Kara. Our guild’s normal set up for a Kara run involves 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 DPS. What I’ve found is that that third healer is often quite bored, if the other two are pretty well geared. I started to wonder if that third healer was necessary, and then I heard of people running Kara with only one dedicated healer.
One healer for Kara? Are they nuts?
It sounded like something I would like to try. So I made a post about it on our guild’s forums to see if anyone would be willing to take the “One Healer Kara Challenge” with me at the helm. I’ve made some great strides in my gear, and I’d call myself about Tier 4.5 equipped. I have a lot of the best healing gear from Kara, the [Grovewalker's Leggings] and a couple of drops from SSC. This puts me at 1867 healing unbuffed, and healing is the only stat that I focus on.
(Not that Stamina, MP5 and Spirit are unimportant, it’s just that I find that the items with good +heal give me those stats anyway.)
Well, I managed to find enough interest, so I posted a run. We took our best geared prot warrior, who I would put at around Tier 5.5, who is also one of our Raid Leaders. We also took an offtank and 7 DPS classes, all ranged, all fairly well geared (some VERY well geared). One of those was a Shadow Priest we put in group 2 to make my job a little easier. There were also a couple other healing classes that could throw in emergency heals now and then, including a boomkin, elemental shammy, and the pally off tank.
My hope was that we would succeed by sheer strength of DPS. The boss fights would largely be a race. Could the DPS burn them down before my mana bar ran out? Everyone also pretty much knew that I would focus almost entirely on the MT, and couldn’t afford to toss out many other heals. To that effect, everyone brought plenty of pots and bandages.
So last night was the night. I was REALLY looking forward to testing my mettle. Another reason I wanted to do this was to prove that I could. I don’t often to get to raid with many of my guildies, so a lot of them rarely if ever got the chance to see me play. I’m sure a few of them wondered if I could handle it – I know I did.
We got started on time, and the pulls began. On the very first pull, I died. One of the skeletal horsies got loose and came for me as I was building a good deal of healing aggro off the bat. I was a little geeked up, and probably threw more healing out than I really needed to. Nerves. The skelly horse whacked me, feared me, and with no other healers to help ME out, I went down. Oh well.
We continued on to the first boss, Attumen. Again, I got a little to healy, and Attumen himself aggroed me. 2 shots, I’m dead. They still managed to take him down, though, with the Boomkin healing and mad, crazy DPS. Oh well again.
I have a real tendency to die a couple of times early on any run tougher than a normal five man. I’m not sure why that is, I guess I have to kind of get “warmed up” and get my healing legs beneath me. Part of this is probably because – due to my limited play time – I have to get in and get going right away. It just takes me a few pulls to get going. There is a real art to healing, and when I get in the zone I feel like I can keep anybody up. Under any circumstances.
After that, things started to go real smoothly. We one shot Moroes with no real issues. We moved on to Maiden and one shot her as well. For Opera we got Oz, which I thought might be the most difficult of the three, but we one shot that as well.
Then we got to Nightbane, and my world was turned upside down. Was it that I just didn’t have the chops to heal that tough fight? No, that wasn’t the problem. It was FRICKING TECHNICAL ISSUES. We start on Nightbane, and things are going swimmingly. I’m keeping the tank up, and we’re really dishing it out. The next thing I know, I’m lagging. HARD. Say hello to my first DC of the night. (I say first because there were MANY more to come.) And, of course, a wipe.
So I get back in and we try again. Another DC, another wipe. Third try, I DC early, manage to get back in, and we take him down. Ack.
After that, I DC’d all the time. On bosses, on trash, you name it. I took a few shots even, though I don’t remember where we were at this point..I think clearing to Aran.
ARRRGGHHH! ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! (Make sure you repeat that as you look at the pics for full effect.)
Here it kind of looks like I’m in some bad Sci-fi movie, and I froze everyone in time. I was also getting some very odd rubberbanding, where I would get “caught up” for half a second, then more freezage.
Ok, I wasn’t really laughing. Here you can see another angle on this fight. I suppose it might have been useful had I been diagramming a trash pull, or something. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
It turns out that’s how the WHOLE rest of the run went for me, for the most part. I managed to get through Curator without a DC. And man, was it beautiful with all that DPS. Once he got to his first Evocation phase, it was all over but the crying. I’ve NEVER seen him go down that fast. Heck, there’s a bunch of 5 man bosses I haven’t seen go down that fast.
I DC’d and we wiped on Aran. The second try I DC again, get back in, and we take him down. I get through Chess fine, though I stuck with a pawn just in case. (Of course I dont’ have any stupid DC issues on CHESS!!!) We get to Prince, and more DC issues abound. I DC once, wipe. I DC again, halfway through, and they took him down before I got back in. Thank god for massive, mind blowing DPS.
Needless to say, my frustration level was high, very high. Let’s put it this way, there was a fork nearby, and I was about 2 DCs from inserting said fork into either my DSL modem or my eye.
I have never had DC issues. Never. I just ran SSC Saturday night with NO problems. Now, when I’m trying something quite difficult for the first time, in an effort to prove myself and accomplish something cool, our group wipes multiple times because I can’t….fricking….stay connected!!
So we called it after Prince. (I did also upgrade my cloak to the [Stainless Cloak of the Pure Hearted] from Prince, bully for me. I also got a handful of off-spec feral upgrades.) I’m sitting here trying to put into words how frustrating it was, but I can’t. That’s how frustrating it was! I really feel like given the overall issues, it was a great success to get all the way through Prince. I think we did prove that it COULD be done with just one healer, and in a lot of ways it made the run more interesting. I only wish technical issues hadn’t gotten in the way. It would be one thing if I just couldn’t keep up. I could live with that. Maybe I’m just not good enough, or I need more +heal, whatever. But for the roadblock to be some frigging ISP related issue is just plain bupkiss.
Anyhow, that’s my story. I have good but not great gear, and I think normally I wouldn’t have any real problems one healing Kara. It would have been nice to see how Netherspite and Illhoof would go, but hopefully we’ll try this again in the future. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to drive to the local AT&T office and bust some heads. Thanks for reading!
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I have also been completely screwed by the AT&T disconnect bug, which started about a week or two ago. I switched to AT&T U-Verse from Time Warner about six weeks ago, and all was fine, until the more and more frequent disconnects. Finally, I couldn’t stay logged longer than a minute, and streaming video was getting hung up, as if I’d lost the connection.
I had the AT&T guy come over, and we checked the exterior line, the modem, tested for local interference, took down the wireless modem firewall, changed security from 128 bit to 64 bit, designated the Blizzard ports used for downloading patches – you name it, we tried it, it didn’t matter; we couldn’t get it solved.
But when I plugged in a cable from the router, the disconnects disappeared. It had to be the wireless. Are you using the wireless modem/router?
So we were all ready to blame the device, EXCEPT – my laptop was doing fine. No disconnects. So we wondered if it was a software issue? I disabled NoScript on Firefox, wondering if it was interfering with the server pinging from the game. Except I was getting hung up on streaming video, too. As you might expect, no result. Was it a virus? I have a Mac, so this is a long shot; virus scan yielded nothing.
So, is the wireless hardware in my computer going bad? I did recently replace the logic board – perhaps something got messed up in the process (the machine is 2 1/2 years old). However, now that I hear you were having the problem, I really wonder. Is it just AT&T wireless sucks?
I never cancelled the Time Warner cable, figuring I might end up going back. It may very well be that AT&T just sucks.