Heal and interrupt, sure no problem. Wait a second, raid healing and interrupting!? Wipe.
Being a shaman means people look your way whenever the word interrupt comes up. We do it at range, we do it often (more often when talented), we do it off the GCD and we don't have resource constraints slowing us down. Again, who thought it was a good idea to have interrupts that cost rage or energy?
So when it came time to do interrupts last night for Halfus my resto Shaman came up the obvious choice given that all other options required two people. That or require me to usurp a DPS spot and stay on Halfus for interrupts causing the adds to go down slower, but that's a better plan B than taking two DPS off adds and putting them on Halfus.
As I mentioned the first attempt at raid healing interruptus was a pretty triumphant failure. I was paying attention to about three too many things when I should have been focusing more on actually interrupting. The result was I missed half the interrupts and also did half the healing I should have been. So yeah, obviously I should be reassigned to a tank.
Tank healing works out much better while interrupting, only two targets to track and I can still splash the raid once in a while for good measure. I was able to focus much more on interrupting and rely on the other healers to watch the raid more closely than, "ooh a clump of people, healing rain". I found my rhythm and interrupts went much more smoothly. I'd compare it to tanking the beam boss in heroic Blackrock Caverns, while interrupting and beam dancing. It is actually a pretty good recipe for success in a casual group, get a few reliable people to do any and all tasks that require additional thought. The only downside is things go to hell rather quickly when those people aren't available.
Our next conquest was Onmitron, Omnomnomtron, Oomatron or whatever other creative nicknames you can come up with. Someone has to interrupt Arcanotron, and 9 pairs of eyes zero in on my location. Makes sense, shamans are again the only class than can interrupt all of Arcanotron's spells single handedly. I did have to switch to DPS however since I don't have the talent points to lower my interrupt cooldown in my healing spec. Not a problem this time as it might have been on Halfus, all four trons share a health pool so it doesn't matter who hits what. We totally one shotted it, and it was our first kill no less in that group.
On to Magmaw. No interrupts here, but resto shaman still get a chance to shine with telluric currents. We can heal the crap out of the raid during the worm phases and regen with lightning bolts during the head phase. Amplified damage means faster mana return and we can pretty much fill up our whole mana bar and be ready to rock those heals for the next worm phase. First time I got to try this out, before last night it was only something I thought sounded really cool. It was everything I hoped it would be and despite losing our tank twice in one fight we downed him in that very same attempt before we left the head phase. Messy, but effective.
I kind of like mechanics like that where the tank becomes irrelevant for a portion of the fight. It's often boring/annoying for tanks, but it gives DPS a chance to save the day which is always fun for everyone when it works out. Magmaw head phases and Halfus stunned phases are the two situations that come to mind. I've seen Halfus taken out by DPS after the enrage timer no less just because he got stunned and DPS took full advantage.
