I wish I were something else

Class envy happens quite a bit.

I'm actually quite happy to be a paladin right now. And yes, I am sober. Though I do wish we had a couple more AoE healing options (or rather, that Holy Radiance was a choice instead of a fire-and-forget, perhaps?), we're in a good place. I still miss having a raid-wide bubble (Divine Guardian), and I sure as hell miss Divine Intervention.

It makes me wonder, though, if I had less experience on my other characters if I would feel the same way.

Because I feel like I field a whole lot of "I'm not this" complaints lately. A druid vows that he's rolling a paladin because he's tired of tank healing with hots (tank-healing assignments are by player, not by class, my usual tank healers are AFK to RL lately). A shaman complains that he doesn't have group heals if people aren't stacked up (hello, ALL healing classes suffer from this). If only I had this spell. If only this spell did this effect instead of this. If only my iconic signature healing spell was actually as good as everyone says it is.

I know the truth: it's all close enough. Vixsin has a great write-up for the bench and the top 1% guilds and class balance therein, but I think it's safe to say that for the rest of the world, class balance is "close enough."

When I hear class complaints (from regular mode players), I always get the sense that it's the grass being greener on the other side than any real technical problems. And I'm biased, I know, having experience with all four healers makes me feel pretty confident I could be an asset to my raid no matter which I brought. (Isn't Enlynn so arrogant?!)

I think it's that time of the expansion, though. We hit brick walls on bosses, a key player we got used to having steps out for real-life issues and the void hurts. But instead of saying we miss the person, we say we miss his class mechanics. Sorry, I'm not buying. We miss the player who know to pop a cooldown at the right time. Him being a paladin, a shaman, a priest, not so much the issue. (Though the one night we raided with no priests was a bit weird. Fast forward two weeks and we have 6. Huh?)

And in retrospect, we made it through the summer only having to cancel a couple of raids. I think a few months ago the tones of a lot of my posts were on the verge of grim. We didn't know if we were filling the next raid, but somehow we pulled through. We've even had a waitlist for the past couple of weeks, and been able to let some players take the night off because they needed it without it being too painful for us. So things are looking up, even though we're still stuck on Beth. We got so close.

I hate fights like Beth'tilac not because of Phase 2 (which I'm doing better on, admittedly) because for Phase 1 I am stuck up on top so I have no sense for what the ground phase looks like. We had some (I hate to place blame here, but I saw some healers pull miracles out of their asses so...) DPS who would rather make excuses for why the adds don't go down than to just make the adds go down. But anyways. We're almost there.

Though, if you aren't paying attention to who has died and who has casted Brez, and you have no idea when the phase change is coming, you perhaps are not the best candidate to demand who brezes who. Just sayin'. Let someone who's actually using raid frames and situational awareness take care of that, hmm? Or maybe a RAID LEADER?

Oh, and our ranks are strictly attendance based, so when you take a demotion it is absolutely, positively, 100% NOT PERSONAL. Making it personal and threatening to quit gets you nowhere.

/rant off

We could still stand to recruit a few more people, but I think that's standard fare in a 25-raid, there's always a bit more room. We're raiding this week, and that's great. And if the worst problems I have to deal with this week are "I wish my class had this", then that's not a bad place to be at all. :)