Listen my readers and you shall hear: the story of a derptastic healer…

So, on Saturday, we ran Heart of Fear. I was sick with the flu for the first guild run through there, and the second week, we basically one-shot the Vizier, so my only real practice against this guy has been in LFR. And I knew I needed practice – I was dead on our Vizier kill, because of attenuation, so I went back to LFR to practice dodging the rings. If you haven’t fought this guy, basically he spews out rings that do around 100k damage each time they hit you. There’s a sweet spot you can run in to avoid being hit, and I made sure to focus just on finding that spot during my LFR runs.

Cut to our raid, where I immediately crashed into them. We wipe. We try again, and again I die to them. We end up wiping again because of lack of heals, so I’m feeling pretty much to blame for these wipes. We try another time and I fail again – for some reason, it’s just not working for me tonight, despite all the practice in LFR. At this point, I’m beyond tired (I was up before 3am to drive someone to the airport, and it’s 11pm now), I’m a little bit tipsy (I had two drinks with dinner), and I’ve got PMS making me a bit irrationally angry at myself. So I try to apologize in mumble, and offer to step out so we don’t lose progression time….and end up crying. It wasn’t intentional and it just happened, and that made me even MORE ashamed of myself – not only was I failing on the mechanic, now I was crying about it!

I’ll just….drooooop…grouuuuup….

And here is where I realized that my raid team is amazing. Instead of them getting weird, or angry at me, or letting me step out, my leader Haru did a quick mental rundown of what we had at our disposal, and decided that they’d be tossing hands of protection on me during attunement…and if I died, I’d just take a brez and wait until the next phase. I felt horrible, at first, hearing that decision – I didn’t want them to carry me! – but the entire raid was having nothing to do with it. “We are going to have you here, downing this boss with us, whether you agree or not!”

And, so we pulled. And I got that hand on attunement. And a brez when I still died…but, you know what? We hit phase 3 and got another attunement and I DODGED THE FUCKING RINGS. We all made it to the end and killed that damn Vizier…and I realized that I really love my guild. They wanted me to be there, even if I was being dumb that night, and forced me to stay and experience it with them.

That feeling? It’s better than downing any boss. It’s one of the best moments I’ve had in WoW – thanks, you guys, for being patient and flexible and helping me realize that it’s not just about the stats, but also about the experience. 🙂

UPDATE: A week later on the next down of the Vizier… I took the LEAST DAMAGE in the entire team from the rings. YAYYYYYY!