Farst Pozt

Hey, after you start something, it's supposed to get easier, right?

I guess I should start with purpose and me.

My intended goal is to write something about my experiences raiding with a multiboxer in WoW (recently, two, actually, but one of them has not been doing Ulduar10/25 with us). Where we succeed, where we fail, what's easy and what's hard. We're presently at 12/14 on both 10 and 25 in Ulduar, no hardmodes so far (excluding 1/3 on Freya, attempts at Heartbreaker, Dispelling the Illusion, and Orbit-uary on 10). We're working our way to Yogg before we go truly crazy.

This is with a quasi-PUG structure. Weeks rarely go by where we don't have to pick up at least two people from LFG. And we have a four-boxing shaman, Nechja and her three clones, who also leads, organizes, and does primary recruiting for the raid.

We're pretty far from cutting edge, but we also do something few others do. We have a participating multiboxer who plays four characters at once, and not only survives many of the more difficult fights for single players, but thrives, pulling around 20k DPS minimum between all of her characters on gimmickless fights (read: Patchwerk). We're even sitting at 11/14 on Champion of Ulduar, and it's more often than not that all four shaman survive a fight when the tanks and healers are doing their jobs right.

As for myself, I've been playing WoW for about four or so years now. My first server was a transfer server (one that was spawned for multiple other realms to transfer off of to lighten player load) called Norgannon. I started back some time after BWL was released, but before Naxxramas (my first character, an undead rogue, was about 55 at the time of the first Scourge Invasion). My raid experience before TBC was... a few wipes to the first few pulls in MC, getting attuned for BWL (never doing anything in it), wiping terribly on the last boss in UBRS, and wiping terribly in ZG and AQ20 (with limited success in both).

After TBC was released, I leveled a paladin as quickly as possible and started gearing it for holy. I felt frustrated by the lack of utility rogues had (as Blind was much worse back then, stuns did nothing in raids, and Sap was a joke before Imp Sap became baseline. It didn't help that I liked combat fists, and no fist weapons existed outside of very rare drops back then, either), and looking at the talents for paladins really interested me. Throughout all this time I was bouncing between a number of guilds, finally winding up in a fairly stable one that could barely kill Attumen.

Eventually I made it into a decent guild that could full clear Kara, and got geared up on my paladin. Unfortunately we made very little progress in SSC and TK, and eventually I got so fed up with officer apathy (or what appeared to be) that I made my own guild with the support of a few other people.

Unfortunately one of the people who came with me almost immediately quit back to an old guild, that basically treated him like a second class citizen. We gradually lost some of the better and more geared players, until eventually the guild just folded and I moved over to Feathermoon Alliance, where my sister had been playing with friends.

I rerolled a druid at this time, since it was the only class I hadn't leveled past 60, and I really wanted to try out druid healing, in part because it looked more interesting than Flash of Light spam, and in part because there was this one terrible druid on Norgannon who I wanted to one up...

Regardless. I made my way to 70 from scratch, then poked my way into raids gradually, a rather nice group of people accepting me in and getting me through Kara to a point I could start healing for other raids. They had just transitioned out of SSC and TK, so Kara and ZA were the limit of what I did for a while, then I got sub spots in MH and BT. Things progressed fairly well for a while, we went 3/5 the first week we did Hyjal, and 4/5 not long thereafter. Unfortunately, the trend was downwards from there.

There was some severe tunnel vision on getting Archimonde on farm, so much so that we'd spend 2-3 hours after killing everything else bashing our heads against him repeatedly. We had a number of people rotating in and out per night, with about 18 or so static people. Repeatedly, it was stated that if "Nobody screws up" we'd kill Archimonde, because we had managed to at one point with an ideal circumstance (and two non-healers respec'd to healing). A lot of blame got placed on healers when people would run out of range, or repeatedly fail to doomfires, or repeatedly fail to use tears properly. Nearly every attempt wound up with someone massively failing at 60% or so, and then the raid being killed by his I Win buttons.

Despite a few of the earlier bosses in BT offering better gear with substantially less time investment, we kept working on Archimonde, week in and week out, because the experience with Vashj had been that switching to TK to kill Kael every other week ruined their Vashj strategy. "Gear isn't an issue, we've done this before" was the response given when BT was mentioned. Eventually this endless blaming of healers and endless headwalling lead me to take a week long break from raiding, at the end of which I was told I wasn't wanted back.

I will admit, I tend to get a bit chatty on Vent, and this tends to be a problem for more "srs" raiding guilds. I also speak my mind a lot, another thing that tends to lead to trouble, as most people can tell you. I can see why they made their choice, and would have rather had a more open discussion with officers, instead of getting occasional complaints in tells from one person and one person only, but the past is the past.

After that I only did periodic raiding in TBC, Kara here and there in PUGs. I worked my warlock towards 70, and 3.0 hit when he was 66. I finished off 70 and did the second Scourge Invasion (which I felt was absolutely awesome -- and I trolled more than my fair share of "I'm quitting due to terrible zombie event that only lasts three days" posts) and managed to get a full set of Undead Slaying gear for him.

I then decided to level my warlock to 80 first when I got Wrath, and did that. My side projects were my DK and Shaman, my DK making 80 shortly after my warlock, then falling by the wayside. Sometime after my DK hit 80, I started raiding again, first with the group that had evicted me (mostly due to lack of association with my warlock being mine~), and then with an "okay" Naxx10. About this time, my sister had picked up a Naxx25 with Nechja, which I constantly bothered her to get me a spot in.

A few weeks went by, and finally I got a spot in Nech's Naxx25, and gradually became a permanent member. A few months later, after the release of Ulduar, Nech expressed some healing concern to myself and my sister (remember how I mentioned we're quasi-PUG? Solid healing and solid tanking were two big concerns for Nechja -- tanking we had, healing we didn't, due to only having about 4 healers that regularly showed). My shaman had been parked at 79 with about 6 bars of experience to 80 for a few months. At first I offered my druid, remembering how well I (percieved) myself healing in Hyjal, but then remembered my shaman being the closer one to 80. I got her last few bars of EXP that night and immediately started gearing.

A few more months later, and here we are.

I'm a self-taught healer. I browsed EJ briefly to see their opinions on various abilities, but gradually settled upon my current talent build and gearing style - Balance of haste and crit, and a fair deal of MP5. The common accepted shaman healer method seems to be something along the lines of holy paladin healing currently -- stack intellect, spellpower, crit, and haste, ignore MP5 pieces -- so I think it's safe to say I deviate from the norm.

And I do actually use Chain Heal.

Shocking, I know.