Raid Healing Leadership
 

Our healing lead is stepping down and as the healer that usually covered for him when he couldnt make it I'm getting the feeling my nightly duties are about to increase, at least temporarily. That being said - I have done the research about other classes (mainly due to already having a resto druid, and holy paladin at 70) and feel confident in my grasp of whos best where in what fights. However since this may turn into a long term responsibility I'm curious as to some of the hazards and pitfalls, as well as any useful tidbits some of the experienced healing leaders on these boards may have to make the job easier.

I'd prefer to avoid the specific class discussion that happened in the last thread on this topic, I am more interested in the interpersonal and administrative aspects of being a healing lead than the statistical.

Try not to dictate too much, if your healers are skilled then they'll adapt to the situation at hand themselves, and giving out specific instructions for them about where to stand and when to use a specific ability or move to a specific lpace will only piss them off.

Healing lead for us is basically assigning healer configurations and monitoring performance throughout a raid with various means and find the weak spots, if something fails. Damage meter mods' 'Death Log' ability is a tremendous help in this regard, if something happens, you can see exactly what happened, so you can see if it's indeed a healing failure or not: an example would be target switching tank healers, to 'save someone's ass' and the tank dying.

Besides of monitoring performance during a raid, you must also know each healer class pretty well to know what and how should be used / casted and you must learn spotting mistakes or inefficiencies in WWS reports. This will come naturally, if you visit the Class Mechanics section and go through the proper topics on this forum.

Other than that, on the social side of things, you must know your healers, what they like, what they don't, how they handle stressful situations, what are their healing style ... this will only come with time, but helps a lot, especially on progress raids, where a lot of tweaking necessary to find the rigth people for the job.

Farm raids will get more and more automatic to the point, when you really doesn't have to do anything but asking 'you know what to do, right?' and it will come naturally.

Have fun in leading the healing :)

An addon such as Heal Organizer can add a great amount of help heal orginizer from curse (/ho dialog to open it in game)

I'm the HCO(healing class officer) for my guild. I went and armoried each of my healers to see where they stood gear wise. I then payed a good bit of attention, but in 5 mans, pvp and raids, who each one. I figured out who were the best at doing what(raid healing, tank healing, situational awareness, reflex healing) and I try to make sure they get jobs suited to their talents. I also try to make sure I know their specs, and abilities, so I can better utilize each. IE: COH priest and Shaman for raid healing.

Next, I make sure I am familiar with the fights we are doing, especially the new encounters. I watch the youtubes, and the strategy sites. I read the forums, like this one and the WOW one. I try to plan out ahead of time who(or what class) is going to do what, and have a back up plan in case it doesn't work out the way I think it should.

Heal Organizer is awesome, until you get to multi-phase fights like Kael'thas, FLK, Illidan, etc. It's usually not too hard to work around that though if you think through the assignments.

On fights like FLK, where in one phase your healers are doing something different than in the next phase, I'll set up HO addon for the first phase, and just type out what they need to do next. For example: After shaman on FLK dies, healer A moves to Tank b, while healer b moves to tank c. Or you can manually set up the tank titles(the place that says "MT1") to include secondary assignments.

I'm the healing lead for our runs.
One thing I do is not assign healing during trash. Too often healers get bored staring at a full health bar of their tank if the tank is taking no damage and then when they actually need to heal they have already lost their focus. By not assigning the healers have to stay on their toes and adds a small element of challenge. It hurts certain healers, like the druids, but most of them add some dps on trash if they find their heals are not needed.

For boss fights I assign healing per a healers ability.
When I say ability, I try and take into account the player's style. One of our priests prefers to aoe heal, spamming CoH. He built himself for mana regen. The other priest prefers using his long cast time/better mana efficiency spells. So, it is a good idea to look at the player as well as the class when it comes to assigning roles.

