Healing in Arena - How to live forever by Sky

Today Sky brings us an overview of recognizing and preventing burst and crowd control chains.

Shutting the Windows

Anyone who did a battleground at level 60 surely had the joy of being two-shot by an PoM-Pyro mage, or maybe even an MS warrior. Gear inflation, berserker buffs, and insufficient stamina all lead to a cavalcade of videos with people showing off high crits, quick kills, and the like. And all of this brought us to where we are today, with items granting twice the stamina as before and the almighty stat we know as resilience. Nonetheless, the concept of burst damage, also known as spiking or spike damage, is very much alive today.


There are basically two ways to kill someone in any game that features healing in any form: pressure and spike damage. Pressure involves gradually wearing someone down over time, either via mana drains or consistent damage. Spiking involves killing someone during a small window of opportunity, usually before healers can react or while they are controlled.

As a healer, you need to be able to handle both of these. In this piece I want to focus on spike damage and how to deal with it, since it is one of the first problems confronted by most healers. Learning some basic techniques can also vault your team’s rating in a short period of time.

Anticipation is Everything

Healing on any level is more about instinct than numbers, and this is especially true in PvP. The best way to gain that instinct is to play a lot and learn, but there are some tricks you can use in the meantime.

Yes talked about setting up and using focus windows for things like counterspells, but healers should be using them as well. For druids and shaman, a focus window allows you to cyclone/earthshock someone you aren’t directly targeting. But for all healers, a focus window can give you a heads up on incoming burst damage. If you play in 3v3 and especially 5v5, you should set your focus to the person who is going to be the catalyst for the spike—in other words, the enemy player who is going to produce the big damage at the appropriate time. Typical examples are elemental shaman and mages: both classes rely on large burst DPS, and a focus window can let you know when they are casting on someone. Even more importantly, it can let you know when they are about to target switch. If you are playing 5v5 and the opposing elemental shaman starts lightning bolting a different target, you can bet the farm his team is about ready to unload on that player.

Another big spike indicator is the use of offensive cooldowns. The most common would be heroism/bloodlust, icy veins, power infusion, and/or trinkets. Heroism is the most obvious but also the most dangerous, because multiple players are getting a huge buff to their damage. If someone uses any of these abilities, you need to be ready.

And finally, the bane of many healers is crowd control. Many games (especially in current setups popular in the meta-game like Eurocomp 5v5, RMP (rogue, mage priest) 3v3) are decided by heavy CC. There is a difference in consistent crowd control versus spike crowd control, but in general a bout of heavy CC is a good indicator that a burst window is opening. Any CC will do, but the one healers need to be the most aware of is a spell lock. A well-placed interrupt can almost guarantee a spike window, and it is something you need to be constantly aware of as a healer.



Prevention is Job 1

So you know when it’s coming, but how do you stop it? Fortunately, you have a wide variety of options, both preventative and reactive. The best option is to simply prevent a spike window from happening in the first place. Now that seems really simple, but in practice it isn’t so easy. The main point is that constantly relying on your healers to bail your team out of trouble is going to lose you a lot of games. Instead, you should focus on preventing the other team’s damage via crowd control and pressure.

Here’s a pretty simple example to illustrate this point. Let’s say you are a resto shaman with a rogue and a mage beating on you in 3v3. You are a 50% health, and you have a choice to either start healing yourself or earth shock the mage. I’d wager most players would have the instinct to heal themselves, when in fact this is a pointless exercise. For one, the likelihood of you even getting off the cast is fairly low given the rogue’s lockdown ability and the potential for a counterspell from the mage. For two, even if you do get off the heal, you are only going to be healing yourself for a small amount (assuming any wound poison stacks). If you shock the mage’s frostbolt instead, you have prevented thousands of damage and wasted several seconds of his time. In a slightly different situation, imagine the mage was about to polymorph your backup healer, or perhaps the melee that is beating on him. If you shock that, you may be saving yourself by allowing another person to heal you, or your melee to disrupt him.

Any healer can do this to at least some extent, whether it is via a stun, cyclone, or fear. In many situations you will prevent more damage by using an offensive ability than you would by healing yourself. It might not show up on the scoreboard, but it will keep you alive.

