If you are really having that much trouble take them to Naxx and practice on patchwerk (assuming you have a decent amount of people). He does a lot of predictable heavy damage.
Errrrr no, not anymore. At least not according to our run last sunday. We were in place, 3 MTs were assigned and kind of buffed up, and everyone was looking to me to assign healing. I was loooking at our measly 7 or 8 healers in various specs and gear, and had no clue how to distribute them evenly.
Suddenly we hear "Kel'Thuzad make Patchwerk his Avatar of War!" and i start flaming people that we werent ready, getting angry about a useless wipe. But... no one is dying. The hatefuls bounce oddly between the 3 tanks, healerchannel lights up with "errrr im on the cow" "i take the orc.. no the undead.. wait". Think we lost 2 or 3 melee due to rogue hatefuls, but other than that it was a rather clean kill.
To this day i still have no idea though who was actually MT-ing patchwork.
bit further derail: personally i find healing in TBC very unappealing since it seems to have lost a lot of its finesse. i loved healing in vanilla WoW, loved being resto, but the increased stamina values have distorted the healing so much i think there ISNT really much more than spam heal these days. You cant exactly pick various ranks of heals anymore, because your tank is getting hit for 3k damage a swing. Sometimes trying to time it just right and anticipating the damage will result in him taking 2 hits without you be able to catch back up, resulting in a death eventually.
People that bring up heroics for practicing, stuff hits so hard there that you dont really have a choice than to focus on the MT solely, everyone else will get 1 to 2 shot anyway, so its more about CC than about good healing.
1. when counseling your classmates do it in a way that people are not humiliated. Have a very strong grasp of the topic you are talking about (competence) but be aware that you are talking to fellow humans who might have feelings as well
I once asked my mother what she thought was the most important thing about leading. "Convince people that it was really their idea all along and they will go anywhere."
I find that I'm so effective at it that half of the time, people are convinced I'm a bad leader - because, hey, they all knew where they wanted to go and how to get there and it was their idea. But that's neither here nor there.
A fair dose of humility goes a long way. While most people will not want to make a dialogue or a debate about their decisions (or lack thereof), be it spells, targets, or gear, approaching any coaching situation with, "They're wrong." is a recipe for disaster. While "that is wrong" versus "this is better" may seem to be analogues, they aren't sociologically.
The whole thing is in the wrists, really. Putting all feedback in the form that it's an observation - "WOW! THERE'S A PATH DOWN THERE!" versus a directive - "STOP WALKING THAT WAY!" that engages interest and is conversational - "WOW, WHAT'S THAT BLUE THING DOWN THERE?" versus confrontational - "THIS MOUNTAIN AND CLIMBING IT SUCKS," seems to be effective, in personal experience.
2. the person you try to teach has to be in a mood to learn. If he is not willing to learn you first have to change his basic attitude.
All the better to pose it as something that piques interest. "Wow! Letting lifebloom tick out on everyone instead of throwing HTs that fight really saved me a load of mana!" Any takers on overhearers changing healing patterns? He didn't just sit through a detailed explanation of HPM, incoming DPS, and dah dah dah.
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
Some people are oblivious to any kind of passive suggestions.
I often wonder how they survived growing up without getting hit by a bus. Probably someone screamed "HEY IDIOT THAT'S A FUCKING BUS. MOVE IT." and cheated Darwin out of a HK.
BSG Reference Sheet
in EJBSG 10 -My instincts tell me that we cannot sacrifice democracy just because the president makes a bad decision.
Teaching tanks to tank would be a good topic too. Healing is pretty intuitive, at least (people are taking damage, you have spells that restore their health); the game never actually teaches people even the basics of tanking. It just gives them the toolbox and expects them to figure it out themselves.
I think that's also a bit based around the class we're talking about. Warriors are probably the tanks with the least intuitive approach to tanking. Druids have it better, because even if their threat isn't completely linked to their damage any more, someone who doesn't understand the mechanics can still get away with simply dealing as much damage as possible which ends up in good enough tanking. Paladins are probably the most intuitive of the bunch as tanking class; the only thing you need to know is what threat is, and than you can just look at the description of Righteous Fury and you simply know exactly what you can expect threat-wise from each of your spells.