One of the pitfalls I've seen arise from RLs or healing-assignment-givers is not being consistent or not finding that balance between micromanaging and simply making sure your healers are doing their collective jobs. This manifests itself in forgetting or neglecting to give healing assignments on a boss that you've beaten before but perhaps is only just recently got on farm status. People get careless or forget to heal a certain person and it could have been avoided if healing assignments had been given out. We had this happen on Azgalor and Anetheron recently when we had too many people healing Doomguard tanks and not enough people spread out on Anetheron. The confusion came because we had a couple different healers from the week before who were used to the same assignment and robotically assumed that role. (We adjusted about a minute into the fight)

Be aware of these minor changes in raid makeup beforehand. Know the healing styles of each player/class so you can best deploy them in the raid. Also, critique your WWS parses from each run and figure out who's decursing/cleansing and who's not (either to reprimand or simply know who can do it the quickest) and who uses flash heals and who uses Greater/Holy Light. I also wouldn't ask who people want to heal. Know what you are doing and tell them before every pull. Saves time for sure. Moreover, don't mix it up without good reason. Female priests in particular (or that 46-year old Paladin) can be quite finnicky/addle-brained and might get confused by an unnecessary change in assignment.

Overall understand that healers work as a big unit and overlap in duties (if planned and managed correctly) is generally a good thing.

That said, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to it. Give out assignments and don't let your healers get lazy. In my experience healers and tanks almost always take care of themselves. I've never had a "healing lead" and only during progression or specific encounters was it really necessary to give out healing assignments. Unless you have indordinate amounts of turnover, it should practically run itself. Maybe it's a larger issue on horde side.

I'm glad you asked. I (mage) organise all of the healing / group setup in our guild. Theres a bunch of factors to consider when looking for a good 'healing organiser' and what qualities they need:

1 - It needs to be someone who can confidently take control of 4 different classes, with the authority to get them to conform to the guilds chosen strat/method of organising healing for that fight.

2 - It needs to be someone who understands and knows the strength's and weakness of each respective healing class - and assign them to a role on a fight they can excel at. People like this will often be reading forums like elitistjerks class mechanics - and have a good knowledge of how other classes work (even if they don't actually play it themself!)

3 - It needs to be someone who understands and knows the strength's and weaknesses of each player and assign people-to-roles with their skill/ability in mind. This is very important too.

4 - It needs to be someone who can quickly understand, analyse, isolate and find problems in healing and know how to fix them. Someone who uses WWS, recount / SWstats etc - and can basically say, "OK, this is what went wrong....". Its terrible when you wipe continuously due to healing problems and nobody seems to be able to find an answer to the question, "So why are we wiping?" Someone like this will be able to point out and fix problems in the raid - but also analyse WWS afterwards and use it as a reference to make improvements in future.

5 - It should be someone who also has (A) and can also set groups up as necessary. Your healing organiser will want to make sure that COH is being used effectively and set groups up accordingly (EG, Bloodboil, Phase 2 illidan) and that your shamans are spread into their correct groups. They'll make sure your preferred raid-healer gets a shadow priest and that all the general-duties of group setup (pallys auras->tanks, druid in mt group, coh raid priest->shadow priest etc) are done correctly. I dont think anyone that organises healing can really excel fully at the job unless they are also given (A) to have some control over group setup.

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Those are five things a good healing organiser needs to be able to do. You might have a fantastic raid leader, but if they dont really have the ability to execute most of those points - your selling yourself short. It might seem obvious - but the healing organiser doesnt necessarily need to actually play a healer, either.

In my experience, the worst thing you can tell 8 healers with regards to handling healing on a fight is = "Ok guys , just work it out yourselves". Yes, you probably can still kill bosses doing this - but its just such a waste - and so much more inefficient/messy - you are probably much better off with someone strong (with the aforementioned qualities) take control.

I put up a WWS after each raid and teach any new recruits unfamiliar with WWS how to understand and use it. I recommend guilds have a dedicated (if they dont already) WWS forum and a brief explanation of how to interpret it. You want all your healers to be able to go there after raids and check their performance, find out whether they did good/poor and compare it with others etc. When you have healers asking after a raid "When are you putting up the WWS??" its a great feeling - people actually care about their performance and want to improve.

Another thing Ill just throw out there. We have two specific channels all healers must join for raids. One is the GuildClass channel (EG FCpaladin) and the other is the general healing channel (EG FChealer). All healers (from all 4 classes) must be in the general healing channel during raids - and we can help people, talk about problems etc etc exclusively in there without needing to clutter raid chat. I also recommend the tanks stay in this channel too - so we can get some good healer<--->tank feedback where necessary.


PS - This is a good thread. Organising four classes, with potentially 8-11 people - is definetely something worth discussing.

