It just kind of happened. I’d been enjoying the raiding, and had started taking a bit more responsibility in terms of running the healing assignments.  My guild were regularly clearing Naxx10, and could pretty much clear Naxx25. With the 3.1 patch we headed in to Ulduar10, and started making good progress.

And then it just stopped being fun. And I can’t work out if it’s me, or if it’s Ulduar. But at the moment I don’t feel any motivation to raid at all.

I’ve been enjoying the Argent Tournament, and have managed to gain my “Crusader” title. And I’ve been running a lot of Heroics with a group of friends, which is a blast. Scarily I’m now predominantly a Moonkin, and starting to feel like I’m making a useful dps contribution. In fact, I thought I might be needed to heal the group on one occaision recently, and felt quite disappointed. What a turnaround!

I’m also dabbling around with a small troop of alts, but haven’t really set my heart on any perticular one to take to 80. I’ve got a Rogue, Mage and Warlock all sitting at 44 (thank you, Recruit-a-Friend), a 61 DK, and a very low level Priest and Shaman. The Big Red Kitty baby hunter guide videos on ProjectLore inspired me to start a Hunter, and she’s really fun.

I’m certainly still finding plenty of things to keep me busy. And I’m not missing the raiding at all. At the moment. I don’t know if it’s me, or if it’s Ulduar. And it’s not bad. It’s just different

I’ve thought a bit more about what made me uncomfortable with the whole moonkin thing, and I think it’s the competitive nature of dps. I know it doesn’t have to be competitive, but I have a very strong competitive streak (my husband won’t let me play Monopoly any more!), and I found myself quite disappointed that I wasn’t putting out more damage.

As a healer it’s easy to keep my competitiveness at bay. Everyone knows healing meters are fundamentally flawed and not to be relied upon, and as long as people are staying alive, and my performance in the meters is comparable with the other healers I am quite happy.

For some reason I felt differently about dps. I felt I should be doing better. I felt that I ought to contribute more. Some of it is obviously gear shortages, as I’m still mostly wearing my healing gear for Moonkin form. Some of it is just inexperience showing (one boss fight it took me half the fight to get in range to cast my little tree friends, which will have lost a lot of valuable dps time). I’m sure it will come with practice, and as I still intend to has a dual spec of Moonkin with patch 3.1 eventually hits, I’m sure I’ll get more practice. I think I need to lower my expectations a little of how much I can contribute as a Moonkin, at least in the short term, but I still feel much more valuable as a healer.

I’m sure when dual specs are implemented there will be some people who find themselves happy in either of their selected specs, and able to switch whenever needed. For me, I suspect I’ll be a tree as much as possible, keeping the moonkin option for solo farming or for those times when I want to do something with friends who already have enough healing.

One of the chaps in the group also plays a healer as his main. We’ve done some runs with him playing his dps Paladin so that I could heal, but he really enjoys healing and would like to play his healer more. So I said I’d have a go at playing dps instead, and for me that meant Moonkin!

With the help of another guildie I installed the Talented UI mod to make it easier to switch my specs around (I still plan to raid Resto), selected new Glyphs, dug a few pieces of gear with +hit on them out of the bank, and headed over to Moonglade to have a little chat with my trainer. Some gold changed hands, and I was suddenly a level 80 n00b!

My first impressions were that it wasn’t so bad. I still need to learn a bit more about spell rotations, and I needed to be a bit more aware of the strats than when I play healer. Healer is easy – I just need to know where to stand and who to heal. DPS is a bit more complicated as I need to know where to stand and who needs to die first. I don’t have a great memory for strats, so I’m sure I did loads of things wrong, but we got through Heroic HoL and a CoT timed run. I was pleased to be out-dpsing the tank, according to Recount, but I think I need to tweak my gear and my technique if I want to produce more dps.

I warned my friends that they might not want me to play Moonkin too much, as I might love it and decide not to heal on raids any more. I didn’t enjoy it *that* much, but it’s certainly something I’d do again in order to be able to group with friends. Providing they’ll put up with me, of course!