OK so. What's up forums.

My guild (And its excellent name) are currently attempting to make the transition from 2 karazhan groups to 1 coherent 25 man raid. Starting with gruul of course. After aggressive recruiting we pulled together enough healing to run the 25 man, killed high king, and stepped up to Gruul, who is not serious business but is in fact, serious business.

Our last raid with:

3 holy paladins
2 Resto Druids
2 holy priests
1 Prot paladin
1 Balance Druid
2 Feral Druids

As a cap of all available people who could heal. This -felt-like enough potential healing but we didn't have these people healing at the same time. It worked very well for high king, who went down well on our guild's first kill last week but we had trouble keeping Gruul up through his increasing growths.

This is our MT. I -think- his level of gear is approrpiate for Gruul-level antics.
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...=Ursin&n=Acute

However, we had trouble sustaining him for a long time and he went down at about 50%, I want to say like 7-8 growths in.

My instincts as a raid leader say that there is some kind of issue with the healing there. Our guild's healers gearwise range to excellent- similar or better to our MT and range down to a mix of blues and scattered epics. Our problems are sustainability. So I ask you, yesiknowthatgruulisezmode:

How do you get people better at synergistic healing? (Other than, obviously, doing it)
A lot of our healers have little to no experience with super-high, super spiked DPS on the MT because of our progression in legacy raiding. I would love to experience it for myself but I do not have a 70 healing.

What is the role of healing rotations in the modern raiding environment? I personally am familiar with the idea but I'm not aware of how to transfer it to a 25 man, or if the concept is even used. I see a lot of priest theorycraft assuming a lot more time in the FSR than i notice our priests and other healers sustaining and I feel like our guild's healers as a whole are missing something.

This may or may not be of importance for Gruul (Who I expect to kill tommorow :D) but I want to get some information rolling for my healers as we move into 25 man content with a greater degree of difficulty.

What do your healers do to coordinate?

That's plenty of healing and you shouldn't need a rotation (if by rotation you meant like a DAoC or EQ style of rotation).For Gruul you just need to split your healing up a bit. Put 2-3 soley on the MT, healing nobody else. 2 on the OT, and 2-3 leftovers that cover raid healing and HoTs on the MT/OT. After that everyone in the raid should have enough pots/stones/fel blossoms to get you through the fight.

Your tank is a bit low on KZ gear and that might hold you back some, but if you've gotten through Maulgar already your tank and your healers should be good to go.

<---(Former Ursin-ite)

50% and you are at 7 growth?

I think you also need to improve your DPSes.

If they can kill him in 14, who cares. He's still dead. Their DPS isn't going to keep their tank alive at 7 growths though - seems like you need to make people buckle down on healing assignments as I said above, and make sure that your DPS are not taking stupid amounts of shatter damage. 1k-3k dmg from a shatter is acceptable, but anything over that and people are just running on top of each other.

For people just getting to Gruul, that's on pace for a 14 growth 1st kill - very appropriate in my opinion.

Nice profile, btw. Neither Lazercanon nor iazercanon exist in NA or Europe.

As I am also involved in the raidings here I believe I can add something to this. I checked a WWS parse of our Gruul attempts rather thouroughly (unfortunatley the log is at work so I can't post it right now). I noticed one red-flag, to me, in our healer strategy. Basically our tree druids were doing the majority of our MT healing, our paladins appeared to be doing spot, and our priests seemed to be doing both spot and MT healing. Vague recollections of healing threads I've read on these boards are telling me this is not how things are supposed to work. Isn't MT healing what paladins are best at?

Agreed, I would not expect guilds to be doing it faster than than on their first kill. TDA just got our first Gruul kill, and it was after 15 grows - a messy affair, with the Hurtful tank being splattered just before the end, but we got the loot.

Our healer lineup was 6 paladins (what can I say? they all turned up that day) and 2 druids. We'd been running with 7 healers for most of the attempts that day, but then one DPS'er had to leave and the only sub available was another (!) pallie.

