Little background:

Guild is working on Twin Emps, first killed Nef back in March, killed Huhurana month ago, and have had only 2 nights on the Twin Emps.

We usually bring about 12-17 healers on a raid (2-3 druids, 6-8 priests, 4-6 shamans). We are pretty healer heavy when it comes to raids. The thing is though, people still die. A lot. What I've noticed, is that if people are not assigned to a tank, they will watch the emergency meter and spam flash heal (or equivalent). By the time that person (person A) is off the emergency meter, someone else (person B) is at the top of the meter, so they switch to them, and by the time person B is healed, person A has taken damage again, and probably died. I know this because I set up player targets on 10 of the healers, and watched them all target the same person within 1 second of each other. It truly is phenominal.

The priests also spam flash heal on boss fights, then, for example, will complain that they're OOM when the boss is at 70%, and bitch at another priest at ~85% mana. The 85% mana priest has been spamming efficiently Heals Rank 2/Greater Heals. Everytime I suggest something to the priests in their priest channel, I get my head bit off, with them saying, "GTFO warrior." I've played my friends' healers sometimes if we want to trade characters for an instance, and healing isn't that hard. Nothing in this game is hard at all. This is the simplest MMO ever friggn' made. But that's another story.

Also, say in BWL, on a lab pack pull, I'm going to DPS, then one of our tanks dies, so I pick it up...and 9 times out of 10 I will die too. Suggestions vary from only using G-heal, and manually cancelling if the tank is topped off to assigning healers per tank in group. I try setting up groups like this, but invariably heals are spammed across groups ineffectively.

How can I 1) get the priests to listen and 2) change their habits so they become more effective and efficient healers?
Also 3) What % overheal do you usually see from your healers? Ours range from 13% (usually the good ones) upwards of 30%.

Edits: Fucking smilies

For trash, to be honest for the most part I would suggest making self-sufficient groups, and have the healers concentrate on keeping the people up in their groups. Your group first, any tanks that need help 2nd, and 3rd look to EM. People spam healing the person at the top of Emergency Monitor are just as bad as a mage spamming frostbolt without paying attention. Honestly, I think trash healing is far more difficult than healing on the vast majority of boss fights, just because there's so many things going on at once. Especially on BWL lab trash, for instance.

For many boss fights, though, there's extremely specific healing assignments, so people should be sticking to their assignments rather than just doing whatever.

As for gheal vs. flash heal vs. heal rank 2 or whatever...honestly no one heal is better or worse than another. It's all about the situation, and part of the skill involved with being a healer is knowing what heal to use in which situation.

For example, your priests spamming flash heal and going OOM that fast (on emps I imagine)? Is it because they aren't cancelling? Is it because they're moving from the Blizzard too slowly and thus have to heal/shield themselves more? Or, the more likely situation is that they are panicing on the damage the tank is tanking, and thus spamming too high a rank of flash heal, which is destroying their mana. Is it maybe because you need to setup a healing rotation?

The other issue is a lot of healers from MC/BWL are used to just standing there and spam healing, and have terrible reaction time. Emps is the first fight which really requires healers to do something other than stand there and heal. It introduces the concept of moving from danger.

As for the part about being unwilling to refine and/or improve their tactics. That just sounds like people being stubborn and retarded. "I know I could do better, but I refuse to change anything!"

The thing is, they don't think they can do anything better, they think they are doing everything right and refuse to change. I used to be fine with dying all the time as I was a fury warrior and pull aggro on trash (not bosses, I pay more attention there), but even when I play perfectly, wear tank gear, and OT stuff, I still die. A lot.

Your Priest Class Leader or whomever needs to pull his head out of his ass, and explain to these slackasses that they should be able to get through twin emps, with no mana pots, with 15 healers (No Mana Tide either), and make it through with no tank deaths. This is entirely feasiable, and doable.

They need to learn that balancing Healing Efficiency with HP/S is the way to go, and how to manage their mana much better. I probably cancel ~40% of my heals on twin emps, and *always* have a Heal R2 channeling. No reason not to, esp on a fight with so much burst potential.

First of all, I feel for you, because the first real "raiding" guild I was in had similar issues with its healing team. There were problems ranging from nonsensical healing rotations where a tank would die because "It wasn't my turn," to horrible mana conservation and constant cries for innervates, to people trying to heal out of group all over the place while letting their own group die, and so on. It's extremely stressful to be a sane member of such a group, and I ended up forming some kind of crazy bond with our MT, who would die every time I was not assigned to help heal him. (I'm still keeping that jerk alive in my current guild, as it so happens.) But there's nothing so frustrating as a healing group that refuses to take responsibility for their mana and raid health, particularly since that's the whole point.

