I'm playing the devil's advocate here too - I know exactly what you're talking about. People who have no clue whats going on have no right commenting on that shit. It is infuriating. But I do think that sometimes actually shouting for a heal, saves a life... seriously. As annoying as it is!
By the time a reasonably skilled healer hears someone yelling for a heal over vent, it should already be halfway through its casting time. It's our damn job to stare at your health bars. Yelling for heals is /facepalm material.
The only exception is when an assigned person is calling out a mob's target (Solarian, Aran, etc.) for incoming damage.
In theory, you should never need to say 'Heal X' in vent. In reality, especially if you have focused healing assignments, it can definitely save people from dying if their assigned healer is unable to heal them for some reason (lag, environmental damage, slacking, whatever).
I realize it's annoying for healers, but experience has shown that if you don't do it, people will sometimes die when they really shouldn't have.
We've generally been able to avoid that by having someone on permanent spot-duty, which is generally myself. While you're right that nothing is as perfect as planned, part of being a decent healer is being aware of potential problems. Especially during fights like Al'ar (armor melt) where things can get bad really really fast if something goes wrong, yet a 6k heal can save the day if you're actually paying attention.
You have to take it on a guild-by-guild basis on whether or not to "yell," but generally, I've found it to be nothing but slightly distracting.
I say "heal X" a lot. I'm a healer. It's partly reflexive, and perhaps it annoys the fuck out of everyone else in my raids, and if so they should tell me, but generally it arises in situations where someone is critically low on health or taking a lot of damage and either: a) They're OOR of me and I'm not seeing any incoming heals on them; b) I can heal them, but my healing alone isn't sufficient to outpace the damage and top them off (e.g. I'm spamming LHW so they don't die but that's not enough HPS, and I can't switch to a long-cast heal or they'll die before it lands); or c) healing them is the #1 priority for everyone at a given point in the fight, where the only way we could lose would be for that player to die, with other deaths being secondary.
I'll shout for heals occasionally if I expect to be taking a significant amount of damage fairly shortly (having just pulled aggro on a bunch of unsnared Tidewalker murlocs for instance), or if I'm out of health potion/ healthstone cooldowns, and/or if I'm low and don't see any heal bars on me - I use DHB, which I find pretty accurate. Certainly I've noticed that asking for healers in vent tends to make a few cast bars show up on me.
I am not a healer, nor do I personally organize our healers, but I do yell at them in raid situations when something goes wrong - not in the "holy shit you're all terrible" sense, but in the "why the hell did the tank just die there" sense. Any time something goes wrong on a boss fight, I think it's important to figure out what went wrong and why, and sometimes those situations can be avoided by someone who is not a healer noticing a tank spike low while healers are focusing on other thing.
However, that can go wrong is if there's too many people yelling "OMG HEAL ME" or whatever. I've certainly seen situations where someone has asked for a heal on vent and suddenly the tank dies because multiple healers switch over to them.
If you were a warlock in my guild and you whined at my healers on a serious fight about healing you because you lifetapped and your pots are on cooldown you'd be told to stfu in no uncertain terms, or spec affliction and be self-sufficient. If you pulled aggro on morogrim adds you should expect to run like hell to survive, not expect to tank them (unless you are specifically geared for a warlock/mage tank who is supposed to tank them, I suppose some people do this). In general dps yelling for heals either means the healers switch targets which can lead to tank deaths, or the healers are smart enough to ignore you and will probably hate your guts.
If you were a tank however, who is getting low and usually is not tanking (i.e. and ot that picks up an add or something), you can certainly say something, although usually things that hit hard enough for you to get low on will kill you before someone hears you on vent and sends a heal your way. And in any case if an OT dies 90% of the time there should be a healer assigned to him and that healer will be told to do his damn job, or if he provides good enough evidence that he can't do it alone another person assigned to it.
As for an MT dying, a simple check of the log can usually determine whether the tank sat around for too long without heals (healers wtf?), or if he got unlucky parry (Blizzard's fault), or if he forgot demo/tclap/SB (better tank or an OT needs to do it if threat is an issue).
edit: One thing I find helpful as healing lead is to have a private bind to the MT. Let's us sort out what happened when he died far more easily and provides an easy channel for me to yell about demo shout on without disturbing the whole raid. Your MT may not like this however
If you were a warlock in my guild and you whined at my healers on a serious fight about healing you because you lifetapped and your pots are on cooldown you'd be told to stfu in no uncertain terms, or spec affliction and be self-sufficient.