Idealy have your holy paladins on MT full time (be careful of silences though when exceed 10 growths especially if your MT is not that well geared)

I've noticed you don't have any shaman at all in your setup.
Shamans are gods when it comes to healing multiple people (Melee that take collasping roof damage, chain heal will help heal the OT/MT too depending on the situation)

As far as a solid setup goes for your make up
3 Holy Paladins on the MT
2 Holy Priests Prayer Of Mending OT/Heal OT
2 Resto Druids Spot HoT'ing/ Healing OT

----
As far as further content goes we usually have all of our pallies on MT roles, rarely bring resto druids (Most active left, other is positioned in South Korea), our shaman usually heal Melee, and Priests sort of watch everyone while keeping Prayer of Mendings/Shields going.

Earth shield is also very nice, Get some shaman :P

EDIT: Regarding EQ-Style Rotations, 4/6 SSC 1/4 TK and have yet to have really seen the need for any kind of healing rotations, bring Shadow priests

14 growths is where my guild was at for our first few kills.

I would consider an ideal Gruul healing breakdown for a guild starting on Gruul to be two paladins and one priest on the main tank with a druid splitting time HoTing the main and offtank. While the damage is certainly containable with 2-3 healers, the vast majority of learning wipes for us used to be sudden tank deaths and I don't imagine it's really much different now. It's a shame you don't have a shaman in there for raid healing though, they are simply excellent at topping off shatter and the occasional cave-in.

These days for learning you might as well go fairly healer heavy with your available people and stick the hybrids in actual hybrid gear or have them dps until eight grows or so and then patch heal with whatever they have. That's a ton of available healing power you have there though, it seems mostly that you just need to work on the logistics of who is responsible for what. Plus, it does take a bit for people to get used to the slowly ramping yet spiky damage and not get lulled to sleep during the first half-dozen grows.

Our first non-bugged Gruul kill was done with five healers, and an MT with similar gear to yours. Two paladins and a priest were on the MT, a priest was on the OT, and a tree druid was on the raid. Damage dealers were instructed not to waste time bandaging if they were lag free, since they would have enough time to move out of cave ins without taking damage and could be topped off by the druid before the next ground slam. This was to keep DPS high since we knew we had trouble keeping the MT alive past 12 grows or so.

If you want to look at our WWS's "who heals whom" page the kill is posted at the following URL. Healers were Ward (OT priest), Wicklepeasel (MT priest), Gian (me, tree druid), Marinated (MT paladin), and Sansul (MT paladin). MT was Prayes and OT was Rideingbeard. Slimjimm was on intervene duty so Prayes didn't die during the silences. You'll notice that Prayes did die at the end, and this was because Slimjimm thought it would be funny to keep executing instead of intervening on the last silence (and it was kind of funny but only because we killed the boss). You can see that people are mostly staying on their healing assignments and this helps a lot. As I am always the only healer assigned to the raid, I can tell when other healers are starting to spot heal excessively and it usually does not end well for the MT.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gian/STA...20070329-1846/

As an aside, your tank can begin to drink ironshield potions at later stages of growth (assuming he isn't already).

Seven healers is enough. Indeed, is exactly what I would want. What we do is put two on the OT, three on the MT, and two on raid healing. One raid healer moves to the MT at growth 8 and the other moves over at growth 12 (at which point the raid is on their own and makes do with bandages and healthstones). Shamans are prefered for raid healing and paladins are prefered for MT healing (priests can do both). It's good to have at least one druid keeping HoTs on the MT to help cover the reverbs. We kill Gruul in 14-15 growths (have downed him four times now).

Due to the ever-present danger of tank death by spike, healer rotations have never seemed a good idea to me (since more healers active means more healing that can ramp up to cover a spike).

Among things to check:
- Are healers downranking early in the fight when tank death is not very likely and then moving to higher ranks later on when the incoming damage begins to increase?
- Are healers (and especially spirit-based healers such as priests and druids) cast-cancelling to avoid excessive overhealing? (Starting a large heal and then jumping, moving, or hitting esc to cancel it if the tank doesn't take a hit.) Some overhealing will and should occur but if mana pools are the limit your healers are encountering (as opposed to tank death due to spike damage) they may be overhealing too much.
- Does everyone have mana potions and are they using them on each cooldown? (I hate this part but it makes a huge difference.)

