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

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.

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.

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.

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

In your original post, I would separate administrative things like which chat channels and which potions from the methodology of healing. They are separate topics. It would also shorten the posts. While brevity may not be important right now, I'm sure you'll add information later. This could make the posts unwieldy if you accumulate several different types of information in the same posting.

A main difference between raid healing and raid DPS is that healing is competitive while DPS is not. I'm not talking about players' interpretation of damage meters after the fact. I mean the act of healing a raid tank is a competition with the other players healing the raid tank. Think about what happens if someone's Steady Shot lands right before your Fireball versus what happens if someone's Flash of Light lands right before your healing Touch. If you win, your heal lands and is mostly useful. If you lose, your heal misses and you lose all that mana you just spent, not to mention that your target gets nothing from it except a warm feeling that you care. What has to happen, oddly, is that players have to overcome the competitive mentality (like you're saying in reference to meters) and try to accomplish something cooperatively with the other players. Ideally, no one's mana would be wasted but there's no way to avoid some overheal.

I was a raiding druid for 2 years, and during that time I was always trying to get my overheal down through better timing and spell selection. Nonhealers (with nonhealer alts!) always contended that as long as no one died, overheal wasn't important but I don't believe that's true. One reason is just my personal aversion to using mana for no result (meaning I should have cast on someone else) and another is my belief that your healing performance should be future proof. You may not go OOM on this fight but you don't know what mana demands will be like later on.

Healing is 60% art and 40% science. You can understand every mechanic in the game and still only be an average healer. Understanding the strengths and weakness of each healing class is important, however even more important is understanding what your particular healers are excel at. For example, I know that I am excellent at raid healing (Kazzak, Void Reaver, etc) and solo healing targets (Priest tank on FLK, etc). I also know that I am weaker on fights that require mass healing on the MT from multiple healers. I would ask your healers what they think they are good at and work from there.

I also agree with having the healer lead doing all the bitching to the healers if possible. Whenever I hear DPS cry about healing I want to stab people. Try to be as specific as possible when talking about what went wrong with healing. I personally hate hearing "healing sucked" and thats it. Most of the time healers will know when and how they fucked up, so give it an attempt our two before giving them a tongue lashing.

Maybe going a little OT here but I really like where healing has headed in TBC. Fights are more dynamic, multiple people tanking damage. It gives me the feel that if I slack off people are gonna die. This is a double edged sword as your healers all have to be on the ball now.

I think really the only reason overheal is bad is if one of the following occur:

1) you run out of mana before the fight is over
2) you don't/won't have spare mana in event of an emergency (ie another healer dying)
3) other assigned targets are dying while you are overhealing someone else

Related to this, it's worth noting that not all deaths are the fault of healers. For example, the following wipe situation is not as rare as you might think (although hopefully not that common for you either).

1) Random DPS guy does something stupid to take damage like pull aggro
2) A couple healers try to keep him alive
3) The healers waste a ton of mana and/or the main tank gets low on heals
4) Tank dies from lack of heals

Now the ideal situation would be for one healer to help out the random DPS guy while he bandages himself and the other healer to stay on the tank. If you have 3 healers on the tank, the ideal number of healers to heal the unanticipated collateral damage in step 2 is probably 1. 0 is bad because he'll die, but 2 and 3 are worse because the tank dies instead, wiping the whole raid. It's challenging to coordinate the unexpected but necessary heals.

But the real fault occurs in step 1, when the DPS guy screws up, and he wasn't even the person who died first.

Wait, you want DPS to take the blame for something?! Thats unheard of!

Agreed.

I don't give anybody a tongue lashing when we wipe due to healer error (which, fortunately, is rare). But I will if somebody takes it casually and doesn't try to learn from it.

I remember when I led as a healer on Quigon I yelled at the warriors a lot.
Now as a warrior I yell at the healers a lot. Not really on topic, but kinda amusing.

At no point in any bossfights should healers even get close to get aggro so no reason to have aggro meters.

Only at the pulling it would be a little more interesting but hey... a PoM can manage that (and PoM counts as a selfheal, right? meaning healing aggro for the tank).

This. Nothing pisses me off more than a tank screaming "WHERE THE FUCK WAS THE HEALING?!"

Having the big warning in the middle of your screen with the stupid sound "Tank xyz has died!" is more than enough as a insult - "You failed to heal the tank, congratulations". If someone begins to comment how much the healing sucks, that just makes it worse. Much worse.

Better to address the issue than wipe again in blissful ignorance right?
I mean yelling like a moron is one thing - but you should always find out why you wiped, cause tanks shouldn't ever just straight up die, unless their gear choice is terrible.

Well obviously, first thing after a wipe because of the tank died should be a checkup.

1) Did his healers crossheal?
2) Did he get crushed an obscene amount of times?
3) Does he need more healing? (How hard is the mob hitting?)


All of this should happen with some decency though, not mindless screaming and shouting - not to mention it should be done by people that are in "charge" of healing. I rather listen to the person assigning the healing than to the MT screaming he needs more healing - if you get what I mean.