The "I don't heal life-taping locks" mindset is so WoW 1.4. Your warlocks are some of your best DPSers. Heal them.
The "I don't heal life-taping locks" mindset is so WoW 1.4. Your warlocks are some of your best DPSers. Heal them.
I agree with this. The only time to not heal lifetapping warlocks is between fights when no one is in danger. Before I had a lot of awareness whether damage was coming from taps or from aggro I used to ask for a reminder in party when the warlock was lifetapping. It's pretty easy to put in a macro.
Originally Posted by Aditu
I think launch is going to be a bit of a crapfest with a lot of Star Wars neckbeards
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).
In most cases it's not an issue, but take Gruul for example. If either the MT or OT dies at some point in the encounter, the person who is assigned to healing the hurtful tank will need to know who (in melee range) is next on the agro list to ensure that they're topped off before getting 1-shot.
Originally Posted by DeeNogger
Every time I bite into an oatmeal raisin cookie mistaken for a chocolate-chip an angle loses its wings. Fucking trani's of the cookie world!
I agree with this. The only time to not heal lifetapping warlocks is between fights when no one is in danger. Before I had a lot of awareness whether damage was coming from taps or from aggro I used to ask for a reminder in party when the warlock was lifetapping. It's pretty easy to put in a macro.
Back when I was specced Holy, I would actually go a step further: If I ever had a free cooldown and saw a warlock with low mana and full health, I'd give them a low rank renew as a reminder to lifetap more. The time and mana cost on my part was completely negligible and it really helped them do competitive damage on endurance fights. To this day, "renew a warlock" is still my default action when there's no pressing healing that the raid needs.
I say "heal X" a lot. I'm a healer. It's partly reflexive, and perhaps it annoys the fuck out of everyone else in my raids, and if so they should tell me, but generally it arises in situations where someone is critically low on health or taking a lot of damage and either: a) They're OOR of me and I'm not seeing any incoming heals on them; b) I can heal them, but my healing alone isn't sufficient to outpace the damage and top them off (e.g. I'm spamming LHW so they don't die but that's not enough HPS, and I can't switch to a long-cast heal or they'll die before it lands); or c) healing them is the #1 priority for everyone at a given point in the fight, where the only way we could lose would be for that player to die, with other deaths being secondary.
That is entirely different though.
I dont mind when a healer says "heal X" 'cause it usually means "Help me heal X" or something to that effect as you stated. Its basic healer communication.
Spikes happen, interrupts happen, shit happens. A lot of fights are fluid and sometimes things need a quick change or adjustment.
The "HEAL SOANDSO" is only really annoying when its DPS_01 and you as a healer know that Soandso got spiked and there are already heals channeling on him. It's just a very "No Shit, Sherlock" moment to me when someone yells HEAL! "Oh really, Thats what my mana is for? Healing people? Jesus, glad you were here to tell me that" is all that goes through my head. I spend a lot of time on my interface to make sure I receive information in the best possible way, it isnt often that some needs a heal and it gets by me.
I am not a healer, nor do I personally organize our healers, but I do yell at them in raid situations when something goes wrong - not in the "holy shit you're all terrible" sense,
I take great joy in telling our paladins they're terrible when the MT dies.
Yelling "dps more" at poeple who yell "heal me" is also one of my highlights of raiding.
Back when I was specced Holy, I would actually go a step further: If I ever had a free cooldown and saw a warlock with low mana and full health, I'd give them a low rank renew as a reminder to lifetap more. The time and mana cost on my part was completely negligible and it really helped them do competitive damage on endurance fights. To this day, "renew a warlock" is still my default action when there's no pressing healing that the raid needs.
Renewing a warlock is so easy, right after you are forced to let a heal go through that doesn't proc clearcasting, almost always automatically renew my favorite warlock then go back to cast cancelling until one lands again.
Being a healer is way too much fun, letting select people die in the raid also brings great pleasure to me.
