Incoherence

I'll make a football (American football, sorry) analogy: your healers are your offensive line. Some people really like knocking a defensive lineman flat on his back. Others like being on the team, but given the choice would really rather be the quarterback (the MT) or a back/receiver (the DPS). The offensive line isn't exactly glamorous; how many kids do you know that have a poster of their favorite team's left tackle on their wall? And, like raid healing, no one really notices the offensive line until they screw up and the quarterback gets sacked (the tank dies).

I happen to like this analogy, although people look at me funny when I start explaining it.

 

sovelis41

One thing that is extremely important, and our biggest problem when I took over raid leading about 6 months ago, is communication. You need communication from healer to healer, tanks to healers, and healers to tanks. Just this past week we wiped on mother out of nowhere simply because we got a bit lazy and 3 of the MT healers were part of their own fatal attraction. No one paid attention to the raid warnings or spoke up that they were ported and simply no heals went out, leading to tank death.

Stress to your healers that if they are for whatever reason unable to heal the tank that they communicate that to their assigned targets so that other healers can cover or they can lean on cooldowns until that healer is back in action. When you wipe use your mod of choice (I suggest recount coupled with GrimReaper) to debug the situation then question your healers about what it looked like from their end. More often than not they will be more receptive and honest about what happened. If you jump down their throats immediately it will put them on the defensive and likely throw them off of their game a bit (different players respond differently but it's something to keep in mind).

After a little while you will get a good feel for each fight and how the raid healing should go, and it will be easy to tell who is slacking or where weak points are in certain assignments and you can adjust accordingly. You will also find that some people are just really good at certain aspects of certain fights (the different types of healers, as mentioned above), and you can utilize that to your advantage.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Dassem

I recommend getting GrimReaper. It's great tool when figuring out if a tank died because of no heals or did he just get smacked too hard. It's available on wowaceupdater atleast.

 

Boneitis

You really need to know what each person is good at doing and bad at doing while at the same time not putting them into a position their class is weak at.

I rarely ever leave healing assignments up in the air and that always gives better results than just winging it. One fight I do not assign healers on is mother sharaz, simply because of the 3 port mt healer issue. Everyone is a MT healer / group healer to some degree.

It's the basic rule of advanced raiding: listen to your players and have good raid communication. Work with your raid to improve your raid. Find out what is preventing them from doing their job well and remedy the situation.

As for healers getting burnt out, I just never stop recruiting healers anymore. We had the same 6 healers (plus 1-2 random people) from KZ to Illidan. There was very little turnover in our raid at all, and when it did happen we luckily had someone to step in, even as a new main tank. Then 2.4 launched and suddenly we didn't have enough healers, all of our paladins went part time for about a month and one of our two resto shamans quit with no warning. Meaning we couldn't do much on Kalecgos. Obviously the raid was angry about stalled progression but we just kept getting new healers and gearing them up and now we're past all that with roughly 12-14 potential healers with more on the way.

Now I just recruit any new healers that seem promising and we gear them up on our non Sunwell days. I've started doing the same with DPS and tanks as well, since you really can't predict turnover. I think the biggest hurdle is convincing the raid that running a raid specifically to gear up new people, even on "progression" days, is a good idea.

 

Mags

Here are my tips of being the healing leader:

Organizing assignments

1) Pen and paper are your friend

It never hurts to write down your healing assignments so you can refer to them later. This is for a couple of reasons: if someone misses their assignment you can refer to it later. It's also a reference tool - the next time you do a particular fight, you'll know which healers you assigned to do, and which roles you assigned classes. After a while you'll start remembering more and more of the assignments in your head, and you'll have to refer to your notes less often.

2) Assign roles early

There is nothing that the rest of the raid hates more than having to wait for the healing assignments to be done when everyone else is ready to go. I usually hand out on the assignments while we're clearing the trash before a boss, then do a quick "everyone know what their role is?" before the pull. Any specific questions can be resolved well in advance of the boss fight.

3) Type out assignments

Most guilds have a healer channel all healers are expected to be in. If your guild doesn't, create one. Typing out assignments means that there is a record of what the assignment was - if someone wasn't there at exact moment they were handed out, they can scroll up to check the assignments. There is a record that is a slightly more permanent than a vent conversation.

My personal preference is not to use macros. My theory is that macros are easy to ignore, and if people know they can ask you to "spam the macro again" they're more likely to pay less attention when you hand out the assignments the first time. I take the time to type out the assignments in as much detail as i think is needed, and in return I expect the healers to pay attention to those assignments so I don't have to repeat them endlessly. I usually give a heads up like "healing assignments incoming" to prompt the healers pay attention to the heal channel for the next couple of minutes.

