Just a quick comment on this question. On my server (Blackrock) our guild is ~3rd on alliance progression. I still have to scavenge around to find a healer with decent gear sometimes. At one point recently I was very desperate for shamans (For twins, back when we were still learning felmyst) and had to basically ask the guild to , en masse, help me get shamans - from anywhere, in any gear - the only requirement is they had to be good. Any raid guild can gear people up, but its only worth it if you think they'll be worth the investment. Guildies knew that if they saw a unguilded shaman - tell me. If they grouped with a shaman (in anything: 5 man, kara etc) who seemed promising - tell me. If you know any friends, on our or another server suitable - tell me. etc


This is very true, but id like to add one more 'common problem' ive noticed with healers:

- Paladin 'main tank' syndrome. These are the sorts of healers who are so used to mindlessly healing the MT for several years they actually forget some encounters in TBC need you to pay attention as well - and die to stupid shit because they werent actually paying attention! They might be fantastic MT healers, but that won't matter if they are dead!

Felmyst is the perfect example. Our Paladins often died due to a nearby encapsulate, more than other classes. Im convinced that its because paladins have been conditioned (by nature of their class design) to basically just spam the MT. I dont know about other guilds, but most of our paladins only want to ever do one thing: Spam the MT. None of them volunteer for the off duties (Infernal healing on anetheron, doomguards on azgalor, incinerate dispelling on teron, raid healing on council, dark barrage topping up on illidan) - everyone just wants to stand still and do nothing but heal the MT. So its no real surprise that when they actually to pay attention (hi encapsulate) as well, the chance of failing seems higher. This, of course, can apply to any healing class - but from first hand experience ive noticed it most on Paladins.

That's odd. Most of my guild's Paladin healer problems have come from our being all too willing to heal the raid, to the point where occasionally we all move off the MT at once. This nefarious and shameful practice will soon stop, however, as I've now got an addon that shows me who the healers are healing (albeit one I installed to find out if the second Paladin is meter chasing).

As for not volunteering for other duties: what is this strange word, "volunteer"? Raid and class leaders are not appointed to head the committee - they're appointed to lead! You don't ask people to do a job, you tell them to do it and you replace them if they don't.

I'm investing quite some time in doing that atm,however we have another issue even though it's eu server it is full of portugese,turkish and finnish people. So while i am trying to recruit unguilded people the plain lack of the knowledge of the english language is a big problem. Recruited 4 shamans 1 shadowpriest(we have non atm) and 1 holy priest 3 shamans left or are inactive the 4th is working hard on his resto gear. The priest i got uses 78% flash heal no matter what i assign. Her gear is far from our current raidinglevel but hey i am nice so i run ssc/tk on offdays for the ones that are worth it. What frustrates me mostly is that yes people are worth it they play good however when they do get their epics it takes weeks if not months to enchant and gem it properly. Some priests are still thinking they need to reach 20% crit to regen mana like paladins.

As for paladins i try to switch them around on encounters so they won't turn into buttonsmashers that have no clue wtf is going on around them.
Haven't raided on your level yet unfortunatly some day hopefully i will get to see the new twins and KJ will be awesome to learn those fights.

As for the respeccing and letting healers dps in raids i'm not a fan of it some may like it and then you'll have to handle with the fact you have lost yet another healer. Had to respec shadow several times on my other priest can't say i really liked the spec.

Thanks for the replies it's great to see constructive posts like these,all that mindless whine get's boring after a while

That depends completely on your guild culture. Personally I think that leading things as if you were playing Raiding Guild Manager 2008 can only end up in tragedy for most serious guilds, but I appreciate the fact that all guilds work in their own way and there are plenty of examples of excellence across the spectrum of management types.

The best way to get respect from your healers is to give it, and to be a resource of information. We don't have any way to pay these people other than shiny epics, so I find positive re-enforcement works better than berating. Set yourself up to be their mentor and personal coach rather than their boss.

