I've done a lot of reading on this forum about tanking and DPS mechanics that have helped tremendously but there seems to be a lack of discussion regarding healing.
I've never played a priest or druid in an end-game riad (would really like to) so I don't know much about how these classes function. Basically what I want to talk about is primary functions of each healer i.e. druid, priest, shaman (more in depth than just 'healing'), how to maximize efficiecy with respect to chain pulling in the Core, and overall healing basics such as spamming heals on a tank during Vael fight as opposed to ordered/staggered Greater Heals from multiple healers.
Like I said, I don't know much but our here in Q we seem to rely on random healing which really hurts our time in MC as well as makes more intricate experiences (such as BWL) more difficult simply because we have no refined basic healing techniques.
I'm sure there is no A+ way to heal so I'm just looking for a bunch of opinions. Would be a big help ~
Have a look at the "Raid priests and alts" thread. There's some tangential discussion of healing that develops in there. It certainly won't answer all your questions, but it's a start.
In general, I've found that just a very brief, minimal articulation of roles prior to boss fights is a valuable exercise. I tend to believe that intricate healing rotations are unecessary in the vast majority of existing content, but some organization really helps. If your healers know what they're going to be doing, that will streamline their reaction time immensely.
Vael is actually an incredibly simple fight for healers from a conceptual standpoint since the "debuff" eliminates any concern for mana efficiency. Clear assignment of healer responsibilities and proper group positioning reduce Vael to a fairly mindless spamfest for healers. In my opinion, the onus for defeating him rests solely on your warriors.
Our problem is usually limited to one of few things.
For instance, during a Razor fight last night, despite yelling "heal Knock" across Vent, he still went down and all the healers had full mana. They also failed to heal the next 3 MT's in line. As you can see this was a wipe.
During the Vael fight, our MT usually just dies before we can get to the first BA (on tank). Our best attempt was something like 23%. Should heals just literally be spammed on the MT by several healers or should one start a Greater Heal and the next wait 1 second to start his Greater Heal?
Chain pulling in MC is also very slow and shortlived. Inevitably someone either clear out dies from no healing (not paying attention) or all the healers are OOM and "need to sit down and drink." From my perspective with so many healers a simple rotation should make the raid a never ending machine. I could be wrong though.
Originally Posted by Lucifus,February 16th, 2006 @ 3:27PM
During the Vael fight, our MT usually just dies before we can get to the first BA (on tank). Our best attempt was something like 23%. Should heals just literally be spammed on the MT by several healers or should one start a Greater Heal and the next wait 1 second to start his Greater Heal?
You want to assign a few healers to simply spam heal the main tank, and then a few healers assigned just to healing their groups, and then maybe a healer or two watching emergency monitor as well as the main tank to ensure that people don't die if the healer in their group gets BA and dies.
Your priests should not be using greater heal and I'd be very surprised if they actually are trying to. It's a 4 second cast, and with the interruption from fire novas, often takes about 5+ seconds to cast. You really want to have 5 seconds between each heal?
You want druids to spam regrowth, priests to spam flash heal, and shamans to spam lesser healing wave. They're all fast casts and can all get 70% or more chance to not lose casting time while taking damage with the proper talents.
Due to the out-of-combat bug fix, the way we do Razor now is different, we mostly have the paladians do a bulk of the healing on alliance side (because they have tons more armor the priests, and druids even, so they can get hit a few times, and still be ok.. I don't know your exact strategy, but most guilds just kite the mobs in a circle as 2-3 warriors have to have piercing howl.
Vael, like he said above, isn't really that hard.. we have 2 paladians, casting flash of light (1.5 sec cast) myself (druid) casting 1.8 sec regrowth, and a priest in the MTs party casting prayer of healing. (occasionally have some other people rotate in due to BAs and stuff..
I have the 70% ressit to interuption on healing spells talent for a druid, so every 1.8 secs I land a 1K, usually 2K crit (about 70% crit on regrowth due to talents.) and so on..
