12-27-2004, 07:17 AM
LochnarITB,Dec 26 2004, 01:39 PM Wrote:That would be a generalization. Not all mages party that way. As long as my little squishy guy isn't being pounded on, removing curses is second only to sheeping adds in my list of priorities. Silencing a caster is third with dealing damage coming in fourth in the list.
It would be a generalization but by far it would not be an over generalization. I'm not kidding on this next part. I got so frustrated with mages not dispelling curses that I started keeping track of how often mages would dispell a curse without being prompted. I would even wait a full 15 seconds after the fight was over before mentioning that they should remove curses on people. Do you know what the ratio was? 50-to-1. That's right, 50 times, a mage would not dispell a curse without prompting. I've frequently seen mages who don't have Remove Curse on any of their hotkey bars. A couple of mages I've seen hadn't bother to buy the spell, because "[They] never needed it." One mage outright refused to cast it on our instance group and said, "I'm not a healer." This is a massive pet peeve of mine.
Another pet peeve is mages who don't have first aid. The example case was in a 40-person raid on Onyxia. The standard tactic is to have a tank try to keep aggro and draw her toward the back wall, so that when she breathes fire, it doesn't hit the rest of the raid. Meanwhile, the dozen or so priests and druids are setup in a healer rotation (with paladins or shamans providing random heals) to heal the main tank. Everyone else slowly and gently does damage. It works pretty well and makes sense.
So, my main focus is healing the raid's tank, right? I'm in a group of four others, and in an emergency (like if Onyxia's eggs hatch and we have whelps flying everywhere), I'll provide some healing to them, but my focus is keeping the raid's tank alive. If the tank dies, we die. It's that simple. Well, the tank got knocked to one side, and Onyxia breathed some fire over a section of the raid before we got things back in order. One of the mages, well out of my healing range I might add, was damaged. And stayed damaged. So damaged that any small flick of fire would kill him. After seeing this for half a minute or so, I yelled, "XXXX, heal yourself!" And he was like "Uh, with what?"
I wanted to reach my hands into the monitor and choke him. First aid is a free profession. It's easy to skill up and everyone can get it. I have bad news for mages. You ain't the main focus of my healing. The party's tank is. There are plenty of times where mages take damage but then manage to get out of it -- via frost nova, sheep, or just having aggro taken back by the party's tank. It would be most helpful to both you and your party's priest if you could give yourself a little in-combat healing when an appropriate moment presents itself. Heck, if a mage is out of mana, a mage with first aid can even heal *other* people while waiting for mana to regen.