Potentially you can also give your healers a shadowpriest for additional mana, although that shouldn't be necessary.

It really depends (sort of)

If your druid has more hit points and pretty high armor (25k+) then hands down yeah.

When we were first doing Gruul I was mainly OT'ing because I could generate a hell of a lot more threat than another warrior could in the OT position, Melee was having to hold back (Hell I was having to hold back with Salv on in cat).

If there is no threat issue with the OT then whatever really

How exactly was your tank dying?

If it was just during normal tanking, your healers need to make sure they always have a heal incoming, not canceling, to handle unpredictable spike damage.

If it was from your healers going OOM, make sure they downrank or generally conserve mana at the start. Cheap mana oils and foods are very helpful.

If it was from your healers all shifting off the MT to heal the OT or top people off, make sure you have them properly assigned and they're sticking to their assignment (SWS or WWS is good for checking this).

If it was during a reverb, make sure that a druid is responsible for having HoTs on the tank. Make sure that your tank is ready to react during a reverb (shield wall late in the fight, last stand earlier, pot/healthstone it gets ugly, etc). I believe Paladins can bubble out of the reverb too -- make sure they're ready to do so when growths get big.

If it was immediately post-shatter, make sure healers aren't getting back to their possitions too quickly. Other than cave-ins they're not going to be taking more damage, so first priority is to keep the tank up. Second is to top those off that need it so a single cave-in tick doesn't gib someone. Third is getting back into position and spreading out.

I think that covers all the likely causes for a tank death. Stick with it, and make sure your dps is as high as possible. Tanks get gibbed in this fight at 14-15 growths for sure, so the quicker you can get it over with, the better.

Your tank is slightly under-geared from a stamina perspective. If possible, I would recommend dropping some of the defense (to around 500) and picking up more stamina. An easy way to do this would be to replace almost all of the sockets with +12 stamina gems. It seems like your tank is too focused on socket bonuses.

Healing is a tricky role and quite possibly the most difficult role in raids, particularly on fights like Gruul. My main has been a healer since release (with some alts on farm-status zones). Learning to heal well and heal effectively takes a lot of practice.

Here's a couple of suggestions:
1) Your dps doesn't need healing as they should never take more than minimal damage, which can be covered by two HS and maybe a health pot (if they don't need mana to keep up DPS).

2) Six healers is a good setup. Put two paladins and a priest on the MT. For the OT, use a priest and any other healing class. Have a druid keep hots up on the two tanks and healers if needed.

3) Make sure your healers start heals before damage is dealt and that they are aware of what type of damage is taken (and what amounts). They need to be able to plan their casts in advance as much as possible. Have them talk to the tanks about damage and what they can do to work together.

4) Except for the HoT casting druid, healers should always be casting a heal on the tank and cancel it if the tank is at full health (or the heal will be 50% or more over-healing) when there is 0.75 seconds left on the cast.

5) After the first 2-3k mana is spent, healers' potion timers should never be off of cool-down. Make sure they are chugging mana pots constantly.

6) The large majority of the time, it's an under-geared tank that is the result of a tank-death wipe, especially if your healers are chain casting on him and he still dies. It's probably because he didn't have enough stamina. I've seen way too many folks complaining about tank healing without understanding this.

If healer mana is an issue you can stick a shadow priest in the healer group. We found that to increase the performance of healers quite a bit, better than sticking a shadow priest on healer duty, gets the boss down faster, gives warlock damage a buff, and gives our healers a lot more mana to play with.

I don't know why people say shaman for raid healing, at least on Gruul. Other than chain heals on melee being hit by cave-in. Shaman are very inefficient for raid spot healing in a spread out raid: shaman single target healing efficiency comes from Healing Way, and you don't get that if you're doing single heals on all different people. Shaman are excellent MT healers (earth shield, healing way stacked up) though.

Priests and druids have the most efficient spot healing ability. Paladins the most efficient single target heal-spamming. Shaman are most efficient at cluster healing (most usually melee or AOE) and are darn good on single target as well due to earth shield and healing way (and on using chain heal on the MT to heal the MT while also topping up melee DPS).