I try not to tell my healers how to heal, but rather give them information that leads them to the conclusion. People tend to own more what they come to rather than what people tell them. (I call it the fine art of letting someone else have my way) "PallyZ I see that often when a tank that I've assigned you to dies, you're casting flash of light but it seems like you're losing ground on the tanks health, how can I help you fix that?" (Have links to WWS for the inevitable "nu-uh")

Another pitfall I've learned to avoid is trying to cram a bunch of information in at once. I work with my healers and give them one task at a time to focus on. Once they've made improvement on that one thing, give them another "DruidQ I see that you've really mastered the rolling lifeblooms rotation we were talking about, I think now it's time to shift our focus to how you can incorporate swiftmends into that rotation to help us recover from spike damage."

Be clear with your healers regarding your expectations of them in raids. I don't say "bring consumables" I say, "every healer should make sure they have 20 golden fishsticks or 20 blackened sporefish" 20 guardian elixirs and 20 battle elixirs or 2 flasks and 4 charges of weapon oil for this raid, if you are unsure about which of the available consumables are best for this encounter/your class, I'll be happy to talk to you about it in tells BEFORE our raid time."

Reward good behavior! When you write a wall of text healing strat, hide an easter egg in it. "Whisper Auz the red dragon flys by night for a 10g prize." When someone blossoms under your tutelage praise them! When someone got that clutch heal and keeps the raid from a wipe puff up their little pixelated egos. When we were learning Kael, I went out one night and bought a bunch of cockroach pets, and at the end of the night I gave one to every player that didn't die before a wipe was called that night. I told my raid "Be the cockroach." When we killed him there were a bunch of cockroach pets running around the raid like a badge of honor.

Over recruit - Your healers have no motivation to do what you ask them if they know you have to take them regardless of their behavior, enchanting, gemming, etc. I keep a mental note of how many healers I need for the average encounter and make sure I have enough healers on staff to sit 1 or 2 a night. This allows me to maintain flexibility in healing composition, sit tired raiders and occasionally say "I see you're having trouble getting that new weapon enchanted so I'm going to sit you tonight to make sure you have the time to farm for those enchanting mats"

Yes, I know I'm a carebear, but what can I say, I'm a female priest so if you change my assignment I might get confused. Also, it works for my guild.

I would agree with this statement. Although I am not a healer, I am the priest CO for my guild and have an alt resto druid, so I've generally been helping with priest and druid healers when needed and keep up with the theorycrafting threads. Whenever there is something that needs improvement, I tend to ask the healer to explain why they were doing what they were doing so I can get an understanding of their mindset and how best to approach them to improve. For example, when we were doing FLK in SSC a long time ago, one of our priest apps was spamming Flash Heal and going OOM. I asked her why she was doing it, and then we had a discussion of her trying Greater Heal for the next raid. I find it's always best to ask them to explain their thought process before barging in with suggestions, unless it's something that is very simple to fix. For example, one of our druids would let lifebloom "bloom" on the tank when the tank got low because the druid thought it would be "extra heal", and we explained why that was not the case. A discussion really helps with healers because often, there may be a misunderstanding or misconception of how something works, and fixing that underlying misunderstanding works much better than an order to the healer telling them what to do.

Being flexible and letting the healers learn from experience is also something that can work out well. Our Improved DS priest recently asked if he could try a 41/20/0 spec because he did not feel he was very effective at the cookie cutter 23/38/0 spec. I was quite dubious about the merits of a Discipline spec, but agreed to let him try it out for a BT raid. After trying it, he was back with the standard 23/38/0 spec for the next raid.

Not all of us are talking about bleeding edge progression fights here. Thats, of course, where someone in control dictates who does what. However on the relaxing, night off farm content (bt. hyjal etc etc) its nice to afford some flexibility and let people make their own choices, 'Who wants to do X tonight?'.

Actually, I am talking about bleeding edge content. However, I was not really talking about the end result assignments that need to be done on every raid encounter, but more about the process that leads up to them.

On farm content everybody knows what the guild tactic is for a given encounter and everyone knows which roles they will likely be expected to fill. You could potentially just omit assignments altogether and things might just work out.