Like he said above too.. tank rotation is the key, and your warriors should only die when they get BAed, never ever before that.
Keep the good work up! :)
Healing is like music. The magic doesn't lie in the notes, but in the space in between.
During Razorgore, I actually like to sit in the middle and make sure all of the tanks are topped off with my favorite spell. Then I try to get renews on the hunters. Shamans are the first priority of course and I make sure they stay alive but if people are dying, I want the warriors alive for intimidating shouts as a backup plan.
Every other fight most Priests just use Flash Heal for the straight heals, Renew hopefully liberally, and Shields in case things get hairy. Vael is easy for most priests because you cast Renew all around your group and then check on the tanks. PoH where applicable.
Thanks this has been some awesome advice so far and has cleared up a few misconceptions.
Right now we are using a Kite All strat. Legos are kited by shaman with Earthbind and Frost Shock and Hunters kite Dragonkin as usual. We may be switching though because a lot of people seem to dislike the fact that one shaman dieing leads to another shaman dieing which leads to a raid dieing. Prolly gonna change to DPS'ing all.
Paladins are amazingly efficient and make excellent chain-healers. With Blessing of Light on the target, Blessing of Wisdom on the Paladin, good +healing gear, some mp/5 gear, and using a lower rank heal, they can heal a staggering amount of HP while having the passive threat reduction on heals for just being a Paladin.
Put a few Paladins on your MT just chaining Flash of Light and the only thing you'll have to worry about is large spike damage?
Sounds like your Razor wipe was due to poor anticipation by the healers. Once you're close to finished with the eggs, you need to have at least a couple healers start preparing themselves to keep the MT up while he aggros and positions Razor. The rest of the raid is obviously going to be dispersed and/or still kiting shit around, so it's important for the MT and his healers to start positioning themselves properly before Razor breaks his MC. The healers need to know where the MT will be at the transition so they can make sure they're in range to land heals and not waste time trying to locate him.
As for Vael, listen to the cow. He speaks the truth. If you approach healing on Vael in this way, though, the priests can be a big aggro risk if, in addition to spamming the MT with Flash Heal, they're dropping PoH when their groups need it. Make sure you think about how to manage that risk during the tank transitions. The only time priests should be using GHeal is if they get BA. While it sucks to lose a healer, the silver lining is that a priest chain casting "instant" GHeals can pretty much keep a tank up all by himself until he blows up. Have the pallies/shamans concentrate on patch healing and keeping the tanks topped off. The tank taking over for the current MT should always be at full health when the transition happens in case the MT healers are a little sluggish in switching targets.
There's no way your healers should be OOM from healing through trash pulls. Are they using Mana Conserve and lower ranks of their spells to keep overhealing low?
Also, as a druid, I do at least as much CC as healing during Phase 1 of Razor. In a nutshell, I just keep one dragonkin napping at all times and toss out HoTs on anyone who's in range. (I find it helps to put Faerie Fire on my CC target so everyone who's paying attention knows I'm on that one.) If that's under control, I'll start loading up the mobs being tanked by my warrior with Insect Swarm for a little boost to damage mitigation.
We do usually try to have druids sleeping the dragons as well. I think after we clear up our Razor strategy our healers really need to be on the same page and be more organized.
Originally Posted by Lucifus,February 16th, 2006 @ 4:27PM
For instance, during a Razor fight last night, despite yelling "heal Knock" across Vent, he still went down and all the healers had full mana. They also failed to heal the next 3 MT's in line. As you can see this was a wipe.
so what happend was: you see mt very low say 2000hp or so, scream heal dude x. the healers all listen to some guy screaming on ventrilo and go "ok I'll heal that x dude" the problem is in that time that mt is long dead. by now all your healers have switched targets to a dead guy and the second mt dies etc etc. it's not ok in pug's and definitly not in a guild group, it's making people pissed off and causing wipes. instead plan ahead and as an example say:
I want these 3 tanks to tank him as soon as the last egg is down and then the rest to come as soon as you can. we are gonna tank him at spot x so make sure you are in range to keep all those people up.
don't know if there's any need to make it more complicated than that, if it seems needed say: you 5 dudes (mix of healers) make sure these 3 tanks stay alive, that means moving into position before the last egg is down and follow those warriors.
your healers should use targets target and have the warrior group up so they know who to heal, ventrilo healing is the worst form of healing by far.
did a bwl a few weeks back where we brought some unexperienced players and had 4/5 of the current mt healing group at chrommagus with corosive breath obey the "heal hunter x" TWO times in a row which wiped us ofcourse.
