Yesterday was my first experience as a healer in an instance. Let me say first, that it is an entirely new game to me. I think I had more fun last night that I can remember in recent history. I'm not specced as a healer, but I found a druid can do alright through say 70 without it.
Grettir, the other other of this blog is a Paladin, I am a Druid. We rolled these alts because we had grown tired of the never ending search for PUG's as DPS. We wanted to have a little say in the direction of our gameplay. One day we decided we should each run one of the hybrid classes, that way we could decide to DPS, Tank, or Heal. I've always liked being a healer, even as far back as the MUD days. Grettir had absolutely no interest in healing so we decided to try to level together as a Prot/Balance combo. These are fast becoming our mains and we knew that would be the case. We are now dedicating more and more time to these characters.
Leveling this way is not as fast as solo. I'll be straight up and honest. We did not level slowly by any stretch of the imagination but we probably could have leveled fast solo with solo builds. This is however an ABSOLUTE blast to play. There's just something cool about seeing twelve MOB's surrounding Grettir while I hit him with a few HoT's then burn them all down with Hurricane. There have been times where we took on huge groups like this and they were all two to three levels above us.
Well, last night we decided to take the plunge and see how we did in our new roles in an instance. We were both level sixty at the time. I put up a quick add on main in Hellfire Peninsula and we eventually ended up with two DPS, a DK and a Lock. We decided to try to four man the instance since we could not find volunteers for slot five. Like I stated before I am not specced resto, I have a hybrid Balance build designed to work as a support character to Grettir. I have done some reading and have been told I should be able to heal the instances up to seventy. We began and right away I knew Grettir had found his calling. I barely had to heal him compared to what I thought I might. We were marching through pulls and he wasn't losing aggro. Granted, he had some learning experiences and he will be writing his own article from a paladins perspective but we pretty much marched out way through Hellfire Ramparts. We lost the lock and replaced him with a warry and ran the instance again, even smoother. We then decided to try for Blood Furnace and had a pretty smooth run there.
I decided last night however, that I should probably invest the money to dual spec and build a healing spec for instance runs and do it the right way since I plan to be a healer for end game. This way both Grettir and I will learn our jobs as we move towards Northrend. I'm sure we won't learn everything we need to know until we actually encounter end game content but we are both enjoying the process. I would recommend leveling with a friend to anybody who has the patience to experience the game in that manner. We have both stepped out of our comfort zones with these characters and it's been the most rewarding Warcraft experience I have had.
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