However, on progression content especially, we tend to rely heavily on the expertise and knowledge of the people we have in our raid to give feedback on what happens to them in a fight and assignments are a rather organic thing that can change from one moment to another. Even though this isn't quite the same situation as people refusing to perform basic assignments, the militant way of thinking that Malleus displayed in the piece I quoted made it seem to me that he's the kind of raidleader (or the kind of person who expects his raidleader..) that basically just plays his own game when working on an encounter and uses the other 24 people as his playing pieces. Which is obviously something that stands rather far from my own comfort zone, hence my objection to the form.

This might just be a simple misunderstanding however.

Oh, no, it's a very complicated misunderstanding. There's a good quote from Cerebus that kind of sums it up:

Now that's perhaps a little bit extreme. Of course as a raiding leader you should get feedback from your raiders. OTOH, once you've devised a plan then everyone needs to follow it unless it's obvious that you've missed something important.

I don't think there is probably a big conflict here. We will ask for volunteers for things but even if nobody steps forwards a name will be chosen and if it's yours it isn't optional. Allowing people to have some measure of control over their evening isn't the mark of a lousy leader. In progress content we will generally have the healing setup done ahead of time so there isn't much in the ways of volunteering. In MH (for example) however you might see "Who is going back for the gargoyles?" or "Who wants to heal the hunter on the wyrm?". It works for us because we have enough people that are willing to actually say "I'll go" and we have a good deal of trust in each other.

Being ordered around over trivial details makes me grumpy for no reason other than it does. The poster that you were referring to made no mention of volunteering as in going into a progress fight and saying "Hey? Who wants to do what guys?" 3 minutes before the pull. I think part of successful leadership is knowing when not to lead (and of course recognizing when that fails and the reins need to be pulled in).

>however, as I've now got an addon that shows me who the healers are healing (albeit one I installed to find out if the
>second Paladin is meter chasing).

Can you give details on which addon this is? It sounds like it would be very useful for raid healing leaders such as myself.

While I'm on the subject is Grimreaper still the best tool for playing back the final x moments of a dead characters life?

Thanks

Thanks for the info.

We already use Grid across our guild as standard. I'm taking from this that it can show who is casting each incoming heal (as opposed to just the fact there is a heal incoming).

I was hoping you'd found a tool that updated a list of each healer and who they were healing as the fight progressed. Now that would be really handy!

As a raid heal leader I find it frustrating to experience problems with healing during a fight, and then re-balance the healing to address it only to find that some people are mostly ignoring their assignment and cross-healing too much or similar.

Best tool I have at the moment is WWS which gives a great breakdown of who each healer was healing during a fight but by then its too late to yell at people!

Have you tried the casting monitor in the XPerl unitframe package? It might be what you're looking for. My own experience is limited to seeing it in a video and thinking "that's an interesting mod". For everyday use I suspect its more information than you really need most of the time, but if you're trying to analyse who your healers are healing, and what heals they're using it could do the job.

I've been leading my guilds healing for quite a while now.
Our guild's a relatively casual one (three days per week raiding), so I get the luxury of having days in between raids for feedback and data analysis. Currently working with Felmyst, we're not exactly a cutting edge guild, so please take that in account when listening to what I have to say.

First of all: If at all possible, I recommend taking the needed time between raids to see where you are and how to improve, as a healcore. Trying to work things rationally on the fly when a pull is coming might often be necessary, but it's rarely as effective as really sitting down to talk about things.
While forums seem to be the best way for analyzing WWS-data, there's definitely merit to ingame mail as well. Telling people where they performed good/bad with the ingame mail system adds a bit of personal touch to your leadership, since usually the only thing folks got in their mailbox is goldselling spam or AH sales. If it's just a short "thank you" or a "good work, but", I really favor the ingame mail. You can even add in some small gifts there as need be!

When giving feedback, my way is to give it form of "positive/negative/positive". Your school of psychology might vary, but it's important to remember how the role of a healing leader isn't to tell people their place, but rather work towards a better gaming experience for us all. Everyone wants to be good in what they do, never doubt that. Strong negative feedback can however lock up folks from improving, and due to that you should always remember who you're talking to, when giving tips on how to improve. Even when there isn't really anything much to improve, it's good to keep the conversation alive and going, in order to draw your subordinates closer. Having people just log on for the raids and not talk about healing beyond them is the last thing you want to happen, if you want to improve your healing core!

