Friday, March 20, 2009

Fat-Fingered Intervention

Let me paint you a picture.

The scene is Obsidian Sanctum earlier this year. A group of guildmates is looking to kill Sartharion with 1 drake up but they're short a healer. No one with a heal button is online, aside from those all ready in the raid.

I log in and ask in guild chat what the good word is, and they respond with their situation.

An alarm goes off in my head. DANGER DANGER, HEALING NEEDED. HULL BREACH IMMINENT. Healing is not my thing.

Someone in my brain deftly turns off the alarm.

"Sure, let me get my healing gear together, I'll help out."

The nine of them are waiting around while I haul my holy gear out of the bank and find it unenchanted and ungemmed. I also go to the trainer and find that this is the first time I'm speccing holy since 3.0 hit servers - I had never before trained Beacon of Light.

As they have been waiting for a while, I'm furiously trying to get my shiznit in order. I fly around Northrend buying rep items, log over to my bank alt to retrieve enchanting materials and buy some cheap gems, and then rush down to Obsidian Sanctum, where a jewelcrafter and enchanter are waiting for me, along with the raid.

I run up to the enchanter in a tizzy, trying to verify that I've got everything I need and holding two other conversations at the same time - one with a guildie holy paladin to figure out what holy healing is all about in WotLK, and the other with the jewelcrafter asking what cuts for the gems I have he can supply.

Somehow, in the midst of it all, I mouse over my enchanter friend and press a button.

That button just so happens to be my Divine Intervention macro.

So, now I'm lying face down on the floor of the Wyrmrest Temple, at the feet of a guildmate, with my unenchanted and ungemmed holy gear on, in a spec I had never tried, frantically trying to reset my action bars. And then a healer logs in.

I cursed. A lot.

That, my friends, is my Fat-Fingered Intervention story.

(I ended up going and failing at Sarth-10 1D at that time, so we just killed 'em regular. And I vowed "no more healing." Which I kept to last night when I let an entire batch of off-set holy gear get disenchanted in Naxx-25 rather than pick it up and stash it in the bank. I'll leave the holy healing to the more experienced and the experts, thankyouverymuch.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd laugh, but I have little or no right to do so, given some of the stuff I've done in the past =/

Holy is not much fun at all anyway lol :P every paladin in my guild except three respecced or rerolled after about a month of raiding lol

Anonymous said...

I've *cough* done something similar.

I play with a lot of keybindings. So here were are on the last trash pull of heroic VH. I mean to sacred shield the tank but instead of hitting Shift-E (my binding for SS) I hit Shift-3 (rotating my action bars). Not realizing what had happened I go to throw out a Holy Shock (#2 on my regular action bar) and instead DI'd the tank. (#2 on my third action bar).

/fail

I don't think I'll ever live that down, despite being a solid player most of the time. Everyone makes dumb mistakes, no? Anyways, lesson learned and it won't happen again.

Dreaming said...

For the exact same reason, I never spec ret to dps. I'd just not know anything about what I should do, which skills to use, where and how move in a melee fight.
So the few unwanted piece of plate dps gear end disenchanted (I only got a nice 2H once just in case you know ... ;p).

As long as we all know what we should do, and enjoy doing it well, bosses will fall :)

Tom said...

Yeah I know how you feel. I have to say though, I'm going to stick with holy as my 2nd spec in 3.1

Why? At least for now it's kind of a rush. With RET if I miss a CD or slack a little no one dies.

With Holy I'm looking at the tanks life going down, down down, praying he'll stay up for an extra 1 second so the heal goes off.

Worse when I'm asked to "raid heal"...I got invited to 10 man OS doing raid heal; WHEW LORDY.. watching 5 people's health bars go down and figuring which one is going to get the heal in time.

Let me just say I have a new found respect for healers.

Anonymous said...

yeah. Not really a DI disaster (there have been a couple of those, mostly in TBC mine comes from a repair bot. I started playing WoW after TBC came out, so i never played vanilla. I hadnt done AQ in TBC, just MC as a classics raid a time or two. So, fast forward to a couple moths ago I am on a run with a bunch of 80's (me included) and like 1 62 into AQ40 for a rep run. the 60 is kinda a whiney %*^& and had a tendency to die. To be fair on that part it had something to do with people not healing him because they didnt compute that he only had like 3k health or something. We get to C`thun and wipe once learning it (2 people had been ther before ever) the call goes out for a repair bot since people are gettin low, from other random deaths, I have a few of the ones from TBC, so i look for somewhere to put it. For all that dont know the TBC bots can be placed and have a range like a bomb etc. Not really knowing the fight well i notice that the convenient free spot is right inside the door to the cthun chanber(just into that short hall) being able to click a spot in the floot I put the bot there. Big mistake first person to walk up aggros Cthun(damn big aggro box) and the chain lightning begins to wipe the raid.
never gonna live wiping the raid with a repairbot when we are 20 levels over the content
as for a DI story, this isnt fat fingered, but, same raid group different day one of the rogues (leader of raid actually) wanted to get back to the begining of the instance to turn in a quest. After raid is finished he goes searching for random stuff to kill him (quickest way back) 4 paladins also want to get back to the beginning. One by one we Di'ed him when he found something so we didnt have to take armor loss frustrated the hell outa him... funny though

Tego
ps yeah retadin no healie too different. good luck with the tankin though