Zephro

For stuff like this assign priests to heal the mages. Druids and pallies can take care of the rest of the raid, if indeed there's any healing that needs doing. You need Flash Heal to keep an IAEing mage alive.

 

Viator

We put one Holy Nova healer in with the heavy AE crew and a paladin keeping an eye on us, as well. It worked pretty well and we got the supression rooms cleared with a quickness. Honestly, the only dude dying a ton was me so it's something on my end, most likely.

Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork

 

KinetiK

A fun trick is to PI one of your buddy priest's mages in the depression room and watch him panic. hee hee.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower

 

MIzpah

Not sure if this is happening in your scenario, but in the suppression rooms we have now asked the Mages not to AOE without a PW:Shield, it seems to have helped a lot.

As an aside I find this thread fascinating as we are going through the process of evaluating performance in all classes (as we start our transition from BWL to AQ40 and Naxx), and it fair to say that people point fingers frequently at healers (priests especially). In part I find this valid due to large performance variations according to SWS that don’t scale with gear, but also when we zoom in to see what people were casting ( a 3:1 cast ratio is worrying when people are casting 80% the same spells).

As GM of the guild I am trying to ensure that the process is fair and logically sound - the intent is to help some people improve, thats all. However do guild's represented here regularly go through such benchmarking ? And if so do they do so across all classes ?

*If too much of a derail should I start a separate thread?*

 

Ashuko

I must echo something that's been said already in this thread, but is without question true: healing in the WoW endgame is all about timing. The druid who might not lead "effective healing" but drops the NS+HT macro'd combo on a tank with 400 health = wipe saver. The on-the-ball priest who times their bubble right before a shadowflame hits and then immediately starts a gheal rank4 and drops it right after the shadowflame hits = uber.

Seriously, the game doesn't deal damage out at a nice, even rate. It comes in spikes, dribs, drags, and rushing floods. Teaching all of your healers to anticipate the ebb and flow correctly is the best possible thing you can do. Treat each type of trash, and each boss encounter, as a unique opportunity to learn exactly what kind of healing (fast 'n' furious, timed, HoTs + bubbles + NSHT) is required for a "perfect" take-down or clear.

Then teach those techniques again and again and again until your healers can execute it perfectly, and are teaching newer recruits as they come in the door.

Plenty of tools can be used for feedback - SW Stats "effective healing" is good (just to show that someone isn't AFK'ing 90% of the time), the overheal % is good as well (as a general guide, anything higher than 30-40% overheal isn't so hot as it indicates a general lack of attention), and combat parsers are great for specifically calling out someone who was assigned to a target and asking them why in tarnation they didn't heal that target at all or forgot to bubble them...etc.

However, feedback is only one part of the puzzle.

Steps to success:

1. Learn the optimal healing required for each encounter. Study which healing "specials" (druid NS+HT, priest bubble, pally Lay on Hands, etc) work great in the context of the encounter you're working (be it trash, or a boss).

2. Teach your healing corps. Then teach them again. Be patient.

3. Make smart assignments. Assign your people into situations that set them up for success, not failure. "Self-contained groups" composed of single parties are great. They help contain mistakes and create better possibilities for success. Caveat: in most situations, of course. Sometimes you just have to have 6-7 healers on X target.

4. Use log parsers and SW Stats (or similar) for feedback and "what went wrong" analysis.

5. Encourage active discussions re: talent builds and gear wish lists.

It's all about a dynamic approach to the problem. :) No single, silver bullet.

http://ctprofiles.net/69539

 

berg

The problem with healing is that the meters are not super informative.
You cannot criticize for overhealing unless it is really bad.
You cannot always criticize for low healing, especially if it is a person who regularly cancels heals.
Healing someone taking a steady 2500 dps is easy but will reflect the most on healmeters. Saving the rogue that eats a nasty cleave or the priest that pulled an add may very well be the most important heal in the battle but it will just be a blip on the meters.


In the end if you want to know who your good healers are ask your warriors/mages/rogues and you will get a fairly accurate list.