Basically, your random guy on the street expects that generating numbers on his screen is good when it comes to tanking (Which is probably also why the image of the warrior tanking in berserker stance with a two-hander is probably very familiar to anyone who has ever PUGged).
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
Maybe I over-reacted by calling the post dumb and condescending. But there is something that rankles.
This may come as a shock, but there was a time you did not know how to read. It had to be taught to you.
Phrasing it this way "be taught" gets at the heart of the problem. Good players are not taught. They teach themselves, or learn by asking and observing. The initiative must come from the player. You're not going to be able to cram 8 pages of EJ healer tips into your healers' brains. And I'm not sure why you think you can. And why is it that we always see threads like "how can I teach my healers to heal" but not similar ones about other roles?
I think it's nearly impossible to force any player to become better unless they are self-motivated. If your healers are going to get better at healing, they need to be the ones trolling the message boards, not you.
I actually have been (honestly) hoping for this thread to pop up in some form for about the past week. I think there's valuable information to be passed on to new people who are taking up healing roles and frankly it's a subject that this forum hasn't seen much (the vast, vast majority of threads are on dps, tanking or game mechanics, IMO). So while the title might not be the best let's actually please focus on imparting information.
To that end, allow me to say what I usually do when confronting and dealing with a new healer.
First off, know how hard heals hit for, and know exact numbers on the tank's HP (seeing incoming damage doesn't suck either). If you don't have a unti frame mod that shows exact HP, get one. Figure out how strong your heals are (I'm sure there's a new Theorycraft mod out somewhere?), and try to teach yourself to heal for his exact HP amount. SCT is phenominal for this- if you turn on track overheal it gives you the amount you overhealed as well as the amount you healed.
Learn your spells. Know the HP/sec (relative only), know the efficency (relative again) and know the utility. For new healers the biggest pitfall is to spam your highest rank fastest spell, and it's counter-intuitive to a lot that the biggest hp/sec spell is universally the slowest cast. Again, a mod like Theorycraft could help here; also suggest that they heal an instance (not an overly hard one) without using thier 'familar' heal at all. No flash, no regrowth, no lesser healing wave.
Learn abuses of the 5 second rule. Simply being aware that if you wait 1 second on that spellcast you'll regen a spirit tick of mana is an unreal mana saver. Almost no caster dps class has ever had to deal with the 5sr, and the idea that it exists (and, of course, how it works) is something that can revolutionize the way a healer is played.
Proactive healing and heal canceling. In effect, watching what level of dps someone takes, starting a cast before they take it and using escape/moving/ect to cancel it is amazing for healing. The side benifit of staying out of the 5 second rule aside, it's a very strong way to be on the ball and -not bored- while healing. Reactive healing only gets so far- starting a cast and watching incoming dps like a hawk is generally more efficent, lower overheal, and lets you use more efficent heals.
There are many many more suggestions, of course, and tons of specifics to class, but I think that the above 4 are good solid tips for any new healer who hits one button and runs oom. While training in heroics is good, I don't think it'd hurt to post on the guild forums 'breakdown of the 5 second rule', for example, as though someone had asked without yelling at someone specificly.
In any case, I also think the above posters are right. Giving a healer an easy task is useless if you want to train them. A challenged healer is a better healer. That said, when you move back into 25 mans fully expect your healers to have a few...hiccups, because coordnated healing is vastly different from solo/small group, and be understanding while they try to figure out what casts thier fellows are using.
In my experince generally a healer makes small, tiny improvements, then suddenly 'breaks through' and becomes good, when it goes from a series of planned thoughts to instinct/habit.
