Not Pushing the Button

I’m a healer. I have other toons: a raid-ready tank that I love to play, a cou­ple of decent dps toons. But in my heart, I love being a healer.

I’ve recently real­ized that peo­ple who are annoy­ing tend to die more often in raids where I’m healing.

For exam­ple, my guild’s cur­rent off­tank is as annoy­ing as hell. He’s the liv­ing exam­ple of the Dunning-Kruger effect… I could go into great depth, and I very well might in a future piece, but suf­fice to say that there is often an under­cur­rent of pri­vate tells derid­ing him dur­ing every raid he par­tic­i­pates in. How­ever, our guild is like a fam­ily, and he’s the weird cousin who makes it to every cook­out. His avail­abil­ity is decent, he’s not com­pletely ter­ri­ble at his class/role, and he tries to be friendly even if he lacks the social skills to pull it off. But there are all-too-frequent occa­sions where I wish I had a but­ton I could push that gives him an anony­mous elec­tri­cal jolt in his real-life chair.

Actu­ally, as it turns out, there’s a lit­tle but­ton that I don’t push that does the same thing. It’s actu­ally a series of but­tons, each of them bound to heal­ing spells. He dies more than average.

I only real­ized this pat­tern of behav­ior a cou­ple of weeks ago when, over guild chat, this fel­low was instruct­ing new raiders to make sure they do their dailies every day in case of high repair bills, and also how elixirs are a waste of time–just get flasks, even for farm con­tent. I was ready to type out a reply say­ing that we only die often enough to mat­ter in pro­gres­sion runs, then thought… hmm. He does die pretty often, but the new raiders won’t. And I some­how know this ahead of time.

It’s funny how you can sud­denly real­ize that your behav­ior is com­pletely counter what you thought your goal was.

I don’t seek out the oppor­tu­nity to let him die, and I don’t try to man­u­fac­ture events where it will be pos­si­ble. Because he’s an off­tank, there are many events where we sim­ply don’t need his off­tank­ing. In the remain­ing events, you only need off­tanks up to a cer­tain point. Out­side of that? Oppor­tu­ni­ties. And I occa­sion­ally partake.

It’s not just me. I mean, we often have two or three heal­ers on our 10-man runs, so some­one could bail him out. But it just doesn’t hap­pen. Consistently.

This behav­ior isn’t lim­ited to just this per­son, or just raids. In one of my early Magister’s Ter­race runs, I ran with an annoy­ing shadow priest who told us all how inef­fec­tive all heal­ers are with­out a shadow priest in their group. He died a few addi­tional times. Not a word was spo­ken. The other three mem­bers of the group knew exactly what was happening.

The same thing hap­pens when a dps class pulls too much aggro or breaks crowd con­trol too often. In the past, I’ve advo­cated let­ting those peo­ple die, because they’re hurt­ing the group/raid from a tac­ti­cal sense and need feed­back. How­ever, I guess that via my exam­ple I extend that behav­ior for other rea­sons too. I know that my healer friends all do the same thing, even though we rarely speak about it.

Is this counter to the group’s goal? Sadly, yes. We want smooth and speedy progress. Is this counter to my goal? No. My goal is to have fun. Is this part of why I love being a healer? I’d like to say “No!” but I strongly sus­pect that the answer is “Yes.”

I’m not proud, but I am smil­ing.

More Words!

• Fools, Silence, and Dam­age Reporting–supplemental
• Take the Group Role
• Raid­ing does not mean Skilled
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid
• The Down­side of Endgame Guilds