Fondren

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>

The auction house is my favorite form of PvP.

 

LucidityAxel

This is far too long.

Most people will remember about three things from any sort of presentation. Pick those three things and put them in this public post. Leave out everything else.

Handle everything else by individual followup on the raid.

 

Negative

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.

 

dest

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.

 

Lilboo

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.

 

• Chicken

Just a key point in general, know your healers.

It's as much as the person behind the class as it is the class itself that makes them a good choice for any healing position in your raid. It can be quite hard to get to know the healers if you yourself are always healing though; you can see a lot of overall heal style and such in players based on 5-mans, but you won't often want to do a 5-man with more than a single healer.

But some healers are far more inclined to focus on a single guy, and simply aren't the type to work on raid healing even if they're the best class suited to it, while others might have trouble staying focused on a single person, in which case regardless of their class you should probably prefer putting them on raid healing. Some are also better at reacting to certain debuffs or what-have-you going up on people than others would be.

If you know your healers you can always figure out a good way of assigning them.

 

Maskirovka

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.

 

Malan

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.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Mearis

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.

 

Whitemane

When assigning healing it's important to know, for each encounter, what kind of damage are we going to take and what targets are going to take it. Is it going to be burst/spike or not? Is the raid going to take damage? And how much damage are each category. Know that aspect of the encounters intimately.

Maskirovka brings up a good point though, but don't run without assignments for tanks. It'll lead to catastrophic results as most people are worried the tank dies and you'll end up with too many people healing him. Or alternatively too many people will assume the tank is going to be alright since other people are healing him and then he dies. Always assign healers to tanks.

 

Playered

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.

 

◊ Cowbell

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.

 

Natural

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.

 

Angerz

Trust between healers is 110% the core of good raid healing.

I tend to raid heal and obviously our pallys are on the MT. Coming into TBC we had a lot of the mindset of "handle it" when it came to healing, this lead to many a tank death as healers switched inefficiently.

If you assign healing, it is imperative that you stick to it. If my job is to heal the raid, you have to trust me to do it. If someone dies, its on me. If you switch to heal one of my targets, youve not only wasted my heal, but the tank or your assignment may die, then its on you.

If you cant trust someone to do the job, dont give it to them.

 

tedv

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.

 

Maliva

I dont completely agree with this. Yes, its important to have one of the MT healers constantly charging large heals and canceling when not needed, but to counteract spike damage its the smaller fast heals coming from multiple sources that are going to keep your MT up.

 

dukes

Everyone who has said druids should be raid healing should probably go and look at the druid healing thread (over here) and check out the conclusion. Basically, tree druids are remarkably good at keeping up 2-3 people with steady lifebloom/rejuve stacks, with the option for swiftmend. If you have more than one tree, stacking them on the same people means very little extra healing is needed and they're still free to use a small amount of time doing other things. It helps to buffer spikes, and means your tanks should always have heals going regardless of silence/whatever else is going on.

If you have druids raid healing while things like Chain Heal are going off, a lot of it is likely to be wasted.

I would go with:

Priests keeping their own group alive if needed along with keeping an assigned person (MT/OT) up. Inspiration is winnar.

Paladins split between raid healing and MT healing. One per MT/OT works fine (holy light is really nice for soaking up big spikes). If you find you lack raid healers, I'd switch paladins first rather than priests or druids (lifebloom stacks are madly efficient, and you don't want to lose inspiration on your tanks really).

Shamans raid healing, as chain heal is god.

Druids on the MT/OT's primarily, aiming to keep stacked lifebloom on 2+ people.

 

Coriolis

Being healing lead I have to say there is a fine line to draw between how rigidly you want your healers to focus on their assignments and how much cross healing you should tolerate (and with SWstats and other mods it's very easy to know exactly what your healers are doing). It is highly dependent on the fight as well, and it is up to you to figure out and make your healers heal the right way for the fight (unless you have the good fortune of having healers who can figure it out on thier own).

For example from my experience (pretty low lvl compared to most EJ posters) on something like let's say when mag breaks out, since there are usually only 2-3 people assigned to the MT when he breaks out it is critical that those 2-3 healers focus on the tank and preheal (before he even breaks out), ignoring everything else around them. As he's breaking out he usually has no demo/tclap on him, and the tank can take very high spiky damage. On the flip side now that we're doing lurker rigid assignments are not nearly as useful, I try to make 2-3 healers stick almost entirely to the tank, rest on tank/raid duty but since the fight can be a bit random (i.e. what if those 3 healers got geisered) people need to be aware and prioritize their healing well. Thankfully lurker's damage is tame enough that a tank should be able to survive with a minimum of prehealing.

Also do know the strengths of your healing classes. You make a big fuss over PoM in your post but don't even mention earthshield which over time will build up much more healing threat for the tank and needs to be kept up by a shaman. Also someone before mentioned that shamans make the best raid healers because they have the fastest spells and pallies are the best MT healers - uh, what? If a shaman can chain heal he is a very efficient raid healer, if he can't (because of spread out ppl) he is the worst class-wise. We have LHW which is equivalent to flash heal (i.e. fast, bad efficiency). and HW which is equivalent to gheal, with the added twist that you need to stack healing way 3 times on a target for it to really be well efficient, making it worse then gheal for the purposes of raid healing.

I don't want to get into a 3 page post over the strengths and weaknesses of the various classes but in short I tend to assign healers this way:

Priests/shaman on tanks, prehealing with their long spells (unless shaman can CH effectively i.e. on something like void reaver shamans are obviously on melee). This is mostly because of the +25% armor buff on crit which helps eliminate nasty spike damage, also makes it easier to use PoM/earthsield for added threat and the fact that the other classes make better raid healers in my mind.