Then ask them which healers they would rather not have and you get a pretty good picture of who needs work.

 

mnemus

You should keep in mind there are bad players of EVERY class.
A good healer should know every encounter in detail and realize the value of having extensive consumables. <the latter applies if that's the norm for your guild across all classes>

The easiest thing to learn in healing is knowing and anticipating what the MOB is going to do and where you should be. I guess this is where PvP healing factors in where you need to know the main abilities of other classes and react accordingly. I also eye-brow people who die to C'thun's Red Beam (5/6 attempts) or set off Thaddius Charges (3/10 attempts) too often. Keep a record, it's not just healers causing these wipes.

Then comes knowing how to manage aggro and managing mana as efficiently as possible while keeping people alive. Speed running 5-mans would probably give you a good idea of this, or even speed running MC <2hrs.

Effective healing and overhealing meters don't really tell you a whole lot, if anything at all. But I found SWStats pretty handy since it monitors and records what types and ranks of spells a specific person is casting throughout a fight and the totals of each type. Although I cannot vouch that it was 100% accurate, it was pretty interesting.

If anyone can tell you who the bad healers are, it's the healers themselves as they get feedback from people who die and then start watching said healer. In the end, pretty much all aspects of great healing are basically just learning and gaming experience, practise, and common sense (which isn't always so common). Good healers are grown, and I'd say healing is one of the raid roles which takes the longest to pick up and perfect if you have zero help. That is why having a constructive and healthy healer community and constructive raid is important; since it's so hard to find out which ones specifically suck (and even if you did you probably wouldn't just kick them anyway), if they honestly want to get better, your best bet is just to make it easy for them to improve themselves from weak->above average asap.

And I highly agree with the person who said you NEED to give healers assignments, logical organization, and a cohesive strat (not just bosses, EVEN on some trash.) Which also leads to identifying specific problems where something went wrong (MT/OT/etc.) more than wrongfully saying all the healers did something wrong when most of them didn't. A whole slew of things could've gone wrong rather than just bad healing; bad raid groups for one. There are different healers doing different things, healing must be precise and is a whole lot more complex than "DPS my assist" or that one giant boss.

I have also come to the conclusion that Naxx is NO LONGER your average instance, many times a person dies when they could have avoided it themselves even if there wasn't a heal coming. Some people still don't realize this but the burden of healing has been shifted quite a bit to every individual player. A key part of developing strats in Naxx now involve keeping in mind ways of minimizing the actual damage the raid takes so healers have a more successful chance to keep people alive. (i.e. Faerlina. "Why didn't you heal me through rain of fire?!") If someone antagonizes a healer, tell them to stfu because there's 20 different things they could have done to help the person/strat improve before that. I could bitch at dps all day on Gothik too, but why?

 

Decker

What I found to be very effective for champion control is having a hunter offtank. As silly as this sounds once the tank gets knockback you can control it by it going right to the hunter afterwards (instead of a healer inside the group). The hunter can avoid cleaves from the mob when it's on the MT, and build up enough hate to hold it until either A) Another warrior removes it from the hunter or B) the original tank takes it off.

Our dodge is high enough that we'll miss 1 of the 3 strikes it'll possibly get in on us. We have high enough HP to take around 2 or 3 hits without a heal, but if we're crit we're screwed.

Deterrance helps for these moments, but I usually wear high HP/dodge gear for these clears. So what if I do less deeps...less time spent ressing unnecessary deaths. Plus a lot of mana is wasted if the champion gets inside the group and cleaves.

This shouldn't be a healer issue ;) My only beef is not getting a heal when I'm "tanking".

http://www.paradosi.net

 

Savos

A lot of posts have said PvP, and while I agree in that it forces attention it is not a really good test. The other players are beyond your control and can assist train right through your healers and such, while it is on them to avoid such situations they are often unavoidable. The mod posted earlier by enshula looks exceptional for evaluating people to see where they might improve.

