Saturday, we managed to get five level 70s grouped for another foray into the Shadow Labyrinth. Our party was led and tanked by Weyland, our erstwhile prot warrior. My Osprey did the healing (abetted in a couple critical moments by Swissy, our laser chicken, who truly puts the BOOM in Boomkin!), while massive amounts of DPS were put out by BM Jaerle and Fred the owl; mage Katika, who can and will ice anything within 30 yards (the Governator’s Mr. Freeze has nothing on her!), and the aforementioned Swissy.
There isn’t much to say about the instance run itself: For the most part, it was a thing of beauty. We one-shot three of the four bosses, including Murmur. Only Blackheart the Inciter took us two shots. We had three other wipes on bad pulls (including a rather spectacular wipe on an "oops!" body pull—but not by me, for a change). The drops were nothing spectacular (I got a robe and slippers off Murmur; the footwear was a definite upgrade, and the robe should make for a decent DPS item, if I gem it properly); the important thing for us was the excellent teamwork, and the effective communication during the boss fights.
And therein lay my epiphany. While I’ve felt I’ve improved as a healer in each instance I’ve run, in Saturday’s SL run, for the first time, I really felt as though I was "in the zone." I wasn’t perfect, by a long shot. I know there was plenty of overhealing, but except for the boss fights, of course, my mana pool was at 80 percent or better at the end of each pull, as was everyone’s health (and usually, everyone was at 90 percent or more).
My time inside the FSR was way down compared to my earlier efforts: I think I finished at around 54%; previously, I was in the mid- to upper-60s. For the most part, especially with the bosses, while I was just as frustrated as everyone else at the different specials they use, everything still appeared to be in slow motion. I knew exactly where the next heal needed to be, and which heal it needed to be. I recognized right away when I needed Swissy to help out: A combat rez here, extra tank healing there (especially on Murmur; the bastard kept pulling me into him just before Sonic Boom). And to her credit, she was right with me every time, even though her true calling is melting faces.
The only thing I saw that we need to improve on is how to handle kill order. And the most salient point there was to stop hitting the sheep target when its CC broke. It seemed like every. single. time. when the sheep broke (before we were ready for it), someone, no doubt in an effort to keep it off one of us clothies, would slap it upside the head, instead of simply letting the mage re-sheep. So I think next time, I want to try a strategy of "Kill the moon [sheep target] last. Let the mage re-sheep it till we’re ready." And Katika is always on top of that anyway. I know it had to be frustrating to see the sheep get broken again right after her polymorph hit.
But that’s really an easy thing to fix, and I think I was just super sensitive to it on Saturday, simply because I really was in such a groove that for the first time, I was seeing the whole battle on every pull. In retrospect, I know now I’ve been getting to this point, playing both the hunter and the priest in instances. But when it comes together like it did on Saturday in the Shadow Lab, all I wanted to do was go again, RIGHT NOW!
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{ 3 comments }
“The only thing I saw that we need to improve on is how to handle kill order”
In my experience, Shadow Labs is *the worst* instance in the world for that. The pulls are all so random that really, you just have to arbitrarily mark everything and say, “Ok, this is how we’re going to kill them.”
On the Murmur healing thing, was your tank staying in for explosions or what? I roll as a shadow priest, but for simplicity’s sake on most SLabs runs, we usually have our tank just tank Murmur straight through and when the explosion starts I start casting a GHeal7 on the MT with a renew and ProM immediately afterward while the MH keeps healing as normal. We usually had moderately geared tanks when we were doing this though. Mostly bears with like 10-13K health.
Yep, the tank hung in there the whole time. At the end, I was spamming Prayer of Healing in between GH’s. Was exciting, to say the least!
I absolutely LOVE Slabs. It’s by far my favorite instance. And I use it now to gauge my improvement as a healer. It’s a night and day difference from when I started. My last run, we one shotted every boss, and our hunter dc’ed just as we started clearing murmur’s room. We kept clearing hoping she’d get back, but ended up 4-manning him…one shot one kill and I got the spellstrike pants pattern.
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