Evaluating players

Meters like WWS and Recount are an invaluable tool for evaluating performance, but analyzing them does require a degree of care when it comes to healers. There is a wealth of information, and raw healing numbers by themselves are often the least informative statistic. Healing numbers are affected by class (shamans will usually outheal everyone else except CoH priests on some fights), the role a particular healer is asked to play, gear, who they are grouped with (eg shadow priests) and a bunch of other factors. So what are you looking for?

Are there healing numbers significantly different from members of their own class? If there are players who consistently score lower than other players of the same class with similar assignments, further investigation is required. Is it gear, bad spell choice, inadequate consumables, laziness or what?

What spells do your healers use? For example, priests with consistently high Flash Heal usage might be a cause for concern.

Where are they getting their mana from? The buffs and debuffs section of WWS can a gold mine of information. You can also check through individual combat logs for thorough micro-analysis.

I recommend a combination of both in-game tools (like Recount) for on the spot analysis, and WWS for in-depth analysis after the fact.

There are also things to look for in-game. Are they keeping their tank alive? Are they keeping themselves alive? These are the two most crucial factors for a healer. Do they pay attention and ask intelligent questions? Do they cross-heal strategically and effectively (in some fights its a good thing, in others it isn't). Are they dispelling quickly?

Evaluating strategy

One of the hardest thing to do on a new boss I think is to determine whether your healing strategy is flawed and needs to be changed, or whether its merely execution issues causing you problems. You have to find a balance between giving a strategy enough time to prove itself a success or failure, and not rigidly sticking to a strat that's failing when changing things around might generate a better result.

If you love researching fights and devising strategies, you probably have the right mindset to be a healing leader. Frequently the job is mundane. The rewards come when you figure out to keep everyone alive on Brutallus with 7 healers, or M'uru with just 6.

As far as burn-out goes, my suggestion would be to over-recruit a little so that you can give healers time off. Even if you love healing, doing it night after night for months on end can wear you down. Especially since healers generally have to pay full attention for the entire night (including all the repetitive trash pulls). Giving people part of the night off or even full nights off can give them a chance to recharge the batteries for when you really need them.

 

Auzara

I really like what Mag had to say and I hope I can add something to this discussion. Most of the same skills are needing for healing organization as in any other any organizational position in a raid. What I think really makes healing organization different from dps organization is the co-operation required.

For the most part, dps does the same things regardless of what their peers are doing. Sure you can argue semantics regarding heroisms and synergys, but in the end it's more of an individual effort.

Healing is a team effort. You have to react to what your peers (healers, tanks and dps) are doing in addition to what the encounter provides. A smart healing organizer will familiarize themselves with the roles each member is playing in the team. I generally break them down to Big Honking healer, Stabilization healer and AOE healer. Your healers probably already have preferred roles.

Big Honking Healer - Overheals a lot, casts their max rank Greater Heal or Holy light and rarely lets a tank they are assigned to heal die.

Stabilization Healer - Generally casts HoTs, flash of light, flash heal or maybe even healing wave, flits from tank to tank giving them little boosts until Big Honking healer tops them off.

AOE Healer - This person casts lifebloom, chain heal, circle of healing, or prayer of healing constantly. They are probably the most preoccupied with the healing meters too.

Most healers settle into one of these 3 roles naturally and the best ones can be coaxed into playing all of them. If I were new to a team, I'd spend the first raid watching them, ask them to simply perform the role they played last raid and watch the spells they cast and the timing they have. While you are getting used to them try and put them in assignments that complement their preferred style. When you pair healers for a single target, pair a BHH with an SH and I'm sure you can figure out what to do with an AOE healer.

Once you have a feel for them, pull them out of their comfort zones one at a time and help them grow. There is no reason a Shaman can't MT heal. It may not be the best use for them on a progression night, but make them do it at least once so if a night comes up where you need them to single target heal, they know what to do. Your team will be most successful if all members of it are flexible and confident.

Once you've gotten to know your team you move on to analyzing healing strategies and evaluating healers. When creating a healing strategy, I don't visualize the healing assignments in terms of people to heal, but rather in terms of sources of damage. I have a good feel for the incoming damage my healers are capable of healing through and I use that to determine how many healers I need to counteract each source of damage into the raid.