See? Got through the whole post without mentioning downranking..*grin*
Essentially, healing is in practice very simple as with the rest of WoW. Basically you need a few things to succeed:
1) Get a proper UI: The number of abortions of priest UI screenshots Ive seen make me cry. All you need to have onscreen is peoples health bars, an MTT list and a HoT tracker (add PoM watch for priests). You dont need, healing meters, threat meters, a separate decursing addon, a HUD, and all the other crap people feel the need to add. Personally I really appreciate AGUF and Sraidframes for these jobs. Get these installed, set them up properly and you are good to go. For the love of god put the MTT frames near the raid frames. This really is a massive pet hate of mine and Ive seen it a number of times in peoples UIs
2) Do a bunch of 5 mans: Basically, grab a skilled tank from your guild and pick up 3 DPS monkeys preferably from LFG. Tell the tank to pull as fast as he can. The DPS will be crap and hit the wrong things, and youll have to manage your mana to keep up with the tank as he zerg pulls. This will honestly make you a better player of your class.
3) Theorycraft: When everyone starts playing a healer, they look at their spellbook and see they have these heals that take too long to cast so they spam the nice fast ones. Unfortunately this means they run out of mana. Give them some good threads explaining HPM, and HPS calcs for their various classes. Gear is also very very important for healing classes too, and its very different to DPS in that different loadouts will benefit some people and not others. Juggling +heal, Mp5 and spirit (int and crit for paladins also) to suit the way you heal is very important for this, so you can see which items will benefit you the most. An addon like recap can really help with this part. Make sure they understand how the 5 seconds rule works, so they can get best use fo their regen (although this doesnt really apply to paladins)
4) Practice: You can have the gear and the theorycraft skills as much as you want, but when your new healer dies in aoe that he didnt see he was stood in it is obvious that experience tells. Your old healers have had to deal with movement fights throughout aq40 and nax, but your rerolls dont have this experience. Be patient with them, and let them get used to healing so that they dont have to stare intently at health bars and merily ignore the big aoe of doom thats coming for them.
Last edited by Saigone : 03/09/07 at 9:36 AM.
Reason: spazz typing
My first character was a priest and made it to the start of BWL (which in terms of GS at the time, was decent progression) but now that I run with the DPS more, I have new perspective on what also makes a good healer.
Too often healers panic. And when healers panic, things start going wrong pretty quick. I definitely made sure everyone knew on vent everytime I got charged off a de-aggro, I made sure I yelled real loud if I got silenced, etc. I guess at the time I thought it was good to let people know that they weren't getting heals (and in some way that it wasn't MY fault if someone died). Tanks would get distracted, sometimes an offtank broke off and picked up a mob that would get CC'ed anyway, so if the tank got feared, there'd be no one to pick up, raid wipes, etc.
I think there's something to be said for calmy saying "I have aggro" and running to the tank, the calmy saying "back on healing"
I think for a lot of us, we yell and make a big deal of it since we know that if there's a wipe on some level we're going to get blamed, so we spazz out a bit when we're forced to act outside our "sit and watch health bars" comfort mode.
I've been reading this thread with alot of interest, as it's been one of the points I've been trying to tackle inguild as well. I thank the posters for sharing their opinions.
A few additional points:
-Education about gear (importance of mp5/healing and spirit), it's enchants (and new tbc enchants) and very important, food and consumables. What works, what should be used, what's easily farmable. Stuff like runes, tubers, mana oil or the fact adepts+healing elixer stack is very easily overlooked and can help to get just that bit extra performance out of your healer when an encounter requires it.
-Dispelling, using a dispelgrid or other mod which offers click on name or box=dispell functionality makes a life of a healer (and the lives of your raid) so much easier.
While many top raiders take this as a given, you'll be suprised how many people have not tried it, or run without any ui 's but ctraid :p A further helpfull addition would be something like witchhunt (wowace.com) incase you want to have an easier time dispelling mob abilities.
-If you don't have it, make a priest/healer channel ingame where alot of class questions can be asked and experiences shared. Apart that it is a nice place to organise your healing assignments/rotations/spam in, it helps to further educate your healers as well.
-Theorycraft , mendwatch, situational awareness, explaining pom, decent (raid)unitframes and so on as mentioned before helps alot, as long as you manage to bring it up in a normal manner. Sure there will be situations where that isn't possible, but if your aim is to keep that person in guild and to try and improve his performance, your initial approach should always be civil and understanding.