For an example, I might send a following message to someone after the raid:

"Topic: Healing last night at Kalecgos
Heya Healadin!
Thanks for being such an important key in killing Kalecgos last night! I did notice you running into mana-issues there towards the end though, think we could improve on that as we get him to farm? Maybe weave in more lower rank HL when the situation is stable?
Also, looking at the number of manapots you drink (every two minutes, bane of us healers, eh?), I'm wondering how you ever find the gold for all of those! I've included a couple of injectors in the mail so you can skip the farm tonight, it's such a lovely summer out there

Catch you on Sunday for Brutallus and Felmyst!"

On the actual healing assignments on the raids, I agree wholeheartedly with Mags about the power of Pen and Paper. I always keep little notes around for scribbling up the nights healing assignments. I usually keep myself free and floating, so that whenever someone goes AFK to get a cup of coffee or gets whacked to pieces by the runaway mob, I can take over their role.
I find this important especially on clearing trash. I can't think of any trash that'd require all the seven-or-so healers to be present, so I tell folks that they're allowed to AFK as long as they inform me of it first. It's worked out much better than having folks get bored of the trashclearing and fall asleep/take afk's without notifying anyone.

Going through the role of each class and their skill usage is something you can find out a lot about by reading this forum, so I'm not going to waste your time by trying to sum it up here. I would however like to remind you that the player behind the healer is as important as the class he's playing when it comes to heal assignments. A paladin might be more mana-effective than a shaman when it comes to spamming an MT, but no one can take that single target mousewheeling for all too long. They'd have rolled Warlocks if they wanted to be bored out of their minds, after all! Keep an eye on what your players want to do, and try to cater to their needs over simply "optimising" the assignments by classes and talent builds. There's no reason to think that the shaman can't do that job just fine, especially if it's farm content. He might even like the change from spamming Chain Heal on the raid!

How do healing leads or healers coordinate heal staggering on a single target (eg MT healing on Brutallus)? Are there any mods/tips/tricks to assist with this?

It's unnecessary to regiment staggered healing too much. Have all your healers aim to have a cast land within a second after stomp - latency, haste and reaction time will give you a good spread over that crucial first 2 seconds for absorbing the initial burst.

We tried to get people to time heals on stomp at start, but then realized that our folks were too good in it, and the logs showed three or four simultaneous heals on stomp landing, followed by an empty 1.5-2 second window where the tank got killed by a burst. This coupled with the fact that sometimes Brutallus decides to do some other little thing (burn someone, maybe?) before stomping, when stomp timer is just up, and it results in Stomp being off by anything between 0.1 and 0.8 seconds. Such delay can be quite detrimental if majority of the healers lined up for that spot.

Since Mana isn't really an issue in modern raiding, at least while spamming singletarget heals, we've defaulted to having enough people (three on this particular case) simply spam healing there nonstop. If they cannot substain highest rank spam for the full fight, they drop down a couple of ranks for the general use, and move up to max rank only for stomp/other healers moving on burn/bad gut feeling.

We don't really even try to have people use different spells at the moment, because different amounts of Haste -value keeps the heals from lining up regularly. One priest doing 2.3sec Gheal results in different pace of heals than another doing 2.5sec Gheals.

Lots of good suggestions here. Being a healing leader is difficult at times, simply because when someone dies it's your group that gets the blame.

I am current raid leader and healing leader of a 7 hour a week run. We're about halfway through Black Temple at the moment. I used to also run with the 2nd best guild on my server, but we broke up due to roster issues after the release of 2.4. I was co-healer leader in that guild as well.

I think the most important thing is knowing how to interpret healing done, knowing the relative damage that needs to be healed over the fight, and knowing how to read meters above all in terms of pure numbers. Some assignments are going to yield massive numbers. Some assignments are not. For example on the council fight the person healing the mage tank is unlikely to be very high on the healing meters. You should not expect them to. If the mage stays alive, they are doing their job. Knowing how to interpret data is extremely important as it allows you to find the healing strengths and weaknesses of people on a more personal level. Knowing the damage the is going to happen in the fight allows you to assign the best healer to the job.