I believe someone else has covered the age old debate of "I need more healz" vs "Take less damage." I use WWS kills from other guilds of the same boss to determine is our dps is "taking too much damage" or if our healers need to be prepared to match that throughput. I also have a strict rule of thumb that my dps is not allowed to complain about heals unless they used a self healing tool or all of them were on cooldown. ("If you didn't have time to react to your health with an instant healing tool, why would you expect our healers to be able to do so with a spell that has a cast time?")

I won't rewrite it, but I also wrote an entry regarding how I evaluate my healers in my blog if you are interested in more of my very strong opinions.

 

Shelendil

This really needs to be highlighted. It's not just keeping your assigned green bars alive; it's about counteracting a source of damage in the encounter and neutralizing it. It naturally removes downtime and encourages cross-healing that doesn't become overlap. Thinking about it in this way also makes it easier (at least for me) to determine how much healing is needed for each assignment.

 

Emtee

The way he does our healing is prefectly fine. We have noticed the difference between a complete tyrant and someone who keeps the people he assigns and plays with in good respect. He tells them on a quiet and informative way, what they are doing wrong and gives them advice on. How to change and improve on their mistakes.

When the general tyrant type will just say "20 cursewords, you fail" without saying what the person in question is doing wrong or how to inprove it. So in the end I like the effect of the maybe somewhat softer person more. (I don't agree with him being to soft, it's all about getting the respect from your players and he has that. Others will need to use offensive languages and shouting but that's clearly because the other players have no respect for that person.)

 

Bunni

I think the thread really could have lived without that particular comment, especially since I don't have any issues with the rest of what you said. We have quite a few female players in our guild (myself included and I've done healing assignments off and on since MC) and I haven't noticed any particular issue with our being more or less "addle-brained" than the guys. Absolutely get a feel for which healers need concrete assignments and which can handle the "spot heal tank, watch warlock and raid" type duties but don't base it on gender or age please.

 

cutfang

I have to agree with Bunni, I only have one female healer that I know of but she manages to be faster than me when it comes to dispelling. It's a bit silly to make assumptions. As healing leader I've found this thread incredibly useful, especially the idea of letting healers respec for a raid or two sounds quite fun.
I usually just let the healers get on with the job, although sometimes we need healers to stay on tank. What happens is that the raid will take massive aoe damage and we'll completely ignore the tanks as we try and top the raid up.

 

Auzara

Cut, whenever I saw that happening, I would remind my healers that they need to consider who will be the NEXT person to take damage when they select their heals. Though to be honest, I haven't really had that happen since Mag's ceiling drop. Most of my healers trust each other enough to stick to their assignments.

 

sovelis41

I always refer to this as "ADD Healing" in our raids. It creeps up now and then on fights like Illidan or even Nej'entus where the tank healers all of a sudden want to heal that guy right next to them that just took some RSTS/AoE damage. Sometimes all of the MT healers think they have to and all of a sudden you have no one healing the MT. Your healers need to know that those assignments are covered and trust the assigned players will in fact heal those people up.

This can be promoted by advocating lots of active communication between healers. If you are assigned to raid heal and someone is ot of your range call it quickly and succinctly so that other healers (and the victim) know that you are unable to help. Too much communication can be a bad thing though as vent gets clogged with meaningless call outs for folks that aren't in danger. It's generally on the healers judgment as to whether or not they should speak up, but after doing an encounter a couple times you figure those things out quickly enough.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Grungo

You also want to make sure that if someone is calling out for help, you have someone designated for those situations (or someone designated to always ignore those calls and stick to the tank) or you wind up causing the very behavior you're trying to avoid: people stopping their assigned task to cover someone else's. I know that whenever I'm tanking and I hear a call for help healing someone else, I pop my avoidance trinket and get my fingers ready to hit Last Stand and/or a healthstone because I know there's a good chance a chunk of my healers are going to be otherwise distracted for a few seconds.

Now, that's not to say that you have to have roles designated so precisely that everyone knows not only their assignment, but who/what they need to cover in case of varying degrees of failure. But just make sure your healers are aware that even during calls for help, *some* people need to stick to their primary task.

 

lairpie

I think that highlights the greatest strength of priests with divine spirit: no aspirations of healing meter topping or clutch raid healing. They heal the tank, and the next fight, they heal the tank. If there's a tense situation, everyone else know they're going to heal the tank, and when there's a ton of raid damage everyone's scrambling to heal, they just heal the tank with bigger heals because they figure other people are going to heal raid damage instead of the tank.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

Deadiam

Me as a healing leader change up the Disc Priest from time to time. I mean, lets be realistic...CoH is fun and single target healing can get boring. We typically run with 3-4 Holy priest (I know its a bit high but we are having hard time recruiting healers) and only 1 Disc so a majority of time we get to be CoH.