Most of the problems here are pure attention span related, not really gaming skill to be honest. Gaming skill itself helps with the attention and such but helps very little overall until you get to late AQ or Naxx really. I just wish that raid healing didn't suck so much and becomes something more fun like 5 man dungeons are (level/gear appropriate that is).

Naxx seems like a lot of fun to me, but I've not be able to do any of the fights yet, but it seems like you need all 40 players to be on the ball for the whole time instead of MC's 15, BWL ~25 or AQ40s 35+.

 

CheshireCat

As a healer, I would strongly suggest that any "healing review" that your guild does be done by whichever of your guild officers is a healer.

My last guild was run by warriors, and their perspective on any wipe or death was, "How can we blame the healers for this one?" They had no clue what we were going through, and it was infuriating and demoralising to be criticized by them.

Perhaps a more diplomatic tank or DPSer could pull it off better than those guys did, but overall, the best evaluation of a healer isn't going to come from some objective criterion. Solicit confidiential reviews from the healers you trust-- they know who the good ones are.

Also, I love the suggestion of assigning half your healer corps to DPS/tanking during trash pulls where healing demands are low. I'll be the first to admit to spacing during trash because the pull required about a third of the healing we had available. The pure mental fatigue of watching heath bars constantly seems even worse when you remove the bits that make healing fun: pressure and responsibility. Reducing the number of healers assigned to the job could totally bring those back.

 

Elmindreda

My guild first began to address this problem after we got most of BWL on farm, but were still having too many deaths on lab packs that greatly slowed our clear time. The system we came up with is the "buddy system". Each tank is assigned a priest. If that tank dies, it is assumed to be that priest's fault unless they can come up with a good alternate explanation. We also have a priest assigned to "the mages" as his buddy. We went from having deaths on every pack pull to having perfect pulls every time. Accountability is key, otherwise people will slack off. Whenever possible, give specific assignments.

 

Rogar

Overhealing doesn't matter at all until the healer has run out of mana and can no longer heal. Canceling heals too often is indicative of a network or synaptic problem. Healers who spend any measureable time at either end of this spectrum are quickly overlooked for others that don't.

Right on. People can number crunch all they want, but at the end of the raid, a healer's reputation is made or ruined by the people he's responsible for.

 

Oneiros

Battlegroup 1 represent!

So last night we have numerous 20-30 second lag spikes. Thankfully, not a single one was in the middle of a boss encounter, so we actually didn't have any wipes attributed to them. But a little later on we had a huge server death. No one could release their bodies, no one could move. One of our warlocks became invincible, he tanked an Anubisath Defender for about 3-4 minutes until he disconnected. Since we were still in the middle of raid time, people still wanted to get something done, so we all ran our little ghosts (which had been stuck inside AQ for a good 20 minutes) to C'thuns room. Check out these nice screens:

http://wtbhealsguild.nrgservers.net/...logo_Cthun.jpg

http://wtbhealsguild.nrgservers.net/...logo_Cthun.jpg

http://wtbhealsguild.nrgservers.net/LOL.jpg

So yeah.. Battlegroup 1 definately sucks a hard one. I can't even begin to count how many amazing players our server has lost due to them xferring off because how hard this lag owns progress (one guild has been stuck on Thaddius for something like 5 weeks). Maybe someday Blizzard will remember its bastard children on the bad servers.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

◊ Kalman

The Battlegroup 1 raiding experience:

12:08 AM "Server restarting in 15:00"
12:08 AM "Server restarting in 0:10"

Disconnected

 

Pandul

Once transfers opened our realm lost like 5 of its top raiding guilds, and its top PvP guild to boot. Admittedly, the server performance has been better and the crashes less frequent, but the awesome community we had was pretty much torn in half.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Using damagemeters or SWStats and having them parse the events (I'm assuming SW Stats does this) gives really useful information.

You can see which priests use hots for most of their healing, which use fast heals primarily and which use slow heals, and the average amount healed by each spell cast so you can figure out the rank used.