One thing I've found useful, is when the situation allows for it, is to keep the same healers on the same tanks. By allowing a healer(s) to get very familiar with a tanks life bar and how it moves (on average) under different circumstances you allow them to throttle healing output better and anticipate incoming damage.

All of the above info is great feedback.

One thing I would like to add that I find quite successful, is to get constant feedback from individual healers about whether they feel overworked or under worked. There was a particular case where I had assigned two or three healers to take care of the raid. I had one of them, a shaman, say "hey, I feel like I could handle healing the raid myself." By giving him that responsibility he had more invested in the encounter, and it also allowed another healer to be used more effectively. By asking healers for feedback about the assignments you give, you show they have a say and that their opinion matters. It does wonders for raid cohesion.

I used to do the healer leading in my old guild. It's been months ago, gosh.
Anyhow, having assignments is always better. The chances something goes wrong are smaller and when you have 2-3 healers assigned to a certain tank and it's the same tank that keeps dying you also know which people to look to. On the contrary to not assigning healers, it could be anyone's fault or no one fault.
What people previously said is very true. Some people have different styles of healing and as you go along with your team you also become aware of which healers you can rely on and which healers seem to lack that extra bit now and then.
After looking at what people you assign to what (or who for that matter) I also looked at the classes. (I know you didn't want to go into an in-depth character discussion but I do believe this has to be said). Paladins are mostly known for the single-target healing, thus I mostly assigned them to healing tanks rather than the raid. Same for Druids with their HoTs, they're excellent for countering spike damage and keep tank healing generally more stable.
Shamans are preferred as raid healers. Priests are a bit all-round but can do excellent AoE healing when specced for CoH.
Also worth noting is Ancestral Healing and Inspiration from Shamans and Priests can make tank healing alot easier.

I personally believe you'll eventually glide into it. You'll get to know your healing team and how to assign each fight.

I'd also recommend keeping some notes for specific fights. For example, here's my entry for RoS P3:
CoH priest - melee. Brain Heal - on caster group. paladin1/paladin2 - MT spam HL. spirit priest - MT. Trees - Raid Heal + LB on MT.

I also used Heal Organizer but my notes let me see what type of healer I used for a specific role and let me make changes based on who was in raid as needed.

Also, knowing the fights well helps out when you are planning heals for a fight. I know it sounds obvious but for example on Azgalor I make sure I have healers that have HoTs as primary healers on MT for the silence effect.

Heal organiser is a great tool for initially setting up a fight but it doesn't replace succinct communication. As the raid organiser (and as a dps toon) I had to step in and organise healers because of consistent poor or confusing healing organisation. A simple, consistent message on what people are required to do is what you need within the raid. As soon as you try and either get funky with the assignments or let people make it up your raid will suffer. If you have a multi phase fight, keep each transition simple.

As posted above, you really need to understand what each class is suited to, what buffs you need and how each of the players plays their class. As soon as you try and micromanage them you are questioning their skill and experience. This is never a way to get people to come back week after week. Give them their job; ask them if they are comfortable, if they are then move on.

I had to replace a heal leader with an addon because after several weeks of poor organisation and catching them dpsing on bosses they did 100k damage on a boss fight while their heal targets died. No other senior healers wanted to take over the responsibility so I had to take it on myself. Make sure you, as the heal leader, set an example do your primary job well, the secondary job of organising healing (while important) is not why you are there. Make sure all of the healing organising is planned out in advance and that people know what they will be doing every single pull. On trash it might be free for all, on bosses you need to be explicit.

In post raid analysis make sure you assess each healer based on what they were asked to do. If you told the paladin to smash big heals regardless of tank health expect over heals. Don’t expect them to be efficient. If you ask the shaman to keep the melee up, don’t look at his stats, look at how many melee died and what their combat/dead time ratios were. If you ask a druid to keep the locks tapping, have a look at where his heals were landing across the raid and his over heals.

For clarification, I am no longer raiding in 25s with the "meta" raid that this was and have joined another guild's raid as an external member.

Awesome replies all, thanks for the tips! One thing I am still curious about is how to best handle under-performing raid members. Since WoW carries far fewer consequences than a real life job does as far as gquitting goes how have you all found ways to successfully motivate, and improve raiders that arent performing while walking the tight rope of not stepping on toes? I want to hear the good and the bad, so if you have a nice story of what NOT to do I can still learn from that.