Looking for Loot

So Rev and I ran LFR last night. We read quick overviews of the fights and checked our gear. I couldn’t quite meet the requirements, but I had a nice cloth helmet that would give me the last point I needed. I equipped it and we were ready to go!

Got in. Some dk says “Ok I’m main tank.” He had more health than Rev so whatever. I decided I’d be Rev’s personal healer. We started trying to talk about strategy but the other tank was just “keep amethyst dog away from the others go go”. Only the amethyst dog wasn’t even up… and that’s not remotely the strat… whatever.

After the raid got petrified and wiped (I didn’t die, I like the petrification mechanism!) Rev told the other guy what to do and he said “oh ok”. And then didn’t do the taunt swapping. At all.

Another druid healer said “Ok, I’ll go tank, you dps” to the tank. We did, it worked better, still wiped, came back and got them down cleanly. I noticed we’d four healed that encounter. LFR means people can stand in bad, not do anything they’re supposed to other than tank swaps, and four healers can manage it. Also, I was doing huge amounts more healing than the other healers. And I’d cheesed my gearscore to get in. Huh.

Next fight has a boss that… does a lot of stuff. As a healer all I was really aware of was oww oww that hurts heal everything not enough mana arrrgh who dies? Everyone who isn’t me or a tank, oww. He wasn’t too hard to get down but again, we were down a healer, I doing about 20% more healing than the next guy on the list, and I was starting to get curious. The five healers we had right now included 3 druids and two holy priests, so you’d think the numbers would be somewhat similar, but not remotely.

I got a lovely offhand fan from that fight, chock full of spirit! Yay! I’d thought loot showed up in the bags of treasure but I guess you get either loot or a bag. Hey I wasn’t arguing.

Looked at the gear from the lowest performing druid healer. Huh… ilvl 429 shoulders. PVP legs. ilvl410 boots. One nice trinket. How on earth did he even get in? Clearly, he had a whole set of tank gear, or something, in his bags because there was no way his raw score should let him in.

I think Blizzard shot themselves in the foot by setting the ilvl to get in so high initially. I know they knocked it down to 460, but when you see 463 and realize you need a heroic piece in almost every slot… and you just can’t get that stupid hat to drop… it’s depressing. You start thinking about cheesing it and once you’ve decided to do that why not go crazy and just get in with whatever you can? Someone else will pick up your slack, after all.

Lest you think I’m just being elitist about gear, I checked this guy’s spell use. He wasn’t using Lifebloom on boss fights. Like, at all. He apparently was just hitting swiftmend and wild growth on cooldown and occasionally tossing a rejuv. Which is a great way to go OOM fast without doing anything useful. Sigh. I’m always amazed when other druid healers are so bad, probably because I know what good druid healing looks like and so can tell when someone else sucks.

We downed the last of the three bosses in one attempt, very cleanly, and I spent a loot token and got a ring. And enough valor to buy a necklace from the bug people, since they’re the only ones who like me enough to give me goodies. Sweet! My mana regen went up about 500 mp5 after that run!

Anyway, I’m liking LFR but looking forward to being able to raid for real soon. I hope soon. We’re getting ready to move here and I think it’s going to affect raiding a little…