So, I've been traveling for the last month and hadn't been online much, either to play WoW or do anything else really. Needless to say, I returned to my guild happy as a clam that I could actually relax and play a little in comfort.
However, another person was not so happy.
Let me preface this story by saying that my main is a holy pally. I'm not going to link her amory or reveal her name in the interests of protecting my guild, but I may eventually, if I feel comfortable enough to do so. My guild is a relatively small, casual guild that does a variety of things - PVP, raiding, RP, etc. Because of that, we're not really focused on one thing. For instance, raiding. As a guild, we have never cleared ToC 10. Mostly because we've never had enough members geared enough to do it. Right now I would say that we have 6-7 ICC geared folks but we can never get all of those folks together on the same night to do anything. In any case, this is not too much of a problem for us as we are not inherently a raiding guild. Lot of our members PUG the raids they need, as do I. In our guild we have very few mainspec healers. In fact, I believe it's just myself (the holy pally), a disc priest and a holy priest. Before I left for my month of traveling, I was the only geared mainspec holy pally but I had been helping a fellow Ret pally to start a holy set. Well, she did. Guess who was not so happy to see me back?
Our guild is small enough to where I've always been the "go to" healer. It's my main spec, it's what I prefer doing. While I was gone, apparently my friend became the sort of "go to" healer. When I returned, I easily slipped back into my old place, not really aware of at first all the changes. Needless to say, there has been some stepping on of toes.
She has not said anything to me personally but there is a kind of... frosty air about our exchanges now, a sort of passive-agressiveness on her part. This saddens me because I've always thought of us as friends, and when I was encouraging her to make her offspec Holy, I sort of felt like I was mentoring her and was proud of all her achievements. Now I feel as if someone is glaring into the back of my head whenever I'm asked to heal something.
On Saturday night, a group of us went to Ulduar. I love that raid (I go Rambo on those Iron Dwarves, man). So I and a PUGged second holy pally healed (my guildie was not signed up for this raid). Actually, I'm being gracious. We stopped at Freya but for the entire night I had been grumbling about the other pally. Many times I would catch him just standing there, not casting a thing and my blood pressure would rise. Two holy pallies in a 10man is not my preferred setup anyway and my job was made doubly as hard with SLACKER!pally. At the end of the night, I had near 5k hps and he had about 1.3 hps. I was furious. The meters show me doing about 75% of the healing. Mysteriously, right at Freya, our two pugs (the SLACKER!pally and his moonkin friend) disconnect so we pause to see if we can find another healer. We do a switcheroo instead and one of our tanks gets his healer and one of our DPS switches to his tank set.
We clear some of the trash before Freya and my guildie logs on. We ask her to come on in but I notice that no one specifically tells her she would be coming in as a DPS. She thinks about it and then, a minute later...
"Who's healing?"
I answer, "Myself and [insert priest name here]."
Not a word. No response.
For my part, I feel as thought SHE feels that I'm trespassing on her territory which, at least in my opinion, seems crazy. She's not the only holy pally in WoW, obviously, she can't get upset everytime there's another one in the vicinity of her. Furthermore, I always thought we were friends, some competition is always healthy of course, but not to this extent. I feel now that we can not both be healing the same raid, the tension between us makes me too uncomfortable. For now I'm going to let her choose which role she wants and I'll do the other but I'll not go head to head with her in a healing match. I think doing so would only make things worse since my goal is for her to feel comfortable again and to stop feeling like she has to compete with me.
I don't know really. The whole situation saddens me. The fact that I even have to contemplate it saddens me. Have any of you ever had to deal with this sort of situation? A guildmate being territorial? How did you solve it?
Until then, I guess I"ll just have to ride my sparkle pony to make myself feel better.
