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.

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.

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.

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.