I have a 2 mod related questions -
Does anyone know of a tool which basicly keeps track of your 5 second rule? (ie a visual indication when you will be outside of it) - I feel such a tool would help new priest learn to exploit it better.
Secondly, pre TBC there was a mod called fast cast. Seeing my guild is mainly european playing on the US servers it helped our healing quite abit. (As on average there is 300-400ms lag), does anyone know of a mod which mimics that functionality for TBC? Or perhaps just an indication when you could safely cancel your spell (esc).
Last edited by ramp : 03/09/07 at 10:09 AM.
Reason: addition to points
Fastcast as the auto function it was doesnt work anymore, I think it now just displays when it is safe to cancel your cast. I cant find the addon at this time, but here is a modified ecastingbar with the same function: http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/files...r-latency-mod/
You can mimic the functionality of fast cast by adding /stopcasting to a macro for all of your primary spells. If you aren't careful, you'll cancel a spell that's still going off though.
Fastcast as the auto function it was doesnt work anymore, I think it now just displays when it is safe to cancel your cast. I cant find the addon at this time, but here is a modified ecastingbar with the same function: http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/files...r-latency-mod/
Coming from someone that's rerolled from a rogue to a priest for TBC, I'll try to shed some light. I wasn't fully inexperienced with healing, I'd filled in by playing other people's chars multiple times in the past and I also led a lot of raids so I knew what to expect from healers.
The first thing is complicated UIs... to me, they're more of a roadblock than an aide. I can't stand cluttering my UI, replacing my unit frames, displaying grids on my screen, etc... I've tried AG frames, Perl, Xperl, Nurfed and after a week with each I always go back to Blizzard's default. I have 3 mods installed: Itemrack, Natur Enemy Cast Bar (for HoT tracking) and SWStats to keep an eye out on my effective healing and how I compare to other priests / other classes. I don't feel that I need any other mods to heal or cleanse effectively.
A lot of people talk about theorycrafting, HPS and HPM calculations... those are not gonna help a healer learn how to heal. They're probably the final step of optimization where you're looking to milk that extra efficiency out of a fight. The only "theory" that I do think is really important is the 5 second rule and the difference between spirit/mp5. I've seen people stack spirit and wonder why their regen still sucks.
From there on it's just practice, they have to see what works and what doesn't themselves. Make sure they know the option of downranking and tell them to test different ranks of heals. I personally use GHeal2 or 3 and GHeal7 for most of my healing, with renews, PoMs and flash heals situationally.
Tell your healers that it's better to run out of mana 2 minutes into the fight than let the tank die 20 seconds in. If the boss isn't dead by the time they run out of mana, tell them to work on being a little more efficient and work at it from there. It's gonna take time and it's gonna take wipes. Some people will obviously learn faster than others, but if your healers are willing to learn and actually enjoy healing, they will.
Fantastic concept for a mod, and one I'd even suggest the OP should ask his healers to install. Low imact awareness of your 5SR is probably going to do more to extend your mana pool than a whole bucketful of consumables.
That said, I'm afraid I have to disagree with the above poster re: consumables. While they are very, very strong, they can also become a crutch and we're talking about ways to make unskilled healers better- I'm really wary of any solution that involves the phrase 'then go farm some...'. If theyr'e within an inch of being perfect and they can do it with a pot, by all means, but if they're OOM in 10 seconds, or let a single target die while at 95% mana, then loading them up with pots is a pretyt questionable idea.
Some other mods that are very helpful for a healer (or not, suit to taste):
Perfect Raid (unit frames) http://www.wowinterface.com/download...rfectRaid.html
Grid (unit frames, phenominal information in a small amount of space)
AGUF (simple party raid frame, shows damage/heals on each frame)
I'd include links for the above but I'm not having any luck with mod sites for some reason. Can anyone else come up with some that might be a good way for begining healers do better?
Regarding consumables, I deffinately agree with you there. Using them may help cover up bad healing, but that you need to tackle the underlying problem instead.
