29 July 2011

BG's, Healers, and Khrox

*be prepared dear reader-wall of text post ahead!

Vidyala, over at Manalicious, recently posted "What your healer wants you to know about bg's." It's a good post and if you're a battleground dps'er, I suggest you give it a read.


Perhaps the reason this caught my eye tonight has to do with Khrox, and his rampaging urge to enjoy battlegrounds, after the frustrating grind through his Firelands dailys. (and we all know what a world pvp gank zone those have been)

Khrox is relatively new to battlegrounds, maybe two months? Can't say for sure though it doesn't feel like it 's been all that long. He began with the simple thought of gearing up better, and pvp gear seemed to fill the bill for "quickly available." He has since come to really enjoy bg's though, and is working hard with being good at them.

In the past couple of weeks his focus has been on taking out enemy healers, since the horde always seem to come fully outfitted with them and bg chat is constantly screaming for their healers to die. So he's taken it upon himself to remedy all this fuss by going for the throat, er, healers.

~I'm getting to the healer part of this, albeit slowly. Note though, if you are a healer reading this, feel free to offer your thoughts~

Picking out enemy healers, at least for me, is a chore in itself. Remember, I'm a little bit older now and two dozen players bunched up under a flag just looks like one big ball of blazing damnation to me, lol. Anyways, I love friendly healers. I do notice when my falling health bar takes sudden jumps upwards, and usually try to get a "thanks" out to the healer, if I can find them in the mess. So this led to me learning about HHTD, and promptly/dutifully installing such. First time out for a run, not only could I easily find and target enemy healers, but my own bore nice big green marks so I could actually keep one eye their way. But now I had another little glitch. Way too many nameplates cluttering the screen for one. And everybody's bars who weren't healers. well they all kinda looked the same to me. Every one was class colored for sure and there didn't seem to be any distinction between friend or foe. Result, turn off friendly name tags, only enemy shows. It also cleared up the playing field such as it is. Better, but not quite right in my eyes.

There's these really good little /y's that come up in the chat box. To the effect, friendly healer is being attacked by so-and-so. With no real marking to help me spot the healer as I scan the outer edges, I feel like I just have to get lucky and spot the enemy name tag. And of coarse, I'm usually in the middle of trying to save my own rear as well. Mostly because a detachment of horde are on me for beating on their healers. Hey, when I say it's a mess in there, it's a MESS!!!

Khrox was a small, tiny little horde magnet before all this. He did and does a ton of damage to the enemy, and they respond in kind by sending forth several killers to end his assualt on them. But since he's been focusing on their healers, and killing them, he's become a rather large horde magnet. I'm quite sure that their healer is screaming just as loudly at them since I've been known to chase them down until they die.

What this all leads to, is that there exists in bg's this kind of unspoken vendetta aimed at healers. Friend or enemy, I'm sure they're feeling all this attention coming at them. And I'm just as sure they're sometimes at wit's end thinking they have no protection from the dps'ers. I fully agree that more needs to be done by us, to help protect them. ~I must note here that I can only speak from my own experiences in bg's-the milage of others may vary~

As a fairly strong dps'er, I'm looking at a couple of options to help my healers. In the background, there's still adjustments needed to be made to the HHTD mod so that I can get full benefit from it. Up front in action, I've taken the coarse for now to know who the healers are by name. I've either had the opportunity to speak with them at some point, or, some actually mark themselves in the raid frames as a healer. In Vidyala's post and comments somewhere, I recall thoughts about healers adopting a pet dps, and dps adopting a pet healer. As humorous as it sounds, I think it's really a good option as well. Khrox certainly finds himself in the process of such, though it seems to be coming about in a natural way rather than formal agreement. But there is one regular healer he sees quite often, and has chatted with on occasion. So when he does jump into one of those balls of flag ownership disputes, he naturally looks around first to see if that healer is also there. If so, he makes determined efforts to try and keep her in LoS.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough here, surely more than I should have. If you're still with me though and you happen to be a healer, feel free to add your thoughts or suggestions for they are most welcome. This is one dps'er who happens to think about you quite a bit...

after all...

my life usually depends upon you.

"Go with honor, friend."

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