You got me there - I've had very bad experience with tanks shouting for heals, it just sends shivers down my spine.

I don't mind people with half an idea about healing commenting about it, but that's rather the exception than the norm - usually the tank only sees two big legs and his combat log, often doesn't know half of whats going on with the healers. Not that thats an excuse, very rarely should there not be a steady stream of incoming heals to the tank.

In my opinion there are two different ways to lead healers :

- If you are a healer, the work is almost done because you normally know (if you're a good leader) how does Pallys, Chamans, Priest and Druids works. Then you may compose with different kind of healing onto do the best thing and estimate the amount of damages that can take a tank nor the raid in some fights (Morogrim e.g.). There are some advantages to be leaded by a healer :

1. Excellent overview of a fight
2. Skill to see and give some indication about the persons who needs to be healed in a hurry.

- If you are a DPS or a tank, you have to make the effort to play any day, for a full timer e.g. a healer class, to correctly understand it. Just assign "Pally Pally Druid Priest" on a tank and not telling them an overview of their healing strategy may be a big mistake.

Some advantages too :

1. The overview that a DPS may have has real felxibility properties, i think 2-3s less DPS because looking at what happening in raid would not wipe the raid.
2. Not focused as much as an healer on Raid Frames. Who cares exactly the damages you are doing on a boss?

You say that healing strategies are a teamwork. Yeah for sure, but entire raids are teamworks, ain't they? The thing to do to not have some mistakes due by healing is to focus on assigns and if a healer must overcross his initial work, he must communicate it asap. Even if the tank dodges serious damages, the precasting of healers may not be interrupted because of crushes and such other thing (e.g. Morogrim again).

Threat meters aren't exclusively useful for figuring out when you get aggro, in some fights they're also very useful to figure out who is likely to get aggro next.

Sure, it's a fairly small amount of fights, and in some cases the meters aren't entirely accurate for this, but it's still nice to know whether Void Reaver will go for Jimmyshieldblock or Rawrbear soon or not.

I also made use of KTM in it's way to increase my survivability on some of the more annoying aggro clearing trash on my Priest in the AQ days, while I could fairly easily have done it without it, it basically helped me get a clear idea how things worked and whether it was a good idea to throw out that extra Renew to patch up that DPS guy over there or not.

I think it really depends how this is done. The first thing I do after I die is to check my combat log/eavesdrop in order to check how incoming damage and incoming heals synced. Sometimes the tank dies simply because there was no heal for 4-6 seconds (even on fights that heavily focus the damage on the MT) Sometimes I as tank failed. Sometimes you just get hit like a truck due to the stupid parry/attackspeed increase mechanic. If you don't analyse you are bound to repeat your mistakes. In my old pre BC raid there was very few coordination efforts going on between the tanks and our healers, both prefering to keep to themselves which was really frustrating when raidleading on bosses like Twins and Patch. Or to keep it short: information is ammunition.

As a healer LEAD (or any raid leading type position), I wouldn't use grid, I'd use sRaidFrames. sRaid supports exact mana levels at a glance, not the summarisation of Grid. (so you can see instantly the amount of mana each person in the raid has, not down the line a brief representation meaning "Low mana").

That will let you judge at any moment who's being worked harder or perhaps not healing appropriately (if you know they shouldn't be going oom so soon, etc). That'll let you make on the fly healing adjustments (so and so needs help - you switch over to heal him/her and you take his place, should be easy. Get an innervate on X).

Also going to agree with Mem on actually analyzing what happened and taking steps to change it. Different ranks of heals needing to go out, different style of healing altogether, shifting people around depending on jobs. Which classes have their strongpoints has already been covered.

I've played a serious DPS lead (rogue), Healer lead (Paladin), and briefly tanking lead in various spots. This gives me a good perception of what may be happening at any time with specific healing (dps'er dead, needs a bres/buffs, certain healers briefly out of commission. swapping groups for totem / heroism rotations). As long as you or whoever is leading the healing is very aware of what's happening at any given moment in a raid on all fronts and how that can affect the classes who heal, you'll be able to make proper adjustments as necessary.

Encouraging your healers to be equally vocal and communicative with whatever issues will definitely help too!

Coordinating healers is fairly easy once you get used to working together, but what they do is very fight dependant.

On Najentus for instance, its pretty much 2pal/1dru for MT and each other healer gets assigned a single group to heal. Originally we had a druid on a group, but he just couldnt get them all raised to high hp fast enough to prevent a death if they got targeted by the spike after a bubble burst.

On akama, 1 person heals each side tank, the rest heal groups/defender tank.

Basically, you have to look at each fight on an individual basis, decide what healing needs to be done, and assign healers to the job they are best at. While paladins are typically MT healers, at times they can be more useful other places, and the same applies for each class.

Just stress the importance of following assignments and then allow the healers to learn how to cover each other if a spike occurs. That part really can't be taught, it just needs to happen.

Good luck, raid leading is always a challenge, but, it comes with benefits, like getting to choose what we raid