You also need to learn how to deal with crowd control. Each class has certain ways of dealing with this directly, as I mentioned above, but as a whole healers can avoid crowd control—and thusly spike windows—via careful positioning. You need to get a feel for the ranges of the most common crowd controls you will be facing. Scatter Shot has a 15yd range; Cyclone and fear are a 20-24yd range; almost all other CCs from polymorph to counterspell have a 30 yard range. Your heals and dispels, by contrast, have a 40 yard range. Use it. Be aware of your enemy’s positioning. If it helps, set your focus to the person you identify as the “most dangerous” person to you so you can track them around the arena. Alternatively, put a raid icon on them. You can actually practice this with your teammates by flying to Nagrand and testing ranges in the arena there.

Outside of preemptive CC and positioning, the only way you can really deal with CC is by abusing line of sight. There is generally no reason for a healer to leave their precious pillar if they can avoid it. It is going to be your best defense against enemy crowd control, mana burns, and even damage. You can turn on your enemy nameplates (default: V) to help you see them if you move around the pillar.


The Aftermath

Try as you might, you can’t always prevent spike windows. But as long as you recognize it, you do still have some options at your disposal. The main defensive ability all healing classes have are cooldowns that either mitigate or quickly heal spikes. Blessing of Protection, Nature’s Swiftness, Pain Suppression, etc are all potential “outs” that let you deal with spike windows. Often times judicious use of these cooldowns will be the difference in deciding a match. If you’ve gotten good at anticipating spike windows, you should know when to drop your them.

If you see a target switch coming and offensive cooldowns being used, it is generally a good time to preemptively use your own. Pain suppression and BoP are the best to use preemptively, and can sometimes close a spike window before it happens. You don’t want to use them so quickly you tip your hand, but you don’t want to use them when someone is at 10% and going to die, either. You also have to keep lockouts in mind. If you get locked out, you can’t use your cooldowns, so use them before you have to actually heal. That way, if you do get locked out, at least that teammate has some protection. Remember that if you get locked out you can still move. Some warlocks might lock you and attempt to fear. Use the time when you're locked out to move to the best position.

If you are a paladin, divine shield should also be used preemptively much more often than it is used defensively. If your enemy team pops heroism, it’s not a bad time to bubble. Toss it up and start chaining big heals on their target. If your bubble drops and their team is still going full bore, use BoP to buy your team some more time. It is your job to give your team as much time as you can. Druids and shamans have a harder time preemptively using cooldowns (you probably shouldn’t NS someone at 90% life), but they are much better at preventing the spike window in the first place.

The best advice to take about cooldowns is this: they are irrelevant once you are dead. If you lose a game and you have a cooldown up, you are going to feel stupid (and you probably should). Using them too early or at the wrong time is bad too, of course, but those are things you can more easily refine and work on over time.

Survival a Team Game

The last thing to keep in mind as a healer is that you are going to have to rely on your teammates early and often to enable you to do your job, just as you enable them to do theirs. Just as you need to recognize the possible spike windows, your teammates need to recognize the times when you can’t help them and they need to fend for themselves.

There are some easy examples here. If you play with a warrior, he should be able to “turtle up” (put on a shield and start spell reflecting if needed) and survive for a long period of time with no heals. This is an excellent tactic when you are spell locked. He can also intervene back to you and get out of line of sight. A less obvious example would be the use of team crowd control. One of the reasons the RPM is such a powerful team setup is due to this tactic. Priests are generally easy to kill with proper focus fire, but if the priest is getting low, the rogue can use snares/stuns/blinds to assist him, and the mage can sheep. The best teams are devastating in their ability to protect their teammates without casting a single heal. You may be the healer, but everyone on the arena floor can prevent damage, and they should recognize that.

If you play with other healers (more common in 5v5 but sometimes also in 3v3), you need to have a plan for dealing with damage spikes. Plan who is going to use what cooldown first, if appropriate, but be willing to change the plan on the fly if you need to. One of the best examples is the priest/paladin synergy in 5v5. If you coordinate divine shield, blessing of protection, and pain suppression, you have three very powerful “outs” that should keep your teammates alive for a long period of time even through interrupts and crowd control. If you waste them by stacking them on top of each other, you limit the amount of “safe” time your team has.

There are a lot more detailed specifics for each individual class, but this should at least give you a broad idea of the tools you have as a healer to deal with damage spikes. The biggest change for most healers is probably shift from reacting to acting. Take the initiative in a game and don’t give your opponent the time to set up a spike, and you’ll make your own job easier in the long run.


Amera