I'll echo Chalon's point on groups for trash situations. If you're rolling deep in healers, it should be easy enough to spread them out sanely among all the groups in the raid, then tell the groups to ensure their own survival for the most part. Concentrating on 5 people makes much more sense than trying than trying to concentrate on 40 all the time, and since that gives everyone a primary healing "assignment", there should be less wanton wasteful whack-a-mole being played with the emergency monitor. Note that this requires your healers to trust each other to heal their own groups, and it also requires people to know when to heal outside of it, such as the aforementioned case where a fury warrior/rogue pulls aggro.

As far as bosses go, and as far as running out of mana on Emps specifically goes, people need to learn to take care of their mana. Mindlessly hitting flash heal on bosses went out of vogue awhile ago, and the emps fight in particular is all about healer mana control. As Deris mentioned, they need to be able to heal through the whole 10-15 minute fight without running low or running out, and all that requires is that a given person take 100% of the responsibility for themselves. It doesn't matter which heals they're using so long as they can sustain it for that amount of time, but has been said before, they're unlikely to get that kind of longevity out of max rank flash heal spamming. Rank 2 heal is king, cancelling is king. If your priests aren't currently using either, then the first basic step is for them to learn how to do both. The priest lead needs to tell them all to pull that spell out and learn how to use it comfortably and in conjunction with faster or bigger heals that should be cancelled if the tank is at full health. It's no mystery as to how people endure this fight--that's how.

As far as attitude goes, that can be harder, but a dose of matter-of-fact reality might help, because they cannot reasonably "take pride" in their healing if they're letting themselves go out of mana and letting people die. The blinders need to come off. Healing classes are not on some sort of unassailable pedestal, and they need to evaluate and improve their performance like any other segment of the raid after a wipe. That doesn't mean that they deserve abuse, but they need to distinguish between "abuse" and the phrases "we're not doing all we can" and "we need to change how we're doing this". They need to disassociate their egos from their flash heals and allow themselves to admit that they have room for improvement before you're going to be able to get anywhere. And on this particular fight, the message cannot possibly be more clear: they need to learn basic mana conservation techniques. Period.

I've noticed that priests who started raiding before 1.10 spam are the primary flash spam offenders. My old guild's MT healer did nothing but chain flash heal 7 and then call out for innervates. Somehow someway she had 8/8 Transcendence, but proceeded to break up the set for gear with more +healing (our priests were understandably miffed) I constantly reminded her to just cast-and-cancel H2 but she never listened to me. Didn't help that the MT agreed with her.

If they are the theorycraft-minded you might consider busting out the math to show just how powerful H2 w/ +heal gear (or 8/8 Trans with GH1) is in terms of efficiency over flash spamming. And your druids will love you too.

Spam flash will only get you so far. I used to have about 970 healing with the same m/5 and considerably less spirit - I jumped up to 369 spirit self buffed, for minimal loss of +healing (down to 715) and don't regret it one bit. I'm almost to the point where I can infinitely cast HR2 unbuffed. a couple more m/5 or spirit either way, and I can pound it endlessly and never go oom. Then I would be just spending my mana on flash 5 and Gheal R2 for oh shit situtions.

consider using healing meters after a long boss fight that requires people to pace themselves, and call out those who blew their load chain casting for 45 seconds. This is flawed to a point though, as I've seen people use flash heal for the express purpose of getting it in before the slower heals, just so THEIR helas would count. But outside of trash, it's hard to keep that up.

This has helped me get some backup before I call out the priests who ask for an innervate 45 seconds into bloodlord :-(

also, you can direct them to the calculator at www.ctmod.net/calculator.ct and suggest heavily to use what gives them the highest sustained hps as their backbone. Yes, spikes happen, but still.

Start running sw_stats in your raids and spam the overhealing / effective healing charts at the end of each boss encounter. The Flash Heal spammers should quickly come to realize how useless they are and *hopefully* do their best to improve.

what? flash heal spammers are some of the most effective healers when mana is not an issue, which owes a large part to gear and consumables

You cannot make people change. Short of getting something like SWstats and showing them the parsed information in a desperate attempt to pique their interest into achieving efficiency, you are shit out of luck.

you must also consider that some overhealing isnt that terribly bad. the person that sits there because their heal might over heal is begging for a burst dps mob to wipe the raid for him. Ive experienced this with my guild, where some of them have been like durr overhealing is bad then dont lift a finger if they risk over healing. It does us just about as much good as the chain caster that blows his load quickly as they sit there and watch vek'nilash chainsaw thru the raid as they missed the heal on the tank.

The best thing you can do is show them the math. You cant argue with math. Have them all install theory craft, and have them turn on the hpm stat. A good healer matches their healing rate with what the raid needs for it to be healed for. For 90% of fights I chain cast rank 4 ht - which i can do virtually forever and have ~10:1 efficiency with it. Even if i over heal 20% with that efficiency, i'm still healing at 8:1.

As for healing meters - I dont find much use for them. Winning the fight is the true healing meter. Its only really useful for catching people watching a movie instead of healing.

