I'm a healing priest. It's what I like doing, and though I hate to toot my own horn, I'm pretty darn good at it.

I've been in two raids. The first was a new made thing, and I somehow ended up in charge through a mess of circumstances. We had maybe 4-5 priests a night (possibly one shadow), maybe two druids (one balance), and a handful of DPSadins. Healing was tough. We strategized it, if it wasn't a boss and even on some bosses, I was solo healing the main tank.

I liked it, to be honest, and we did very well with it. We had good people, and great healers.

The one I'm in now takes at least fifteen if they possibly can, and will accept up to 18, maybe 20. Healers. 8-9 holy priests, 4-5 druids, 6-7 paladins, all of them healers, and most of them there every raid.

I don't do much, anymore. I tried doing what I used to -- what I liked. Anticipating damage, using GHeal and letting the tank take some damage, using renew a lot. It didn't work out so good. If anyone took even 200 damage, there is an imediate heal spam. HoTs are just overheal, even if not currently in combat. I couldn't get a heal in edgewise, and GHeal was entirely out of the question.

I have been relegated to emergency monitor spam healing, just like everyone else. It's killing me, slowly.

So here's the question.

Is this normal in raids? I mean, you hear about heal-botting all the time, but I had always sort of assumed that was mostly facetious. Should I just switch to my mage or warlock, or just deal with it, or something else?

What the priesting like in your raid? How do you deal with it?

EM healing is an assigned duty. It's not something you do just because.

As a priest, you better be concentrating on your group.

We normallty run about 15 healers, approximately 5 priests,druids,pallies. We don't encourage crosshealing and frown upon emergency monitor spam. Healers are assigned to groups for a reason - To keep that group alive. The only real cross healing that should be happening is on the MT's and OT's.

So to answe your question: No that isn't normal

Up to 20 healers is unusual in 40-man raiding. 14-16 is more common, some guilds run even less.

More healing above what you 'need' to do the fight isn't contributing that much relative to the value of having more DPS. Healing keeps your side up, DPS brings the other side down.

That said, sounds like you a relatively new to raiding and I'll guess you are still gearing up. In multi-healer situations (any raid really), what kills tanks is sudden damage, and the basic idea is that between each attack from the mob, you try to heal tanks back to full. That way when you face a mob that can do special attack + normal attack/crushing blow combos that hit for 8-9k within a second, your tank survives because he was at maximum health to start with.

Regarding priest spells, when you first start out on MC and bluish gear, Flash Heal does a good job. As you add more +healing, spells like Rank2 Heal become a mainstay as well. More +healing changes the efficiencies, and will mean you can select the right spell for the situation.

What are you raiding? While you can get away with running MC and BWL with large numbers of healers not doing much, it's pretty hard to use that sort of healing in the more dynamic fights of AQ40 and Naxx.

It sounds like you have a good grasp on the fundementals of raid healing. The raid on the other hand doesn't seem so well set up. Tell your leaders to get less healers in the raid, it should make your clear times a lot better, or if that isn't a possibility then consider another guild or getting some people to respec as hybrids.

Most of the healers I talk to consider it much more involved and interesting than the mindless mashing of buttons that most dps classes do.

Once you hit naxx it changes.

Sad to say but EM spamming works pre-naxx, even with only 15 healers. The ae dmg is either so targetted (huhuran, emps, cthun), staggered (firemaw) or nearly nonexistant (nef, fankriss, 10bazillion others) that 5 ppl spamming EM works, and possibly is even efficient.

Doesn't work in Naxx though, you'll die. There's too much damage going around for people to not stick to distinct assignments. Some fights you'll assign 1-2 ppl to brainless EM healing, but you don't have the majoroverheal issue like you do otherwise.

One of the biggest issues we've had with our recent healer applicants is their total unfamilarity with healing assignments. They want to spam EM monitor cus that's what they did in MC/BWL. We rejected quite a bit of healer applicants lately.

I have the exact same problem and it all started when someone decided to make a swstats site and some priests became like the rogues at the core hound packs 1.5 years ago but for an entire raid. oh, and we've cleared aq and killed 8 bosses in nax so far. It's driving me nuts aswell. We still use healer assignment for bosses and stuff but I get the feeling that instead of watching their asigned tank a few of them are more interested in spamming warlocks which is yea, pretty lame. didn't see this one comming.

EM + chain heal (the shaman spell) is awesome for trash clearing

We usually don't assign healers for trash, we do for most bosses. The problem with trash clearing is that the number of tanks you need varies from pull to pull. Also for horde if you want to maximise your dps you want mellees all stacked in shaman groups. We have mellee groups set up as rogue rogue rogue warrior shaman usually, and sometimes that warrior needs to tank, so he needs people from outside his group looking after him at those times. It's too complicated to be continually assigning healers to tanks based on whether they are tanking or not depending on the pull.

Don't take this as an insult, because I truly don't mean it as one, but I'm really suprised you're that far into content with your current setup. That said, in regard to your "having nothing to do", well yeah, thats because you have way too many healers in your raid. Bringing as many as you've described, acctually ends up *hurting your raids. Drop down to 15. I've always been partial to 6/5/4 priest/pal(sham)/dru. You'll notice more for everyone to do, plus bosses and trash dying faster, and on a side note, will be able to weed out your sleepers, of which I'm sure you have many, as you yourself desscribed being bored. If 15 can do the job, whats the sense in bringing 20? You have to evaluate your raid by looking at the big picture. Do you have so little dps you barely eek out emp kills? Could you get through Huhuran's enrage without innervates for your priests on soak groups? Etc. The goal for an ideal raid, is more dps, and smarter healers. Not so many healers, that dps doesn't matter.