Another important thing is to know how each class plays. Knowing such things allow you to give advice to people, and select the proper assignments for each situation. For example, your strongest healer might well be a Paladin and your weakest may be a CoH priest, but you still should be using the CoH priest to heal the melee in a fight like Void Reaver and have the Paladin on the tanks. If a tank needs a single healer and is taking periodic damage, it might be wise to have a druid assigned to that tank rather then a Paladin as the druid will be able to cross heal much easier - the Paladin will not. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each class.

Many people have mentioned WWS already. WWS is a wonderful tool for certain things, but if you're looking at Raw healing done it's not nearly as good as some others. It does not include the healing from Prayer of Mending for priests (Can be up to 50% of their healing in a given fight - ie. Archimonde) or Earth Shield for shamans. Although it will show the proper healing done BY the spell, it distributes the healing done incorrectly. I would suggest getting Recount if your goal is to look over raw healing done, as to my knowledge it includes both these spells correctly. This will also give you an idea if your priests are using Prayer of Mending enough, which is a very important spell for them. I always have a meter running during the raid because in my head I've already decided what kind of numbers a person should be putting out - combine that with watching the heal bars and the damage the target is taking, you can figure out who might need help and who is slacking so you can adjust your own personal healing if applicable. Running a meter during a fight is excellent if you know how to read it correctly.

Treat your healers with a lot of respect. Many people feel like crap when their target dies, they don't need you rubbing it in their face every time it happens. At the same time, you need to be commanding them and leading them so they know the importance of your assignment. Asking for feedback is always good. The healing core is a group of individuals, not any one individual. If a healer does 50% of the healing done on an attempt between 8 healers, but their assignment dies - they failed their part of the machine. It's important that you as a healer let people know that their assignment is very important. The more people stick to their jobs, the better things generally go. Although intelligent straying from an assignment is a good thing too, but it's not something that should be encouraged - rather something that your healers will need to learn on their own.

Also as a rule of thumb for assignments:
Shamans - Raid Healing
Priests - Back up raid healing, back up tank healing - excellent floaters
Druids - Main Tank healing and Off-tank healing (Can do both at the same time)
Paladins - Main Tank healing and Off-tank healing (One)

Strengths and Weaknesses per Class
Priest:
Strengths:
- Versatility because of variety of spells - can do any job effectively
- Circle of Healing is situational, but extremely useful at times
- Lots of instant cast heals
- Properly placed PoM's help the tank(s) get threat
Weakness:
- Jack of all trades, but master of none.
- Improper mana usage makes them go oom quickly
Shaman:
Strengths:
- Chain Heal is generally the best AoE heal for most situations (trumphed by CoH in certain situations)
- Longevity of Mana makes them good raid healers
- Totems to the group they are in, and an extra heroism for DPS
Weaknesses:
- The weakest single target healer of the 4 healer types
- No instant casts, except for NS which is on a 3 minute CD
- No HoTs so their healing can be luck based
Druid:
Strengths:
- HoTs in combination with swiftmend make them excellent single target healers
- Ability to effectively heal 3 targets at once with Lifebloom (Tanks)
- HoTs soak up periodic damage, and reduce burst damage
- Extra Battle Res
- Able to heal on the move
Weaknesses:
- Poor raid healers in comparison to other classes unless damage to raid is predictable and periodic
- Tree form can be problematic if the fight requires a lot of movement
Paladin:
Strengths:
- Strong single target heals make them excellent tank healers
- With proper usage of cool downs and mana potions, they have virtually infinite mana
- Because of mana pool longevity, they are able to avoid the problems cancel-casting suffers from for the most part
- BoP which is useful in certain situations, as well as DI which helps for wipe prevention
Weaknesses:
- Poor at raid healing en masse
- No HoTs, so healing is luck based at times
- No instant casts, other then holy shock which is ineffective and not mana efficient.