The problem is that it's difficult to determine anything from healing meters. Raw healing meters can be gamed by overhealing, "overhealing" meters can be gamed by abusing HoTs, and "effective healing" meters really just test which of the Flash Heal spammers has the lowest ping.

Personally I hate Emergency Meters. If someone is low, it should be obvious just by looking at the CTRA bars and seeing the largest negative number on the board. And just blindly healing #1 or #2 on EM avoids issues of prioritization: for example, on Nefarian pre-20%, mages are a higher priority than hunters.

If you're having a serious problem with Emergency Meters abuse, assign healers to specific targets. "Heal your group" strikes me at least from a Horde perspective as wasteful of totem buffs, but there's no reason why on trash you can't assign some healers to tanks, some to melee DPS, some to ranged DPS. This will at least reduce the amount of cross-healing.

To me, Emergency Meters are a tool. And a pretty useful one-- someone in danger or suddenly taking damage is something I want to know about, so that I can then decide what to do about it.

Of course you still need to think about priorities and efficiency, but if you're nailing your foot to the floor, don't blame the hammer.

We used to try and raid with 16 healers (2 per group) as a baseline. This served us fine through BWL and AQ40 but once we started hitting certain Naxxramas fights we ran into a number of problems with the healers. It wasn't that they were being lazy as such but due to our raid makeup and typically running with one more healer than most guilds everyone had gotten quite complacent about only needing to heal their group plus the MT. We broke out of this by deliberately raiding with less healers (say 13-14) and then mixing the groups up such that they were optimised to help DPS rather than healing. We then found that healing naturally became more efficient simply because the healers had to pay more attention than previously.

As a side effect certain encounters became a lot easier because we were killing the bosses quicker which left less room for error over the course of a longer fight. Certainly I think you can actually make things more difficult for yourself by taking too much healing and not enough DPS.

A lot of people who have played a class for a long time (like I suspect your healers have) are pretty set in their ways and will take great offense to suggestions that outsiders have to give about their play style. Chances are, they've played so terribly for so long that it will be difficult to correct them, but over time they have felt that their healing style is acceptable because it hasn't severely impeded the progress of the guild. You're probably seeing that on emps now, and they're probably dumbfounded as to why they're wiping.

I do wish you luck though, because bad healing is one of the hardest things to rectify.

Cross healing is bad for the most part. I always set up two heavy tank groups. two warriors and 2-3 healers each. The rest are damage groups and the healers in those groups keep them up. It works out much better. If you only need one healer for a damage group, but there are two in there, one of them shoudl take it upon themselves to do crosshealing.

You really have to start to trust your other healers to hold up their end of the bargain (keeping their group alive) and focusing on doing the same.

If your healers must use Emergency Monitor, assign specific classes or groups and have them turn off the rest. Use SWStats (or adding them to your target lists) to see if they are following instructions.

In the end that is only a stopgap measure though, they're going to have to break out of the Flash Heal mold and learn why to use certain heals at certain times. They have to understand the encounters and they have to understand the math or at least accept the conclusions that others have come to.

That's exactly what's happening and the most senior priests are the ones that believe so much in their ways.

My guild falls into the casual/hardcore description: a lot of casuals who want hardcore results, and about 20% of the guild is actually hardcore. Although my guild has a lot of skill and potential in it, but I feel our current healing habits are going to hold us back bigtime.

I just want this shit to stop happening (only progression for this time period was about 3 nights on Sartura, 1 night on Fankriss and 2 nights for Huhuran (+1 more after grounding totem nerf patch), and 1.5 nights on emps: I spent 90g yesterday (40g in AQ40, 50g in ZG) I'm fine with paying the repair bills as gold is so easy to get in this game, but still, it just exemplifies the situation.

emergency meters are crap for real healing - I think a lot of your problems are coming from their use. The problem is that they are set as some % of people's health, but if a mage is at 50% well he's effectively dead, whereas a warrior is fine for a little while (in micro-second terms).

If people are spot healing they should be just watching the individual bars in my opinion. If they can't watch 40 bars (it ain't much fun) then split the grps - spot heal 2 groups each or something. It really isn't that hard, but wean them off emergency meters - they don't save anyone and they breed overhealing as everyone jumps to the same target at once.

I have 8/8 Transcendence, and for me the most powerful healing method on the Twin Emps is to cast a Rank 1 GH to get the extra dot running and then spam Rank 2 Heal (canceling if needed) until the Transcendence proc is done and then repeat. I never run out of mana and my tank never dies even when half the other healers assigned to him die from their own stupidity (deaths from blizzards and bugs).

If your healers are having issues overhealing, tell them to use the mod SmartHeal. It will cast different ranks of your heal spell for you, and if you use Bonuscanner mod, it will take into account +heal gear.

Certainly it is better to do it yourself, but this may help them.