 

tiberion02

We call those people Paladins

 

Mondays

I just recently took up the job as healing leader myself. I'm currently playing on Grim Batol (eu) our server is overpopulated and basically my guild is on the bottom of the foodchain. I really have to scavenge around to find a good healer with decent gear. I have 2 active holy paladins 3 active holy priests and 1 active resto shaman. Our gear is not topnotch but not to bad either problem is that we're focussing on BT/MH and as you can see we have a far from perfect healerteam. How can i compensate for the lack of active healers and perform well with this setup?

Apart from that when i assign healing i get almost no replies from any of the healers and we usually end up wiping due too the healers not doing what they're told. Not only that some of the healers simply do not read forums,enchant and gem their gear properly. Is it a lack of dedication and respect or do i simply fail? I've been healercl in my previous guild and i've never experienced this before so i'm quite frustrated.
Also the overhealing and the flash heal spam is freaking me out how can i tell people to change their gamingstyle in a non offending way?

 

Shakes

It depends on whether you have support from your guild/raid leader. If you don't, you'll just have to grin and bare it. If you do, then you need to be suggesting you aggressively recruit more people (resto shaman and druids in particular).

The reality is there's a shortage of healers and so you can't take too tough an approach like you can with the DPS, who you can basically tell "enchant your gear, turn up with consumables and fix your rotation or find yourself looking for another guild". A softly softly approach works best, or else you may find yourself without enough healers to even form a raid.

As far as healers not doing what they're told, if they listen to the raid leader but not you, do your healing assignments by proxy: tell the raid leader what you want the healers to do, and get him to tell them what to do. It's inefficient I agree, but sometimes it's tough when you first take a job to get people to listen, it can help to get someone with more clout to give the orders. Once people see your strategies actually work they'll start listening to what you have to say. Nothing wins people over like success.

 

xarg

This entirely depends on your view of the game. Personally, having played all 3 roles in raids at various points, I find healing and tanking far more interesting. This is because they require effort.

DPS is fun for a change every now and then, to see big numbers, but in general it involves spamming one key over and over and not paying too much attention at all. This I generally find boring and will want something else to do.

Try to find healers who enjoy a challenge. Who are happy that they can't afk for half the raid and not get noticed. Who are glad that what they are doing matters, and has a direct result on the raid. These are the people that are more likely to keep coming back to raids over and over.

The people who get worn out from healing are the lazy people who don't really care about how they're doing. They'll just see healing as more effort, and thus as a "thankless task".

Tanking is very similar, it requires more effort, constant attention, and you are often directly responsible for wipes. You can either find the kind of person who is proud to minimise the wipes caused number, or the person who doesn't really care.

But yes, I agree with your first suggestion, every now and then punching out some numbers is fun. Raiding as elemental on my shaman would usually last as a novelty for about an hour or two before I'd get bored and wish I had something more interesting to do. The best way I found to satisfy the dps itch was to be the strider kiter on Vashj.

 

Dhotti

1. You're always going to have a tough time with that healing mix. I'd be pugging a lot on my alts (especially as a tank) looking for talented, but undergeared healers.

2. You can't expect people to read forums, theorycraft, etc. But you should expect them to take advice, especially from their healer leader. If they aren't able to do so then they're wasting your time and the other 23 people in the raid.

3. Overhealing shouldn't be an issue unless people are going OOM. I tend to coach people by a) showing them WWS comparisons between them and another healer doing the right thing and b) quoting/paraphrasing sections of the various guides in the EJ class mechanics forums (you folks have far better theorycrafting than I am capable of).

I've been healer leader for a bit over 2 years now, I've been generally blessed by good healers who just need to be assigned and then they think for themselves. I've mainly found that the problem areas in healers are:

- Priests still stuck in their flash healing ways. This is relatively easy to fix by suggesting they use 3-4 different ranks of gheal for tank healing. A DS priest can still be highly competitive on the healing meters and really should never be taken into a raid just for the sake of a buff.

- Shaman who forget to Earth Shield and re-drop totems or to use totems outside of their standard three. Posion cleansing totems are particularly useful on some of the BT trash. I just keep stating ES assignments as a gentle reminder and asking a senior person in their group to nudge them about totems if they forget. That nasty pull after Naj'entus I call out "Posion cleansing totems!" before the pull.

- Trees who don't know what a rolling lifebloom is. This one is possibly the hardest to fix - rotation-wise I think trees are the hardest healer to play, but I would say they are an absolute necessity in raids to stabilise the tank healing.

