I've been asked to assume the role of healing leader for one of our raid groups. As a long time officer and real life business owner, I'm okay with leading. And I am widely recognized as a knowledgeable and skilled healer (Holy Priest).

However, I've come to realize that knowing HOW to heal is not really the same thing as knowing how to coordinate a group of healers.

I am seeking advice on the mechanics of healing leadership. I'd prefer to avoid discussions of which-class-is-better-at-what since that is discussed in other threads.

As a beginning, I've prepped an internal briefing that's posted on our forums. I've reproduced it below and would appreciate your feedback....



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Raid healing is all about working as a team. Each class has advantages and disadvantages that force us to work together for the success of the raid. For this reason, I'm enclosing some basic rules and thoughts that will hopefully maximize our performance. Your feedback is appreciated.


CHAT:
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Please join the BLUEHEALERS chat channel so we can keep healing instructions out of /ra chat.


HEALING ASSIGNMENTS:
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Assignments are considered priorities. You won't get yelled at for occasional cross healing. But please don't cross heal unless there is an emergency (a tank below 50% without incoming heals or multiple clothies taking damage).

Remember that mana efficiency depends on using big slow heals instead of lots of fast ones. This means that the tank won't always be at 100%. A typical MT healer is most efficient using slow heals in ranks that yield between 2000 and 4000 non-crit healing. So don't assume that we're asleep because we let the tank slip from 13K to 9K health. We need that much "stretch" to maximize efficiency.

PRAYER OF MENDING
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PrOM should be used on all pulls, since it front loads heals while moving aggro to the tank. If your assigned tank is not pulling, then please use your PrOM on the pulling tank just after the first hit. This gives us two PrOMs worth of aggro building.

Sometimes we let the tanks pull when they are at less than 100% health. We do this in order to get the full effect from PrOM. (If PRoM heals for 2K, but the mob only hits for 1K damage, then we've missed an opportunity to give the tank another 1K in healing aggro).

It's important that everybody else be topped off at the pull, especially on two tank pulls where we want PrOM bouncing between them like a tennis ball. Keep your eyes open for warlocks who life tap at the last moment and ask them to top off and bandage before the pull.



CONSUMABLES:
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Part of being a good healer is knowing what consumables to use in different situations. I think that it's important to keep a balanced set of gear and then swap out secondary gear and consumables according to the needs of the fight.

I recommend that everybody keep the following in inventory:
- Super Mana Pots (Bring enough, times two plus 10%)
- Magesblood Pots (MP5) and Healing Power Pots (+Heal) -OR- the flasks of your choice.
- Fish Sticks (+Heal) and Sporefish (MP5) plus your favorite stamina food. (Note that Sporefish is somewhat difficult to find on this server).
- Dreamless Sleep Potions (For mana naps)
- Swiftness Potions ("Run Away!!! Run Away!!!")
- Nightmare Seeds can be expensive, but are very useful when you know you're going to get whalloped.
- Superior Mana Oil (Zaharah can make this by the gallon. Bring Netherbloom and Arcane Dust.)
- Bandages (I'm not kidding. It keeps you outside the five second rule.)
- Reagents. (Of course)

I don't carry healing pots since I prefer to keep my potion cooldown available. Instead, I use desparate prayer + healthstone + nightmare seed. But YMMV.


MANDATORY ADD-ONS
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I would prefer to keep the choice of primary GUI an individual decision. This is a matter of style and our diversity gives us strength.

But I expect everybody to RUN Healbot (at least in the background). I don't care whether you use another primary click interface, but it's a huge help to our fellow healers when we can see your incoming heals.

Other mandatory add=ons include:
KLH Threat Meter (or compatible meter, such as OMEN)
A CT-RAID or PERL compatible information sharing add-on.



REZ ORDER
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Our fearless leader, is always looking for a way to speed up raid progress. One way healers can contribute to speedy post-wipe recovery is to rez people in the proper order.

1. Other Rezzers
2. Spellcasters who have to mana up and/or buff the party.
3. Pet classes who have to rez/summon their own pets.
4. All others.

I realize that it's tempting to rez the raid leader first since it's good to suck up to the boss. But you will notice that Rogues are not a priority on this list. Besides, he's too busy yelling at us for wiping to accept the rez.