However with tbc the options there increased almost a tenfold. The reason to inform your healers about them though, is when you are at a fight where they are required, you avoid half of your healers not knowing what type of food to use, elixers, oils and so forth. It's a minor thing I agree, but I recall when we were doing patchwork pre-tbc, using mageblood/oil/runes etc had to be 'learned'. As that was the first real fight where mana potions were not sufficient. Just as someone levelling a new healer now will not encounter any of those untill the Kara.
1) PvP healing is a great tool for many of the issues listed. You learn not to panic when people are low on HP, and know exactly what your "Oh Shit!" abilities are to save someone. You learn what crowd control abilities you have when you attract aggro. You learn how to dispell quickly. You also learn how to prioritize who to heal based on the situation and how to set up your UI and binding keys to something you're comfortable with. Finally, those players that adapt to healing well in PvP, usually adapt very well to PvE.
2) Don't let a non-class member who's never played the given healing class in a raid situation, tell the "student" what to do or give criticism. I've seen it where rogues and warriors who have an alt 50+ priest, think they know exactly what is going on and that is should be "easy." Many of your "L2P" comments come from these types and negatively affect the student and the guild in general.
So healing generally takes time to learn, because it is often about feel more than numbers.
Exactly, healing is all about efficiency. As overhealing is wasted mana. Healing is definately trickier to master, as dps is more or less just going all out until the mob is dead. Where healing is about keeping them at full health without wasting mana (especially for long fights).
As one poster mentioned up above, PVP really helps out in learning how to heal better. I've usually preached the same to my guild. You learn to heal through spikes of damage, dispell/decurse and positioning.
Errrrr no, not anymore. At least not according to our run last sunday. We were in place, 3 MTs were assigned and kind of buffed up, and everyone was looking to me to assign healing. I was loooking at our measly 7 or 8 healers in various specs and gear, and had no clue how to distribute them evenly.
Suddenly we hear "Kel'Thuzad make Patchwerk his Avatar of War!" and i start flaming people that we werent ready, getting angry about a useless wipe. But... no one is dying. The hatefuls bounce oddly between the 3 tanks, healerchannel lights up with "errrr im on the cow" "i take the orc.. no the undead.. wait". Think we lost 2 or 3 melee due to rogue hatefuls, but other than that it was a rather clean kill.
To this day i still have no idea though who was actually MT-ing patchwork.
bit further derail: personally i find healing in TBC very unappealing since it seems to have lost a lot of its finesse. i loved healing in vanilla WoW, loved being resto, but the increased stamina values have distorted the healing so much i think there ISNT really much more than spam heal these days. You cant exactly pick various ranks of heals anymore, because your tank is getting hit for 3k damage a swing. Sometimes trying to time it just right and anticipating the damage will result in him taking 2 hits without you be able to catch back up, resulting in a death eventually.
People that bring up heroics for practicing, stuff hits so hard there that you dont really have a choice than to focus on the MT solely, everyone else will get 1 to 2 shot anyway, so its more about CC than about good healing.
You can do patchwerk with one OT to make it more fun but its really not going to help healing in tbc raids - cant think of anyencounters to learn on though.
Something that was a decent strat to rotate OTs on the patchwerk of old was to reactively heal, unless your doing something really easy healing should be pre-emtive and absolutely not reactive in tbc.
Well, a lot of this is retreading some of the ground covered above, but...
As far as mods go, personally I find Clique+Grid to be absolutely indispensable. Click-healing is simply faster in a group/raid situation than targetting and casting via hotkey. For me, I have LHW bound to shift-click, Chain to shift-rightclick, two different ranks of HW bound to ctrl-left and ctrl-right, and then my NS+HW macro as alt-click.
Also, as noted, SCT with Overhealing displayed has been the single tool that most improved my healing efficiency. It's one thing to look at SW Stats or Recap after two hours in a zone and say "shit, I had 40% overhealing? how did that happen, it felt like I was doing fine" and another to have instantaneous feedback whenever you cast a spell that was wasted. It makes you, unavoidably, more sensitive to it. That said, you want to be aware of overhealing, but ultimately, effective healing > overhealing if you aren't running OOM and letting people die as a result of spamming away your mana bar. On a lot of Kara trash for example I will recklessly spam and I know I waste a lot of heals, but there is zero chance I am going to run OOM on a trash-pull, but there is a non-zero chance that a Greater Fleshbeast or a pair of Ushers might burst my tank down before I can react if I cancel a heal because he was only missing 10% of his health.
