Last night I had an interesting experience in Nagafen's Lair (SolB) I
thought I'd share - I had a chance to empirically test out two different
approaches to combat in an unbalanced group.

I was in a pickup group of warrior, warrior, shadowknight, mage, enchanter
(all 40-44) and me, a charming, debonair, devil-may-care woodelf bard with
37 songs. Obviously I was the only healer (ack!) but thankfully the group
was pretty high-powered and the tanks knew their jobs. We were in the pool
room fighting swarms of GKs, which the enchanter thankfully kept enthralled.
The mage, a guildmate of mine, was doing incredible damage with his new
44th level DD and his pet, so most of the kobolds went down pretty fast.
That said, they can hit pretty hard...

For the first two hours or so I did my standard fighting mix (celerity,
chains, psalm) and hymn/clarity in the downtime. The fights went along
smoothly enough, though it was a constant struggle to keep everyone healed
up. I was doing my part adding to the damage with my ugly stick and silvery
war axe, and everyone seemed happy. I did have to scold the somewhat
hyperactive warrior who was pulling, asking him to please let me heal him
every now and again (between combats he'd be running around looking for
targets, and between fights was the only time any healing happened).

The night wore on, and I decided to test a different tactic: chains,
celerity, hymn, wielding a mandolin the whole fight. I reasoned that I was
not doing much of the damage, and perhaps the fights would go the same
either way... the results exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. Where
before one or both fighters and sometimes the mage would be down a bubble or
two after each round of a few GKs, now nobody lost even a half bubble of
health. I still waded into melee and did *some* damage with my fists, but
the difference in the amount I healed was enough to keep the group at or
around full health for another hour or so, by which time it was late and I
had to go.

Incidentally, we watched the zone go from 30 people down to 7 by the time I
left - yeah, there was one lone wizard by the zone blasting, and our
group... and that was IT, empty zone at 1am PST. Turns out everyone was in
Hate. = )

Aloro Silvertongue (E'ci)
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