A few nights ago, I decided to participate in a Heroic Naxx pug (and you know my thoughts on the subject). But I always go back to it since I like to use my Shaman to decompress.
Like most pugs, we stood around for 30 minutes (literally) for the lead to dish out instructions. The boss we were about to engage was Gluth. We were about to run through the pipe, but we had to hold off and wait for a Paladin.
Now you might think this is trivial. But wait until I tell you why.
“My HealBot is not working properly. I can’t heal without it.â€Â
As you can imagine, that sent a nasty surge up my spine. Here’s a Paladin. He’s been assigned to main tank healing. And he can’t heal without his Healbot?
Is it truly that difficult to do nothing but hit the Flash of Light or Holy Light keys at will?
After the 30 minute brief, we had to wait around for an additional 10 minutes (multiplied by 24 players and thats 240 minutes or 4 hours) for this guy to get his addon going.
Airline pilots have a wide variety of electronics and instruments at their disposal. Most of the time, they can toggle the autopilot. When push comes to shove, they have to take manual control of their plane. Sometimes emergencies happen. Perhaps there’s a circuit fried somewhere rendering GPS useless. They have to be trained to be able to make visual landings of their aircraft under extreme weather circumstances.
Lesson 1
Good healers use addons to heal. But great healers don’t have to rely on them.
Don’t get me wrong. I think HealBot is a good tool. As is Clique, Grid, and whatever else you decide to use. At the same time, the next time you go on a farm raid try toggling off and healing in vanilla mode. The point isn’t to see if you like it. Because I guarantee you, you won’t. The point is to see if you can do it. Blizzard will make patches and they will continue to update the game. Addons will break or error out on certain fights. Sometimes updates will come out days or even weeks later.
Would you delay raiding because a key addon you need isn’t available?
I should hope not.
I love my Pitbull as much as the next guy. But if I need to heal by pulling out the raid frames manually, I can. Sure it reduces my overall effectiveness, but at least I won’t be handcuffing the raid.
Lesson 2
Check your addons before entering a raid to ensure that they’re working properly.
This goes without saying. But a 10 second check saves 10 minutes of heartache.