Anyway, in terms of the basic healing skills, practice makes perfect. I, too, share the observation that the best PvP healers tend to be superb PvE healers, so that's always good practice. Beyond that, just solo-heal things. Solo-heal 5-mans, and once you're geared up, solo-heal heroics (stay far away from Arcatraz). Solo-healing heroic pens, ramparts, furnace, or other less healing-intensive ones is very good practice in managing a mana pool and reacting to spikes (oh hey that trap just broke and the mob crit the nearby hunter for 80% of his health).
[...] And why is it that we always see threads like "how can I teach my healers to heal" but not similar ones about other roles? [...]
I'm pretty sure I remember a thread, like about a year ago, about how to teach warriors how to tank. DPS is pretty much a given, because that's what you do your whole wow life before hitting level cap. Every class does it. Managing aggro is as hard as downloading KTM, and DPSing is as hard as pressing one key the whole fight for the most basic dps(obviously managing SnD cycles or keeping your arcaneblast up while exploiting the clearcast on AM is a bit more complicated, but you can manage to do acceptable DPS by just spamming frostbolt).
Healing and Tanking(and tanking even more so) aren't learnt when leveling. At best while leveling, you healed Scarlet Monastery, which teaches you nothing since the damage taken is so low so healing it only means casting heals every now and then between mind blasts.
But Tanking and Healing are hard because you never HAD to do it, and while it's true you can't feed people 8pages of EJ so they instantly learn how to heal better, it's much easier to tell them to read a small thread with all the important information on healing instead of having them read the 85pages threads about their class and the 40pages threads about healing in general, or raiding, or whatever. Not everyone has been reading EJ for a long time and if you suddenly feel like learninh more about your class, it's good if you can find small tidy threads with all the info you need, instead of going thru pages of pages of stuff that might have been modified since then(some of the classes threads are from BC beta aren't they, or were they wiped when we changed boards?).
However I'll agree with you, if someone isn't willing to learn, you won't make him a good healer, whatever you do anyway.
First off, know how hard heals hit for, and know exact numbers on the tank's HP (seeing incoming damage doesn't suck either).
Learn your spells. Know the HP/sec (relative only), know the efficency (relative again) and know the utility. For new healers the biggest pitfall is to spam your highest rank fastest spell, and it's counter-intuitive to a lot that the biggest hp/sec spell is universally the slowest cast.
I think you're mistaken about the counter-intuitivity, it's simply never examined (which I know sounds... well, let's let that go). It's like money - if you need some RIGHT NOW, it's going to cost you more then if you're willing to wait for it.
I also think how you stated an important point doesn't place the right emphasis - saying something like HP/s suggests a thorough mechanical grasp - "I get 500 HP/s from...". Alternatively, saying it, and coaching it as, "Flash heal is the sprint, you get tired doing it too long, greater heal is the cross country runner..." It's a simple, two point correlation that's easy to remember, has a great visual cue, and gets the job done for coaching new healers. Once you've got the cross country versus the sprinting down, then knowing that you're a 3 minute miler is only natural.
Cliches are cool, too, as much as you'll get berated for being the cliche guy. "Good heals come to those who [can] wait." And other lame variations.
In effect, watching what level of dps someone takes, starting a cast before they take it and using escape/moving/ect to cancel it is amazing for healing.
This tied with...
Originally Posted by Lurchdawg
Too often healers panic.
I think are important. Realizing that one healer can't do it all ("Hey, the main tank just lost 5000 HP, but there are 3 other healers in the raid who can be healing him. What do you think happens next?" 15000 HP in wasted mana!). Obviously, this varies from fight to fight, and so forth, but too often healing is, "Hey, that guy is missing 5000 HP. I'm going to throw my heal on him. Wait for cast complete. Oh, overhealed for 4985. Lame." There's no multithreading to it, either. That is, constantly reevaluating this cast - should it complete? - and triage - well, he doesn't need this heal as much, but that guy needs one DESPERATELY.
