Logic vs Intuition?
So while the title isn’t exactly what I was thinking, it’s close enough.
I’m going to talk about priesting for a moment here.
Ok, you can get back up from the floor. I know, shocker. ;P
I’m being serious here!
Anywho, I’ve noticed that more and more lately… I can priest and heal like a mofo and tweak this and that when I need to (yay challenging raids!) to get the people a live and the bosses dead… but, for the life of me, I don’t know how I’m doing it.
I read a lot of priest blogs, Ego, Matt, Kestrel, to name some, but while some people can use numbers or logic to figure out where they need help, or where they can rock and get more out of what they’re doing… I can’t.
It’s just there. In the brain pan. And I wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, is just going with your gut a bad way to play?
Lemme give you a tad of insight to where I’m coming from.
Enter Arrows of the Queen, a really kick ass series for a fantasy horse loving pre teen, such as myself. The main character, Talia, has the gift of empathy, and can maniplutate the moods of those around her. She’s a shy, timid, slightly rigid young girl, but eventually turns into the heroin a B type person like me knows and loves. In the second book, Arrow’s Flight, steamy romance aside, she’s out on her internship, and her gift starts breaking down, because she’s lost her instinctual grasp of it. Her intiution behind the gift gets underminded by some nasty rumors, etc, plot ensues, she eventually gets control back by basically “logic”-ing her gift, and viola ends up a stronger person for it.
Ok, so not a lot of parrallels I can draw from that… but I got the impression from the book, intuition isn’t enough. Sometimes, maybe, but if you watch NCIS, that’s totally not that case. (<3 Abby!) Gibbs is like the intuition GOD. And he kicks ass, saves people, shoots the bad guys, gets the red head, etc.
In my very twisted and confused and bored out of my skull way, I’m trying to justify being surrounded by a bunch of theorycrafters by winging it, and trusting what my gut tells me.
Is that wrong?
6 Responses to “Logic vs Intuition?”
Not wrong. Good to need a system, but intuition combined with logic is the best combination in my opinion.
Two points: One, as a healer I think I’m lacking on both the control AND intuition on healing. I’m sometimes overwhelmed by how far I still need to go to be good.
Two, I LOVED that series and was delighted to see someone reference it.
When I DPS (Priest myself) I go by the numbers, I time my spells so I always cast MindBlast when it’s off cooldown, I always keep dots up and time the re-applies to wevae in with the spell rotation. I have spent time with dummies to check the order to apply the dots and such.
When I heal, I wing it. Cause you never know what’s gonne happen. Sure, you can read up on the fight and such, but how to know that the tank will dodge? or that the hunters first three arrows will crit? So, besides casting PoM on the tank before the pull (that’s my read-to-go sign) – I do like you, I wing it.
I tank with my gut, and have enjoyed figuring out ways of doing things just with my own group. Every guide out there is great, but until you have your own raid composition with skills and classes you have to adjust and go with your gut.
I agree with what BlueTiger wrote. DPS’ing is easy to do “by the numbers”. You have a set time on how long each spell/ability will take to cool down, how long the GCD is for your particular character. The randomness of when AOE effects goes off is really the only thing you have to worry about (in general).
For healing, you have to worry about all of that, plus another REAL person’s abilities in hitting all of their buttons in the right order to try and help you keep them alive. It’s a much more fluid area of the game. Logically knowing which spell will fill up their health bars the fastest, vs. the most cost effective is necessary, to an extent, but if you just “know” that hitting one with the combination of another works better for how you’re geared/outfitted/ui setup, then what more do you need. Your job is to try and keep people in the raid standing up. If you’re good at your job, then it doesn’t really matter how you do it, just that you’re doing it, and hopefully (as it is a game) enjoying it.
You _have_ to “wing it” when you’re healing. You have to be able to adapt to everything on the fly and not rely on a preset rotation. As a healer, everything you do is dictated by what the rest of the party are doing. Making split second decisions like allowing DPS-A to die because if you heal them then the MT dies is part and parcel of the job.
I prefer healing. My main is a holy paladin (but I am pushing my priest up, she’s 64 right now) and I have a lot more fun playing her than I do playing my DK tank or my mage/hunter DPS. The tank is probably closest in style of play – in that you have to be able to adapt every second, you can’t just hit the same buttons over and over – and you have to be completely aware of what is happening around you even when all you can see is the bad guy’s crotch.
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