It's also important to quickly identify people who died in awkward or dangerous locations so we can ask them to run back and wait for summon as early as possible.



NON COMBAT HEALING
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Another way to speed things up during raids is to minimize healing AFTER combat. It makes no sense to use up all your mana healing the party while the DPS casters are drinking. We end up with everybody standing around waiting for the healers to mana up AGAIN.

Fast touch ups are okay. But if there was a big fight then it's usually faster to have everybody eat while ALL the casters mana up. (Mage food is free).

It may sound silly to focus so much on trivial details. But we're on a tight schedule. Fast recovery during trash clearing translates directly to more time on the boss.


HEALING PETS
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DPS Pets are not a priority. Tanking pets are.

If the raid leader asks somebody's pet to tank a mob, then please give them the same priority as on off tank. It's not that difficult since most pets have enough stamina that an occastional HOT will be sufficient (Yes, regular HOTS stack with Mend Pet).

If your raid GUI does not show pets by default, then learn how to turn it on. Alternatively, use the /focus function to temporarily add a pet to your interface.


FEAR WARD
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Fear Ward is unique in that it has a 30 second cooldown and no "Prayer of" group buff. It also requires frequent re-application due to its short duration and cancel-on-use mechanics.

This means that sometimes it's necessary to prioritize who gets fear ward before a pull. Typical priority goes as follows:

1. Tanks
2. Healers who may be in fear range (because I can't heal while I'm scared).
3. Melee and others who may be in fear range (including pets).
4. Ranged DPS who are usually outside of fear range.
5. Warlocks last. (Tradition)

Usually we only cover the first two groups, but if time permits then ward as many people as possible.

Note that this sometimes means that pets get warded when ranged DPS doesn't. They're easy to forget, but if you've ever seen a pet feared into a group of adds then you know why pets are important.


PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKING
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I'm sure that everybody has already heard my rants about healing meters, so I will be brief: There is no such thing as "winning" the healing meter. Healing is not a contest. Meters are tools for performance improvement. *end of rant*

I currently use SW Stats to track combat effective healing, target selection and mana efficiency. I'm also playing around with Wow Web Statistics (WWS), which is a favorite on the Elitist Jerks web site. I plan to take Recap for a spin, too.

SW Stats shows me who is healing whom and what spells are used (I'm always trying to improve my ratio of fast heals to efficient heals, for example).

I also use the X-Perl GUI to check who is using which consumables, just in case anybody forgets.

I'm sorry if you have a problem with my "watching our performance." I realize that I'm probably not qualified to tell a druid or pally how to play their class. But benchmarking helps us identify two things: problems and opportunities. We tend to recruit very selectively, so I'm glad to say that we rarely have performance problems. However, if you're not the kind of person who enjoys talking about opportunities for improvement, then you're probably in the wrong guild.


BUFF ASSIGNMENTS
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<Long list of names here. Removed for brevity>

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=1

Section VII is about healing as a team, and later down the list is a few ways to set up different healing rotations. It's a pretty good read.

An important thing to keep in mind is that it's no coincidence that different classes have different cast times on their most efficient heals. Shaman are excellent *excellent* raid healers because their most efficient heals are very quick. Tree druids are good if people aren't taking *huge* spike damage.

Paladin and priest are still the MT kings.

Something I've found out about setting up healing...it's better to use too little than too much. If you frontload while assigning people you'll inevitably end up with either : Nobody left to heal the raid, or too many healers.

As a warrior/MT, I would inevitably think, "I'm getting slammed! I need at least 4!" Then 3 minutes later I'd be redoing assignments because tank #4 had nobody to heal him.

After passing healing assignments on to someone else finally (thank god), I noticed she was doing this right off the bat as well.


It's always better to force your people to overperform than underperform.

Is this directed to new recruits, to get them up to speed with how the raid healing operates? If that is the case, then I don't think it's too long. You cover points that are important to your success, you can always refer someone back to them, and this way everyone is on the same page.

Dokou? Man this post reminded me of our old pre-TBC GM (priest) who quit.

Agree on length...plus I'm convinced 90% of WoW raiders have some form of ADD...

In perfect honesty, our method of raid healing is "Handle it" until we decide to make specific adjustments. It seems silly, but it cuts down on pre-pull time that puts raids to sleep, and it's very interesting and IMO important to see how people react to getting things done with no assignment.