With vastly inferior gear, ancient druid secrets, and a smelly feral build, I was able to maintain competitive healing results. Why? Because I would never panic, and accept that some of the heals in the raid are done by people other then me.
Alternatively, I may be a terrible healer, and may need to be more on the receiving end of this thread then the posting. Who knows.
Originally Posted by Saigone
1) Get a proper UI: The number of abortions of priest UI screenshots Ive seen make me cry. All you need to have onscreen is peoples health bars, an MTT list and a HoT tracker (add PoM watch for priests).
I swear up and down by Perfectraid. Grid is just a little too small for me, I think there's an inclination to either become whack-a-mole or unfocused on it. Personal preference, of course. But it and grid are exactly the bee's knees on this point - you get all the information you need, and none you don't. You (generally) don't need to know whether Somedude9 in the raid has 5945 mana or 5955, but to know that hey, half the raid is 20% mana or below, eep.
As a druid, I enjoy XRaidStats, and have Heal MP as an average of mana pools from druid/priest/paladin/shaman. When it's time to innervate, mouse over the bar and see a list of names where I can make executive decisions. It takes up very little screen real estate normally, and quickly and conveniently provides very thorough information.
As for HoT tracking, may I recommend Chronometer? NECB seems a little large, and Chron is Ace.
Originally Posted by ramp
-Dispelling, using a dispelgrid or other mod which offers click on name or box=dispell functionality makes a life of a healer (and the lives of your raid) so much easier.
Am I alone in my love of Clique? A minute, at most, configuring it, and blam - (in my case) alt-clicking on any unitframe removes curses on them, shift-clicking on any unitframe removes poisons. AGUF with aura filter on means that hey, if anyone's frame isn't like the other ones, shift/alt click on them already!
No extra screen real estate used with yet another unitframe, either.
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
To be honest though, doing 0% overhealing is just as bad as doing 30%. It means you are definitely healing too late and risking people dying. I personally would go too nuts on people overhealing unless it was >30% for priests and druids and 20% for a paladins.
One of the really hard things is that you have to instantly triage people, and at times you will have to let someone die so you can save someone more important, as if you try to keep both up they will both die.
I also think that (especially with new healers who wont be particularly confident) that its really important to ensure that the guild doesnt get into a culture for blaming the healers for a wipe, as they will end up giving it up. Equally, make sure that the healer class leads are capable of telling their class they are underperforming when the wipe genuinely is down to bad healing.
I really do think though its all about feel. DPS is a science, and healing is an artform.
Edit: to the chap above. I agree entirely with you on using xraidstatus to show the overall healer mana pool. I dont have the individual mana/energy/rage displayed in my main raidframes, and its useful to know what the overall mana status is like. About perfect raid, I tried it briefly, but it didnt show who was in your group which made it hard to use PoH well and thats the best HPM priest spell if you can judge it properly. Im a massive fan of sraidframes, especially when you set them up properly to show buffs/debuffs properly. The greying out people out of range is another excellent feature of it.
Last edited by Saigone : 03/09/07 at 11:43 AM.
Reason: referencing above post
Slightly off-topic but perhaps you should make sure the people who are healers want to heal? Really, really want to? There are a lot of people who play healers that deep down don't really want to, TBC is a golden opportunity to reroll.
I've always wondered why someone rolls a healer. Its IMO the most thankless role in WoW. Wipes are blamed on healers, while downing a boss is always because of DPS. It definitely is more "intense" and "more pressure" than DPS classes, I suppose thats one reason. I do hope some people don't roll healers to feel "wanted" though, thats a very bad reason.
My girlfriend and I rolled on WoW together, I played a paladin and she played a priest. Got to 60, raiding, yadda yadda. I hated it. Spamming heal buttons and 5 minute blessings was all I did in MC. Gave up on WoW for a while, came back as a warlock.