Originally Posted by Lucifus,February 16th, 2006 @ 4:27PM
For instance, during a Razor fight last night, despite yelling "heal Knock" across Vent, he still went down and all the healers had full mana.Â* They also failed to heal the next 3 MT's in line.Â* As you can see this was a wipe.
During the Vael fight, our MT usually just dies before we can get to the first BA (on tank).Â* Our best attempt was something like 23%.Â* Should heals just literally be spammed on the MT by several healers or should one start a Greater Heal and the next wait 1 second to start his Greater Heal?
Chain pulling in MC is also very slow and shortlived.Â* Inevitably someone either clear out dies from no healing (not paying attention) or all the healers are OOM and "need to sit down and drink."Â* From my perspective with so many healers a simple rotation should make the raid a never ending machine.Â* I could be wrong though.
How many healers are in the raid? When we first started out in BWL, we had 8 priests, 5 pallies, and 3-4 druids. That was pretty decent for most fights.
BWL takes some getting used to for healers because there's a lot of tank transfers and burst dps, which is pretty new in comparison to MC. This means that EVERY healer should have a target-of-target mod. It was something that was kinda cool but gimmicky in MC, and it quickly became mandatory for BWL. Razor conflagrates and changes targets. Vael kills tanks and changes targets. Broodlord deaggroes tanks and switches from tank to tank like crazy. And finally, Ebonroc requires constant tank transfers. If you don't have some way to see ahead of time who's going to get damaged (by way of target-to-target), the tank can certainly croak before you ever get a heal off. Especially if you're ghealing. Most guilds would never ever gheal anytime in BWL. There's just too much burst dps and target switching.
As for the individual fights --
It sounds like Razor is just a matter of switching targets quicker, which will be helped by target-of-target. After a conflagrate, you have to know who Razor's going to be beating on so you can start a heal before the tank takes damage.
Vael is a fight that I think a lot people don't entirely heal properly. I hear a lot of priests say they just spam PoH the whole time. I've never done that because people don't take such a large amount of damage from fire nova that they need to be constantly PoH'd. I think it's typically 3-4 flashes per PoH for me, but it depends how my group's average FR is. You have to be flexible. If the MT is dying pre-BA, it means the priests are PoH'ing too much and not flashing the MT enough. Mana conserve must be OFF for this fight, you don't need it.
As far as power pulling in MC, I can't really get a handle on how things are for your raid because I don't know the number of healers or what kind of gear they have. There's a certain point where you don't have to rotate healers at all because their gear is good enough that mana is no longer an issue. That's when we really started to cruise through MC.
Normally our ideal raid group consists of 5 of each class. If something is short we just fill in.
I can't speak for the healers myself but I read a lil bit on this forum about practive and reactive healing and I think we have a lot of reactive healers. So by the time a threat is recognized the heal doesn't land in time.
Gonna give the bosses a few more goes this weekend and I'll try to voice some of these suggestions and see if we can improve. Thanks for the help guys much appreciated.
What's all this talk about proative and reactive healers? Shouldn't you be both depending on a specific situation?
A proactive healer (the way I interpret it) is someone who anticipates a person taking damage and casts a pre-emptive heal, or maybe puts abolish on a tank before he even gets hit with a poison. And a reactive healer, more or less, would be someone who sees a person taking damage and turns his/her attention towards that person. Now if you're one or the other but not both, that's pretty limiting and ultimately dangerous to whatever or whomever you're tasked to watch over.