EQ-style rotations are unnecessary and probably unuseable in WoW for anything above MC anyway. Fights executed properly are rarely tests of healer mana these days (assuming flask, oil, chain potting), but often have phases that test healer throughput. Gruul, for example, healing is very light for the beginning (you might even tell a healer or two to DoT Gruul up and wand or something) but if you're getting to 12+ grows is become a test of topping the tanks off fast enough after every hit that they don't die if there's a reverb. If you're getting to 15+ grows it becomes a test of how long your healers can restrain themselves from throttling the DPS for not killing him already

Would have to see a WWS parse, but the 7 full time healers and prot paladin should be easily enough, especially with 3 other innervates available (2 others if one feral is OT), so if they're going OOM by 8 grows I'd have to guess they're either massively overhealing or your raid is taking masses of unnecessary damage early or half your healers are dying off early.

OOMing is not killing us very much, it's mostly spike stuff. I don't see how anyone could oom at 50% unless they were messing around.

If we don't kill him tommorow i should be able to get a WWS going. vontre or i.

I'll try and convey this to the healing team as best I can.

I have been wondering a bit about this. From the start I have tried to gear for surviving the worst possible spike, not gambling on avoiding it. As a result my evasion is pretty poor, clocking in on 16% dodge and 17% parry, but I have 15,4k hitpoints and 15,9k armor unbuffed. My gear is pretty similar to what the tank in the guild in question is using. I have used Solid Star of Elunes exclusively so far.

I realize that my way of thinking will lead to more manaconsumption, but if I live through it then I personally find it worthwhile(perhaps the potchugging healers disagree though).

Now I'm not saying evasiontanking is the wrong way to go, ït's possible that it's a better alternative then what I have chosen to go for.

From a healers perspective, what is preferrable?

I'm sorry if I went offtopic here, but could possibly be part of the reason there are problems, and I'm curious myself and haven't seen it discussed. =P

*Hopes his first post will not be his last*

From looking over the armories of some people in your guild, mostly the DPS, it occurs to me that they may not be taking the role of "raid dps" very seriously.

Perhaps you should consider persuading people to respec into more raid oriented talents.

To give you an idea what I'm talking about, I'm going to post some armories of people in your guild.

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...in&n=Icesickle
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...Ursin&n=Chouda
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...rsin&n=Deeogee

High stam > high avoidance. As a healer.

If you can take a pair of back-to-back hits without dying, worst-case, no matter how hard they are ... I'm happy. Because I can keep you up through that.

Fully geared in T4, our tank on Maulgar still takes (occasionally) 15-16k dmg in under a second. This is when Arcing Smash and regular melee hit at the same time, for maximum damage. If he can live through this, we don't really care about much else.

Also, with very high avoidance, you run into the issue that you might have "miss strings" of 6-8 attacks where nothing lands ... and then suddenly 3 or 4 straight hits land, and the tank dies, because as much as your healers might *want* to, it's hard to keep heals incoming when your damage is streaky.

I like healing druids. 4 out of every 10 hits is a dodge, and all the rest hit for a reliable, predictable amount, mitigated heavily by armor. I can keep heals incoming, jump the ones that the tank dodges, and the tank survives. Makes me happy.

Also, as far as healing goes, if you're finding that you're losing the main tank, I would put another healer dedicated on that tank. This is especially important if some of your healers are hybrids whose gear isn't as up-to-snuff as your main healers.

We run with anywhere from 6 to 9 "healers" -- feral druids, protection paladins, boomkins, etc, etc.. We used 6 on our last Gruul kill, and had 4 dedicated to the MT -- two of them were hybrids in lesser gear. If we'd dropped it to 3, I very much doubt they could have kept him alive.

You can easily have one reliable person solo heal the OT, if they have the gear. I normally heal the OT myself up to about 12 growths, and then one paladin bounces back and forth between MT/OT to help me catch up to 12k hatefuls. Works quite well.

None of those people raided in the gruul/high kings I have been on.. You're really looking too hard into the information rather than just beleiving what i say.