Most of the time when I or another officer in my guild yells to "Heal X!" it's when they get very low health and they shouldn't. Obviously it's not going to help if nobody is healing him already, but what it does do is provide a wake-up call for the healers. If we yell something, they generally look, go "oh shit he got really low", and pay attention to damage from that particular source a bit more. The other time we yell is if the tank is consistantly hanging below 100% health, usually that's more along the lines of "Wow, stop letting the tank spike so low, play better please" than actually yelling to heal him though.
While it doesn't deal specifically with raids, when I'm on my Priest in a 5-man or similar (Karazhan), I always tell the Warlocks "Life Tap all you want - I got you" both to improve the speed of the run and to test the limits of my regen. A favorite game of mine is too see how little water I can drink in a given run.
I agree with this. The only time to not heal lifetapping warlocks is between fights when no one is in danger. Before I had a lot of awareness whether damage was coming from taps or from aggro I used to ask for a reminder in party when the warlock was lifetapping. It's pretty easy to put in a macro.
I certainly WILL heal them, when I feel that I can do so safely (there is always an unofficial healing competition going on and ignoring your assigned target and healing a lifetapping lock is by far the easiest way to win it). If you didn't notice in my previous post I specified a "serious" fight. Some bosses require single-mindedly prehealing tanks to stop crazy burst dps from leading to a dead tank (I remember gurgthock posting a combat log of morogrim doing 23K damage over 1.7 secs IIRC) and at that time I don't want people being distracted. If they aren't getting a heal there is usually a reason for it, and whining on vent can only be dangerous and annoying. Thankfully we personally have no issues of this kind as our warlocks tend to do top dps without being any burden to the healers.
There is a huge difference between lifetapping on a kara run when a healer can do that run half asleep and still be perfectly fine and on your progression night on a new boss. If you find yourself drinking water in kara more then 3 times per clear, something is wrong :P.
There is a huge difference between lifetapping on a kara run when a healer can do that run half asleep and still be perfectly fine and on your progression night on a new boss.
Haha, I'm the exact opposite! When I'm spotting away during Lurker or Leo or Morogrim, I prefer them to tap THEN so that I can top everyone and then return to watching. I'm a horrible, horrible sort of perfectionist that gets annoyed when ONE lifebar goes down 5%. Like a picture frame that's hanging just slightly crooked. I have much more fun re-arranging the whole gallery than playing mini-whack-a-mole.
Slightly OT - I think Priests make excellent raid leaders due to Mind Vision.
I abuse MV, I always know what my raid members are doing, whos afk, whos lagging behind, who takes how long to "move"..etc.
Coming back to topic.
1) I insist all my healers to get the certain add-ons that show range and show incoming-aggro.
2) I don't like to make healing too strict. I assign healers for MT healing (all paladins), and I trust the rest of the healers to be able to react situations (unless of course the encounter demands assignment).
3) I absolutely despise anyone who calls for "heal x", or even worse.. "heal me". First of all, I don't know who the hell "me" is.
Secondly, I can't for the life of me remember reacting to a "heal x" call - because by the time someone reacts to that call ; either the person is already dead or is already safe.
4) Lately I've started to incline towards the "healing is an art" sentiment. You see, I know healers who speak hardly any english, dont read strategy guides, and sometimes even use default UI - yet they make excellent healers when I view their performance on SWStats. In fact, I am going to throw a stereotype... DPS classes who re-roll healers tend to be very good at it compared to original healers. Because as a DPS class, you know what the game looked like from the "other side".
In fact, I am going to throw a stereotype... DPS classes who re-roll healers tend to be very good at it compared to original healers. Because as a DPS class, you know what the game looked like from the "other side".
Same goes for other rerolls. In my experience, people who have played multiple sides of the trinity have a better understanding of the game and generally play their current role better as a result, whether you are tanking, healing, or dpsing.
I'm just going to clarify - random_DPS_class_X yelling "heal me!" on vent is pretty much always the wrong thing to do. As a non-healing raid leader, however, I don't think telling the healers that a particular tank spiked dangerously low (and perhaps a paladin might want to LOH, for instance) or that a certain person needs extra attention (someone with Shadow of Death in the raid on Gorefiend) is at all out of line, and if my healers take offense to it, so be it.