One style isn't definitively better than the others but you can still figure out how improvements can be made.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Xard

I hate to possibly do a little hijacking, but seeing the guy above talking about megaman time attacks:

My guild is all about rerolling level 1 paladins on this one german RP server and then trying to do hogger raids. There's a hilarious video of about 10 guys all trying to chase down a level 8 troll across all over Elwynn forest and constantly renewing their seal of the crusader (or whatever) but being completely inable to catch up to the guy. The Benny Hill music really fits it well, too.

anyways back to talking about healers messing up!

 

Dakous

I beg to differ, sir.

As a rogue, I have taken personal responsibility for killing whatever it was that was put in front of me. If that means giving it the hurting of the ages such that it can fathom beating none more than me, facing it away from the crowd, and crossing my fingers really hard, rest assured - that dragon will be evasion tanked correctly, and with lock on aggro. Some rogues don't avoid dodge, parry, and stamina like the plague while still maintaining top three damage performance.

It turns out with heals a rogue can tank many raid mobs for periods of time in excess of 15 seconds (without prep). I'm not stupid nor insane, I wouldn't perscribe it as anything above a last resort. However, I have slain enough progression content competitively while it was staring me squarely in the eyes that anyone who thinks "I'm not going to waste good mana trying [to heal a rogue]" and thinks that being a DPS class is just one of a big horde that bears no individual responsibility MUST not have seen me go to work.

And I dare you to play a rogue and place 8th on the damage meters. Much individual responsibility indeed. While I'm not ignorant of the plight of the healer, don't pretend like it's candyland over here. If a rogue severely lagged behind the others in the DM and wasn't a recruit and wasn't replaced the moment number 1-3 rogue from #2 guild said, "Gosh, I'd like to see Naxx...", I would be surprised.

There are two extremes to the healer issue - warriors, who expect healers to make them invincible, and immediately flay them for any shortcomings thusly, and healers, who fear accountability. There is a middle ground. Accountibility that doesn't take effective healing on a damage meter as the gospel truth. I think another poster said it best - subtly ask everyone if they'd be grouped with each healer. Everyone leaping on a bandwagon is a pretty good sign of a hit. Everyone leaping off a sinking ship is a pretty good sign of a miss.

Too often the fallibility of effective healing is used as a cloak for terrible healers. But I won't ignore the other side of the spectrum - as an extreme example, I was in a PUG ZG run with a warrior wearing the blue warrior PVP set, and all PVP rewards aside. Strangely, his HP didn't go smooth and steady, it went full, almost empty, full, almost empty... oops, crit, died. He said on vent, "OMFG HEALERS STOP LETTING ME DIE."

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

Boevis

My guild has an "MC Trash" complex, where as soon as a boss encounter ends and loot is handed out, /afk begins. We inevitably have a lot of deaths due to trying to take on a pair of gargoyles with 20 people. I'd say it averages about 3 deaths per pull, with the packs in Grand Widow's room, the Monstrosities before Patchwerk, and the Spiders that do the 2k poison accounting for the upper end. We rarely assign any healing, with notable exceptions being against the 2 Gargoyles, and the Deathknights which we Range or LoS (respectively) and assign for the further Tank. Trash is taken seriously to the extent that after a screwup, we rez up and 'just do it right next time'.

On boss fights, our assignments are rather specific; "X, Y, and Z heal Tank A" "X Decurse groups 1/2, Y on 3/4" "Priests PoH after the Web Spin" "Druid 1 Heal warlock, Druid 2, Priest 1, and Priest 2 heal Warrior, Shaman 1 Make sure they don't die in a Blizzard" I'd say about 3 times a night someone says "He just died, I dunno what happened" Which usually leads to the Tank in question reading their combat log aloud over vent, revealing that Priest 1 and Druid 2 didn't land a single heal in a 6 second period, yet both of them will claim seeing the Tank at full and thus canceled their spells.

If the same healer keeps showing up in that sort of conversation, he quietly gets labeled as 'not very good'. Usually it's an experience issue, someone whose never seen Nef before suddenly called in for Twin Emps, so they're reminded of what to do in their class channel and we move on. Beyond that, they'll be at the bottom of any "combat rez" priority, and generally not innervated. This last thing also applies to healers that, dispite having healing assigned, are found healing many other people or constantly OOM, or Rediculous overhealing or Die constantly from area damage (cleaves, blizzard, explosions, poison clouds) It's also true of a player that slacks horribly on removing debuffs to not be a particularly attentive healer.

