Huttball Healing

I've long maintained that the best way for a healer to become familiar with their keybinds in a healing atmosphere is to go heal in a PVP setting.  Back in WoW, every time I rearranged my interface, I'd head to the battlegrounds and heal anything within healing distance, just so my fingers would learn to associate the spells with whatever keybind I had set.  So it seemed natural to do the same thing while leveling in SWTOR.

Unlike my first battleground experiences in WoW, when I headed to the SWTOR warzones, I did so with much more anticipation than dread.  You see, being repeatedly flattened at certain bottleneck points in Kalimdor had left a bad taste in my mouth when it came to PVP in all forms, so when I first queued for battlegrounds in WoW, I was surprised to discover I enjoyed them. The SWTOR warzones did not disappoint me.

Let's face it:  warzones are a major adrenaline high.  (Almost as much as role playing for law enforcement training scenarios . . .)  Once you learn the basic rules of engagement, it's all improvisation--thinking on your feet.  You need to have a fairly decent grasp of your abilities and strengths and understand how you can use those to your advantage to help your team.  Contrast this with PVE operations, which, while a lot of fun, are usually carefully planned out beforehand, so everyone knows exactly what they will be doing.  (If everyone is doing their job, surprises are kept at a minimum.)

As a healer, you can quickly gain a reputation for yourself in warzones.  But in SWTOR, this is not always a good thing. "Wait," I can hear you say, "If you're a good healer, don't you want to be known as such?" Well, it depends on who knows it and against whom you are playing.

There is great satisfaction and pride to be found in knowing you are the one keeping that Sentinel alive, while two or three of the enemy are doing their best to hammer him into the ground. (Feel the power of the bubble, the Healing Trance and the Force Wave . . . Muahaha . . . oh, wait, a Jedi isn't supposed to have an evil laugh.) And teammates greatly appreciate a good healer on their side and tend to recognize them when the match is over.  It is a rare warzone when I do not end up with at least one vote for MVP which didn't come from my husband.  (The most I have had to date is four votes in a single game, out of the seven possible if everyone voted for me.)

But there is a flip side to having a reputation as a decent warzone healer, which becomes obvious in Huttball.

I expect to be killed by the opposite team when they figure out I am a healer, but unlike the other two warzone scenarios, in Huttball, we frequently find ourselves facing members of our own faction on the opposing team. This means the people whom I worked so hard to keep alive in the previous match may well be on the opposite team . . . and they remember me.  (They may have even voted for me!)

It's rather frustrating to find myself piled upon by those whose lives I saved repeatedly in the previous warzone. I have had some Huttball matches when I have been killed over and over by the same person I remember healing as they carried the ball to a glorious victory just a few minutes previously.  One particular match, I was targeted so much I wondered if it was worth jumping back down into the arena after rezzing, as I was most likely not going to make it more than ten steps in, anyway, before being flattened.

Sometimes after an especially brutal pounding by people I had formerly thought friendly to me, I have pondered what to do about this.  Stop healing in Huttball?  No way!  Healing is what I do, and I refuse to change that just because I happen to do decently well at it.  (That sounds all wrong, doesn't it?)

One day, in an "a-ha!" moment, a partial fix occurred to me:  stop chain-queueing warzones.  After finishing a warzone, I get out of the queue and go work on crew skills or auctioning items or something else for a few minutes.  By the time I requeue, I have a prayer of playing with a different group of people, who may be strangers.

Fortunately for me, regardless of what happens, I do not measure success in warzones by the number of deaths I experience or don't experience.  Death is "merely a setback", and soon I can jump right back in, buffing in the air as I leap from the platform, to find the nearest teammate in need of help and save the day . . . or at least, the minute . . . once more. Success is counted in the small moments when I frustrate the enemy for a short while longer, hoping the Huttball carrier can make it over that glowy line or the gun turret will be held just long enough for reinforcements to arrive.  (The other day, success was achieved in that "Hail Mary" Huttball pass I made to my husband, who was healed by another healer as he crossed the goal line.)

In the end, whether we win or lose, it's still a rush.