Same goes for other rerolls. In my experience, people who have played multiple sides of the trinity have a better understanding of the game and generally play their current role better as a result, whether you are tanking, healing, or dpsing.
Completely agree with that. I cringe to think about how I treated healers when I played my warlock. I didn't bother to understand what they were doing and the things they had to deal with. I certainly think about things differently now that I play a priest.
This is an interesting thread, mainly because of my personal experiences with the main topic coming up lately, which being the "heal me" thing. I was a raid member as a mage on my first server for a long time before becoming raid leader. I pretty much left healing assignments and such to the officers who were healer. Back then we were pretty bad at organizing groups. It was the bad thing of 8 self sufficient 5 mans, and by the time I got raid leadership people were too set in their ways to change much.
Then me and some others moved to a new server. Rerolled warrior and ended up tanking everything through MC, ZG and AQ20. Healing responsiblities were chosen by the guild leader (I was the raid leader). We had both come from the original server. We had been close for a long time, friends for over a year. We did MC with another guild and their tank had a habit of yelling heal me constantly. My friend and GL was first mad about it but then apparently got used to it, or so he said.
Fast forward 3-4 months. We had just finished ZG but left the fish boss for last after some people left. Until this point I had never in my 5+ months of tanking had told anyone to heal me. Fight goes on and I'm at 20% after a knockup (that fish guy hit pretty hard) and then 3-4 seconds later still no heals. Parry/shield block as my health continues to drop. 2-3 seconds later and still no heals. I finally for the first time in my WoW life call out on vent "I need heals" They don't come, we wipe, end of raid. Little did I know that was to be my last night of raiding on that server.
After raid back in town/etc, officer chat opens up with attacks from the guild leader on me about my comment. About how I didn't respect the healers or him (after always being very protective of healers in my raids and been supportive of them getting offspec pieces and not restricting all dps gear to dps'ers) He really laid into me and it just shocked me. How that someone who I had known for over a year and thought I was friends with would rip me for one comment in the heat of battle. Things had been building for me personally for a while in that I was favoring the game over real life, and that to me really drove the nail into that coffin. Later that night my wife and I decided to leave the game until our lives were ready to handle playing again, and even though we play again now we don't raid and don't plan to beyond Kara. (and I'm never leading raids again)
So while in general I agree with the constant "heal me" is very annoying and tiresome. I mean do raid leaders yell "dps the boss!" well maybe when the raid is dying and the boss is at 5%, but thats just natural. So too is in the heat of the moment when a tank can go heal me. (I think tanks can understand being 2 shot gibbed by a boss, yeah you just bought the bad RNG, but most frustrating is when you're low, you blow every pot/hs/trinket you can and in the end the heals still don't reach you)
I think there has to be a line of respect between the triumvirate of roles in the game, and in the end that comes down to trust and respect of the players involved. My experiences from that night showed me that my GL didn't trust and respect me, and when I decided to come back to the game that knowledge was why I've never looked back about going back to my old guild.
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.
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).
In line with these two items:
All the rules the original poster has listed are good. This is basically all the knowledge a raid healer should know. Unfortunately, they are all blatantly obvious or redundant. Furthermore, all of these "rules" need to be priorities, not absolute law. If your healers don't know most/all of this information already, they don't have a fully functioning brain.
You should try to trim out the things that are terribly obvious, and endorse more of a "just win the best way you know how" attitude. If there is a unique strategy to a fight, make sure everybody knows to do what they're told, when they're told, and leave the details to them. Micromanaging healers will do more harm than good.
This is basically all the knowledge a raid healer should know. Unfortunately, they are all blatantly obvious or redundant.
If there's one thing I've learned in recent months of guild/raid leadership, it's that assuming something is blatantly obvious or redundant is probably the biggest mistake you can make. A lot of raiders, especially if you're in a somewhat lower end guild, are unbelievably dense and unlikely to think outside of their own private bubble.
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").
I have found an addon called "GridManaBars" in WowAceUpdater. This works very fine for me.
So there is no need for sRaidFrames anymore.
07/11/07, 1:13 PM
Similar Threads