My girlfriend (now wife) loved healing in 5 mans but hated it in high pressure raids. She said she'll never play a DPS class, she much more prefers keeping others alive than hitting things. Its a mindset I will never really understand, but god bless her! She did stop playing at 60 though, too many people who treat healers badly are in this game IMO. I always make the effort to help healers in my guild farm, quest, 5 man, whatever since I know how frustrating it is sometimes. Blizzard had a serious chance to up the number of healing players by allowing 2 talent specs per class in TBC, I wonder why this never seems to come up on their radar.
I'll chime in for backing SCT+Overheal as an indispensable tool. Healing in an efficient manner takes a lot of practice and it's a harsh mistress since screwing up generally involves a wipe. You learn the quirks of fights and which pulls suck badly, and you discover who is a good tank and who is not in short order on those pulls. The most important thing is to learn to heal predictively and cancel when it's not going to be a good heal. There's nothing wrong with being overly cautious, but if you don't cancel those heals you're going to run yourself out of mana.
I am also appalled at the number of one-dimensional healers that I see. Priests who never use PoH or Shamans who don't use Chain Heal in particular just blow my mind. I just don't understand how you can have a useful tool like that and then spam flash heal or greater heal and wonder why you can't keep a group up.
To be honest though, doing 0% overhealing is just as bad as doing 30%. It means you are definitely healing too late and risking people dying.
I disagree, this may be true for some fights but with a crit-immune tank you can have very low levels of overhealing without much risk. Knowing the flow of the fight and knowing when that boss is going to get his extra cleave attack again is far more important than simply spamming a higher HP/S heal and overhealing just in case.
I often wonder how they survived growing up without getting hit by a bus. Probably someone screamed "HEY IDIOT THAT'S A FUCKING BUS. MOVE IT." and cheated Darwin out of a HK.
Being a good healer is hard and it won't come without practice. That said, there's three things to keep in mind:
#1) The Healer's Objective
Healing is fundamentally different from tanking and DPS roles. Tanks want to maximize threat and damage dealers want to maximize damage. But healing is not about maximizing healing. A healer's objective is to keep everyone from dieing. It's (usually) better to heal 1500 damage on someone about to die than land a 4k heal on a tank with 10k health remaining. Don't look at healing meters (either effective or total). Look at the health bars of everyone in the raid.
A corollary of this is that healers need to know the fight. Deciding between healing a rogue at 20% and a warrior at 50% depends heavily on the fight, for example. As extreme examples, in Patchwerk you would always heal the warrior and in C'thun you would always heal the rogue. There's no magic formula for knowing the right person to heal, but it's not always the tank and it's not always the person with the lowest health total.
#2) Healing Solo
If a healer doesn't have experience solo healing a 5 man group, they are unlikely to be effective in a raid. Healing a 5 man is great experience for perfecting mana efficiency and selecting heals. Picking just the right heal to use, and timing it, makes a huge impact in mana efficiency, so practice in heroics. As a priest, my healing bar has the following heals accessable with key bindings, and I use all of them:
That's a lot of options, and nothing short of experience will teach you when to use what.
#3) Raid Healing
Obviously things get much more complicated when you aren't the only healer in the group. The primary reason is that your heal selections need to take into account the decisions of other healers. That and there's more than 5 different targets to receive heals. You need to have a feel for the healing styles of everyone in the group. When you know what other healers will do, you can change your healing accordingly to prevent overheals.
For example, if you are a priest healing the raid along with a tree-form druid, you can trust the druid's heal-over-times will handle most of the collateral damage on the raid, and you should focus stay healing the main tank. An easy way for the main tank to die is for someone else to take damage and have all the healers panic heal that person. Two seconds later the tank dies from lack of heals. Of course, if six people take damage at once, the druid might need backup on collateral heals, so you would want to help out. Now your job is to figure out which of those six people the druid isn't healing right away, and to heal the one who needs it the most.
As with solo healing, nothing short of experience will teach you how to heal in a team of other healers.
03/09/07, 6:02 AM
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