We all know the feeling of seeing the Dungeon Finder pop up a certain instance, or knowing that tonight’s raid will be squaring off against that boss and feeling our heart fill with dread. Palms sweating, we have flashbacks of dying tanks, desperate DPS running in vain for their lives, followed by the agony of dissecting the wipe.
That (slightly over-dramatic) scene is a response to facing your bête noire. Literally “black beast”, but more figuratively translated as “nightmare”. Mine? Heroic Pit of Saron, and Heroic Anub’Arak-25.
Causes
Many things can cause a reaction like this, in different combination for every person. Reflecting and understanding the origins of your bête noir is vital to defeating it, so here are some common causes and things that have helped me in the past.
The Unknown
Some things are scary because you simply haven’t encountered them yet. This is a perfectly natural human reaction which keeps us out of danger in the big, wide, dangerous world. However it can lead us to build things up in our minds, imagine the worst and focus on the ways it can go wrong.
As a personal example, while we were working on ToGC I worried a lot about Anub’Arak: would I see the marks? Would I be quick enough? Would I misjudge it and overheal? I didn’t have any way to know, so I fell back on worrying.
The best way to counter this one is to do your research as thoroughly as you can in advance to reduce the uncertainty. Talk to people in other guilds; read strategy discussion threads (PlusHeal is excellent for this); look up boss abilities or analyse WoL parses so you can understand the mechanics in as much detail as possible. But accept that you can only know so much, you will never remove all doubts.
Pressure
I’ll set out my stall early and say for the record that I’m in principle a fan of measures like limited attempts which attempt to prevent “brute-forcing” encounters, and maybe I’ll touch on this in a later post. However I’m not a fan of things like the Naxxramas “Undying/Immortal” achievements or Tribute to Insanity.
I think that expecting perfection for most people is a bit of a stretch, especially when, at least from my perspective, the bulk of the pressure in those cases tends to be borne by the tanks and healers. I really believe that all three roles are equally important (I really do!), but immediate causes of wipes tend to be traced to tanks or healers while the underlying causes (e.g. why was there so much damage in the first place) tend to come up only in later analysis.
In any case the knowledge that a single slip-up could doom 24 other people’s achievement for that week can make a healer very nervous, to the point where they may dread an encounter. This one is, I think, harder to solve. A supportive guild will definitely help here: you might get a ribbing but if you know there’s no lasting animosity or risk of a summary gkick then that can be a great relief. I also suggest that a thorough analysis of the reasons for wipes (see a theme developing?) will allow you to root out those underlying causes, which allows you to feel better prepared for next time as well as properly apportioning the causes.
I’ll refer over to Critical QQ for a discussion of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in relation to WoW, which is also relevant here. This holds that the more competence one has at a given task the more this weakens self-confidence, essentially because mistakes are more readily recognised and noticed. Someone who understands the intricacies of healing will be acutely aware when they have made a mistake, while those raiders who may have made more mistakes overall may simply be unaware of this.
An example: Heroic Anub’Arak, Tribute to Insanity attempt, a wipe at a few hundred k health. The immediate cause of the wipe was a small gap in heals on the offtank which led to adds destroying the main tank and the raid in short order. While the initial diagnosis pointed to a slow or distracted healer, the subsequent discussion revealed a number of other mistakes which all contributed.
Difficulty
Perhaps the most difficult to work around are encounters feared for their subjective difficulty. I intend to return to the question of what makes healing challenging in a future post, but suffice it to say that this can be highly subjective. All healers have individual strengths and weaknesses and differences in style, as well as the particular focus of the class they play, so they can struggle with encounters that others shrug off effortlessly.
Handling this is just as subjective as the cause is, so each person’s solution will be unique. What has helped me as I’ve developed as a healer is to extend my understanding of my fellow healers in raids to learn where their strengths overlap with my weaknesses and vice versa, so I know that the raid as a whole has the skills to cover the demands of the encounter. When solo healing, when the teamwork solution obviously doesn’t apply, try “forcing” yourself to run the instances but do it with guildies if possible: guildies should be willing and able to adapt to a change in the execution to enable you to heal it more easily, or will be more understanding and forgiving of you testing your abilities and experimenting. I’ve been leaning on my guild recently as I try to regain a more in-depth understanding of the Holy playstyle on my Priest, having healed as Disc almost exclusively for a couple of tiers.