Our guild is by no means hardcore - we're only at it 13 hours a week - and we don't scream at/threaten our raiders with the wrath of doom. There have been times early on where people forget about MT healing because of raid-wide AoE damage, eventually they learned to trust the raid healers (there may have been a few firm words there). These days the only real issue I have is to get them to communicate if there are several healers stacked on one target - for example on the fel rage on BB you need a mix of fast heals and big heals and occasionally you'll end up with everyone going for the fast option.

Admittedly, I have a core of 11 healers that are a nice class mix and incredibly reliable which helps a lot. I try to give people a night or two off when we're doing content that don't need anything from. It wasn't always that way - we started SSC with 5 trees, 1 pally, 2 priests and no resto shaman. A mixture of patience and gentle guidance has developed a solid healer corps.

PS. As a female ex-priest (now rerolled resto shaman), I did find the previous insinuation about being addle-brained somewhat offensive. I'm a geek, I understand the theorycrafting, I've played various forms of computer based RPGs for 14 years (yay nethack & MUDs), I understand game mechanics better than the majority of my (largely male) guild. Your crass generalisations should be taken elsewhere. (And 40+ year old pallies can be taught new tricks and be useful members of a raid.)

 

xarg

If your healers are healing in a terribly non-efficient way then you really do need to give them a bit of help.

A tack I often take is to be non-committal about what you're telling them, suggest that you think they'd perform better and be more useful to the raid if they were healing in x way. It's incredibly frustrating when people say "well that's the way I do it and it works for me" when they are the guy who's always last on the healing meters because they're a flash heal spammer. Any way you can nudge them towards trying out different (and better) things without making them feel like they're terrible is good.

In the end if the person refuses to change you're going to want to find someone to replace them. Eventually work up to the point where you say if they don't make an effort to change for the better of the guild, they're going to get replaced by someone who puts in effort. If they still don't change (and this is the case the majority of the time if they've resisted up to this point) you steadily stop inviting them to raids and giving their spot to the other person.

Often the player needs to respect you to pay more attention to you. When I can spam Chain Heal rank 4 to my heart's content and completely decimate any healing meter, in any raid, ever, any other shaman we have come on board is going to listen to my suggestions. This is similar to teaching tree druids to juggle rolling lifeblooms. It wasn't something I fully understood and got the hang of until I'd leveled my own druid to 70, then asked for advice on why my performance was bad.

 

Renew

You need to make sure that you have healers who understand how important they are to a raid and reinforce that to them.

- It is a selfless job, the majority of the time you will be on the end of the blame, so having people know what's coming and if the blame is wrong fill in the rest of the raid on how so.
- Healers usually cannot afk at all, especially Druids who are stuck on global.
- Running light on healing makes things fun if you have a solid healing squad. It should keep them interested, especially during farm content. Make sure you do this on nights when spirits are high, there are always those nights that people just want to get in and out, those nights make it easier on everyone.
- Communication is huge, as a raid, as a healing squad. People should know who is healing where and why. That way if support is needed, it's there as soon as possible.
- As a 'lead' you should know how fights work and how game mechanics work. Reading up on things, talk with others; basically just collecting information will help you out a ton in decision making.
- Assignments should be based on your guilds play style and strengths. Assignments then should be filtered through the encounter dynamics.
- Trash is not a joke, make sure people have assignments. Wiping to trash affects the raids mentality, keeping things positive will keep the raid focused when it's go time on bosses.

It's not a difficult job, having someone they can talk to and respect is what you will be there for.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Shakes

This is not a universal truth. If you find healers are shouldering an unfair portion of the blame, speak up! Often people aren't even aware they're being especially harsh on healers. In a previous guild, the raid leaders/officers fell into the "blame the healers" trap, but after sending a detailed message to the raid leader breaking down how tank or DPS failures were actually to blame for many of the things the healers were getting flack for, things improved dramatically.

As a healing leader, I'd advise you to defend your healers strongly against criticism from DPS who think it's their god given right to get heals no matter how long they stand in the fire. Nothing burns healers out faster than being forced to take unfair crap from bad players. I know healers tend to be the "stand at the back and not say much, just do a job" personality types, but sometimes as healing leader you need to "tank" the aggro from other players.

 

Renew

I just meant that it's trivial to be a DPS class, where as if you are a healer you do not have a 'meter' that people can gauge you on and pat you on the back.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Shakes

I find plenty of satisfaction in mocking DPS classes who call for a meter, eg "If only WoW had a way of installing your own DPS meter without having to spam raid asking for someone else to do it!" Your job is as fun and as rewarding as you make it. :lol: