giggle/rant/sob of the day

Reading this post about healing the Lich King fight and I come across the humorous line,

“if for some reason you still run with a group of window lickers that still don’t understand the benefits and abilities of a discipline priest, this fight alone should change their mind.”

I cant help but laugh. I mean, I cry a little too, but I am laughing. My guildies certainly don’t think they are window lickers (in fact some of them kinda have a high opinion of themselves), but there are still far too many of the influential people in this guild that honestly think they are carrying the guild disc priest. You know.. the one who is always so low low low on direct healing numbers.

It’s not like I am a bad. I do my part, I research the fights before we get to a new boss and I don’t make any more mistakes than anyone else. Plus I am a priest, I survive some crazy stuff due to my CD’s and burst healing. But because the default healing chart that comes with Recount is only for direct heals, and mitigation is a new concept to most WoW players, there are some who look at that chart or any deviation in my performance as proof I am not pulling my weight. Human psychology dictates that once a person is convinced that another is a bad at something, even if this person isn’t any better or worse than any other, the person in question must work ten times harder to disprove the erroneous opinion. Any mistake or error on their part is normally magnified ten times worse as proof of their earlier (and in this case wrong) opinion.

On the two non-disc friendly fights I keep my head above water. On BQ I float in the upper middle of the chart and on dreamwalker I just focus on tank healing, PI the Pally, and feel grateful I am not sent out of the room in shame. But in the rest of the fights my output varies from leading with as much as 44% of the overall healing to being head to head, toe to toe with the two other top healers in the guild.

But it doesn’t make for a fun evening when you are being doubted and constantly under fire. From being called out  in vent by an officer about my low healing output in Dreamwalker, to having one guild member recently flip out and Gquit during a raid after telling me that the only reason I am in this guild is that people feel sorry for me, it’s a nightly struggle to just keep my sanity over what I know I am contributing. The worst time I have of it is in my ten man group where every week I have to gently but firmly point out that whatever heroic encounter we are learning at the moment would not be better done with me as a Holy Priest. Usually posting the Heal+absorb meter quiets the demands for me to stop being a Disc Scrubb, but the ensuing comments from showing just how much further ahead my output is on the meter switches to resentful statements like “gee wish I only had to spam one button to top meters” (a resto drood said that last week) and “you can tell a healer is good based on their direct heals”,  and my personal all-time favorite, “your legendary mace is healing for you, so absorbs don’t count on the meters”. You really cant win if people don’t want to change.

All this would come to naught if it weren’t for two really awesome officers in my guild. Without these two people having my back, I probably wouldn’t have made it past the first month with this guild. They lobby constantly to educate others on how a Disc Priest heals, and always show support for me when the other officers question my abilities and direct heal numbers. And to be quite honest, not everyone feels this way. Most guildies understand that a disc priest’s most beneficial utilities to a raid wont show up on a direct heal meter, and the others trust the healing lead who advocates on my behalf.

That said, I think it’s disheartening that my two friends have to work so hard for tolerance of such a necessary raid healing class at a time in the expansion when everyone should know what the other classes can do, and show team support even if they don’t. But there you have it. People are people and they will always fuss and fidget about everything under the sun.