Pallies - are on a mixed raid/tank duty depending on the fight, usually they are a assigned to a tank with the understanding that they can throw out heals to the raid if they feel the tank won't die with that

Druids- often asked to stack hots on the MT for burst fights, otherwise normally raid healing

 

Maliva

WINNER! You really cant stress this enough. More often than not its one of the healers cross-healing someone elses assignment when they should have stayed focused on thiers that causes a wipe. You HAVE to be able to trust your healers to cover their assignment, if they cant handle it then you'll find out quick enough and can reassign them or help them figure out why their assignemnt failed.

Also, its important for morale to not immediatley blame the healer if their assignment got blown. Before pointing fingers I strongly recommend taking a look at the logs to see what really happened. For instance, if people cant get the fack away from everyone else in Gruul's before a shatter there is absolutely nothing the healer can do. The rest of the raid needs to be set up properly and the DPS/Tanks need to be doing their jobs as well, so just make sure you know exactly what happened and why an attempt failed.

 

Natural

I agree with you here. You can get a ridiculous lifebloom stack going if you start it with trinkets as well. In most encounters where a single tank takes the most direct damage, trees should maintain the stacks one tank as well as throw HOTs to the raid.

 

Lycur

If you're looking for things to cut the whole section on PRoM can probably go - simply saying it's nice to have it up on the pull pretty much covers it.

The healing pets, non-combat healing and rez order stuff is probably useful, but not very. You could certainly be a bit more succinct here.

You already covered this, but I'll just reiterate: healing meters are completely useless. If you think somebody is not up to par breaking out combat log parses and checking what they were doing throughout the fight is pretty much the only way to get an idea of what's happening. You might also look into Recount, since it seems like the actions performed over time graphical breakdowns would be useful. Just make very sure you're not blaming healers for things that aren't their fault - it's the responsibility of DPS to keep themselves up as much as its the responsibility of their healer.

As for addons I'll echo Natural in saying get Grid: our better healers swear by it. Also, you can strike the threatmeter from that list - I've never seen a healer pull without doing something extremely stupid (NS HT 13 isn't a good idea when Vashj shoots the tank on the pull!). Beyond this KTM's handling for global threat is basically useless, get Omen if you're getting anything.

 

james

TBH, I think this is more about allocating resources than actually telling players how to play. I'm just as happy to play most fights or trash by ear, but since TBC raids run with less healers, it needs more assigning - even at trash. There are certain roles that some classes do better (obv. one being raid healing @ shamans) - and some classes do less well (group healing @ Najentus for paladins). Not a big fan of paladin MT healing @ "movement fights". And then there's individual ability and gear. Staged fights will often mean multiple roles, and this needs organising as well.

 

Mulva

I could not agree more with Dukes. Being a tree druid myself I'm typically assigned to tank healing. Even though I haven't totally re-geared/re-gemmed from my old standby balance/resto build to full tree yet it's amazing the amount of HPS (for low HPM) a tree can put out. A triple stack of lifebloom (ticking for 800), rejuv ticking for 990, the occasional swiftmend and regrowth is very effective at creating a nice 'buffer' after a spike on a tank. If a tank goes from 90% (at which time a healer may cancel a big heal for efficiencies' sake) to 20% (earthquake + crushing on Morogrim for example) that healer may be another 2+ seconds till their heal lands, meanwhile 2-3 ticks for 800 and a tick for 990/swiftmend for nearly 4k get a tank back out of trouble. On fights with multiple tanks it gets downright silly how much healing can be done. A great (albeit totally rigged) example of this is healing AR tanks on Solarian: I typically do about 325k healing, solo healing the 2 soak tanks (3xlifebloom+rejuv on each at the end), where the next closest is a CoH priest with 200k.

Another thing you may want to add is to make sure your mages are putting Amp Magic on tanks, combined with ToL Aura it makes for a big increase to healing.

 

Playered

I'ld like to point that it really depends on the player, im a far far better raid healer as a Tree and I try to keep hots up on the MT aswell as rather than having that as my primary role, dont steriotype the healers based on their class/spec, draw from their strengths.

 

Mem

We have quite a mixed bag of healers in our raid. Some are old pros, some rerollers with a lot of ambition and well, some are just pretty casual, lazy, inflexible, whatever. It is really important to know who will perform well and who won't and to balance the healing assignments accordingly. Also you got to know how flexible your folks are and that they know their priorities. If you are crosshealer, sure, look for the tank as well but first keep your folks up. On the other hand having MT healers who try to pull double duty as crosshealers is often asking for desaster as they are not able to react to spikes or let the MT drop to dangerous level.
As MT i can asure you that there are healers where I get a very bad feeling if I have to rely on them (having one bad healer on the MT might not be dangerous, having two of them is often asking for desaster). And as you might imagine if I don't have a warm fuzzy feeling about my assigned healers I will have to play a lot more defensively than normally.

A threatmeter might not be useful for assessing healing aggro but it might help in those multitank encounters like Voidreaver in order to anticipate where the next blows might land.

Also be aware how healing classes synergise with the tanking demands. Lifebloom and earthshield are pretty nice on encounters where threat is an issue, as is having a continous 25 % armor buff on your tank during heavy physical encounters.

However all these remarks are probably more aimed towards the healing leader than the general healing public. I think, the OPs comments are pretty neat and to the point. Just one addition: don't use PoM on multimob boss pulls (or earthshield or the like) like Karathress unless you have a whole bunch of hunters misdirection the targets towards your tanks. Otherwise one tank might get a nice bunch of aggro to every mob.