Consistancy is the rule. When it's the same Druid on Viscidus who goes OOM too fast from moonfire and can't keep his group cleansed, blaming "the healers" is only going to piss the rest of us off when it's clear as day who screwed up. Aside from everyone making fun of him in raid for moonfire spamming Viscidus for the 4th time, someone has got to explain, preferably in a healer or class channel, what he is supposed to do, and definately not supposed to do on the fight. Eventually, a person that just can't keep a reasonable performance for whatever reason just isn't invited to progression nights.

There are definately situations where someone is just going to die, and there's nothing you can do about it as a healer. Anub, Instructor, Grand Widow, Maexxna, Twin Emps, C'thun are notable for their flat out killing someone, usually by that person's own fault. As a healer, unless it's the Main Tank, I'm not going to bother healing someone that refuses to get out of AoE's or can't be bothered to notice the Instructor is about to Shout, Priests/Mages that don't hit slow fall when Impaled. Yes, sometimes you're in a Blizzard and slow, and you pick a direction to run ... and the bug there decides he's going to explode, not much you can do but pray you resist, or a tentacle pops up and not only knocks you toward Dark Glare, but hamstrings you as well ... you're dead. But when I see a rogue running toward an exploding bug or strait into a blizzard, or a Priest just stand in the Blizzard trying to get off a 3 second heal ... I'll throw them 1 heal, 1. After that, their death was completely preventable by themself. Just like I can't be expected to heal a Patchwerk Tank that insists on Berserker stance, I can't be expected to waste mana on someone that insists on ignoring their own safety.

Overall Healing is just for e-peen :dong: Any priest that wants to be on top, can use the Hotspam addon, and PoH on any fight with AoE, Shamans can boost their standing with 5/8 EF's bonus or just spam Chain Heal on a tank against mobs with cleave, Druids can also HoTspam. If worse comes to worst and you desperately want to be on top, go stand in the slime and heal your self to full repeatedly. Grats on the peen.
SWstats is an amazing mod for analying healing on a Boss Fight. Effective Healing and Total Healing are both meaningless unless you look at the more in depth healing info, who did this person heal, which spells did they use, what was their overhealing, how efficient are they being, who was the tank healed by.

 

Norther

I consistantly beat everyone in the raid at effective healing. I'm a priest. My only close compition is another priest and another paladin. Everyone else is way lower.
I have around 50% overheal. Doesnt matter though. When I'm casting heal rank 1, it costs me 135ish mana. I Regen about 140mana a tick. It takes a tick and 1/4 to cast. So while chain casting that spell I'm GAINING mana. So if I overheal with those heals...it REALLY doesnt matter at all.
My guild uses paladins to cleanse spam. We only have priests dispell / abolish if we have only about 2 paladins per raid. We normally field 4/5. So if you were to watch the cleaning meters, paladins would be kings and priests / druids would barely be on there. Druids way moreso than priests because of decursing though ;).

Infecting you with Body Thetans since 2008.

 

summonplz

Even if you face it away from the bunch and back to the MT spot, the healers would still have to heal both you and the MT through any frontal cone attacks until you decided you had had enough of playing special boy and let the tank have it back. Much much easier to keep heals on the tank, let you die (in the tank position, of course), let it get back on the tank and then keep on killing the boss.
If the tank is down then all bets are off, healers and everyone else use their best judgement to keep the attempt going.
It comes down to the fact that while you probably have some very nice dodge gear and stuff, you aren't a tank and you shouldn't have pulled aggro in the first place. If you screw up and pull aggro, you should be doing everything you can to get the kill back on track including dying. Healers just have less of a problem with this concept than rogues do :)

 

Tel

I completely disagree. Having had to ninja remove salv, burn adr rush and drag firemaw out of the healing camp twice now due to tanks making mistakes i think that its very beneficial for a rogue to be getting a few heals here and there.

