobs. By the time I get there he was dead and the Pally DPS was next in line. I backed away and with a little luck, melded successfully. I proceeded to apologize and rez people. The first thing he says is... "Wow, that sucked... I didn't get one heal.".

My suggestion to every tank or aspiring tank is to make a quick macro. If nothing else just use it in random pickup groups. It will save the party from much grief and your healer will thank you, I promise. If nothing else it can just say "/y The tank is pulling now...". If you want to get creative you can throw in an audible emote. This makes things great for that errant healer that might be watching the television while drinking or alt-tabbed out to browse applicable loot. It gives just enough warning that when the flesh starts to fall, a greater heal or a regrowth should be right behind.

Suggestion Box: Random Harvest Times

While pulling weeds in the garden the other day I made an interesting observation. It doesn't take the same amount of time to pull each weed. Some come out of the ground quickly while others seem to be held in with Mighty Putty. I am sure the same would be true of getting copper and silver deposits out of the ground. Or even for skinning a freshly killed animal.



I feel that in order to make most tradeskills more realistic the "timers" should be a random amount rather than a set number of seconds.

Now, I don't know what is more sad; the fact that I think of things like Warcraft while weeding the garden, or that I was comparing Crabgrass to Felweed.

Scalable Instances

Why oh why can't Blizzard make instances scalable to the number of people who enter?(It should be noted that my main is covered in "welfare epics" and my other 70 has simple blues and greens because this is all the content I have time for, not because of leet puprz)

It burns me up to think of all the content in this game that I will NEVER see. There is absolutely no way most people will ever get to see the best parts of the game. I don't care about the gear. I just want to see the zones and experience the fights.

I don't understand why Blizzard does it. Why do they develop so much content only to restrict it to the few people who have the time to spend 4-5 hours a day playing? Don't we all pay the same amount? Why can't instances be scalable? I don't expect to have the time and flexibility to be able to be the first person to see the new content but sure as hell want to see it eventually!

It happened first with BWL and Nax when TBC came out. These places are all but deserted now. Now it is destined to happen again with most of the BT, Eye and who knows what else once WotLK is released. I guess I can always keep raising my rogue in hopes of stealthing parts of it at level 80.