Raid Leadership: Healer Lead - Page 2

Maliva · 07/10/07, 11:22 AM

Originally Posted by Fondren

Remember that mana efficiency depends on using big slow heals instead of lots of fast ones.

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 · 07/10/07, 11:23 AM

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 · 07/10/07, 11:35 AM

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 · 07/10/07, 11:36 AM

Originally Posted by Angerz

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

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.

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 · 07/10/07, 11:37 AM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 07/10/07, 11:38 AM

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 · 07/10/07, 11:41 AM

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 · 07/10/07, 11:45 AM

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 · 07/10/07, 11:53 AM

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 · 07/10/07, 12:02 PM

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.

Jrix · 07/10/07, 12:03 PM

Rigid assignments (and to a lesser extent, assignments) generally lead to the psychological burden of healers feeling no responsibility of those outside their assignments dying; in addition to creating some tunnel vision as stated above.

Regarding pets - honestly.. remove it. In any rare fight in which you'd actually designate the pet as an off tank, I seriously doubt healers are going to ignore it regardless of this information.

Also, I'd recommend talking about the /focus command and suggesting that all healers use it to some extent. In addition, suggesting that they alter their UI to incorporate health deficits.

It might also be a good place to suggest macros and addons beyond the little you stated.

Also try and make it look like you're not just talking to priests

And finally 20stam/30spirit food mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
wtf, it feels left out

drowsy · 07/10/07, 12:21 PM

Do most groups use dorje, forecast, or things like that to monitor tank healing in fight? I'm not seeing them much when I watch videos of boss kills, but they've been very informative for us. We had a problem a while back with heals syncing up too much such that spike fights became dangerous, especially on nights when short paladins, and it let us know when to cancel if something is about to land, as well as getting our combined heals to be less spiky.

Fondren · 07/10/07, 12:21 PM

Excellent feedback, y'all. Thanks.

In retrospect, I agree. It is overlong. (I didn't have time to write a short one). I'll be cutting a lot of the fluff to make room for your suggestions.

You are correct: this is written primarily for the benefit of new healers. We've got good habits in the current team and it's my intention to formalize those habits as the team grows and changes.

I absolutely agree with the comment about healing feedback coming from the heal lead (and perhaps peer healers). Demands and orders from pure DPS players is rarely constructive. I've also made a point of keeping non-healers out of our chat channel so we can vent in private when necessary.

I've found that there are many different ways to approach a certain healing problem. You can debate the best approach until you're blue in the face, but the bottom line is that as leader you must select and implement a SINGLE VISION. An 80% effective solution executed well is better than an over-engineered 100% solution poorly executed.

cheebamonkey · 07/10/07, 1:17 PM

Just to comment briefly on how to lead healers. Healing is it's own meta game set inside of wow that is hugely different from DPS or Tanking. The difference lies in the fact that if someone, anyone dies in a raid the blame will mostly fall onto the healers as a whole as compared to tanks where if one loses aggro it's that one tanks fault and dps where the meter determines each players individual performance. It is in that sense that healers need to work as a team much more so then any other subgroup of a raid. This is only something that can be learned over time and from experience of healing with each other. As a leader you can assist in making the process seem less painful by assigning healers to specific jobs but as some have mentioned assigning things to rigorously and people don't help each other out, assign things too loosely and there isn't enough focus. This is why at times I feel like a broken record when one pull I'll yell at the healers for not focusing enough on the MT and the next pull I'll have to encourage them to cross heal when they see people in trouble. I think the real key here though is discovering the best way for each healer to hold that balance. While I was still a healer (Switched to shadow recently) that meant that if i was assigned to heal a Tank and I saw someone in trouble I would either sheild/PoM/renew the tank and then toss some direct heals on the person in trouble or shield/Pom/renew the person in trouble and quickly go back to the Tank. The point being that my job wasn't to top off the person in trouble, but just to keep them alive long enough to ensure the person who's job it was had time to get to them. Too often healers pick a target and heal the till they are topped off and in doing so forget to heal their assigned target.

Also as far as raids go and general setup I've always stuck to putting a pally and a druid on the MT for every fight. The combination of constant Hots and FoL plus the ability of both to put up instant heals when needed really helps with burst damage. For the 3rd healer if needed usually a priest given PoM, PWS and Inspiration or a shaman for Ancestral Healing. Outside of this I've found Shaman and Priests to be the best spot healers due to their group heals and their fast heals. Then I just fill the rest of the spots with pallies since they are solid in all healing aspects and their buffs are extreamly powerful. Generally I like to run with 4 pallies, 1 Druid, 1 Shaman, 1 Priest healing bringing in an extra of either Druid, Shaman or Priest to fill a 9th slot if warranted for the fight. Of course we rarely have this setup due to lack of pallies but it would be ideal.

As for a tool for gauging how well healers are doing I would use WWS. It allows you to look at how focussed your healers were as well as numerous other aspects to their individual style of healing.

Deris · 07/10/07, 1:27 PM

I think at first during TBC, we needed assignments pointed out, and time to figure out who goes where, espescially with the new Paladin Class (Horde) to deal with. As time went on, we went from having a "heal lead" to being mysteriously silent in the healer channel, and most people knew exactly what to do for what fight. The most coordination we do now is for Vashj (positions), Naj'entus (location), etc - alot of it comes down to "Where do they stand" more than "Who do they heal.".

Outside of positioning, everything else takes care of itself for the most part. Paladins get put on the MT. Shamans Raid Heal. Priests fill in whatever role is lacking, and Trees HOT depending on the fight (sometimes only the MT, other times more of a functional role of HOTing melee, etc.).

Healing - being so small, really will begin to manage itself assuming the healers all have played together for a while. On any given fight I think someone could die in basically any capacity, with minimal communication needed for others to take up their role.

Once your healing has that type of teamwork going, and begins chugging consumables like there is no tomorrow - you'll be blaming DPS for everything