Emergency Monitor

edit: what, how the hell did you beat me by 3 minutes.

Now I understand why it takes so long for things to get banished.

/rude

EM = Emergency Monitor; aka "Reactive Healer's Crutch" ;)

An addon that lets you see as soon as anyone in the raid has taken a ton of damage and is in "emergency" need of a heal. If several people are relying on EM, then you usually have several heal landing on that person at once in an attempt to save them. I call it a crutch because my opinion is only a handicapped healer needs to use it; someone who doesn't anticipate damage, and someone who cannot think proactively. If you're a good healer, EM only tells you what you already knew would happen, and should've already taken steps to help prevent it if possible.

EM = Emergency Monit...


Oh.

Why the automatic assumption that people who use EM don't also have RA and group windows up?

Sitting there claiming that a healer sucks simply because he/she uses EM is narrow-minded and just shitbrained stupid. Further, it's unnecessary for anyone to come here defending their ability as a healer and their use of a mod that provides nothing more than consolidated information.

Been thinking a bit how to attempt to add some value compared to the other responses.

Gurgthock was saying that a guild recruits a priest not a (insert other class alt here). I can see the point in that, however, at what level does a priest become incapable of improving outside of raids? Do you still "force" this person to log onto a priest and attempt to farm?

GCR might be a bit different than normal guilds. Sorta Goonsquad'ish in that we let anyone that's a Shacker in. Shackers are quite a bit smaller community then the SA though so we don't really have a whole of resources to draw on compared to GS/EJ so we tend to rely on a very few people and fill out our raids with whatever else is availible. That can cause this sort of thing I suppose when we are short a priest(druid) or 3.

Seems like the EJ people think this is stupid and the other guilds around are a bit mixed, probably closer to EJ than the linked thread. Oh well, just looking for other thoughts on this. I found this thread pretty interesting at least.

About the tangent about raid healing: I don't use mana conserve, emergency monitor and decursive myself but I suppose using those things correctly will make you a better player. Unfortunatly for the most part MMO are not about being skilled, more time dependant than anything, so the differential is quite small in my opinion. I get the Chromaggus is going to make me download decursive. And I'l hate it :(

Though the most fun I've had in BWL is Vealstraz and healing off tanks on Firemaw (at least the way we do it). Vealstraz because I actually get a chance to do all the stuff that was useful in a 5 person instance. Firemaw because you can tell when you are doing a good job (unless the off tanks decide to taunt during a shadow flame lol ) and switching around targets a lot and being in danger of eating one too many flame buffets while trying to get a heal on tank so he lives to get out of LOS.

Why can't blizzard make all fights like that? That would be fun.

Well, I'm not really speaking about EJ, since we also have never recruited particular classes, and are the same sort of community-based guild as GS/GCR. We make do with what we have. Fortunately for us, priests are probably our third most-numerous class, behind warriors and rogues. Go figure. But for most "real" raiding guilds, that's obviously how it works. Let's say you have a 55-man roster. One of your old priests quits and now you find yourselves on raid night having 4 priests most nights when you'd rather have 5 or 6. So you look for good available priests and you recruit one to fill that slot. If a month (or five months) later, after you've helped gear up his priest so he can contribute to your raids to the fullest, he now decides that he doesn't really like healing so much after all and wants to DPS instead... isn't it obvious that this won't go over well?

But if you're just a community of players trying to work with what you have, then you have to accept the strengths and limitations inherent in that approach. You have to either learn to do the fights with only 3 priests or druids on a given night, which is possible if not optimal, or you have to question your identity as a guild and either recruit new players to fill your class needs or convince (pressure?) existing class members to play classes that you need.

As for "forcing" people to play a class, eh, it depends on the circumstances in which they joined the guild. If it's a social/community guild and someone joined to play WoW with friendly folk and find groups, then duh, of course you shouldn't (not could you) force them to play a specific class. But if you're a raiding guild you probably recruited someone under what was in essence a contractual arrangement: "We require a priest. You will provide us with priestly services, and in exchange we will offer you access to endgame content and endgame loot." Under those circumstances, well, yeah, the whole reason the guy is in the guild is because you needed a priest. If he doesn't want to play a priest, then fuck him.

I hate decursive, and I expect Blizzard to break it as soon as they figure out how to do so. You absolutely do not need it for Chromaggus. Really. Just configure CTRA to highlight people who have the debuffs you can remove, and work out a system where each dispeller is responsible for one or two groups, or one or two classes, or something like that, and you can do dispelling, raid-wide, more efficiently than decursive-spamming.

I'm going to continue to laugh at all of the people that spam EM and end up with 25+% overhealing.

I think I see a bit of miscomunication Gurghthock.

I mean they continue to play their priest during raids and such like usual. But other than that they either do not log on (preferable...? ) or roll up an alt to farm or do something different while not raiding.

Not really demanding spots in raids for an alt unless a situation exists where needing another well geared class that isn't a priest. Unlikely of course but it may happen.

Never meant to imply that you stop healing in raids in current hot stuff dungeon or whatever since that's pretty much what you need to go after the new unexplored content. Once you get it down then you can play around with the groups and such to allow a bit more liberty in class make up and such.

25% overheal? Holy crap though... I try to stay at 10% or lower or so and thought that was pretty bad :(

And we do have quite a bit of experience doing stuff short on classes... Lucifron with 1 priest? :P GCR used to run Molten Core when we were learning it with about 9 shaman any given week heh. Those were pretty fun weeks.

The 2 wipes so far to Chromaggus have been rough, I can definitly see the merits in having priests dispel groups as opposed to the more FFA approach we do things now. Trouble is convincing others to do it heh.

When they do, yet still have mana left over, where exactly will the humor lie?

Tangent out of nowhere, last seen headed in the direction of troll territory. I'm out.

Don't imply shit and won't be no shit.

<sigh>

At the risk of an argument starting, I never implied anything. You completely misread my post. I simply stated that there's nothing wrong (or funny or whatever) with a person overhealing if he/she has mana to spare. If no one dies, and 100% mana wasn't used, one can overheal 50% and it wouldn't matter. And really, I'd prefer to overheal rather than trying for an under or perfect heal (again assuming I don't run myself out of mana) because overheals are a guaranteed heal-to-full.

Actually, no. Sorry. There won't be any argument. I really am done now.

Um. What?

Baseless trolling to annoy all of the druids out there. I rather enjoy it.

Simple solution: I usually heal the 3rd or 4th person ranked down the EM. I anticipate all the other healers healing the one at the top :)

Talk about how they need to post less and innervate more

I started doing the same thing about three weeks ago when I'm not looking after the people in my group. Seems like it works pretty well. The only trouble is you absolutely cannot share this strategy with anyone else in your raid group, lest the technique gain broad acceptance and healers start getting chewed out for overhealing the shit out of the #4 guy on EM who's only missing 750 HP while the guy at #1 goes down in a heap.

haha yea.
Anticipate the anticipation. Stop. But if you anticipate the anticipation of the original anticipation, you negate the anticipation and are back to square1 :(

Yeah, except for that little detail where at all the healers can actually communicate with each other in the first place, this would be a neat problem in distributed intelligence.

I like Emergency Monitor when it's used to filter out unnecessary data; I'll set it to only watch the groups near me, or only warriors, or only mages and warlocks, or only odd-numbered groups, or whatever.

I should probably look into setting up Player Targets to show who other healers have targeted, and see if that helps with picking up the slack that other people are missing.