Let's say you're in charge of keeping a main tank alive. Proactive healing would be landing a heal a second after a shadow breath lands. Sure this is good but what happens if everyone does the same and a nasty cleave lands a second after that? Hello, Mr. Reactive and thanks for popping your NS macro.
Another example - clearing the BWL nursery. A proactive healer will cast a HOT on a warlock knowing that he's about to AE. A reactive healer would see the hatchling adds coming from behind, warstomp them, then check EM to see who is taking damage before a tank can get things back under control.
In other words, labels don't mean crap. If people aren't dying, you're a good healer.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Originally Posted by Kaubel,February 17th, 2006 @ 3:26PM
A proactive healer will cast a HOT on a warlock knowing that he's about to AE.Â* A reactive healer would see the hatchling adds coming from behind, warstomp them, then check EM to see who is taking damage before a tank can get things back under control.
I don't want to start some semantic shitfit, but I'd define both those actions as proactive. A purely reactive healer would have his head buried in the health bars and wouldn't see the adds approaching the warlock until the warlock took enough damage to show up on EM or whatever. Anyway, some clarification of nomenclature might be in order. I use the words 'proactive' and 'reactive' as an imperious way to condense lengthy yet simple classifications and make myself sound smarter. Really, all they mean (to me) is:
A proactive healer's sphere of awareness encompasses all the players he's responsible for healing and what those players are doing. He reacts (!) to both the visible conditions around him (e.g. sees whelps heading towards a caster) and the distilled information presented to him by CT_Raid, EM, etc. He takes action to (1) prevent damage from happening, (2) buffer expected damage that's about to happen, and (3) respond to damage that's already happened.
A reactive healer's sphere of awareness encompasses the CT_Raid boxes, EM (if enabled), and not a whole lot else. He reacts to bars turning red or players' names appearing on EM, clicks on them, and pushes a button.
You could substitute any labels you like in place of 'proactive' and 'reactive,' and the distinction is still the same. One is a good healer, the other will never be more than merely adequate at best. The basic point is that an inexperienced healer often gets caught up staring at the little boxes and bars, when he really needs to come up for air and take a look around at what's actually happening so he can balance all the information coming at him and direct his efforts better.
I was under the impression that a good raid contains both reactive and proactive healers. Whether limiting these people to the form of healing or depending on the natural game play style didn't matter as long as there was a nice balance.
Originally Posted by Runnybabbit,February 17th, 2006 @ 2:49PM
A proactive healer's sphere of awareness encompasses all the players he's responsible for healing and what those players are doing.
What you're describing is situational awareness. (Ironic that I'd reference a term often used by aviators and combat pilots. The irony lies in the fact that instrument-only flying is a basic and required skill for those people.)
But like you said, it's semantics. Since my profession is sports related, I suppose I use the term "reactive" differently; i.e., I've never heard of someone having a good "proaction time" when describing athletic ability.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Originally Posted by Kaubel,February 17th, 2006 @ 4:28PM
What you're describing is situational awareness.
Exactly. Good healers have it, and bad ones don't. Proactive versus reactive. Active versus passive. Whatever. As long as you recognize the distinction, the labels are immaterial.
I'm a Texas state licensed and nationally certified athletic trainer (LAT and ATC respectively) as well as a Texas certified teacher. I've been all over Texas working in various schools, hospitals, and clinics, but right now I'm the Head AT and a health teacher at a local high school. This summer, I'll be taking the NSCA-CPT exam so I can get paid doing private fitness training.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Groovy. I played baseball through my junior year of college, when I tore the labrum in my pitching shoulder two weeks after I was notified that the Dodgers were probably going to draft me in the 38th round. (The draft doesn't even have that many rounds any more, which tells you what kind of a flex story that really is.)
Since then, I've always toyed with the idea of getting into sports medicine. Probably as a way to compensate for lost chances or something, beats me.
02/16/06, 3:22 PM
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