Patience is a Virtue

A few days ago, I wrote about how the shaman class lead was leaving the game and how I wanted to be the class lead in his place. I didn't know how to broach the subject with the guild leader though.

Well, tonight she asked me. So I am now an officer of the guild and the leader of the shaman class! There are officially five female and six male officers in the guild. How unusual is that?!

I also got to inspect a WWS parse of tonight's raid, so I have a better idea of the healing differences between the new resto shaman and me. It seems as though he is a more reactive healer and doesn't manage his mana as carefully as I do.

For a while, I thought he was making liberal use of nature's swiftness to emulate haste. I knew he was casting more heals than me and that's hard to do because I am always casting. Upon examination tonight, I noticed that he uses lesser healing wave much more often than I do and he uses a very low rank healing wave to top people off. He also uses a higher rank chain heal than I do, though I can't tell if he uses rank 4 or 5 (I use rank 3).

On the other hand, I am a very steady healer. I stick to chain heal rank 3 and up-rank (use 4 or 5) depending on how much damage the raid is taking as a whole. I rarely cancel heals once I've started them because I gamble on them actually healing something by the time they land, which is also why I down rank so much. Why waste a lot of mana on over-heal? I almost never use lesser healing wave, with the Supremus fight as the notable exception. The only time I use healing wave is when I'm healing someone after a rez or pulling a "Hail Mary" heal off on the tank.

So the difference between us is due to healing style. There are positives to both methods, certainly, but we can both learn from each other as well. At this point, I think the one thing I will try to adapt from his healing style is some of the reactivity. I am a little slow to cast heals sometimes, partially because I'm already healing someone else. I'm also not as good at positioning as I should be, so that's something to work on.

It will be very interesting to see how the new resto shaman does when he gets his two piece T6 set bonus. We're already neck-in-neck on the healing meters.