Healers tend to pay a ton of attention to what's going on when they have no assignment, and if you wipe with little to no assignments, they always know who took tons of damage and why. If you give too many rigid assignments, you tend to get responses like "I don't know, I was just healing XXX".

The Handle it '™' method is ideal for learning IMO.

I think everything you've written is good, that's the basic approach you need to take.
I don't agree with the above that you should simply strike out the majority of the post though, you've got a lot of things to cover and just reducing it to 3 things isn't going to get it done. I'd recommend instead that you add a "Bottom Line Up Front" section at the top and just bullet in the major key points, such as "Be in the healer chat chan, Rez other rezzers first, Follow your healing priority assignment, etc". Then the rest of the post offers the full explanation for those that need more info.

I also very very highly reccomand that if you need to criticize healing in a fight, have the healing lead do it. Nothing pisses healers off more than non-healers telling them what to do, or yelling 'heal xyz' in the middle of a fight.

One thing I would add on there is the importance of healers to communicate with each other, if you wipe due to healnig then you must say to each other any problems you are having and see if someone else can support or swap with you on the assignment.

I dont know what to say about the recommended addons however, on the fights where healing is truely intensive I dont have time to look at some more bars telling me what other people are healing because im soley focused on my raid frame and briefly keeping an eye on my environment where needed, spending a second between each heal to see who others are healing is going to cost lives imo.

If raid healers are overlapping each other on healing the same targets all the time then assign them to specific groups/areas/players, you get similar results without downtime.

I don't think it's too long. If your healers attention spans aren't long enough to read this post, I wouldn't want to raid with them.

As an ex-raid healer who went through Hydross in SSC (just so you don't think I'm some DPS class telling you how to do your job :P), I can tell you one of the most important points is that if you DO have assignments, make your healers stick to them. People are assigned to heal other people for a reason, and I think one of the toughest things is getting a healing core that will trust the other healers to do their jobs. There's nothing that pisses me off more than an MT dying because one of his healers just HAD to heal that rogue.

Keeping things simple is important. I would follow these guidelines:

- Keep paladins focused on the MT. If they have the proper gear, they can spam FoL or Holy light rank 4 nonstop, picking up with big holy light heals when necessary.

- Keep druids and shaman raid healing. They've got excellent raid healing efficiency and utility. Druids can also trinket and keep a beefy lifebloom up on the MT.

- Assign who keeps earthshield on which tank, and HOTs on MT tank if there are special events (stuns, silences).

- If the fight requires decursing, split up the raid and decursers.

- Tell your healers to get Grid. It is the best raid frame for healing and decursing, period. It will also identify which players have incoming heals, which can be a lifesaver.

I also recommend parsing your fights with WWS. It's a very good way to analyze how to improve your raid healing.

If your objective is to get people up to speed on the art of healing, then this is the most crucial point to get across:

Good healing is about stopping deaths, not topping heal meters

Most new healers fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of healing. When you're doing DPS, you want to deal as much damage as possible without pulling aggro. And when you're tanking, you want to generate as much threat as possible. But healing is NOT about healing as much damage as possible! It's about making sure no one dies.

So after Gruul shatters the raid, if the main tank has taken 1000 damage and some rogue took 6000 damage, you still heal the main tank. That's because the main tank is still the most likely person to die in the next 5 seconds. You can top off off the rest of the raid with HoTs and chain heal after you're certain the tank is in good shape.

In contrast, on a fight like Magtheradon you really do want more of the healers to top off the raid immediately after a shadow bolt volley, since random raid members are the most likely to die from infernal spawns or future volleys.

Being a good healer is in large part about knowing the fight dynamics and understanding who is most at risk. Being a great healer requires a good understand of how everyone ELSE in the raid heals though. The optimal person to heal is whomever is most likely to die that isn't already receiving sufficient heals, and you'll never know who that is unless you have a sense of how the other healers in the raid heal. (As an aside, I had to totally change my healing system when I changed guilds pre-TBC, because the healers in my guild just did things different. The ranks of heals and ratio of instant to HoT casts that worked for one guild did not work for the other.)

So while all that stuff about using the right consumables is great, that will just turn into overhealing unless they know how to decide who to heal, and with which heal.