I agree the a tank should take it back asap, but there NO reason a rogue cant grab that mob and drag it back into position before it whipes you if a tank is unable to for whatever reason. If the rogue dies doing so, then ok, no big loss. If the rogue keeps it in position long enough for the tank to get back on it then surely thats a good thing?

 

Dakous

I thought my qualifiers about not being insane, nor stupid, and the whole "last resort" kinda hinted at the absense of a MT-in-plate. Perhaps your idea and my idea of last resort may vary since I'm a tooth and nails sort of guy.

Healers have a problem with accountability, as seen in this thread. Sorry, welcome to the World of Warcraft warriors ("Hi, Vael just wiped the raid because you don't know how to tank transition!"), and rogues ("Sorry, you are the weakest link being noticably below the other rogues in output, goodbye!") have been playing the last year. Do healers get the shaft at the hands of mouth breathers who don't understand heals have a cast time and can't increase maximum HP by a gajillion? Yes. Boo. Hoo.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

◊ Anias

Actually I don't have a problem with accountability - I just feel that trying to generalize is worthless. Be specific about what you want improved, keep that discussion in tells so you don't have to deal with the social fallout of public reprimands, and if it doesn't improve replace the individual. Simple.

There's very few individual healing assignments in wow. I can very much blame TankX for incorrect positioning that wiped the raid. If healers 1-5 are healing him and he dies? It takes some detective work to reveal that healer 5 isn't keeping up his end of the fight. I could certainly yell at healers 1-5 and expect improvements, but if healers 1-4 did their job and the tank died because 5 was slacking, yelling at all of them pisses off 4 good healers and improves 1 bad healer. That's not a good solution, but it's the one a majority of raids take. Better to do the work to determine that healer 5 healed for 1/10th of what healers 1-4 did, and hadn't cast anything for x seconds when the tank died.

As a side note - the most valuable tool for improving your raid is /combatlog from your main tank. An alternative is an addon called transcriptor. Reading back through the log and determining that the mob is crushing for x, your healers are contributing y, and your tank is in beserker with a 2hander equipped is quite helpful to diagnosing what's wrong. :blink:

Math is very easy, explaining math is quite difficult.

 

Taikero

When I was still playing my Priest, it was always very apparent who was and wasn't pulling their weight, at least as far as other healers observing each other is concerned. I've found that as a Rogue I can't focus on what the healers are doing so much anymore because I'm busy focusing on my own problems, generally with AoE or trying to catch up to some boss or mob running around.

Of course, I used to always use DamageMeters and Recap in tandem to compare things like overhealing, overall healing, and of course I'd look to see who got dispelled/decursed and who was doing it.

I remember when we were still wiping on Firemaw, and we hadn't assigned a PW: Shield priest yet for the MT. We wiped about five times, and after I had been saying we should be shielding the tank for a while, my raid leader finally listened and changed only my role from an offtank healer to PW: Shield bot (I had a lot of mana/5 gear, and considering how often you have to be casting during that fight, I was the logical choice). We took him out the next pull, just from changing one person's role.

Don't think of it as bragging or anything, because that wasn't my point. My point is that sometimes the tank "just dies" not because of any fault of the healers not doing their job, but sometimes it's a matter of the way the fight is being approached. In the above case, a PW: Shield bot assignment was the answer. In others, an extra offtank or more resistance gear or more DPS or any number of things could be at fault for the tank just "dying". But that's why it's so hard to assign blame to healers. Usually the only way to gauge any of it is to check DamageMeters/Recap and the combat log, and of course be sure you're getting dispelled/decursed.

Just some food for thought. Generally if your raid's wiping, it's usually not the fault of one person being /afk or not doing anything (Well, usually), but more likely it's a combination of factors that might be making it difficult or impossible for your healers to do their job.



Of course, if your healers are constantly /afk during trash or just aren't paying much attention, especially on an "on farm" boss, well.....You need to yell at that asshole for not pulling his weight.