As to your question, and what Kaubel eluded to; Be specific. Give people jobs and assignments, and hold them to it. Improve your raids effeciency by everyone doing their job, not by having so many heals flying around that jobs are moot. Know who is healing who, and when, so you can stop 20 people from sitting at their computer staring at an emergency monitor waiting for a flashing name. Healing can be an extremely fun and involved job, but only if you acctually get TO heal.

DPS.

Pretty much the same with our groups. Healers are responsible for their own groups on trash, and assigned roles (and if EM duty is a delegated job if need be) based on the encounter. This'll promote less overheals and trash clears can go faster with less drinking/deaths.

zak, just assign each healer a group and you'll be fine. you don't actually have to be in that group to heal them...problem solved.

I don't quite understand why you would ever want to put 2 tanks together in the same group for trash. We spread the tanks out, generally in groups with 2 healers. It works a lot easier than any cross-healing mechanisms.

For bosses, that's a totally different story. If you have multiple tanks in an MT group, then you have clearly assigned MT healers for one or both depending on how the mob works. In this case the "heal your own group" is only going to work for the ppl assigned to that, and you have another 5-7 ppl on MT heal or whatever other stuff is going on.

It seems like most here don't like crosshealing. While I agree you should focus on your tank on certain encounters, crosshealing is almost required during trash and some bosses.

I can't imagine doing some of the trash pulls with people only healing their own group. There are such things as being out of range, silenced, out of mana etc. There may also be more damage done to some groups than others. Allowing crosshealing will make the overall survivability a lot better.

Being a good healer is knowing when you need to focus on keeping your group alive and when you have time to spare for the others.

cross healing is required sometimes, but it should be minimized because it generates huge amounts of overheal if your healers have some latency issues.

Without the overhealing you could take maybe 2-3 more damage classes with you...

To the OP:
20 healers is just WAY WAY overboard for ANY encounter currently in game. That's is hurting your raid for sure. The longer a fight lasts, the more stuff can go wrong (because people have more time to invent new ways of sucking!) and you will wipe because of this for sure.

Not to mention your guild name, the mechanic introduced specifically to swat down having a 1 warrior 19 priest 20 druid raid.

"Guys, we're here in hour ten of our Sartura kill..."

I think I've been assigning healers in our raids since Luci

http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=2606 - HGS and you cant go wrong.

Tho it can mean that your healers are very reliant on you and your assignments, tho you can break that with some ground rules.

Group healing always makes me feel like I'm back in Molten Core.

Back in early molten core we had groups set up very preciesly, a few people were assigned to MT and a few to OT, and otherwise you healed your group. We put the weakest healers in the mage group and pretty much all they did was afk autofollow until some aoe, bubble once and move on. I remember begging not to get stuck healing mages.. or warlocks... DEAR GOD GIVE ME A TANK.... please... before I fall asleep.

We stepped away from that for BWL and I can only think of 3 instances where I'm called on to heal by group- 1) Vael. 2) Ouro where I chill out in the hunter pit and PoH. 3) C'Thun. Otherwise I sort by class and either heal my assigned target... or cross heal merrily.

We have assignments for most bosses (and like an above poster mentioned, we've become very reliant on assignments) and some trash. It all kinda depends. We start off cross healing and refine. Even cross healing we sort out into assignments most of the time, I'll notice the rogues aren't getting healed and focus on them while someone gets the warlocks and someone else gets different tanks etc.

The way I figgure it, if you can manage with 13-14 healers cross healing and not run oom, and not have people dying like flies, it doesn't really matter how much overheal you have. There's no special bonus for finishing full mana if you can regen enough to keep going on the next pull.

Assigning by groups just always brings to mind that one poor group of mages with the afk sleeping priest who would jsut get slaughtered on AoE pulls because thier keeper nodded off outof sheer boredom. At least with cross healing there's always something interesting to do =)

Wow. My guild runs it totally different. We have all the druids / priests in last 2 groups and just have everyone cross heal.

Works well for us *shrug*. Then again we assign priests / druids tp specific tanks.

for us 12 healers is fine for a lot of bosses. 15 is typically the ceiling for most bosses. 16 is nice for Patchwerk but note that one of those is a balance durid who we can easily move to DPS.\

priests often focus on the group, yes. for Naxx trash we tend to put a pally and druid in with maintank groups while priests cover dps and offtank groups. healers dpsing is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with healing/cleansing.

I used to love healer heavy raids, 2 healers in every group, but now I totally recognize it can be boring as hell to have that many for trash and even some bosses. plus 20 can hurt your progression a lot in Naxx and even in AQ. getting Emps down in 15 mins with 20 dedicated, non-dpsing healers with the raid in BWL/AQ gear is pushing it.

My guild does as well, we stick healers in whatever groups for trash and then assign tank healers and everyone else just xheals.

For most encounters we split up in 8 'normal' looking groups. Two healers usually, with maybe a tank and two DPS.

We could put everyone together to perhaps maximize benefit of trueshot aura and battleshout(if we were short warriors), but that comes with a large overhead.