I think this depends on your mix of healers on your MT. Try to mix it up having 1x druid, 2x pally, 1x priest on your tank. Having the Pallies switch it up between FoL and HL. This adds a variety to your mix. Also during stomp, have your meteor slash healer (most likely a shammy) Cast chain heals off of the tank, having them chain back towards the raid behind your current tank. It also helps if healers in your guild have different views on gearing. I put a heavy emphasis on spell haste currently, while my fellow healers have a fair mix of haste vs. +heal. The larger variety of healing styles and gearing styles all help to accommodate for the insane burst of a boss.

Not exactly. The name is a little misleading. What it actually displays is outgoing heals, and who they are on. So if I were healing you, "Malleus" on my name line would be replaced with "+MalkuthSB" for the duration of the cast.

It's an addon that's at its best when you use long name lengths. I use Grid buttons that are larger than most people's, so I can display 8-letter names.

Overall, I like your healing characterizations a lot - highlighting the main points while ignoring the details.

Still, I think your characterizations may change a bit as you progress further into BT and then Sunwell.

Some points for watching/discussion:

- Shaman assigned to heal MT

In encounters with huge physical damage on the main tank, shamans chain-healing through the main tank into the melee group (or others, depending on placement) can be very effective as they keep the armor buff up. Brutallus is the prime example, but this technique is applicable wherever positioning allows for it.

- Paladin's mana efficiency

As for the virtually infinite mana, my experiences differ a bit from yours. Sure, if you can give a paladin a shadow priest, he should have no problems whatsoever. If you can't, and the encounter calls for long periods of non cast-canceling HL activity, I would no longer call a paladin's mana pool a non-issue. In BT, I'd say this starts with the Illidari Council.

- Priest: CoH use

Starting with the second half of BT, in my experience this changes from "situational, but extremely useful at times" to "situational, but frequently extremely useful". This is especially true if the priest knows when and how to combine PoH with CoH.

- Priest: Improper mana usage makes them go oom quickly

Here, I don't concur. First, improper mana usage will make all healing classes with perhaps the exception of the druid go oom quickly. Second, I consider it rather a strength of the holy priest to be able to perform an inefficient all-out-healing phase followed by a more relaxed mana regeneration phase - made possible by the insane OO5SR mana regeneration since patch 2.4.

To me, the second weakness of the holy priest is something else, and maybe that is what you really meant: Mastering the class is quite a challenge and needs lots of experience and attention to detail. The difference between a reasonably good player and a player using everything the class has to offer is way larger than in other healing classes - as can be witnessed in almost any raid.

I would agree, the strength and weakness' are subject to change. I think for the most part a good shaman WILL chain heal the tank even if on raid healing if possible, simply so the first and largest chain goes through the tank. I have been in Sunwell with my old guild before we broke up - we had Kalecgos down to 2% and then split. It was getting frustrating because our healers were largely responsible because of disorganization in the fight in general. I can definitely relate to what you're saying there with CoH - I think anyone who has done pretty much Bloodboil and beyond is thankful for CoH.

That was more along the lines of what I meant I suppose. I think for some people, playing a priest is hard because like you say we can regenerate at a rapid rate but we can also burst our mana at an explosive rate. One of the hardest lessons for the other priest in my current raid to learn on Najentus, was not to heal TOO much. It's very easy to get lost when you have so many spells that can be used for so many different things. I play a priest myself, and I absolutely love it because of the fact it is so challenging. Tons and tons and tons of different heals - good and bad times to use them. It's a very complex class in comparison to the others. I used to play a Paladin before, and have a Druid and a have raided on a shaman in BT/Hyjal. It's much more fun and challenging to raid on the priest, and I feel I am more effectively able to heal in most situations then the other classes or at least on level with them. Granted I'm never going to beat a good Shaman on Gorefiend, or do better then a Druid on Hyjal trash, I still feel like I am able to all round perform on par with the other classes at each of their roles. But the numbers when you look at the theory aren't there, though on the meter there are times when I've done 20-30% of the healing on a boss encounter. (Archimonde for example) But it takes a lot of thinking and situational awareness, but I enjoy that since I can be more versatile and I have more fun with it then the other toons I heal with. (I will have my 3rd 70 Holy priest soon - yeah I'm a loser O_o)